Print Issue of November 23, 2017 (Volume 47, Number 8) by Chicago Reader

C H I C A G O â&#x20AC;&#x2122; S F R E E W E E K LY | K I C K I N G A S S S I N C E 1 9 7 1 | N O V E M B E R 2 3 , 2 0 1 7

IS THIS MAN NATIVE AMERICAN? Or is Barney Bush, as his critics charge, the Indian Rachel Dolezal? By RYAN SMITH 16

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THIS WEEK

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FEATURES

EDITOR JAKE MALOOLEY CREATIVE DIRECTOR VINCE CERASANI DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY JAMIE RAMSAY CULTURE EDITOR TAL ROSENBERG FILM EDITOR J.R. JONES MUSIC EDITOR PHILIP MONTORO ASSOCIATE EDITORS STEVE HEISLER, JAMIE LUDWIG, KATE SCHMIDT SENIOR WRITER MIKE SULA SENIOR THEATER CRITIC TONY ADLER STAFF WRITERS MAYA DUKMASOVA, LEOR GALIL, DEANNA ISAACS, BEN JORAVSKY, AIMEE LEVITT, PETER MARGASAK, JULIA THIEL SOCIAL MEDIA EDITOR RYAN SMITH GRAPHIC DESIGNER SUE KWONG MUSIC LISTINGS COORDINATOR LUCA CIMARUSTI FILM LISTINGS COORDINATOR PATRICK FRIEL CONTRIBUTING WRITERS NOAH BERLATSKY, ANNE FORD, ISA GIALLORENZO, JOHN GREENFIELD, ANDREA GRONVALL, JUSTIN HAYFORD, JACK HELBIG, IRENE HSIAO, DAN JAKES, BILL MEYER, MICHAEL MINER, J.R. NELSON, MARISSA OBERLANDER, LEAH PICKETT, BEN SACHS, DMITRY SAMAROV, OLIVER SAVA, KEVIN WARWICK, DAVID WHITEIS, ALBERT WILLIAMS ---------------------------------------------------------------ADVERTISING DIRECTOR CHRISTOPHER BEST SENIOR ACCOUNT MANAGER EVANGELINE MILLER ACCOUNT EXECUTIVE BRIDGET KANE MARKETING AND EVENTS MANAGER BRYAN BURDA DIRECTOR OF DIGITAL JOHN DUNLEVY ADVERTISING COORDINATOR HERMINIA BATTAGLIA

IDENTITY

Native American or fake Indian? The Vinyard Indians are attempting to become Illinois’s ﬁrst state-recognized native tribe. But tribes long recognized by the federal government say the group’s members are just a bunch of white people caught in an act of cultural appropriation. BY RYAN SMITH 16

IN THIS ISSUE 12 Joravsky | Politics CPS boss Claypool fesses up to an invoice change he previously said he didn’t recall—but only after being shown proof of the change. 14 Transportation If the CTA raises fares, how about some sugar to make the medicine go down?

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29 Visual Art The beguiling mystery of Deborah Slabeck Baker’s drawings 30 Movies In Roman J. Israel, Esq., an activist attorney comes out of hibernation to take on the modern world.

ARTS & CULTURE 4 Agenda A John Waters Christmas, the National Book Critics Circle: Best Books of 2017, Sing-a-Long Sound of Music at Music Box, and more recommended goings-on about town

25 Dance With the Joﬀrey leaving, what’s the future of the Auditorium Theatre? 26 Theater Tracy Letts’s The Minutes tells a dirty secret, then a dirtier one. 27 Theater Court Theatre’s Much Ado About Nothing is a joyful production with a dreadful spoiler. 28 Visual Art The works of Bill Walker and Dapper Bruce Laﬁtte reveal the resonant expressiveness of rage.

41 Key Ingredient: Yuzu kosho Hanbun’s David Park turns the spicy, fermented condiment into a dessert.

CLASSIFIEDS

MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE

31 Shows of note G Herbo, Power Trip, Cold Specks, and more of the week’s best 35 Secret history Garage rockers the Royal Flairs made good use of a saxophone and an accordian.

FOOD & DRINK ON THE COVER: PHOTO BY NEETA SATAM. FOR MORE OF HER WORK, GO TO NEETASATAM.COM.

CITY LIFE

11 City Life An arborist and competitive tree climber on life at the top

39 Restaurant review: Steingold’s of Chicago It isn’t your bubbe’s deli, but don’t hold it against this North Center shop devoted to twists on the Jewish-American culinary canon.

42 Jobs 42 Apartments & Spaces 43 Marketplace 44 Straight Dope What’s the dope on harnessing electricity from electric eels? 45 Savage Love Is it cruel to be cruel in fantasies? 46 Early Warnings Ani DiFranco, Thurston Moore, and more shows you should know about in the weeks to come

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kids—makes communication, well, complicated. This Chicago premiere features terriﬁc, truthful performances under the sharp and sensitive direction of Erin Murray. —ALBERT WILLIAMS Through 12/18: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM; also Tue 12/12, 7:30 PM (understudy show) and Mon 12/18, 7:30 PM, Redtwist Theatre, 1044 W. Bryn Mawr, 773-7287529, redtwist.org, $35-$40, $30-$35 students and seniors.

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EARLY WARNINGS

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CHICAGOREADER.COM/EARLY 4 CHICAGO READER - NOVEMBER 23, 2017

The Book of Will The Bard’s passing is prologue in this quasi-historical drama by Lauren Gunderson about the messy posthumous rush on the part of the surviving King’s Men to secure Shakespeare’s literary legacy. Jacobean-era book publishing and its associated roadblocks—funding, contested rights, diverging editorial visions, piecemeal scripts—aren’t easy bedfellows with compelling stage drama, and Gunderson’s eﬀorts to inﬂate the stakes with romance and rivalries feel more perfunctory than persuasive. But even if it spends too much time in mourning (four separate characters in two short hours!), Jessica Thebus’s handsome and all-around well-acted Northlight Theatre production asks some stimulating questions about the life art has long after its maker is gone. —DAN JAKES Through 12/17: Wed 1 and 7:30 PM, Thu 7:30 PM (no show 11/23), Fri 8 PM, Sat 2:30 and 8 PM, Sun 2:30 and 7 PM, Northlight Theatre, North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, 9501 Skokie Blvd., Skokie, 847-673-6300, northlight.org, $30-$76. Clever Little Lies Bluebird Arts R presents the midwest premiere of Joe DiPietro’s sad comedy about marital

infidelity among the suburban WASP set. After Billy confides to his father, Bill Sr., about his passionate affair with his 20-year-old personal trainer, both men’s marriages threaten to collapse in the aftermath. Bill Sr.’s inability to keep his son’s secret reveals the cracks in his own relationship with Billy’s mother, Alice. Billy’s wife, Jane, is so absorbed with their newborn daughter that she doesn’t notice he has strayed. Both couples are too invested in their stable way of life to chance losing it all for the promise of passion elsewhere. There’s some hostile sniping but no all-out emotional fireworks because none of them is capable of that. Alice remarks toward the end that in an affair we show one another only the shining jewel side of ourselves, while in relationships we inevitably see the other side sooner or later. Similarly, DiPietro’s play starts in light and ends in darkness. Luda Lopatina Solomon directed. —DMITRY SAMAROV Through 12/16:

JAN ELLEN GRAVES

Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 2 PM, Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N. Southport, 773-9356860, bluebirdarts.org, $40, $34 students and seniors. Escape to Margaritaville This R Jimmy Buﬀett jukebox musical, directed by Christopher Ashley and

here in a pre-Broadway run, is what Parrotheads have been waiting for. Like Buffett’s restaurant chain, it bottles the spirit of the islands as welcome escapist entertainment. It’s definitely more fun if you’re familiar with the singer’s catalog, as nearly 30 of his songs are incorporated into the love story of Tully (Paul Alexander Nolan), a musically inclined beach bum, and Rachel (Alison Luff), a hard-driving entrepreneur who just can’t relax. “Cheeseburger in Paradise” was a crowd-pleaser on the night I attended, serving as a pivotal moment in the secondary (and more heartwarming) love story between best friend Tammy (Lisa Howard) and bumbling Brick (Eric Petersen). Walt Spangler’s scenic design, Paul Tazewell’s costumes, and a bevy of beach balls contribute to the theater’s charming Caribbeanization. —MARISSA OBERLANDER Through 11/2: Wed 2 and 7:30 PM, Thu 7:30 PM (no show 11/23), Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 2 and 8 PM, Sun 2 PM, Tue 7:30 PM; also Fri 11/24, 2 PM, Ford Center for the Performing Arts, Oriental Theatre, 24 W. Randolph, 800-775-2000, broadwayinchicago.com, $32-$212. I Saw My Neighbor on the Train R and I Didn’t Even Smile This sometimes raw but ultimately upbeat

2015 comedy by U.S.-based British writer Suzanne Heathcote (executive story editor for the TV series Fear the Walking Dead) focuses on three generations of women in a fractured, fragmented family. Emotionally fragile Rebecca (Jacqueline Grandt), still grieving for a pet dog that died a year earlier, has taken in her 15-year-old niece, Sadie (Emma Maltby), because Sadie’s dad, Jamie (Adam Bitterman), can’t handle her (especially after she’s kicked out of school when a sex video of her goes viral). Rebecca and Jamie’s mother, Daphne (Kathleen Ruhl), wants to oﬀer support, but her acerbic nature—and her daughter’s lingering resentment that Daphne abandoned the family when they were

Lizzie Dubiously proclaiming itself the world’s first feminist musical theater company, Firebrand debuts with a show written by three men. The calculatedly edgy rockish opera imagines Lizzie Borden as a pigeon-loving, sexually abused closet lesbian who murders her ambiguously oppressive parents so that she, her sister, her maid, and her lover can wear dominatrix costumes. Or something. The show has no clear tone (camp? parody? pissing contest?) and no point of view beyond “unruly women are fierce.” The effortful score sounds rather like Pat Benatar, Stephen Sondheim, and Meatloaf tossed in a blender. Director Victoria Bussert keeps her four overburdened female performers speaking and singing into handheld and headset microphones simultaneously while unconvincingly imitating Broadway belters cum rock goddesses. The design, however, is gorgeous. —JUSTIN HAYFORD Through 12/17: Thu-Sat 8 PM (no show Thu 11/23), Sun 3 PM, Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N. Southport, 773-935-6860, athenaeumtheatre.com, $45, $20 students. Othello: The Moor of Venice Invictus Theatre’s inaugural production is hampered by the typical misfires of low-budget storefront Shakespeare: rudimentary design that can’t evoke place or mood, uneven and overly emphatic acting, insistence that nearly every scene is the climax. It’s further hobbled by a semi-mechanical Othello and an indiscriminately loquacious Iago, making the play’s circuitous central conflict between the two particularly unconvincing. But it’s also got the graceful, deliberate, and hugely compelling Callie Johnson as Othello’s doomed wife, Desdemona. She’s the kind of actor whose persuasive force draws everyone

onstage into her orbit, a fact director Charles Askenaizer exploits to great clarifying effect, particularly during the nearly three-hour production’s final hour, which falls increasingly on her shoulders. The show’s actual climax is worth the wait. —JUSTIN HAYFORD Through 12/3: Wed-Sat 7:30 PM (no shows Wed 11/22 and Thu 11/23), Sun 3 PM, Mon 7:30 PM, Heartland Studio Theatre, 7016 N. Glenwood, 773-791-2393, invictustheatreco. com, $20, $10 students. The Pearl Fishers This lavishly colored, cartoonlike production, designed by Zandra Rhodes, is a perfect fit for George Bizet’s 1863 fantasy opera The Pearl Fishers, with its very pretty music and piece-of-crap—er, ridiculously contrived—libretto. Set in an exoticized Ceylon, it’s the story of two young friends who fall in love with the same beautiful virgin. One wins her heart; the other ascends to power; vows of chastity and loyalty are, of course, broken, amid some klutzy dance episodes. Never mind that: Lyric Opera’s terrific cast of singers includes the felicitous pairing of soprano Marina Rebeka and tenor Matthew Polenzani as the lovers and baritone Mariusz Kwiecien (who sounded fine in the opening show in spite of an intermission announcement that he was performing though ill) as the jealous third wheel. Andrew Davis conducts the Lyric Opera orchestra and chorus. —DEANNA ISAACS Through 12/10: Wed 11/22, 2 PM; Sat 11/25, 7:30 PM; Wed 11/29, Mon 12/4, and Thu 12/7, 7:30 PM; Sun 12/10, 2 PM, Lyric Opera House, 20 N. Wacker, 312827-5600, lyricopera.org, $20-$299. Tick, Tick . . . Boom! A proto-Rent with less politics and more whining, Jonathan Larson’s autobiographical Tick, Tick . . . Boom! is an often insufferable portrait of a composer overwhelmed by anxiety as he approaches 30. The three-person cast makes this musical especially attractive to smaller theaters, but Donald Kolakowski’s basic direction doesn’t delve deep enough into the characters to make their relationships honest and believable. Nic Eastlund has a traditional musical-theater voice that’s occasionally at odds with the rock score, but he captures Jon’s intensifying fear and frustration as he caves under the pres-

The Pearl Fishers ò TODD ROSENBERG PHOTOGRAPHY

Best bets, recommendations, and notable arts and culture events for the week of November 23

worse, it lacks the erotic spark without which nothing makes sense. —TONY ADLER Through 12/17: Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat-Sun 4 PM, Silk Road Rising, 77 W. Washington, 312-857-1234, silkroadrising.org, $35.

DANCE Wild Boar ò AIRAN WRIGHT sure of his career and love life. Molly LeCaptain is the bright spot of the production as Jon’s irritated girlfriend. Her performance radiates a sad aﬀection for this man who will never put her before his work, and her singing is powerful while at the same time ﬁnely modulated for Prop Thtr’s small space. —OLIVER SAVA Through 12/16: Fri 8 PM, Sat 3 and 8 PM, Sun 3 PM; also Thu 12/14, 8 PM, Prop Thtr, 3502 N. Elston, 773-539-7838, thecuckoostheaterproject.com, $30.

All Funkd’ Up Tony Award-winning choreographer Savion Glover combines live funk music with his renowned tap dancing. Sun 11/26, 4 PM, College of DuPage Gahlberg Gallery, McAninch Arts Center, 425 Fawell Blvd., Glen Ellyn, 630-942-2321, cod.edu/gallery, $59-$79.

Wild Boar I’m not trying to be funny here—something really seems to have been lost in translation. Written in Chinese by Candace Chong, rendered into English by Joanna C. Lee and Ken Smith, and then “adapted” by no less a talent than David Henry Hwang, this 2012 work has everything it needs for political suspense: a kidnapped professor, a crusading publisher, a tormented reporter with a sexy secret, and an epically corrupt real estate deal, all set in a present-day Hong Kong, where democratic notions chafe against Chinese autocracy. But every atom of intrigue gets buried in glacial scenes full of bloated, illustrative dialogue and didactic overkill. Potentially interesting aﬃnities with (oddly enough) Roman Polanski’s Chinatown and the novels of English fantasy writer China Miéville get scattered to the winds. Helen Young’s staging is ungainly, though Anthony Churchill contributes sharp projections;

LIT & LECTURES Kwame Dawes, Matthew Shenoda, and Natasha Trethewey Dawes and Shenoda edited the new book Bearden’s Odyssey: A Tribute to the Art of Romare Bearden, a collection of poems penned by 35 writers of the African diaspora. U.S. poet laureate Trethewey, who contributed, joins them for a reading and discussion. Mon 11/27, 7 PM, Poetry Foundation, 61 W. Superior, 312-787-7070, poetryfoundation.org. The National Book Critics Circle: Best Books of 2017 Join Liz Taylor (former president of the National Book Critics Circle) and Charles Finch (a past ﬁnalist for the NBCC’s award for criticism) as they discuss the year in literature, picking their favorites. Fri 11/24, 6 PM, Book Cellar, 4736 N. Lincoln, 773-293-2665, bookcellarinc.com.

’Tis the Seasonal Depression R In one of the most endearing sketches of this holiday comedy revue

from GayCo Productions and director Jeff Bouthiette, Christopher Thies Lotito plays a grumbly mall Santa conducting an open call for a new Mrs. Claus. Katie Cutler steps up, states her name, and through a combination of hilarious gaffes that I won’t ruin gives the worst audition of all time. Lotito, who’d make a great Orson Welles, despairs of finding the right lady when in strides Evan M. Duggan, whose charms instantly warm Santa to the idea of casting a man. There are dozens of other moments like this, livening the banality of Christmas cheer with a dollop of wholesome identity politics and a bigger dollop of rollicking, irreverent sass. The war on Christmas never felt so good. —MAX MALLER Through 12/22: Fri 8 PM; also Thu 12/14 and 12/21, 8 PM, the Broadway at Pride Arts Center, 4139 N. Broadway, 800-737-0984, pridefilmsandplays.com, $20.

Sacrilege: A Nativity Story The story of Christmas is told from the perspective of Mary Magdalene—on her way to Bethlehem while tailed by malevolent forces. Through 12/19: Tue 8 PM, Annoyance Theatre, 851 W. Belmont, 773-6979693, theannoyance.com, $8.

For more of the best things to do every day of the week, go to chicagoreader. com/agenda.

MOVIES More at chicagoreader.com/movies NEW REVIEWS Coco This engaging Pixar aniR mation plays magniﬁcently with elements of Mexican folklore and ﬁne

art. A ten-year-old boy who dreams of becoming a musician travels from his village to the Land of the Dead to ﬁnd the spirit of the man he believes to be his estranged great-great grandfather, a celebrated singer who died in the 1940s. When the boy arrives, however, his other deceased relatives try to steer him away from music and return him to his family in the world of the living. Directors Lee Unkrich (Toy Story 3) and Adrian Molina mine sentiment from the conﬂict between individual desire and familial responsibility, but their grandest achievement is the intricately designed spirit world, full of allusions to folk art and modern painting. The voice talent

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COMEDY Generation LatinX This bilingual weekly variety show invites Latinx comedians and musicians to perform—sometimes in English, sometimes in Spanish, sometimes without words altogether. Through 11/28: Tue 10 PM, iO Theater, the Mission Theater, 1501 N. Kingsbury, ioimprov.com/chicago, $10. Hostile Corporate Makeover This show captures the awkward, funny moments that inevitably occur in an oﬃce, where people are scrunched together for 40 hours a week. Sat 11/25, 8:30 PM, Donny’s Skybox Studio, 1608 N. Wells, fourth ﬂoor, 312-337-3992, secondcity.com, $13, $11 students. A John Waters Christmas Filmmaker, author, and pencil-mustache enthusiast John Waters rants about Christmas and asks tough questions such as “Has Santa ever been nude?” Mon 11/27, 9 PM, Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport, 312-526-3851, thaliahallchicago.com, $35-$42. Miracle on 45th’s Tweet The holidays can be stressful, to put it mildly. Huggable Riot’s new sketch show revisits a time when Christmas was free of anxiety and full of childlike wonder. And when family members didn’t want to escape by playing around on their phones. Through 1/3: Wed 8 PM, Annoyance Theatre, 851 W. Belmont, 773-697-9693, theannoyance.com, $12.

Coco

VISUAL ART Queer Lines Celebrate nongender nonconforming people with drag, spoken word performances, and photos from queer families. Opening reception Fri 11/24, 6:30 PM. Open run. Chicago Art Department, 1932 S. Halsted, #100, 312-226-8601, chicagoartdepartment.org, $15 suggested donation. Reindigenizing the Self Tanya Aguiñiga uses clay, plants, hair, and other natural substances to create work that reﬂects on her Mexican heritage. Through 12/31. Tue-Sat 11 AM-6 PM or by appointment. Volume Gallery, 1709 W. Chicago, 312666-7954, wvvolumes.com.

includes Gael García Bernal and Benjamin Bratt. —BEN SACHS PG, 105 min. ArcLight, Century 12 and CineArts 6, Chatham 14, Cicero Showplace 14, City North 14, Crown Village 18, Davis, Ford City, Harper, Lake, River East 21, 600 N. Michigan, Webster Place Rebels on Pointe The all-male drag company Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo—better known as “the Trocks”—has been drawing audiences since its oﬀ-oﬀ Broadway beginnings in 1974. As this behind-the-scenes Canadian documentary shows, the rigorously trained dancers, squeezed into tight costumes and toe shoes, use their masculinity to interpret femininity through classical and romantic ballets, adding µ

NOVEMBER 23, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 5

AGENDA “Explosive... heart-in-the-mouth experience… will not be a play you quickly forget” – Chicago Tribune

“Simmering satire of a smalltown city council meeting” – Variety

“Astonishing new play” – Chicago Sun Times

Don’t miss Tracy Letts’s scathing new comedy directed by Anna D. Shapiro about small-town politics and real world power

THE

MINUTES

Rebels on Pointe B comic improvisations and some pratfalls. Athletic injuries and a grueling touring schedule of 200 days a year take a toll on some members, but the company offers such a supportive family environment that three marriages between dancers have resulted. Bobbi Jo Hart directed. —ANDREA GRONVALL 90 min. Fri 11/24, 2 and 8 PM; Sat 11/25, 8:30 PM; Sun 11/26, 3 PM; Mon 11/27, 8 PM; Tue 11/28, 6 PM; Wed 11/29, 8 PM; and Thu 11/30, 6 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center. NOW PLAYING The Departure Lana Wilson’s documentary looks at former punk rocker, now Buddhist priest Ittetsu Nemoto as he contemplates whether to give up his effective suicide prevention work as his own life is changed by health considerations and impending fatherhood. In Japanese with subtitles. 87 min. Fri 11/24Thu 11/30. Facets Cinematheque. The Future Perfect Nele Wohlatz directed this 2016 Argentinean drama about a 17-year-old Chinese woman who moves to Buenos Aires, starts a relationship with a young man from India, and slowly recognizes the new possibilities open to her. In Spanish and Mandarin with subtitles. 65 min. Also on the program: Wohlatz’s five-minute short Three Sentences About Argentina (2016). Fri 11/24-Thu 11/30. Facets Cinematheque. Lady Bird Greta Gerwig R got her start as a tall, blond “it” girl for such indie heroes as

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Joe Swanberg, Noah Baumbach, and Whit Stillman, quietly racking up screenwriting credits on some of their projects. Now, with her solo writing and directing debut, she leaves all three of them in the dust, delivering one of the freshest, funniest American comedies in years. Set in her native Sacramento, the ﬁlm concerns a 17-year-old misﬁt (Saoirse Ronan of Brooklyn) stoically enduring her last year of captivity at a Catholic girls’ school and in her parents’ home. Gerwig shares with her male mentors a smart, subversive sense of humor, but she also brings to the table an enormous (and enormously mature)

generosity toward all the characters, including the heroine’s wise, straight-talking teachers and loving, stressed-out parents. The movie has a slightly scattershot quality, as if Gerwig were emptying out a fat notebook of funny ideas saved up for years. But those ideas never miss. With Laurie Metcalf and Tracy Letts. —J.R. JONES R, 94 min. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Landmark’s Century Centre. Sylvio A gorilla’s routine life of working at a collection agency, playing basketball, and devising puppet shows is disrupted when he accidentally becomes a TV celebrity. Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney directed this absurdist drama based on their Vine video series. 80 min. Fri 11/24-Thu 11/30. Facets Cinematheque. REVIVALS Antonio Gaudi This 1984 R documentary about the architect essentially lets Gaudi’s

work speak for itself, and it couldn’t be more eloquent. The cinematography by Junichi Segawa, Yoshikazu Yanagida, and Ryu Segawa provides perspectives you couldn’t get on-site in Barcelona, guiding you at a perfect pace through intimate interiors or whisking you to aerial vantage points, alternating between minute details and comprehensive views. The often gently moving camera and the lyrical editing unobtrusively yet decisively shape what you see. The acutely perceptive sound track doesn’t have to compete with continual voice-over—much of the historical information is provided in on-screen titles that barely disrupt the enveloping beauty of the images. Produced and directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara (Woman in the Dunes). In Japanese and Spanish with subtitles. —LISA ALSPECTOR 82 min. 35mm. Fri 11/24, 4 PM, and Sat 11/25, 3 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center. Honey, I Shrunk the Kids R A charming and amiable Disney live-action feature (1989), directed by ﬁrst-timer Joe Johnston, about an inventor (Rick Moranis) who devises a gizmo

that accidentally shrinks his kids and two of their friends (Amy O’Neill, Robert Oliveri, Jared Rushton, and Thomas Brown) to quarter-inch height. The special eﬀects are uneven, but the poetics of the basic idea really pay oﬀ: a suburban backyard is transformed into an endless jungle packed with adventures, including rides on a bumblebee and a friendly baby ant and menacing attacks from a hose and a lawn mower. The setting and at least one character—Matt Frewer, best known as TV’s Max Headroom—recall Joe Dante’s The ‘Burbs. —JONATHAN ROSENBAUM PG, 93 min. Screens as part of the “Cinema Science” series, with an introduction by Shauna Price of the Field Museum. Tue 11/28, 7 PM. Music Box. The Red Turtle In this R gorgeous, completely wordless animation, a shipwrecked

man suffers in solitude on a desert island until the day he encounters a giant red turtle and it turns into a beautiful woman with wild red hair. Dutch artist Michaël Dudok de Wit, who has directed four short films since 1992, makes his feature debut partly under the auspices of Japan’s beloved Studio Ghibli, whose founder, Hayao Miyazaki, took a shine to his short Father and Daughter (2000). De Wit’s characters are more plainly drawn than Ghibli’s, but fans of the studio will probably be enthralled by his richly colored, finely textured, and powerfully immersive natural backgrounds. This is one of those animations that creates a world so beautiful the characters need only wander around in it. —J.R. JONES 80 min. Donald Crafton of the University of Notre Dame lectures at the Tuesday screening. Sat 11/25, 6:45 PM, and Tue, 11/28, 6 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center.

Sing-a-Long Sound of R Music Many critics trashed Robert Wise’s 1965 screen version

of The Sound of Music, but the musical’s emotional openness and unguarded optimism honestly express the worldview of songwriters Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein. In the words of theater historian Ethan Mordden, their last collaboration is a “youthful piece written by the elderly, because it is entirely about freedom, which youth always seeks and the aged feel the loss of.” The film’s sweeping aerial cinematography and Salzburg location footage and Julie Andrews’s smart, feisty performance enhance the story’s appeal, and this “sing-along” edition, outfitted with subtitles for the lyrics, affirms Rodgers and Hammerstein’s belief in the power of music to unlock the buoyancy of the human spirit. —ALBERT WILLIAMS G, 174 min. Fri 11/24-Sat 11/25, 1 and 7 PM, and Sun 11/26, 12:30 and 6:30 PM. Music Box. v

SPONSORED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

Come explore Hyde Park! Welcome to Hyde Park! We love our pocket of the city on the lakefront—if you haven’t been here recently you’ll ﬁnd great shops, restaurants, and cultural landmarks; an involved, diverse community of residents; and a proud history of creative expression – all forming a passionate pull on the people who call it home. Come check us out…

NOVEMBER 23, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 7

SPONSORED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

Shopping Akira • 1539 E. 53rd Street Ancien Cycles & Café • 1558 E. 53rd Street Bonne Santé Health Foods • 1512 E. 53rd Street Connect Art Gallery • 1520 E. Harper Court Dearborn Denim & Apparel • 1504 E. 53rd Street 57th Street Books • 1301 E. 57th Street 57th Street Wines • 1448 E. 57th Street

First Aid Comics • 1617 E. 55th Street The Freehling Pot & Pan Co. • 1365 E. 53rd Street Hyde Park Records • 1377 E. 53rd Street Jojayden • 1457 E. 53rd Street Marshalls • 5104 S. Lake Park Avenue, 2nd Floor Modern Cooperative • 1500 E. 53rd Street NoteworthyNotes • 5231 S. Harper Court Powell’s Books • 1501 E. 57th Street Seminary Co-op Bookstore • 5751 S. Woodlawn Avenue The Silver Room • 1506 E. 53rd Street The Silver Umbrella • 5305 S. Hyde Park Boulevard

Sir & Madame • 5225 S. Harper Court Target Express • 1346 E. 53rd Street Sugarly • 1368 E. 53rd Street Toys et Cetera • 1502 E. 55th Street ULTA Beauty • 5228 S. Lake Park Avenue Wesley’s Shoe Corral • 1506 E. 55th Street Whole Foods Market • 5118 S. Lake Park Avenue

Images: A. Modern Cooperative, B. Jojayden, C. The Silver Room, D. Dearborn Denim & Apparel, E. Sir & Madame D 8 CHICAGO READER - NOVEMBER 23, 2017

SPONSORED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

Dining & Entertainment A10 Hyde Park • 1462 E. 53rd Street Aloha Pokē Co. • 5221 S. Harper Court Bon Jour Café Bakery • 1550 E. 55th Street BBQ Supply Co. • 1301 E. 53rd Street Cemitas Puebla • 1321 E. 57th Street Chant • 1509 E. 53rd Street A

Dollop Coffee Co. • 5500-A S. University Avenue Fabiana’s Bakery • 1658 E. 53rd Street The Harper Theater • 5238 S. Harper Avenue Hyde Park Taco Station • 5300 S. Dorchester Avenue Ja’ Grill • 1510 E. Harper Court Jolly Pumpkin Pizzeria & Brewery • 5251 S. Harper Ave. Kilwins • 5226 S. Harper Avenue la petite folie • 1504 E. 55th Street Medici on 57th • 1327 E. 57th Street Mikkey’s Retro Grill • 5319 S. Hyde Park Boulevard Nando’s PERi-PERi • 1447 E. 53rd Street

Nella Pizza e Pasta • 1125 E. 55th Street Pizza Capri • 1501 E. 53rd Street Plein Air Cafe • 5751 S. Woodlawn Avenue Porkchop • 1516 E. Harper Court The Promontory • 5311 S. Lake Park Avenue The Revival • 1160 E. 55th Street Rajun Cajun • 1459 E. 53rd Street Valois Cafeteria • 1518 E. 53rd Street Vanille Patisserie • 5229 S. Harper Court Images: A. A10 Hyde Park, B. Vanille Patisserie, C. BBQ Supply Co., D. Nella Pizza e Pasta, E. The Promontory

E NOVEMBER 23, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 9

SPONSORED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

Landmarks A. Washington Park Arts Incubator • 301 E. Garfield Blvd. B. Court Theater • 5535 S. Ellis Avenue

C. DuSable Museum of African American History • 740 E. 56th Place

Hyde Park

D. Frederick C. Robie House • 5757 S. Woodlawn Avenue E. Hyde Park Art Center • 5020 S. Cornell Avenue F. Logan Center for the Arts • 915 E. 60th Street

G. Museum of Science and Industry • 5700 S. Lake Shore Drive

H. The Oriental Institute • 1155 E. 58th Street

I. Osaka Garden • 6401 S. Stony Island Avenue

J. Promontory Point Park • 5491 S. Lake Shore Drive

K. The Renaissance Society • 5811 S. Ellis Avenue

L. Rockefeller Memorial Chapel • 5850 S. Woodlawn Avenue

M. Smart Museum of Art • 5550 S. Greenwood Avenue

Upcoming Events Small Business Saturday Saturday • November 25 • all day Visit participating businesses on 53rd, 55th, and 57th Streets, as well as surrounding areas www.downtownhydeparkchicago.com/events Hyde Park Holly-Day Saturday • December 2 • 8 a.m. - 7 p.m. Breakfast and lunch with Santa | Ice carving | Drop-in cookie decorating | Costumed characters Mini preview performance of “The Nutcracker” | Live reindeer | Buddy the Elf www.hphollyday.com Chicago Reader Made in Chicago Market Sunday • December 3 • 11 a.m. - 5 p.m. Plumbers Hall, 1340 W. Washington Boulevard, Chicago Visit the “Hyde Park Village” with great local businesses on the balcony level www.chicagoreader.com/micm @53rdst_hp 10 CHICAGO READER - NOVEMBER 23, 2017

53rdStreetHydePark

@53rdSt

fiftythird.uchicago.edu

CITY LIFE Chicagoans

The tree climber

Beau Nagan, 38, arborist and winner of the Illinois Tree Climbing Championship

I CLIMBED TREES maybe more than your average kid. My dad did landscaping and tree work, so we never really got in trouble for climbing; I’m one of four boys, and he was just trying to keep us from beating each other up all the time. My younger brother Cormac is actually also a tree-climbing champion—he came in second in the men’s division in the world this year. You basically use a system of ropes and pulleys. All of our ropes are minimally rated at 5,400 pounds. They also can’t stretch more than 7 percent at a 10 percent load, which is a lot different than a rock-climbing rope, which has to have stretch since you’re falling into it. If you’re climbing properly on a tree, you never fall; you swing. And any piece of hardware we use has to have two different

methods of locking and has to be minimally rated for about 5,000 pounds. One of the events in the championship is aerial rescue. There’s an injured “climber” in the tree, which is a dummy, of course, and you have five minutes to bring it down. Another is belayed speed, which is similar to a climbing-wall race, except we use tree branches. So you’ll start on the ground, and as soon as you hit the top of the tree, you ring a bell. In another one, you attach a rope to yourself and wrap the rope around your feet and inchworm up it for 50 feet as fast as you can. Anything under 20 seconds is really good, and 13.8 is the best ever. The best I’ve done is 16.8. When I first started doing tree work, I was not too terribly comfortable with the heights, not because I’m afraid of heights per se, but because I

“If you’re climbing properly on a tree,” Nagan says, “you never fall; you swing.” ò EDDIE QUINONES

didn’t really trust the equipment, and it seems counterintuitive to let go of something with your hands. I will, to this day, get a little nervous if I’m in a very tall tree that doesn’t have branches underneath me. There’s something that makes you feel more secure about being surrounded by the tree itself. Being an arborist is one of the more dangerous jobs in the world, and it’s pretty easy to make big mistakes.

That’s why safety’s so important. I try to do everything the same way every time to just grind it into my brain. There have been many close calls in my life. I would prefer not to talk about things like that. When I was a kid I’d climb to the top of a tree and not think about it, but now the safety of it is so ingrained in me that I really don’t climb trees more than a few feet off the ground without ropes. I did set up a giant

tree swing for my kids. It’s only about five, six feet off the ground, but once they start swinging, they’re going 40 feet or so. That was my daughter’s birthday party, instead of going to FunFlatables. I even had one of the other dads ask me to swing him around. It was exhausting to try to swing a grown man who’s bigger than me, but hey, fun is fun. I’m not gonna crush anybody’s dreams. —AS TOLD TO ANNE FORD

Ñ Keep up to date on the go at chicagoreader.com/agenda.

SURE THINGS THURSDAY 23

FRIDAY 24

SATURDAY 25

SUNDAY 26

MONDAY 27

TUESDAY 28

WEDNESDAY 29

f Th anksgiving Pa rade With more than 5,000 participants, 2017’s parade promises to be one of the biggest yet. Check out the ﬂoats, bands, as well as Scooby-Doo, Yogi Bear, and Fred Flinstone in giant balloon form. 8-11 AM, State between Randolph and Congress, chicagofestivals. org. F

i The Customer Is Always Right: Holiday Edition The popular comedy show—in which customer-service horror stories inspire improv—returns for a limited holiday run. 7 PM, Annoyance Theatre, 851 W. Belmont, 773-697-9693, theannoyance. com, $8.

☼ Da niel Ki bblesmith Kibblesmith, a staﬀ writer on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, discusses his new book Santa’s Husband, an illustrated look at what the North Pole would be like if Santa were married to a black, gay Santa. 1-3 PM, Challengers Comics + Conversation, 1845 N. Western, challengerscomics.com. F

ã PBR Movie Night Gremlins, described by former Reader ﬁlm critic Dave Kehr as, “E.T. with the lid oﬀ,” screens at the Boiler Room. Pizza, Jameson, and PBR are on special, as well as gremlins. 8 PM, the Boiler Room, 2210 N. California, boilerroomlogansquare.com. F

J Manic Mondays Lauded comedians Taneshia “Just Nesh” Rice and Marilee Williams host this weekly stand-up showcase, one of the few on the south side. Open run: Mon 9 PM, Frances Cocktail Lounge, 307 E. 75th, facebook.com/Frances-Cocktail-Lounge-179688212084613, $5.

× The Hyde Pa rk Wi ne Society Promontory chef Bernard Bennett teams up with sommelier Derrick Westbrook of 57th Street Wines for a four-course prix ﬁxe meal with the theme “Beaujolais and Harvest.” 7 PM, the Promontory, 5311 S. Lake Park, promontorychicago.com, sold out.

? Oh Hai, Ch icago From the folks who brought us a Stranger Things-themed pop-up comes a new concept that will tear you apart, Lisa. The bar transforms into the set of The Room—a movie so hilariously bad it deserves an drunken, immersive experience. 5 PM-2 AM, Emporium Popups, 2367 N. Milwaukee, emporiumchicago.com. F

NOVEMBER 23, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 11

Chicago Public Schools CEO Forrest Claypool ò RICH HEIN

CITY LIFE POLITICS

Forrest agonistes

CEO boss Claypool fesses up to an invoice change he previously said he didn’t recall—after being shown proof of the change.

By BEN JORAVSKY

s Thanksgiving bombshells go, Chicago Public Schools CEO Forrest Claypool’s letter of apology regarding his role in “invoicegate” isn’t anywhere near as explosive as the release of the Laquan McDonald video. If you recall, it was on the eve of Thanksgiving in 2015 that Mayor Emanuel released the S P E C I A L

A D V E R T I S I N G

video that blew away what had until then been the official version of what happened when police gunned down McDonald, an unarmed 16-year-old. A judge had ordered the video’s release, but no doubt the mayor was hoping that most of the public would be too distracted by the holidays to pay attention. Clearly that didn’t work,

as protesters spent the next several weeks essentially accusing the mayor of concealing evidence of murder. “Sixteen shots and a cover-up” was the constant refrain. Claypool’s letter is more difficult to comprehend, because it came virtually out of nowhere. So allow me to provide some context that may help you understand what’s going on.

In 2016, Claypool, Emanuel, and Ronald Marmer, the chief lawyer for CPS, decided to sue the state on the grounds that its funding formula discriminated against low-income black and Latino kids in Chicago. There are dozens and dozens of law firms in Chicago. But Claypool decided only one was up to handling the case: Jenner & Block LLC. Marmer used to work for Jenner—in fact, the firm’s paying him a million dollars in severance pay. Thus, hiring Jenner raised a question: Is it ethically sound for Marmer to supervise the legal work of a firm that’s still paying him? The CPS code is pretty clear on this matter. It says employees are prevented from having “contract management authority” over an outside vendor “with whom the employee has a business relationship.” The code defines a business relationship as one involving $2,500 a year or more. Marmer’s getting his severance package in $200,000 installments. Claypool seemingly was still determined to hire Jenner & Block. So he went looking for someone who could help him out.

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Read Ben Joravsky’s columns throughout the week at chicagoreader.com.

He subsequently went through six lawyers before he found one who told him what he wanted to hear. Wanna hire Jenner? Go ahead, knock yourself out—though I’m sure lawyer number seven dressed it up in some nicer legal language than that. That lawyer was J. Timothy Eaton, a former campaign contributor to Claypool, who charged CPS $1,475 for his winning opinion on the Jenner issue. (Here I must give a shout-out to intrepid Sun-Times reporters Lauren FitzPatrick and Dan Mihalopoulos, who’ve uncovered these facts in a series of articles over the last few months.) But Eaton wasn’t the only lawyer who billed CPS for advice on the ethics of hiring Jenner. James Franczek, who represents CPS in its union negotiations, also submitted an invoice for services rendered on “ethics” and “Marmer.” (CPS hasn’t released how much Franczek charged.) Last year the matter caught the attention of CPS inspector general Nicholas Schuler, who’s in charge of ferreting out potential ethics violations—like, oh, maybe Marmer overseeing

CITY LIFE Jenner & Block’s work on a lawsuit. It’s been a contentious investigation. Last December, Schuler publicly accused CPS officials of stonewalling his efforts. In late October, the two sat down to discuss the matter. Schuler asked Claypool if he’d changed the description of Franzcek’s invoice for services rendered. Claypool said he hadn’t. So Schuler showed him evidence that the language had been changed: the words “ethics” and “Marmer” had been replaced with “personnel matter.” The smoking gun, to use one of my favorite Watergate phrases. And so last Friday, Claypool sent a letter to Schuler, writing: “In reviewing our discussions, and my own recollections, it is clear to me that in one respect I have fallen short.” Claypool goes on to explain that he “had already informally asked two lawyers on contract with CPS about this issue. I was disturbed when they billed for their advice, because I had not asked for a formal opinion and did not expect to be charged for one. And, to be candid, I didn’t agree with their advice.”

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He continues: “As I have told you, I did not recall asking for changes to make the description of services on one of those bills less specific. However differently I recalled my past conversation, the documents you shared with me this week make it clear I did do that. I apologize for that mistake. Cutting corners, even in pursuit of the rescue of this institution, simply is not excusable.” OK, let’s unpack this sucker. First, how does anyone forget asking for changes in an invoice, particularly changes that obscure the nature of the invoice by making its language “less speciﬁc”? Second, if Claypool thinks a lawyer who represents CPS isn’t going to charge for his opinion on a CPS matter, he doesn’t know much about lawyers despite being one. Third, if Claypool expects to pay only for legal advice he wants to hear, he might as well hire himself—and you know what Lincoln says about that. (“He who represents himself has a fool for a client.”) Finally, changing an invoice isn’t “cutting corners.” It’s potentially falsifying public records.

Claypool sent his letter to reporters on the same day he sent it to Schuler, who’s so far declined to comment on the matter. It arrived out of the blue—most reporters didn’t know Schuler had questioned Claypool, much less revealed evidence that the invoice had been changed. By confessing to the deed before Schuler publicly accused him of it, Claypool stole Schuler’s thunder. Now when Schuler eventually releases his full report, Claypool and his aides can dismiss it as old news. Slick move, Forrest. At the end of his apology, Claypool claims he did it all for the kids. “For me, the bottom line is to be here in in service to the kids,” he writes. “That’s what motivates me.” As I recall, Mayor Rahm also claimed he was looking out for the kids when he closed those 50 schools in 2013. Hey, kiddies, at Thanksgiving make sure you give a special thanks to your uncles Rahm and Forrest for all the wonderful things they’ve done for you. v

v @joravben

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S E C T I O N

NOVEMBER 23, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 13

CITY LIFE TRANSPORTATION

Fare play

If the CTA raises costs, it should also improve service and make the payment system more equitable. By JOHN GREENFIELD

ince 2009, regular CTA fares have held steady while all other major U.S. transit systems have raised their rates, but it looks like that’s about to change. The writing was on the wall after November 8, when Leanne Redden, head of the Regional Transportation Authority, wrote CTA president Dorval Carter arguing that the CTA needs a fare hike to plug its budget gap and avoid major service cuts. Last summer’s Illinois budget deal included a 10 percent reduction in state funding for all three transit agencies, plus a 2 percent sales tax surcharge that must be remitted to the state for administrative purposes. In response Pace and Metra officials have already announced that they’ll raise fares in 2018. The CTA alone will be out some $33 million in revenue, and Redden warned that if a balanced budget isn’t approved by February 1, it will trigger mandatory withholding of 25 percent of RTA operations funding, about $360

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million a year, leading to a huge reduction in CTA service. “None of us wants to go down that path,” she wrote. In the letter’s wake, Mayor Rahm Emanuel told the Tribune that “everything’s on the table but one thing: There will be no service cuts.” What he hasn’t ruled out is a fare increase. We’ll soon learn what’s in the cards—the CTA is slated to announce its ﬁnal 2018 budget this week. Thus far no one’s said how big a fare hike might be needed, but it should be noted that even a 25-cent increase to the current fares of $2.25 per train trip and $2 per bus ride could tip the scales for some customers, who might turn to other affordable options like Uber Pool, Lyft Line, or Divvy as an alternative, which could be counterproductive for increasing revenue. Moreover, an extra quarter per ride adds up to about $120 a year for daily round-trip commuters, a nontrivial expense for working-class Chicagoans and a real hardship for some impoverished residents. So transit advocates say that if raising

fares is inevitable, the CTA should take steps to improve service and should adopt a more equitable payment policy to soften the blow for lower-income folks. Otherwise it faces additional decreases in ridership. “State legislators should never have let things get to this point,” says the Active Transportation Alliance’s government relations director Kyle Whitehead. Things may not be completely hopeless, however. Earlier this month Active Trans released a report, “Speeding Up Chicago Buses,” with proposals to boost CTA bus ridership, which could help offset losses stemming from a fare hike. Bus use has dropped by 21 percent since the Great Recession hit in 2008, a slump the group blames on reduced bus speeds due to increased traffic congestion and competition from ride hailing. The study focuses on six of the busiest routes in the system, all with high potential for improvements: #4 Cottage Grove, #8 Halsted, #53 Pulaski, #66 Chicago, #79 79th, and #80 S P E C I A L

A D V E R T I S I N G

S E C T I O N

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MAKE HOLIDAY MEMORIES Join in the tradition of hunting for your very own Abbey Farms grown Christmas tree or select a fresh, pre-cut ﬁr from Father Andrews’ family tree farm. Warm up with craft beer and wine at the Pine Tree Café, sample seasonal baked goods, and enjoy fun holiday festivities at the farm. 2855 Hart Rd · Aurora · 630.966.7775 AbbeyFarms.org

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Tomorrow Never Knows Festival, a city-wide event, unites independent venues and gives rise to local indie artists & acclaimed national musicians and comedians. Purchase tickets at tnkfest.com.

A 25-cent increase to the current CTA fares of $2.25 per train trip and $2 per bus ride could tip the scales for some customers, who might turn to other aﬀordable options like Uber Pool, Lyft Line, or Divvy as an alternative, which could be counterproductive for increasing revenue. ò RICHARD A. CHAPMAN/SUN-TIMES

est. 1967

Celebrating our

Golden Jubilee th

ANNIVERSARY

WeLoveyou ,

YouPeople! youpeople! just steps from the Dempster “L” stop

Tue - Sat 10 - 6 Irving Park. It outlines several relatively lowcost, short-term strategies to shorten travel times, which could mitigate a potential ridership slump. These include building more car-free bus lanes (which already exist on the downtown Loop Link corridor and the south side’s Jeffery Jump route) and enforcing them with traffic cameras. Transit-friendly stoplights shorten reds or extend greens to help buses travel more efficiently—the city is currently

“State legislators should never have let things get to this point.” —Kyle Whitehead, government relations director of the Active Transportation Alliance

implementing this technology on Western and Ashland. And prepaid, all-door boarding can reduce “dwell time” at bus stops. Whitehead adds that elected officials should look into establishing discounted fares for low-income residents, similar to what currently exists for seniors, students, and people with disabilities. Center for Neighborhood Technology director Scott Bernstein argues that the CTA can add value for riders and raise additional revenue to prevent future hikes or cuts by upping its real estate game. The city’s recently passed transit-oriented development (TOD) ordinance, which eliminates the usual car-parking requirements for new construction near train stops, has led to a boom in upscale residential development along north-side el lines, but he says Chicago needs more affordable housing near stations, which would grow ridership. He adds that renting CTA properties to more useful types of retail, such as grocery stores and pharmacies, could help make stations “destinations, not just origins.” For example, the Wilson Red Line station, currently under renovation, will have new retail space available. More than 2,500 people have signed an online petition asking the CTA to rent it out to the upcoming Chicago Market food co-op. Streetsblog’s Steven Vance has floated a couple other proposals to make CTA fare policy more equitable in the event of a hike. Currently, single-ride paper tickets cost $3, or

75 cents more than the fare with a Ventra card. And unlike card holders, riders who pay cash to board a bus have to pay the full fare again if they transfer to a train. More aggressive marketing of these advantages could boost enrollment and save money for riders who make the switch. Vance also suggests that the CTA implement fare capping so that customers who pay as they go for multiple rides on a single day never spend more than the price of a one-day pass, currently $10. This would be helpful for lower-income riders who don’t want to invest a Hamilton on a pass for fear that they might not get their money’s worth. Under this scenario day passes would no longer offer a cost savings, but they’d still be handy for visitors who don’t want to purchase a permanent Ventra card, as well as for nonproﬁts that buy passes in bulk to distribute to clients. London, the ﬁrst major city to implement fare capping, uses the same fare-card concessionaire as Chicago, Cubic Transportation Systems, so it shouldn’t be too hard for Ventra to adopt it. If a CTA fare hike is in our future, how about some sugar in the form of service and equity improvements to help the medicine go down? v

847-475-8665

801 Dempster Evanston

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John Greenfield edits the transportation news website Streetsblog Chicago. v @greenfieldjohn

NOVEMBER 23, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 15

NATIVE AMERICAN

OR FAKE

INDIAN?

The Vinyard Indians are attempting to become Illinois’s ﬁrst state-recognized native tribe. But tribes long recognized by the federal government say the group’s members are just a bunch of white people caught in an act of cultural appropriation. By RYAN SMITH PHOTOS BY NEETA SATAM 16 CHICAGO READER - NOVEMBER 23, 2017

Vinyard Indian Settlement chairman Barney Bush

IN A SMALL CLEARING IN THE MIDDLE OF THE SHAWNEE NATIONAL FOREST, BARNEY BUSH SPRINKLES A HANDFUL OF GLITTERY DUST INTO A BONFIRE AND POKES AT THE NIGHT SKY WITH AN EAGLE FEATHER AS IF SIGNING SOME KIND OF PHANTOM LETTER. It’s the second evening of Reconnection Days, an annual festival held on the third weekend in September by the Vinyard Indian Settlement, a small nonproﬁt entity 345 miles south of Chicago that’s the literal stomping grounds of a tribe of self-identifying Native Americans led by Bush, a distinguished poet, author, activist, and educator. Three times a year, the Vinyard Indians invite the public to join them on their 25-acre parcel of land a mile

north of the speck-on-the-map town of Herod, Illinois, to participate in Native Americanthemed feasts, crafts, and traditional ceremonies that they say were quietly passed down to them from their Shawnee ancestors. Bush is a hulking figure. The 73-year-old strolls the grounds of the settlement with the help of a long walking stick. He’s nearly bald on top but has a knot of long dark hair hanging from the back of his head, and he wears a tiny red stud in each ear. Like many rural downstate Illinoisans, he speaks with something of a southern drawl. When Bush calls himself an Indian, for instance, he sounds as if he’s saying “End-yun.” “Glad to see so many young people here tonight,” Bush says to the crowd gathered around the blaze. There’s wistfulness in his sonorous voice. “We’d like to make more use of this place while we still have some elders alive.” The Vinyards say they once practiced such rituals in secret, in fear of the hostile white world all around them. But in recent years they’ve made a more public embrace of what they assert to be their native heritage. They aim to expand the settlement’s footprint both physically and culturally—to buy more acres of nearby property (“our homelands,” Bush says) to preserve them from energy companies who would use the land to hydrofrack for oil and natural gas and strip-mine for coal. They also want to build a cultural center on the settlement to preserve their heritage and bring tourism dollars and maybe even some hope to an area that’s desperately in need of economic relief. In May 2015, the Vinyards were on the verge of becoming Illinois’s first state-recognized Indian tribe. The Vinyard Indian Settlement of Shawnee Indians Recognition Act, HB 3127, which had unanimously passed in the Illinois house, seemed like a lock in the senate until members of a coalition of federally recognized Indian tribes traveled to Springﬁeld to testify against the Vinyard Indians, accusing them of being white people posing as natives. The senate responded to the outcry by delaying the bill. Now, more than two years later, it remains stuck in bureaucratic limbo. Members of the Vinyards suggest their critics are playing politics to protect their own share of federal funds divvied up among the native population. According to Bush, the tribes’ testimony and the information they provided to the senate were patently false. “They gave the senators so much misinformation that . . . I think they did more harm to themselves in trying to demean us.”

Ben Barnes, second chief of the Shawnee Tribe, one of the leaders who went before the state senate in the matter, often compares Bush to Rachel Dolezal. The 40-year-old from Spokane, Washington, not only successfully assumed the identity of a black woman for much of her adult life before being exposed as white by her parents in June 2015, but also ascended into leadership roles in the AfricanAmerican community and centered her life around her chosen identity. She’d been head of an NAACP chapter, a black studies teacher, and a member of a police oversight commission. According to Barnes, Bush has played the same game as Dolezal—only for much longer. “The world should see that Bush is like Dolezal, where he’s this racial or ethnicity shifter,” Barnes tells me. (The implication is that Bush dyes his hair black and applies tanning spray to appear Native American.) “These [ceremonial] activities he presents for people are minstrel shows. When they do those pantomimes, that is offensive and racist.”

onight what’s drawn a small group through the thick black wood to a spot just south of the Vinyard Indian Settlement is a ritual Bush calls the stomp dance. Tribe members cluster around the ﬁre alongside curious locals and young activists from the Carbondale area, some of whom occupied the Standing Rock encampment during last year’s Dakota Pipeline protests. Outsiders are allowed to dance if they follow the rules: no pictures, no recordings, no drugs or alcohol; women are required to cover their legs with skirts or long pieces of uncut fabric. Mark Denzer, a Vinyard Indian elder and executive director of the settlement, instructs those gathered to hold hands in a ring around the blaze. Earlier in the night, while Bush prepared squash for a shared feast, his granddaughter Haleigh used pliers to affix dozens of deer hooves to a pair of leather chaps that she’s wearing as part of the ceremony. As the group begins to shuffle counterclockwise around the ﬁre, the percussive clacking of the hooves echoes through the warm air. Denzer begins a series of evocative call-and-response songs in an indecipherable language. For a moment after the music stops the forest goes quiet until eerie howls from a pack of coyotes pierce the silence. Bush chuckles knowingly, as if he’s somehow summoned a kind of animal magic to the middle of the southern-Illinois wilderness. Shadows from the flickering flames dance on the faces of those assembled. There are expressions of

delight and wonder. Raw encounters with nature are scarce these days. Maybe that’s what I’m doing here. Maybe that’s what everyone is here for. To brush up against something that feels primal and authentic. Still, Bush wants the Vinyard Indian Settlement to be deﬁned by more than Native American song-and-dance routines. “I remember my granddad asking me why I did [powwow dances]. And I said, ‘Well, I am proud to be an Indian.’ And he said, ‘Don’t you already know you’re an Indian?’ He’s right. If we can maintain ourselves here culturally as an entity and keep to some semblance of traditional ways and grow on those and be more engaged in the community and social causes . . . ” He trails off, seeming to continue rattling off in his head his list of ambitions for his tribe. But instead of expanding their reach and impact, the Vinyard Indians find themselves devoting what limited resources they have to proving their identity, says Georgia De La Garza, the settlement’s business manager. (“I’m not a Vinyard Indian, but I’m Cherokee,” she says. “My great-grandmother was on the Trail of Tears.”) “I think it’s really sad that they’ve had to prove who they are. Sometimes I hear Barney’s voice and hear the stories he grew up with and see him practice the traditions of being a Shawnee on a daily basis. For him to be denied, it’s heartbreaking. Really heartbreaking.”

istory, as they say, is written by the winners—but the consolation prize for the losers is that they sometimes get naming rights. America in particular has a tendency to honor people and things systematically uprooted, destroyed, or murdered to make room for the very thing being named. It’s a cruel irony, for instance, that the names of so many of our suburbs and subdivisions carry the words “forest,” “deer,” “fox,” or “meadow,” memorializing the ﬂora and fauna cut down to make way for modern civilization. It’s far from a 20th-century phenomenon. Illinois, of course, takes its name from a confederation of Indian tribes also known as the Illiniwek. The group is estimated to have numbered more than 10,000 people in 1673. But the war and disease that came with the inﬂux of European settlers into the territory ravaged the population. By the time the Illiniwek ceded the last of their land to the U.S. in 1832—just 14 years after the state of Illinois officially joined the union—they were reduced to a village of fewer than 300 people. When in 1939 President Franklin D. Roosevelt officially named the 280,000 acres J

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of southern-Illinois woodlands the Shawnee National Forest, Shawnee Indians and other native tribes had been a rarity there for at least a century. What Indians remained in Illinois or anywhere east of the Mississippi in the 1830s were swept away by current president Donald Trump’s hero, Andrew Jackson, who in his 1830 inaugural address articulated a profoundly racist notion that came to be called manifest destiny: “What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms, embellished with all the improvements which art can divine or industry execute?” Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830 worked as advertised, removing 46,000 Native American people from their land to the west. The Trail of Tears National Historic Trail serves today as a stark reminder of the grueling journey of 9,000 Cherokees through the Shawnee National Forest en route to land designated as Indian Territory in Oklahoma. A smattering of Indians managed to avoid the long arm of Jackson’s removal policy and remained in the midwest by assimilating into white society. They dressed, acted, and spoke like whites, and sometimes adopted Christianity as part of the smokescreen. “A lot of tribal communities really did hide in plain sight,” says Doug Kiel, a citizen of the Oneida Nation and a Northwestern University assistant professor who lectures on Native American history. “It was either defy the ruling and continue to ﬁght for territory, be sent off to reservations out of the way of white expansionism, or try to ﬁt into white society as best they could.” The Vinyards cite oral histories passed down from their elders to support their claim of being descended from one of these groups of assimilated Indians. According to tribal lore, about 80 of their Shawnee ancestors led by Chief Sedowii crossed the Ohio River in 1809 or 1810 near what is now Shawneetown, Illinois, to escape a colonial militia. The militia had been pursuing the Shawnee from Ohio to prevent them from joining the resistance army of Tecumseh, the Shawnee Indian political leader and war chief. Chief Sedowii’s people encountered a different group of Shawnees and French salt makers, who briefly provided them with food and shelter before sending them on their way into the wilderness of what is now Gallatin County, in southeastern Illinois. As the story goes, they journeyed a few miles to the area currently known as Karbers Ridge and came upon a friendly community of German immigrants, all of whom had taken up the surname of Vinyard. Bush says some of the Shawnee

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Garden of the Gods Wilderness in the Shawnee National Forest near the Vinyard Indian Settlement in southern Illinois

were removed to Cape Girardeau, Missouri, and Blytheville, Arkansas, and later ended up in what would become Shawnee Mission, Kansas. Others stayed and intermarried with the German settlers, taking the name Vinyard as a form of camouﬂage. “My granddad said they stayed there and kind of blended in with the German immigrants. That small group of people wanted to survive, so they did what they had to do,” Bush says. “The local white folks got used to those Indians being there, but they made fun of the Germans by calling it the Vinyard Indian Settlement. That name got started as kind of derisive term.” According to Bush, some residents of the Vinyard Indian Settlement kept remnants of old Shawnee culture and practices alive in secret until the early 1950s. “When my grandfather passed on in about 1953, the assimilation had become so pervasive that no one wanted to continue anything in public. So they asked different members of the family to take over the settlement because no one would, includ-

“ILLINOIS LEGISLATORS HAD ALMOST JUST CREATED A BRAND-NEW TRIBE OUT OF A BUNCH OF EUROPEANS.” —Ben Barnes, second chief of the Shawnee Tribe

ing my own mother.” Growing up in Herod in the Vinyard Indian Settlement area, Bush says he always felt like an Indian, even if some of his family members tried to hide from their heritage. “It hangs over us like a cloud,” he says of his ancestry, however disputed. “It’s sometimes a cloud of good water or a cloud of bad water, but it’s always hung over us. And we all know that. And there’s people in the family who left here to get away from it all.” Like the Shawnee people he claims to descend from, Bush lived a rather nomadic existence for many years, moving to native communities throughout Oklahoma and other western states, including Colorado, the Dakotas, Montana, and Wyoming. “When I was about 16 or 17, I jumped in the van with my cousins and just took off west,” Bush says. “They’re the ones who took me into the powwow culture. I started dancing and feeling very proud of myself. I was manifesting some part of my ancestry.” Bush’s involvement in the Native American community deepened in the late 60s

and 70s as he became a “red power” activist and organizer associated with the American Indian Movement, the civil rights campaign that formed in Minneapolis in 1968 and is closely associated with the Black Panthers. He blossomed as an educator, teaching writing and English in various Native American schools, including the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and was instrumental in establishing an Oklahoma school for Cheyenne Indians called the Institute of the Southern Plains. Bush is perhaps best known as a multidisciplinary artist. He’s published several books of poetry, and his writing has been anthologized in collections like the 1988 Harper’s Anthology of 20th Century Native American Poetry. He had a recording deal with Paris-based Nato Records, which released several of his musical and spoken-word performances, including the double album Remake of the American Dream, featuring music and vocals by Bush and English composer Tony Hymas on piano. Guitarist Jeff Beck plays over a reading of a Bush poem about Indian chief Kintpuash (aka Captain Jack) on the 1998 Hymas experimental jazz album Oyaté. Bush even opened for Joey Ramone at the 1996 Hodiits’a II music festival in Navajo territory in Arizona. “Bush’s poetry reading, his message about strength, unity and determination in the face of constant set-backs was potent and resounding,” MTV News wrote of the performance. “Bush, a kindly older gentleman with shoulder-length salt and pepper hair, stood defiantly at center stage and read from his notebook, zapping the kids with lines like, ‘I was once told that the pen was mightier than the sword, I don’t know if that’s true, I think greed might be stronger.’ Bush railed against the ‘vampires of the system’ and the ‘cultural pedophiles’ who tried to deny the children of the [reservation] their culture.” It was also during the late 90s that Bush met with his ﬁrst cousin and several other members of the Vinyard Indian Settlement, who asked him to return to southern Illinois from New Mexico, take over as chairman, and revive it from its near dormant state. He agreed on the condition that the tribe’s ambitions go beyond ceremony. “What does it mean to continue the culture? Does it mean just to have feast days? Because I’ve always been a bastard when it comes to ceremony and the value of culture,” he says. “I want culture to do something. I don’t want it to just look pretty—all the feathers and the bells and jingles and buckskins and fringe. Let’s have a [political and cultural] impact here in southern Illinois.”

Georgia De La Garza, the settlement’s business manager, has been a catalyst for the Vinyards. A couple years ago, she convinced Bush and the six-member tribal council to earn income on their land by converting a cabin on the property dubbed the MakWa Lodge into an Airbnb. She also pushed the tribe to begin seeking recognition from the state of Illinois.

wo centuries after European settlers supplanted the Shawnee, Illiniwek, and other native peoples, it’s the whites who are now vanishing from the Ohio River Valley area of “Little Egypt” in southern Illinois surrounding the Vinyard Indian Settlement. The cause isn’t war or government-sanctioned removal but economic deprivation. Over the last generation, globalization and outsourcing have scrubbed the region of much of its manufacturing and other blue-collar jobs.

The state has bled an estimated 300,000 factory workers since 2000, which disproportionately affects southern-Illinois workers. Little Egypt is still coal-mining country, but because the methods of modern coal production require fewer miners, companies like Peabody Energy keep extracting more wealth from the ground while paying fewer locals to do the dirty work. (Fifty-six million tons of coal was produced in 2015 compared with 33 million in 2010, according to the Illinois Coal Association.) Factor in America’s so-called

war on coal, which continues in the form of strict new environmental regulations, and Illinois has lost about 1,300 jobs in coal over the last few years, according to the Chicago Tribune, bringing the total number employed to only 2,800, a fraction of the 50,000 working during the industry’s peak in the 1930s. Meanwhile, the cash-strapped state government keeps cutting millions annually (including $19 million in 2017 alone) from the budget of Southern Illinois University—a regional economic hub with an estimated $859 million J

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Haleigh Bush, Barney’s granddaughter, wears a homemade shaker made of deer toes that’s used in the ritual stomp dance.

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economic impact on the southern 23 counties of Illinois, according to a 2011 study. Pope County, where the Vinyard Indian Settlement sits, teems with enough rugged natural beauty to mask the area’s haunted, empty quality. The abundance of decrepit, vacant, or uninhabitable farmhouses and storefronts makes it easy to imagine a time in the near future in which humans are extinct from the place. Forty percent of all homes in the county are vacant—much higher than the 10 percent statewide vacancy rate. Since the 2010 census, the county’s population has dropped 6 percent, to 4,470. Pope County’s biggest break in decades came in late August. Hundreds of thousands of tourists from all over the world ﬂocked to the Shawnee National Forest and surrounding towns to view the so-called Great American Eclipse; the southern tip of Illinois was in the path of totality, which made the area a prime destination. “I had rooms booked for a year and a half” in advance, the owner of a bedand-breakfast in Golconda, the seat of Pope County, told me. But the shot in the arm lasted only a weekend. Three weeks after the eclipse, Golconda, where 13,000 Cherokees once crossed the Ohio River by ferry along the Trail of Tears, is practically a ghost town. There are more vultures circling overhead than there are people in the streets. Some large houses situated along the riverbanks—even those lining Columbus Avenue, once considered the wealthy district of this town of 668—are boarded up or in a state of disrepair. Some look as if they would crumble in a stiff wind. The rich have all moved away, and what’s left of the population is disproportionately poor—the poverty rate

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in Golconda is 25 percent, nearly double the rate in the rest of the state. (For children under the age of 18, it’s 43 percent.) Alcoholism and drug addiction are a growing problem, and the region is ground zero for Illinois’s opioid crisis. According to a June report from the Belleville News-Democrat based on numbers obtained from the Illinois Department of Health, the number of prescriptions for opioid-based painkillers in Illinois’s 16 southern counties grew 30 percent from 2008 to 2016—much more than in the rest of the state. “We have a lot of dysfunction in these counties down here that needs to be attended to—as much down here as in the inner city. But because we have so many trees left, you just can’t see it,” Bush says. “All we’ve got left is fracking and strip mining.” Environmental destruction by greedy corporations is a persistent theme in Bush’s poetry. His 1985 book of poems Inherit the Blood told the story of a grandmother confronted with an encroaching coal mine. “I’ve always been concerned about the idea of people destroying the landscape for coal or for oil,” Bush says, “and destroying our old village sites and graveyards in order to get to all of that.” At an anti-fracking lecture several years ago, Bush and De La Garza became fast friends. (“I said at the meeting that we needed to organize and stop the fracking,” De La Garza recalls, “and Barney stood up and said ‘Ohho!’ and turned around and shook my hand, and that was the beginning of our friendship right there.”) She’s an outspoken environmental activist and founder of Shawnee Hills and Hollers, an organization advocating for a fossil-fuel-free southern Illinois, and a community organizer for an anti-mining group called Justice for Rocky Branch. (“I’m really

known by the coal industry here,” she says. “I ﬁght it tooth and nail.”) In addition to the environmental activism its members are engaged in, Bush and other Vinyard Indian Settlement folks are in the midst of dreaming up a Native American cultural center for Pope County. “It would be

amazing for the community,” De La Garza says. “We would like to be able to have a cultural living center for the people, for the elders to teach youth crafts and stories and the language, learn farming and gardening, and also a place for the public to be educated. We’ve been archiving ﬂints, tools. The Shawnee are known

Vinyard Indian Settlement member Kathi Wolfe displays homemade jewelry.

for their beadwork—we’ve got some beautiful old beadwork, leatherwork, and moccasins.” De La Garza has been a catalyst for the Vinyards. A couple years ago, she convinced Bush and the six-member tribal council to earn income on their land by converting a cabin on the property dubbed the Mak-Wa Lodge into an Airbnb. At the end of 2014 she pushed the tribe to begin seeking recognition from the state of Illinois. The official status, De La Garza told them, would be an advantage in applying for grants and obtaining federal money to help purchase more of what the Vinyards call their homelands. Because of her activism work, De La Garza knows her way around the halls of power in Springfield. She eventually drummed up support from state rep Brandon Phelps of Harrisburg (who resigned in September for unspecified health reasons) and southern-Illinois state senator Gary Forby, who lost in 2016. For southern-Illinois legislators, the Vinyard Indians and their proposed cultural center and programming posed an opportunity to draw tourism dollars to an area starved for them. Phelps first introduced HB 3127 to the Illinois house in February 2015 with two Democratic legislators, representatives Greg Harris of Chicago and Stephanie Kifowit of Aurora, serving as cosponsors. The bill would make the tribe “eligible for any services and benefits provided by the United States and state agencies to Indians that are otherwise available to state-recognized tribes.” State recognition of native tribes isn’t a common practice. Only 16 states have voted to acknowledge tribes—partly because it’s largely a symbolic gesture. State recognition, however, does sometimes open a door to the possibility of smaller federal grants. Between 2007 and 2010, 24 federal programs awarded more than $100 million to 26 tribes that weren’t federally recognized, according to a report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office. In April, HB 3127 passed unanimously, 113-0, in the Illinois house. It seemed all but guaranteed to pass in the senate until May 2015, when several federally recognized Indian tribes—including the Cherokee Nation, the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma, the Miami Tribe, and the Absentee Shawnee Tribe—wrote letters to lawmakers and sent representatives to Springfield to testify that the Vinyards were frauds, fake Indians appropriating native culture. Barnes of the Shawnee Tribe spoke out against the Vinyards during a senate hearing. “This happens all the time,” he says. “There are 400 fake Cherokee tribes. There are 80some fake Shawnee ones. And a similar J

“I WANT NATIVE CULTURE TO DO SOMETHING. I DON’T WANT IT TO JUST LOOK PRETTY—ALL THE FEATHERS AND THE BELLS AND JINGLES AND BUCKSKINS AND FRINGE. LET’S HAVE A [POLITICAL AND CULTURAL] IMPACT HERE IN SOUTHERN ILLINOIS.” —Barney Bush, Vineyard Indian Settlement chairman

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Barney, ‘If you try to get federally recognized we’ll say you’re Shawnee. But if you say that you don’t want federal recognition, then you’re not Indian.’ That’s what they told him, pointblank. They said, ‘If you want to be federally recognized, you’re Shawnee.’ That way they can come here and grab the land and build casinos. It’s very interesting. Very political.” According to Barnes, the Shawnee made no such offer to Bush. “That’s completely preposterous,” he says. “We don’t want [casinos] there.” After testimony from Barnes and other Indians, the senate responded by sending the bill to legislative purgatory. It bounced around various committees and was amended and subjected to further readings over the next year before being sent back to the rules committee in June 2016. The final entry in the bill’s status, dated January 10, 2017, is “session sine die”—postponed indefinitely. De La Garza says Forby told her the committee would bring the bill back to the table after the Vinyards submitted their own genealogy report supporting their claim to a Shawnee bloodline. They did so in early 2016. “We handed in the big book to the senate and they called committee and said, ‘Absolutely, you are who you say you are. We want this to happen.’ But this was in 2016.” The Vinyards are trying anew to find sponsors in the senate to revive HB 3127 for 2018, but so far there are no takers. My numerous calls and e-mails to Phelps and Forby, the former legislators who’d originally supported the Vinyards, went unanswered. Barnes wasn’t surprised those who’d once championed the Vinyards’ quest for official standing wouldn’t want to speak on the record about the issue. “They were clueless and had been uneducated. And they didn’t understand federal Indian policy. Once they found out that they made a foray into the federal arena and made no provisions to check the authenticity of [Bush’s] claim, I think they feel embarrassed now,” he says. “They had almost just created a brand-new tribe out of a bunch of Europeans.”

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number of fake Delawares. “We don’t want—we don’t believe [the Vinyards] can get federal recognition. They can’t meet the criteria. They’ve done the DNA testing. And it’s not there. They’re not Native American at all,” Barnes says. “The problem is that the state of Illinois has no established criteria. You can self-identify and say ‘I am Indian,’ but that doesn’t make you a nation. That does not make you have the rights to enter into a treaty with the government as a nation of people that preexisted the United States.” For support, the tribes critical of the Vinyards’ claims cited Illinois and Indiana historical records detailing the removal of Shawnee around the War of 1812 and during Jackson’s Indian Removal Act. They included a letter from Lee Ann Flynn, Bush’s cousin, in which she states she researched the family genealogy and found no relation to Shawnee Indians in their bloodlines. “I have asked but never received any documentation from Barney or the Board of Directors of the Vinyard Indian Settlement,” Flynn wrote. “In fact I was told the documentation I was seeking was ‘the white man’s way of hiding us,’ which makes no sense to me because the census records do exist and show all family members to be ‘white.’ ” According to De La Garza, the federally recognized tribes submitted a “fake genealogy report where they had Barney’s dad married to his grandmother.” The senate then offered the Vinyard Indians the chance to submit their own genealogy report, De La Garza says. “They said, ‘If you prove you are who say you are, then we’ll come back to the table.’ ” She obtained the volunteer services of a former boss, Juli Claussen, a member of the Association of Professional Genealogists, who compiled her own report that was submitted to the legislature. It concludes that Bush and his family members are, in fact, descended from Shawnee: “I hold the oral history as credible in this case because it is consistent between individuals from various branches of the family; it is detailed; the non-verbal cues of the interviewees were consistent with truthfulness; a great deal of the information on identities of ancestors was verifiable by the official records and its accuracy confirmed when cross-checked with those records; and remnants of Native American rituals, language and traditions have been preserved and carried on by descendants.” De La Garza claims that the other tribes testified against the Vinyards out of greed. “They would be losing some of the federal funds. They want everything for themselves. They don’t like to share,” she says. “They offered

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T Mark Denzer, a Vinyard Indian elder and executive director of the settlement, holds a canoe paddle he carved and a medicine bag he made from elk hide and earth pigments.

he population of people who self-identify as Indians keeps climbing, according to U.S. Census figures. The number of people who claimed to be American Indian or Alaska Native jumped 18 percent from 2000 to 2010 to 2.9 million—double the rate of growth of the total U.S. population. The percentage increase was even more pronounced among those of a multiracial background: 2.3 million people identified as American Indian or Alaska Native in combination with one or more other races in 2010—a 39 percent increase from the 2000 census.

“CLAIMING TO BE INDIAN IS OFTEN AN ATTEMPT TO ESCAPE THE BLANDNESS AND EMPTINESS OF WHITENESS WITH SOMETHING THAT FEELS EXOTIC.” —Doug Kiel, a citizen of the Oneida Nation and a Northwestern University assistant professor who lectures on Native American history

“Why is it that everyone claims to be Native American?” Barnes asks. (There have been several cases in recent years in which white people have claimed to have Indian blood without being able to provide substantial proof; Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, actor Johnny Depp, and academics Ward Churchill and Susan Taffe Reed are among them.) “What is this exoticism that allows people to think that being a Native American gives them a sort of cachet?” It’s a trend that began to take off in the 70s. “All of a sudden, with the 1970 census, during the red-power movement, a lot of people began to feel more comfortable claiming to be Indian,” says Kiel, the Northwestern lecturer. “Some had the perception that it meant there were ﬁscal beneﬁts and you were entitled to free stuff, which is often not the case.” There are also cultural reasons. “I think it’s often an attempt to escape the blandness and

emptiness of whiteness with something that feels exotic,” Kiel says. In more left or liberal circles, especially where there’s an increasing call for white people to “check their privilege,” a native identity may confer upon the claimant the benefit of speaking as a member of a marginalized group. That’s not to say that when people misidentify their bloodlines, it’s always done on purpose. Sometimes false family lore is passed down for generations. Warren, for example, has said that she grew up with stories of her family’s native ancestry. “I am very proud of my heritage,” the senator told NPR in 2012. “These are my family stories. This is what my brothers and I were told by my mom and my dad, my mammaw and my pappaw. This is our lives. And I’m very proud of it.” I also know this firsthand. The day after I visited the Vinyard Indian Settlement, I carried out my father’s last wishes: to bury his ashes in an urn bearing the fleur-de-lis as an homage to his French heritage. His single-minded obsession with his family tree led him to decorate his bedroom like a French museum. He hung a fleur-de-lis flag and shield and posters of French monarchy. He wore necklaces and rings displaying the symbol. But for decades my dad had been infatuated with what he believed was his Irish heritage—so much so that he once planned to change our family’s surname to something more Gaelic. The French fixation came just three years ago, after he got a DNA test through the ancestry website 23andMe. The results showed that the family history my great-grandfather had written 40 years ago—in which he claimed that my dad’s side of the family was overwhelmingly Irish and British, and that we were probably related to the explorer John Smith—was mostly bunk. Our dominant ancestry, the test revealed, is French, and my dad adopted it like someone else might change his allegiance to a sports team. Being Native American in the U.S. certainly has different connotations than being French or Irish. Who is counted as native and who isn’t is essential to the 567 federally recognized tribal nations who have a formal relationship with the U.S. government. Billions of dollars are divided and distributed every year to the tribes through the Bureau of Indian Affairs. (In his proposed budget, President Trump plans to allocate 2.5 billion to the bureau, $303 million less than in 2017.) The more tribes there are, the thinking goes, the fewer the federal resources available for each. That’s partly why the battle over native authenticity has grown increasingly fierce. In a New York Times Magazine story published

in January, David Wilkins, a professor of American Indian studies at the University of Minnesota, said there’s been a surge in tribal members being “disenrolled”—between 5,000 and 9,000 people in 79 tribes across 20 states since the mid-90s. The way the federal government decides who qualifies as an Indian is through the so-called blood quantum measurement, a rather arbitrary percentage of bloodlines related to ancestry. The concept of the blood quantum dates back hundreds of years, but it didn’t become a part of federal law until the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which allowed federally recognized tribes to form constitutions and statutes to deﬁne their own membership criteria. As a result, most tribes began adopting blood quantum requirements that demand a member’s blood be at least one-16th to one-half that of their tribal ancestry. The Vinyard Indian Settlement has set blood requirements for what Bush calls its “citizens” at a quarter Indian, with at least an eighth of that being Shawnee. But actually determining blood quantum has always been an inexact science that involves consulting incomplete records—often from times when Native Americans weren’t counted (the U.S.

Census didn’t officially include Native Americans until 1890). The focus on blood quantum measurements also prioritizes race over all other factors. “It’s a fraught system that excludes many,” Kiel says. “Part of the problem is it’s a European concept to deﬁne Indians by their blood. But for many native people, ideas of belonging, kinship, and communities go beyond what’s in blood. People could be adopted into a community. But increasingly, since the 19th century, we’ve relied on a certain magical number to determine your Indianness, and it becomes the way the U.S. rules Indians. The U.S. makes a census and sets a bar, but it’s entirely an external measure.” Asked speciﬁcally about the Vinyard Indian claim, Kiel wavers. “Questions of identity in Indian country are always so hard. There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical because there are a lot of pretenders. It’s just true,” he says. “But there are gray areas. One of the reasons why the [blood quantum] still exists is underlying anxieties for Native Americans: ‘What if we look too white? Then people aren’t going to recognize our sovereignty.’ That’s a real anxiety. There’s a lot of ambiguity, and it leaves space for those who play Indian.” J

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hen it comes to questions about his own blood quantum, Bush is elusive, sometimes contradictory. On one occasion, he said, “In my growing up, I just have always thought of myself as an Indian.” Later he reiterated the Vinyard Indian Settlement’s blood requirement. Pushed again about his own percentage, Bush gave a tortuous answer. “Well, that’s a good question,” he said. “The qualification—I think the truth of the matter is—should be the qualifying truth. That we’re basically all here now, as we exist now. We’re descendants of Indians. As far as being an Indian is concerned, we might be culturally Indian. Culturally, socially—that sort of thing. But we’re descendants of those people. “I don’t want to get into conflicts over who’s Indian and who’s not Indian,” Bush continued, “because that’s an old, old battle in Indian country that’s not going to get won.” He has strong words for critics of the Vinyards, including Barnes and others who testified in front of the senate. “If you’re going to blow your mouth off about full-bloods and who’s an Indian, who’s not—if you’re the descendant of anyone who is not a [full-blood] Indian, you’re not a full-blood Indian. That’s a fact.” “There are people who have become so ingrained in this identity of federal recognition, state recognition—now you’re not legitimate if you’re not one of those people or under one of those rolls,” Bush says. “And it doesn’t matter what your blood degree is. According to my aunt, you weren’t a full-blood Indian if you had a non-Indian ancestor. Which is true, you aren’t. And the tribes of eastern Oklahoma, you go into those health centers down there, and you think you’re in a health center in Pennsylvania. There are people who are descendants that are still eligible. The Cherokee tribe honors citizenship as long as you can prove a Cherokee ancestor all the way back to Andy Jackson.” Peggy Brewer, a Golconda soap maker and beekeeper who was among the attendees at Reconnection Days, says she was skeptical of Bush and the Vinyards until she met and talked to them. “I watched them for years and read about their events and some of the negative things said about them online,” she says. “But I think [Bush is] a good man with good intentions. When you’re mixed race, you always get questioned.”

hile the stomp dance at Reconnection Days is advertised as a Native American ritual, it feels strikingly similar to a Christian church service. There’s chantlike music, reverential acknowledgment of a Cre-

“FOR MANY NATIVE PEOPLE, IDEAS OF BELONGING, KINSHIP, AND COMMUNITIES GO BEYOND WHAT’S IN BLOOD.” —Doug Kiel

ator, and something like a group confessional. In between trips around the bonfire, those sitting around the blaze are summoned to “speak your truth” while gripping an eagle feather like a talisman. Tribesmen and nonmembers alike describe struggles with all manner of problems: financial troubles, loneliness, loved ones addicted to alcohol or opioids, grieving for the dead. They say how thankful they are to have a community to share their pain with. Bush seems to be struggling with a different kind of pain. Earlier he’d told me that he wasn’t in physical condition for a prolonged stomp dance, as would be the tradition of his forebears. “I can’t stay up for dancing all night long anymore. I’m just past that point of being able to handle it,” said. “But I go out and I take a couple of rounds.” After trudging around the fire for two song cycles, Bush is the first to bid the group good night. Limping with his walking stick into the woods, he disappears into the darkness. v

v @RyanSmithWriter

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b ALL AGES

ARTS & CULTURE As the Joﬀrey Ballet prepares to leave the Auditorium Theatre, the venue’s future is uncertain. ò JOHN R. BOEHM PHOTOGRAPHY

CULTURE

Jexit: The Auditorium Theatre faces a post-Joffrey future By DEANNA ISAACS

he Auditorium Theatre—that massive, stony hunk of Chicago history—celebrated the anniversary of a rebirth earlier this month with an evening of spectacular dance by members of 14 top national and international companies, including Alvin Ailey, Berlin State Ballet, and American Ballet Theatre. Also on the bill were some familiar pleas for ﬁnancial support. The behemoth, designed by Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan and first opened in 1889, needs some work. Again. And it won’t be cheap. When you’re 128 years old and you’ve been neglected, there’s no quick ﬁx. The November 12 gala, put together by CEO Tania Castroverde Moskalenko, marked the 50th anniversary of the Auditorium’s 1967 reopening. At that time the decrepit theater, owned by Roosevelt University, had been shuttered for more than two decades. It was brought back to life thanks largely to the efforts of a single woman—Roosevelt Univer-

sity trustee Beatrice Spachner, who made it her personal crusade. Spachner founded the nonproﬁt Auditorium Theatre Council to support and run the theater, and worked for years to raise the money for its restoration. The ’67 reopening event was a New York City Ballet performance featuring legendary dancers Edward Villella and Suzanne Farrell. Villella, back for the gala last week, took the stage, looked out at a packed audience under the Auditorium’s distinctive concentric arches of golden lights, and declared that he’d danced all over the world, “but never in a theater like this.” Castroverde Moskalenko followed up with a request for support that’ll keep the national historic landmark “glittering and great.” The celebration came on the heels of some unexpected news, however. The Joffrey Ballet, which has been the Auditorium Theatre’s prestigious resident company for 22 years (in what seemed like a perfect pairing), will dump the Auditorium at the start of the 2020-’21

season and move in with Lyric Opera. Castroverde Moskalenko, who’s only been on the job for a year, says the move came as a surprise to her. In an interview last week, she told me she’d heard some rumors in the spring and had asked Joffrey officials about it in May, but was told they were “just exploring options.” After that, Castroverde Moskalenko says, she heard nothing more until she got a phone call from the Tribune asking for comment on the departure. On September 22, Lyric and Joffrey issued a joint announcement of a seven-year rental agreement. Joffrey artistic director Ashley Wheater was quoted as saying that the opera house’s “backstage assets” alone will take the dance company to “new levels of artistry.” Castroverde Moskalenko says the three-year notice gives her board enough time to come up with a new strategic plan for the Auditorium (which now functions variously as rental house, presenter, and producer), and will “allow us to reimagine our future.” At this point, she adds, “I don’t know what that plan is.” When it originally opened, the Auditorium building included office and hotel space and was said to be one of the world’s first mixed-use facilities. It put Chicago on the map as an up-and-coming cultural hub, lending it the prominence that landed the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. The Auditorium’s 17-story tower was the city’s tallest structure, and the interior boasted eye-popping innovations, like 3,500 electric lightbulbs, air

cooling (thanks to 15 tons of ice, replenished daily), 26 hydraulic lifts under the stage, and a democratically designed 4,200-seat house (now 3,900) that put the expensive box seats at a 90-degree angle to the stage and gave the cheaper seats the good views. By the 1930s, when its original opera and symphony tenants had long since moved into their own buildings and its shared hotel bathrooms were out of favor, the Auditorium Building had fallen into bankruptcy and disrepair. The city took it over and turned it into a servicemen’s center during World War II, converting the stage to a bowling alley. Roosevelt University acquired it in 1946, and moved its classes and offices into the hotel and office space. In the 1990s, a new crisis arose: then president Theodore Gross, looking for money to build a suburban campus, signaled that he might dip into the theater’s funds. Several members of the Auditorium Theatre Council took Roosevelt to court, waging a lengthy battle for control of the venue that ended with a state supreme court decision in 2002 affirming the university’s ownership. Roosevelt is now dealing with its own financial troubles, mostly stemming from debt taken on to build a new landmark—an adjacent, glassy blue tower with a zigzag profile that’s primarily used for student housing. The theater has been operating at a loss in recent years. Castroverde Moskolenko says fiscal year 2017 reversed the trend, closing with a balanced budget of about $14 million, but raising money for restoration and maintenance is an ongoing project. And Castroverde Moskalenko doesn’t yet know how much she’ll need. Still, she doesn’t want to dwell on the Joffrey’s exit. The Joffrey and the Auditorium are wedded in the local public mind, she says, “but the Joffrey is here 14 weeks out of a 52-week year. It’s not everything we do.” It’s not what makes the theater important to the larger world. Last week, the National Trust for Historic Preservation bused the 1,500 attendees at its annual conference to the Auditorium for the main session. Amid concerns about a House tax reform bill that eliminates the tax credit for historic preservation that has fueled much of its work, trust president Stephanie Meeks recalled the 1960s rescue of this unique building, which was named a National Historic Landmark in 1975. Looking to inspire her audience for the potentially more difficult long haul, Meeks told them, “This room is filled with Beatrice Spachners.” v

v @DeannaIsaacs NOVEMBER 23, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 25

Jeﬀ Still, Danny McCarthy, Cliﬀ Chamberlain, William Petersen, and James Vincent Meredith ò MICHAEL BROSILOW

ARTS & CULTURE THEATER

It just gets uglier

Tracy Letts’s The Minutes tells one dirty secret, then a dirtier one. By TONY ADLER

s far as I can tell, Tracy Letts has two basic points to make in his new dark comedy The Minutes, getting its world premiere now in a compellingly strange production at Steppenwolf Theatre. One of them is fairly obvious, almost banal given the current cultural moment. The other not so much. Letts’s obvious point is a variation on the old saw handed down from Balzac, that the secret of a great fortune is a forgotten crime. He leads us back through layers of denial, deception, and plain ignorance to the abomination at the historical heart of a small town called Big Cherry. This being the United States, any such act is likely to involve either

slavery or the Native American genocide, and though we never find out where Big Cherry sits geographically, it turns out to be better situated for the latter. Letts, who hails from Oklahoma (basically a vast holding pen for displaced tribes until it was declared a state in 1907), alludes to Indian oppression in his 2008 Pulitzer Prize winner, August: Osage County, where Cheyenne housekeeper Johnna is the only functional adult in a crowd of white folks and, ironically, the ﬁnal refuge of her drug-addled, racist employer. The Minutes goes a step further. Though it focuses on the winners of the Indian wars, as the earlier play did, it puts their forgotten crime closer to the center of things.

Chamber Opera Chicago Presents Two One-Act Family Holiday Operas! Gian Carlo Menotti’s

The 12th anniversary of this treasured Chicago holiday tradition, perfect for all ages!

Direction by Francis Menotti, son of Gian Carlo, and Kyle Dougan. Sung in English with Orchestra, featuring dancers from Ensemble Español Spanish Dance Theater.

Sunday, December 10 at 3:00pm • Sunday, December 17 at 3:00pm The Royal George Theatre, 1641 North Halsted Street, Chicago Opening with a new adaptation of Victoria Bond’s one-act children’s opera, The Miracle of Light!

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Tickets ($10-$20) at the Royal George Box Ofﬁce, 312.988.9000, or www.chamberoperachicago.org 26 CHICAGO READER - NOVEMBER 23, 2017

That’s progress, I guess, but not what you’d call news. I mean, we’ve had no end of chances to examine the poisoned roots of American society lately—especially at Steppenwolf, with its recent array of let’s-indict-the-audience shows. If that were all The Minutes had to offer, I’d call it well-meant but stale. Yet there’s that second point—a weird, vivid, profoundly pessimistic answer to the question What is to be done?—to keep it interesting. The Minutes unfolds over the course of a single meeting of the Big Cherry city council on a portentously stormy night. Letts, director Anna D. Shapiro, and their ensemble of strong veteran actors (from Kevin Anderson, who’s ending what he calls an “acting fast” here, to the constantly working, endlessly admirable Francis Guinan) do a great job of teasing out the ethos of this particular civic ritual. The pregavel pleasantries at the refreshment cart, the public personas, personal agendas, parliamentary pomposities, thin skins, and opaque grudges are all hilariously true to life. Jeff Still’s Mr. Assalone and William Petersen’s Mayor Superba constitute the nexus of power as the men who know why and how the levers of authority get thrown; Anderson’s Mr. Breeding is their hail-fellow, golf-playing jester. Danny McCarthy’s Hanratty is a man on a hobbyhorse, foolishly thinking he can get his accessibility proposal passed on the merits. James Vincent Meredith’s Blake has a hobbyhorse of his own: the Lincoln Smackdown, which is, oddly enough, exactly what it sounds like. As the longest-serving, least-informed council members, Guinan and Penny Slusher are constantly batting away proofs of their incompetence. And Brittany Burch’s city clerk is at once supremely efficient and deeply pissed

off. Only Sally Murphy has no clear mishegoss as Councilwoman Matz—but she manufactures one, creating a ditzy fundamentalist. Into the municipal coven falls Mr. Peel (Cliff Chamberlain), a pediatric dentist and newcomer to Big Cherry, who ran for council for the same reason he joined Kiwanis: to see if he can’t pull some business from the DDS everybody goes to at present. Having been absent from the previous week’s meeting due to his mother’s death, Peel wants to know what he missed—an innocent question that eventually opens up a can of worms. Most of The Minutes’s 100 minutes pass in comic absurdity, familiar fools reacting to one another like the two strangers in Eugène Ionesco’s The Bald Sopranos, who strike up a conversation on a train only to ﬁgure out— slowly, by the deductive method—that they’re husband and wife. The ﬁrst dirty secret, about the town’s founding, comes out after a silly reenactment of the official story (already pretty toxic), all the old council hands throwing themselves into the performance. It’s the second, dirtier secret that transforms the tone of the evening. Played out in a manner reminiscent of a Maori haka, frighteningly choreographed by Dexter Bullard, Letts’s second point offers a simple argument for why not just Big Cherry’s crime but those of nations and even humanity as a whole are beyond help. Talk about indictments, it lays bare privilege at the most fundamental level. Even so, the audience on opening night seemed to love it. v R THE MINUTES Through 1/7: Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Wed 2 and 7:30 PM, Sat 3 and 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM, Tue 7:30 PM, Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted, 312-335-1650, steppenwolf.org, $50-$105.

v @taadler

Rebecca Hurd and Jennifer Latimore ò MICHAEL BROSILOW

THEATER

Much ado about muffins (with a literal spoiler) By AIMEE LEVITT

he wonderful thing about Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest is that it’s escapism in its purest form. It makes no grand generalizations about society. The problems are ridiculous. The big fight at the end of Act II is over the consumption of muffins. A professor told me once that the competitive muffin eating symbolized sexual greed, but I think people who try to find that sort of significance in Earnest are looking at it all wrong. The muffin eating, if done correctly, as it’s done in Writers Theatre’s joyful new production, is there because the word “muffin” is funny, and so is the sight of a grown man cramming several into his mouth at once. This sort of epic triviality is exactly what we need right now. And Writers mostly pulls it off. The play moves along with wit and style. The actors read their lines as if they were speaking naturally, not reciting epigrams that have been repeated a million times—which is hard to do. The performances are generous: Alex Goodrich and Steve Haggard, as Jack and Algernon, leave plenty of laughs for Jennifer Latimore and Rebecca Hurd, who play Gwendolen and Cecily. (Goodrich and Hurd are especially good.) Shannon Cochran plays Lady Bracknell not as a gorgon but as a hilariously judgmental society matron who wants a good marriage for her daughter, and the character is better for it. Anita Chandwaney, Aaron Todd Douglas, and Ross Lehman make the most of Miss Prism, Dr. Chasuble, and Lane/Merriman. Collette Pollard’s sets and Mara Blumenfeld’s costumes are just realistic enough not to detract from the complete absurdity of the

goings-on. Much of this, of course, is due to the director, Michael Halberstam, who made the wise decision to do a naturalistic production and treat the characters as real people instead of cartoons. But this Earnest is still rooted in the reality of 2017: two weeks before the play opened, Tom Robson, now a theater historian and associate professor at Millikin University, accused Halberstam, who is also the cofounder and artistic director of Writers, of sexually harassing him verbally and physically during the theater’s 2003 production of Crime and Punishment. Halberstam had directed. Robson, then 23, had been the assistant director and dramaturg. Others came forward to corroborate Robson’s account of Halberstam’s behavior. Writers announced that it was investigating Halberstam, but that he would continue as director of Earnest. There were whispers in the theater the night I saw the play. In 1890s England, Earnest was still performed even after Wilde became a scandal, then a prisoner and an exile. Did people whisper in lobbies then too? Did those whispers come back to them while they were laughing at Wilde’s dialogue, the way they do for us? Did they wonder if they could untangle the work from the person who made it? Did they want to? Should we? v R THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST Through 12/23: Wed 3 and 7:30 PM, Thu-Fri 7:30 PM (no show Thu 11/23), Sat 3 and 7 PM, Sun 2 and 6 PM, Tue 7:30 PM, Writers Theatre, 325 Tudor Ct., Glencoe, 847-2426000, writerstheatre.org, $20-$80.

v @aimeelevitt NOVEMBER 23, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 27

ARTS & CULTURE

VISUAL ART

Rage is all the art

By TAL ROSENBERG

Dapper Bruce Laﬁtte, T.D.B.C. Presents Exodus, 2017

n paper, Bill Walker and Dapper Bruce Lafitte, the subjects of separate, free, and ongoing art exhibits, don’t have much in common. Walker, who died in 2011, was based in Chicago and known primarily for his murals, in particular the Wall of Respect, which Reader contributor Jeff Huebner called “one of the most significant, if unsung, artistic events of the turbulent 60s.” Lafitte, 46, lives in New Orleans, where he makes elaborate drawings with markers and ink. But despite their having worked in different time periods and locations, I was nevertheless struck by how much Walker’s pieces reminded me of Lafitte’s, and vice versa. The most obvious similarity between Walker and Lafitte is that they’re both black male outsider artists. What’s far more interesting are the similarities between their aesthetics and creative decisions. Part of that is attributable to the medium: “Bill Walker: Urban Griot,” which runs at the Hyde Park Art Center through April, and “Dapper Bruce Lafitte: Kingpin of the Antpin,” which is on display at Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art through December 11, are focused almost exclusively on drawings. The artwork is equally vibrant and rich in detail; both Walker and Lafitte incorporate significant amounts of text in their pieces as well. Yet what stands out most of all are the ways in which Walker and Lafitte use anger as an artistic device, something that enriches and distinguishes their work. Though larger and more wide-ranging in scale than “Kingpin of the Antpin,” “Urban Griot” concentrates on a specific time period

28 CHICAGO READER - NOVEMBER 23, 2017

Bill Walker, Red, White and Blue, We Love You 3, 1982

in Walker’s life (1979-’85) and three series: “For Blacks Only,” “Reaganomics,” and “Red, White and Blue, I Love You.” Some of Walker’s murals are represented at the start of the exhibit by photographs and explanatory text, but for the most part curator Juarez Hawkins favors drawings, paintings, and collages taken from the archives of the Chicago Public Art Group and private collections. You can see glimpses of Walker’s murals in these works. In For Blacks Only 4 (1979), figures are rendered as all-black shadows: a man pointing his ﬁnger at a woman on a stoop, gentlemen in broad-brimmed hats walking into a shoeshine parlor, congregants ﬁling into a church. It’s a busy scene, with the storefronts and people all packed in together, just as Walker’s murals tend to feature crowded, kinetic tableaus. It’s also one of the few primarily celebratory pieces in the show. For the most part, “Urban Griot” is informed by raw indignation. Reaganomics 6 (1981) makes an explicit connection between the economic policies of the 40th president and white supremacy and racial violence: a giant Ku Klux Klan member personally lynches a

black man, both of them facing a Nazi soldier who’s squeezing a sickly man wearing a crown with a Jewish star on it. Red, White and Blue 3 (1982) shows a pitch-black mother holding a pitch-black baby, both with narrowed eyes and downturned red mouths, standing in front of a sign that reads we no longer accept milk stamps; according to the program these figures represent the Madonna and child, perhaps symbolizing how America’s Christian ideals are at odds with its actions. Where Walker’s anger is directed at the various aspects of 1980s capitalism, Lafitte’s is focused on a specific event: Hurricane Katrina. For T.D.B.C X Marks a Spot (all the work in “Kingpin of the Antpin” was created in 2017), Lafitte draws cars and boats floating on a brown surface, likely the dirty water that flooded the streets of New Orleans in the aftermath of the hurricane. Lafitte seems to make specific associations between the hurricane and its effects on New Orleans culture: in black marker he writes on the water “RIP good Shit,” “RIP justice,” and “RIP sanity.” Yet he also writes “make good art,” an indication that expression might be a way to overcome

the harshness of the storm. Like Walker, Lafitte calls out political leaders—T.D.B.C. Presents Got Love From Ray Nagin features trees, draped in the wires of felled power lines, with text written on the leaves (“no love from gov blanco” on one, “no love from g. bush” on another). As heartbreaking as these works may seem, they don’t register that way. In both Walker and Lafitte’s pieces, tragedy doesn’t have the effect of depressing the viewer. Yes, the pieces are often rendered in vibrant colors, but another thing that Walker and Lafitte’s work has in common is that they’re filled with people, a means of showing the humanity and liveliness at the core of urban communities, even those faced with injustice and loss. On the trunk of one of the trees in T.D.B.C. Presents Got Love From Ray Nagin, Lafitte writes, “I hope my art shows a good thing from Katrina.” These exhibitions demonstrate that viewing anger only as an emotion is misguided; anger is a necessity, and a powerful resource for artistic expression. v R “BILL WALKER: URBAN GRIOT” Through 4/8/18: Mon-Thu 9 AM-8 PM, Fri-Sat 9 AM-5 PM, Sun noon-5 PM, Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell, 773-324-5520, hydeparkart. org. F R “DAPPER BRUCE LAFITTE” Through 12/11: Tue-Sat 11 AM-6 PM, Thu 11 AM-7 PM, Sun noon-5 PM, Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, 756 N. Milwaukee, 312-243-9088, art.org. F

v @talrosenberg

ARTS & CULTURE VISUAL ART

Power of the pencil By DMITRY SAMAROV

eborah Slabeck Baker uses simple tools to make oblique art. A show of her recent work at Firecat Projects, “6B,” consists of 11 graphite drawings on light brown paper and three embroideries done in black thread on linen. Each piece contains a word or phrase, such as tightrope or union or loop, surrounded by seemingly trivial images, like dancers or statues or a doghouse; each is ﬁnished off with an ornamental border reminiscent of raised stage curtains. In the interplay of text, picture, and decoration, the poetry of Baker’s craft quietly reveals itself. Firecat proprietor Stan Klein told me that he’d seen the 65-year-old Baker’s embroideries a long time ago at Aron Packer Projects, so he was surprised when she came to hang her show and brought a bunch of large pencil drawings. (In fact the exhibit is titled “6B” in honor of the type of pencil she uses.) Via e-mail, Baker explained that she’s been sewing since the age of four but hadn’t seriously used pencil and paper for roughly 20 years. She returned to the medium out of a desire to create larger pieces. But

Deborah Slabeck Baker, Linked, 2017; Tied, 2017 ò WARREN PERLSTEIN

whether they’re on a smaller scale with needle and thread or a bigger one with graphite, she thinks of all her efforts as drawings. She starts by making a border, creating a sort of stage, then writes a word or phrase that suggests the imagery that will surround it. There’s little premeditation or planning aside from choosing text that’s personally meaningful. She doesn’t disclose that meaning in any straightforward way but has a knack for picking elements that bounce off each other and vibrate. In Cryptic, for instance, the title is inscribed on a banner that drapes the front

of the unfinished pyramid from the U.S. dollar bill—but inside the pyramid are silhouettes of the faces of a man and a woman, viewed in profile, with a heart between them, and outside the air is filled with six-pointed stars. The composition of these pictures is reminiscent of Odd Fellows banners or old-fashioned tattoos, where the symbols and slogans in the images form a kind of secret language for an exclusive club. But unlike the art of those subcultures, Baker’s drawings aren’t menacing or secretive—they’re warm, intimate, and inclusive.

Baker’s often symmetrical drawings are preternaturally calm. In Love, another couple faces each other—a word balloon above his head says “XOX,” one above her head “OXO.” Their skulls are visible, but the piece doesn’t suggest death. Instead, the pair seem serene, as if they expect their love will last them to the grave. Baker’s artworks won’t bowl you over with explicit messages or obvious virtuosity, but in a simple and quiet way they’ll burrow into your subconscious. v R “DEBORAH BAKER: 6B” Through 12/11: Mon-Sat 10 AM-4 PM, Firecat Projects, 2124 N. Damen, 207-249-9486, firecatprojects.org. F

NOVEMBER 23, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 29

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ARTS & CULTURE Denzel Washington in Roman J. Israel, Esq.

MOVIES

Sleep of the just By J.R. JONES

ublished nearly 200 years ago, Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” tells of a man who falls asleep during the colonial era and wakes up two decades later, after the American Revolution, to find himself living in a different nation. This notion of a long sleep and a rude awakening is tailor-made for social satire— think of Chance the gardener, the graying simpleton played by Peter Sellers in Being There (1979), who has spent his entire life cloistered in a rich man’s home but, upon the man’s death, is turned out onto the mean streets of Washington, D.C., and mistakenly adopted by Beltway types as a political savant. Now Dan Gilroy, writer-director of the creepy news satire Nightcrawler, brings us Roman J. Israel, Esq., whose title character, a self-styled “revolutionary” criminal defense attorney, has been holed up for decades in the Manhattan office of a two-man law firm. The awkward Roman writes brilliant defense briefs that his partner, William, delivers in court, but then William suffers a heart attack, his family shuts down the struggling firm, and Roman is ejected into

the real world to fend for himself. As an actor, Denzel Washington invests himself in his characters’ foibles—the alcoholic denial of the airline pilot in Flight, the generational rage of the Pittsburgh patriarch in Fences—and for him, Roman’s hothouse idealism is a gold mine. Wearing blocky glasses and a goofy Afro, Roman listens to jazz on headphones and returns home every night to a claustrophobic apartment in a gentrifying neighborhood, where he tends to his walls of LPs and phones in noise complaints, citing the applicable statute by number, on the construction crew carrying on next door. Invited to address a community meeting on the topic of police stops, Roman asks “the brothers” in the audience to give up their seats for “the sisters” who are standing and is baffled when the sisters attack him as “gendered,” “sexist,”

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30 CHICAGO READER - NOVEMBER 23, 2017

and “patronizing.” At the courthouse, Roman flirts with another sister working security by asking her where to find “the white people’s court.” (“Black ass,” she mutters once he’s out of earshot.) With his framed pictures of Angela Davis and Bayard Rustin, Roman is a relic from another era. Roman’s antagonist, played with quiet resolve by Colin Farrell, is George Pierce, a former student of William’s who now runs a blue-chip criminal defense firm with a staff of 60, and whose referrals of weak cases to the smaller firm were the only thing keeping it alive. Formidably smooth and assertive, clad in a perfectly tailored suit that makes Roman’s ill-fitting ensemble look even more bumptious, George was once inspired by William’s passion for justice but has long since succumbed to the lure of money. He recognizes Roman’s encyclopedic case knowledge as a valuable asset and, in an act of charity that masks his avarice, hires the older man at his current pay of $500 a week, privately telling an assistant that they can bill Roman’s services for $500 an hour. If Roman is a throwback to the Black Power movement, George is the man of the moment, master of a modern legal system in which the cost of going to trial figures more heavily than any sense of justice. Therein lies the edge of this increasingly serious film. Roman may be emerging from a countercultural cocoon, but he’s been focused on one of the most pressing criminal justice problems of our time—prosecutorial abuse of plea bargaining. When Roman first shows up to argue a case after William’s death, his client is Derrell Ellerbee (DeRon Horton), a black teenager who participated in a convenience store robbery with a friend but was stunned when his friend pulled a gun and killed the cashier. ssss EXCELLENT

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Because the shooter is still at large, the prosecutor has charged Derrell with first-degree murder to scare him into copping a plea for a lesser charge and accepting a five-year prison sentence. This is nothing new to Roman; for years he’s been organizing a giant class action lawsuit, personally interviewing some 3,500 wronged defendants, that he thinks could trigger major reform of federal sentencing. And George—whom Roman derides as “a low-flying bee” for his professional history of pleading out his poorer clients—is just guilt-ridden enough to consider funding the suit. Great characters always have the potential to change; such is the case with George and, unfortunately, with Roman as well. Frustrated by the condescension of his well-heeled new coworkers and shamed by his own blunders in the plea-negotiation process, Roman is beaten and robbed one night by a scuzzy white hipster, and the trauma snaps him out of his longheld idealism. “I’m tired of doing the impossible for the ungrateful,” he tells George. Hoping to scare up some money and reward himself materially after years of sacrifice, Roman secretly commits an ethical violation that could get him disbarred, which then places him at the mercy of one of his clients. “Purity can’t survive in this world,” he tells Maya (Carmen Ejogo), a young activist who’s taken a shine to him. “The conditions are too barren.” Like old Rip Van Winkle, Roman has emerged from his slumber into a nation much changed, though the story turns tragic only when he decides to live there. v ROMAN J. ISRAEL, ESQ. sss Directed by Dan Gilroy. R, 126 min. For venues see chicagoreader.com/movies.

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Recommended and notable shows and critics’ insights for the week of November 23 b

ALL AGES

THURSDAY23 Bijelo Dugme 10 PM Joe’s Live, 5441 Park Pl., Rosemont, $60-$100. 18+

PICK OF THE WEEK

Rising Chicago hiphop star G Herbo becomes royalty with Humble Beast

ò ERIC JOHNSON

G HERBO, YBN NAHMIR

Friday 11/24, 6:30 PM, Portage Theater, 4050 N. Milwaukee, $45. b

ON HALLOWEEN, AUBURN-GRESHAM one-stop shop and hiphop hot spot Exclusive773 handed out bootleg rap CDs by Chicago rapper G. Herbo to trick-or-treaters. That evening owner Steve Wazwaz tweeted a video of fans gleefully clamoring for them. Their enthusiasm went through the roof after one of Wazwaz’s employees casually activated his phone’s video-chat program and turned the screen toward the kids so they could talk to his friend: G Herbo himself. I can’t blame the kids for freaking out. Over the past ﬁve years Herbo has shown an unparalleled ability to speak to the experiences of this city’s black youth, infusing his songs with the intimate details of his time growing up in the south-side neighborhood known as Terror Town. For all the bloodstains splattered across cracked-cement corners and the lack of opportunity that weighs heavily on the people in his songs, Herbo always ﬁnds a way to inject a little bit of light into his narratives and instrumentals, no matter how dire or vitriolic. What’s more is he gives them a triumphant heft that would make proud any

kids who see themselves in him. His first studio album, September’s Humble Beast (Machine Entertainment Group), debuted at number 21 on the Billboard 200 (by comparison, Vic Mensa’s major-label full-length, The Autobiography, peaked at 27). It sounds brighter than his previous material, which is partially a reflection of Herbo’s success; his artistic reputation has grown enough that he landed a featured verse on “Crown,” from local street-rap legend Bump J, shortly after Bump was released from prison this spring after serving an eight-year sentence for armed robbery. But for all the changes in his life (and if the glistening soul track “Street” is any suggestion, he’s doing quite well), Herbo still knows how to tap into the pain, anger, and anxiety of coming into adulthood while black and penniless in Chicago. “Malcolm” contains about as great and succinct a lesson in systemic injustice as you’re likely to hear this year—the rapper trenchantly maps out a young, violence-streaked life with the kind of detail that could fill a thousand-page tome. —LEOR GALIL

On his energetic new album Three Letters From Sarajevo (Wrasse), Bosnian composer and guitarist Goran Bregović displays his broad-minded ability to express the full splendor of vintage eastern European traditional and folk music. He’s been charged with brazen acts of cultural theft in the past, such as translating the gritty sounds of a singer like Šaban Bajramović, known as the King of the Romany, for a mainstream listenership. While that remains debatable, there’s no doubt that he’s popularized music from the region, notably scoring films by Serbian director Emir Kusturica and touring the world with his Wedding and Funeral Orchestra. On the new record he engages in a different kind of outreach, expressing Sarajevo’s cosmopolitan side with a global assortment of guest singers (including the gruff Algerian rai star Rachid Taha, Spanish art-pop chanteuse Bebe, and Israeli folk-pop vocalist Asaf Avidan) and instrumentals that feature violinists of three different traditions; Western classical, Arabic, and klezmer. Bregović doesn’t often perform in U.S., and tonight he appears with Bijelo Dugme, the highly influential Yugoslavian rock band he cofounded in 1974. The group created a crucial opening for pop music behind the iron curtain, but to be honest I find most of the group’s voluminous output unlistenable; its stiff, hyperactive hard rock has aged poorly. At its best Bijelo Dugme retooled traditional themes, presaging what Bregović would later do as a solo artist with jacked-up Romani tunes such as “Ederlezi” and “Djurdjevdan.” The group has gone through many shifts in membership, but Bregović lends legitimacy to this version, which features singers Mladen Vojičić (aka Tifa), who first joined the band in the mid-80s, and his replacement, Alen Islamović. —PETER MARGASAK J

Goran Bregović ò HERRI BIZIA

NOVEMBER 23, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 31

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Power Trip ò COURTESY GRAND STAND HQ

continued from 31

FRIDAY24 G Herbo See Pick of the Week. YBN Nahmir opens. 6:30 PM, Portage Theater, 4050 N. Milwaukee, $45. b Power Trip Cannibal Corpse headlines; Power Trip and Gatecreeper open. 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport, $30, $25 in advance. 17+ Power Trip have long produced crossover thrash for the tattered, sleeveless Cro-Mags T-shirt wearer in all of us—and with their recent sophomore album, the Dallas dudes prove it. Since its release in February, Nightmare Logic (Southern Lord) has been universally regarded as a triumph of dystopic metal, a record that has brought together all adrenaline junkies who require a little grime and sweat in their riffs. Its core message is that the world is a few nudges away from resembling a scorched and abandoned industrial compound, with track titles like “Executioner’s Tax (Swing of the Axe)” and “Waiting Around to Die” playing into that mantra. The latter also offers a gruff couplet from front man Riley Gale, “You say the future is yours / I say your future is filled with rot,” but beyond lyrics, the song’s heaving, piledriving rhythms and gnawing, wailing guitars spell out the real doom. With assistance from metal-production savant Arthur Rizk, Power Trip glean the tone of pioneering 80s crossover bands like Exodus and Anthrax without ever aping their strut. Nightmare Logic is as fresh as anguish gets, and if a better metal record has been released in 2017, I haven’t found it. —KEVIN WARWICK

SATURDAY25 MFNMelo Part of the John Walt Day concert beneﬁt. Saba headlines; Joseph Chilliams, MFnMelo, and Frsh Waters open. Squeak and DamDam DJ between sets. 7 PM, House of Blues, 329 N. Dearborn, $20, $18 in advance. b If you’d seen any Pivot Gang rappers performing in the last nine months without knowing they belonged to the local hip-hop collective, you’d have soon caught on based on two phrases they pepper throughout their time onstage: “Pivot Gang” (obviously) and “Long live John Walt.” Walt, the Pivot cofounder and rapper-singer born Walter Long Jr. (he changed his stage name to Dinner With John in 2016) was stabbed to death on February 8. He would have turned 25 on November 25, a day his friends in Pivot Gang have christened John Walt Day. Every member of the collective will perform during tonight’s tribute concert, which will benefit the John Walt Foundation, the local youth and arts organization they’ve launched in his honor. To a lesser degree, the event is also a belated release show for Pivot Gang member MFnMelo, who released his debut full-length mixtape, Melodramatics, last month. Melo raps with a resonance that emanates from deep within him; his voice carries a weight that sounds like it’s emerged from his belly, and brings with it a force that’s imprinted with his soul. He’s a smooth performer, and he dispenses his lines with a conversational ease that allows him to shift into half-singing when the moment suits him. Melo’s lighter, uplifting turns on “Lately,” which features Walt and Saba—whose lyrics to a new single called “Where Ideas Sing” were displayed in a work by public artist Matthew Hoﬀman on the out- J

NOVEMBER 23, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 33

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2 showS! FRIDAY DECEMBER 1 Mourning [A] BLKstr ò COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

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continued from 33

side of Apple’s new downtown store—suggest he may not be far from seeing his own work plastered around town. —LEOR GALIL

Mourning [A] Blkstr Ono and Blacker Face open. 9 PM, Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, $8. 21+ This remarkable combo from Cleveland only formed at the start of 2016, but they’ve grabbed my attention with a flurry of recordings since then. Led by producer RA Washington, Mourning [A] BLKstar features a trio of dynamic singers—James Longs, LaToya Kent, and Kyle Kidd—and an indeterminate number of musicians. The ensemble traffics in a gritty strain of DIY Afrofuturist soul music, balancing hip-hop production techniques with lo-fi experimentation that bathes sultry grooves in darkness, either in scratchy samples or washed-out synth tones. In February the group released The Possible through its Bandcamp site. The album contains a series of murky but seductive ballads dominated by themes of distrust—one narrative after another details a desire for human connection despite having been burned. When in the roiling mid-tempo jam “Nova” Kidd recounts the betrayal he’s experienced, his refrain, “So fuck you,” seems like the only logical expression of his feelings. More recently the group released BLK Muzak (Glue Moon), which reaches a new apotheosis in its vocal interplay, summoning the spirit of vintage Sly & the Family Stone and Curtis Mayfield while still bearing traces of Cleveland’s rich punk legacy. The result is that in Mourning [A] BLKstar’s best material, such as the harrowingly lean “Flicker,” there’s something both comforting and unsettling. —PETER MARGASAK

Radian 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $20, $15 in advance. 18+ Austrian guitarist Martin Siewert has always stood out to me for using his instrument like an arsenal of paintbrushes. In his many projects, includ-

34 CHICAGO READER - NOVEMBER 23, 2017

ing improvisational and experimental outfits Trapist and Efzeg, he thoughtfully applies his sound upon whatever canvas the group conjures. And since joining the Viennese trio Radian in 2011, he’s brought the group’s dry, instrumental strain of post-This Heat noise and rhythm closer to rock than it’s ever been—though any band that has a rhythm section of drummer Martin Brandlmayr and bassist John Norman will never sound like a normal rock band. Last year the group released On Dark Silent Off (Thrill Jockey), their first album with Siewert—aside from a terrific 2014 collaboration of Radian and Giant Sand leader Howe Gelb. On the title track he adds discrete strums on an acoustic guitar, while on the opener, “Pickup Pickout,” his corrosive tones swell from abstraction into the whoosh of a power chord. “Scary Objects” is a veritable symphony of Siewert’s techniques, its narrative constructed from fuzz, feedback, long needling tones, hydroplaning vibrato, and terse fragments of sinister licks over characteristically taut, twitching beats and swells of liquid bass. Across seven new pieces the trio sustain an exciting tension between neck-snapping rhythms and ever-shifting sounds, as Siewert extrapolates over Brandlmayr’s disparate, chopped-up grooves. I’ve always loved Radian’s records, but the visceral thrill of the trio’s sound increases in their live performances, where the tactile crispness of their music is heightened. —PETER MARGASAK

MONDAY27 Longface Monobody and Date Stuﬀ open. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western. 21+ F It’s hard to calculate the number of woeful musicians who count Radiohead as a direct influence, but the ones who are actually able to capture the unnerving quality of the UK group’s alt-rock in their own voice are few and far between. Chicago’s Longface get that ricocheting melodies and roller-coaster falsetto can only go so far; that it takes a sense of direction, a little bit of guts, and a lot of individual

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personality to be anything more than a derivative of their inﬂuences. On their recent debut full-length, Hillbilly Wit, which guitarist Glenn Curran released on the label he cofounded, Sooper Records, the band marks its own territory. Front man Anthony Focareto oozes personality, and his Kentucky roots show in the easygoing vocal lilt and nimble acoustic guitar-picking that anchor the quasi-symphonic opener, “Crescent Moon.” The group’s taste for unusual musical detours ﬁlls the album with vitality; the feral lounge melody on “Crime Jazz”—which sounds like it was left to mutate in total darkness—is just one of many curveballs that enliven the record. Tonight Longface celebrate their LP with a belated release show. —LEOR GALIL

TUESDAY28 Jim Baker & Michael Zerang As part of a residency celebrating their 35 years of collaboration, Baker and Zerang play a duo set, then invite Steve Hunt and Joseph Kramer to join them for a quartet. 9 PM, Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, $10. 21+ The backbone of Chicago’s illustrious history of improvised music is made up of a small handful of indefatigable players who endlessly explore and play gigs—sometimes for just a handful of folks— but few have been as long devoted to spontaneous experimentation as keyboardist Jim Baker and J

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Cold Specks ò NORMAN WONG

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percussionist Michael Zerang. Each Tuesday this month at the Hideout they’ve been celebrating their musical relationship, which goes back 35 years. Baker is a jazz-trained master who’s long bridged the divide between Bill Evans and Cecil Taylor, while Zerang, who grew up playing in his father’s Assyrian band, Kismet, has crossed lines between Arabic traditions, free jazz, and theater music, and for decades has served a crucial role as a live music programmer. Both have valued risk-taking above all else, and both have long preferred new challenges to old standards, colliding pure sound and freewheeling rhythms in ever-changing proportions. Baker is as ﬂuent on APR synthesizer (his focus in this particular project) as he is on piano, and Zerang is arguably more impressive with makeshift setups than with a standard kit. Most of the November concerts have featured collaborations with emerging musicians who operate outside of the jazz world— including trance violist Matchess and electroacoustic experimenter Aaron Zarzutzki—which says something about the duo’s continued engagement with new sounds and approaches. The pair wraps up this residency with a duo set before joining forces with two fellow jazz veterans, drummer Steve Hunt (NRG Ensemble) and inventive sound artist Joseph Kramer (Coppice). —PETER MARGASAK

Cold Specks La Timpa opens. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1025 N. Western, $13. 21+ Cold Specks’ Ladan Hussein (aka Al Spx) is one of a number of artists, among them FKA Twigs, Kelala, Dawn Richard, and Frank Ocean, who combine R&B and rock into uncategorizable pop—though her particular version of it has been characterized as “doom soul” or quirky indie soul in the past. The Somali-Canadian performer’s latest album,

Fool’s Paradise, sounds less odd than her earlier material, in part because it’s so perfect. Hussein’s new arrangements are less fussy than before, their electronic elements seamlessly incorporated into a series of dreamy midtempo tunes worthy of Sadé, and also like Sadé, above it all floats Hussein’s marvelous, insinuating voice. The title track is particularly mesmerizing as she rhythmically lifts her sensuous alto up into a light falsetto, chanting “Kala garo naftaada iyo laftaada,” a Somali phrase that means “understand the difference between your bones and your soul.” Hussein has spoken about her Muslim identity, and being Muslim in post-Trump North America, and those themes ﬂavor the album, especially its title track. Still, the music is anything but despairing—it’s confident, centered, even celebratory. Though it sounds very diﬀerent, Fools Paradise recalls the spirit of Sinead O’Connor’s I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got in being an expression of faith in the face of hate. —NOAH BERLATSKY

WEDNESDAY29 Grizzly Bear Serpentwithfeet opens. 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 4746 N. Racine, $40. 18+ For Grizzly Bear’s first album in five years, Painted Ruins, the band broke from its independent roots to join forces with major label RCA. Produced by bassist Chris Taylor, the new music has a glossier surface finish than ever, and the band hasn’t simplified its intricate style. In fact, the tension between the world-weary lyrics of Ed Droste, Daniel Rossen, and (for the first time) Taylor and the churning grooves, ethereal harmonies, and sparkling melodies of the music does nothing to reduce life’s complexities into digestible bites. The narratives tend toward the cryptic; there’s a pervading J

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MUSIC

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Come enjoy one of Chicago’s ﬁnest beer gardens! NOVEMBER 24..............ARTIFACT NOVEMBER 25..............THE POLKAHOLICS 20TH ANNIVERSARY SHOW LETTERBOMB NOVEMBER 26..............WHOLESOMERADIO DJ NIGHT NOVEMBER 29..............PETE CASANOVA QUARTET NOVEMBER 30..............BENEFIT FOR GENESIS THEATRICAL PRODUCTIONS DECEMBER 1................HEPKATS DECEMBER 3................FREDDY FLOW DECEMBER 6................JAMIE WAGNER & FRIENDS $11 SUPPER DECEMBER 7................SMILIN’ BOBBY AND THE CLEMTONES DECEMBER 8................LOST IN THOUGHT DECEMBER 9................UNIBROW DECEMBER 10..............HEISENBERG UNCERTAINTY PLAYERS

EVERY TUESDAY (EXCEPT 2ND) AT 8PM OPEN MIC HOSTED BY JIMIJON AMERICA

Grizzly Bear ò TOM HINES

continued from 37

sense of darkness in otherwise ebullient tunes such as “Mourning Sound,” which plays with the titular homonym and contrasts hope for the future with dismal, violent imagery in lines like “We walked with the morning sound / It’s the sound of distant shots / And passing trucks.” “Four Cypresses” also intimates a fraught environment, but other songs reflect on more domestic conflicts. The stuttering “Three Rings” matches ambiguous lyrics that seem to yearn for some kind of romantic detente with disjointed drumming that echoes the narrator’s internal tension. I was initially put off by the slickness of Taylor’s production, but repeated spins have revealed the depth of the band’s performances. The fuzzy drive of Taylor’s nimble bass lines provide muscular counterbalance to the group’s aerated melodies—which though less direct than on previous recordings have lingered on and insinuated themselves into my brain as effectively as anything else Grizzly Bear has done. —PETER MARGASAK

Joel Paterson 8 PM, SPACE, 1245 Chicago Ave., Evanston, $12-$22. b Guitarist Joel Paterson is a devoted student of American roots and early jazz guitar who pointedly ignores the lines between the once racially deﬁned genres. Although he’s recorded only a few albums under his own name, his technical ease and versa-

38 CHICAGO READER - NOVEMBER 23, 2017

tility have made him a ubiquitous presence on the local scene, where he’s collaborated with Devil in a Woodpile, Jimmy Sutton’s Four Charms, and Cash Box Kings, and he’s done session work with national acts like JD McPherson, the Cactus Blossoms, and Pokey LaFarge, among others. Considering his broad embrace of vintage sounds, it should come as no surprise that he’s a fan of holiday music; he recently dropped Hi-Fi Christmas Guitar (Ventrella), a trio effort with regular cohorts Beau Sample (bass) and Alex Hall (drums) that surveys a slew of familiar songs with meticulous, gorgeous, and spry arrangements. The proceedings effortlessly pingpong between Les Paul-style overdubbed counterpoint (“I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus”), the lyric grace of Chet Atkins (“Silver Bells”), and the sound of Don Rich in Bakersfield honky-tonk (“Jingle Bells”), but ultimately, parsing particular influences misses the point. Paterson’s real achievement is retaining a sentimental adoration for these endlessly reinvented warhorses while crafting arrangements that sidestep the ubiquity of material and delivering it all with unalloyed pleasure and crystalline musicality. For a number of tunes at the album release concert, the trio will be joined by Chicago Hammond B3 master Chris Foreman (who plays in a Patterson-led trio every Sunday at the Green Mill). Together they’ll tackle some tunes from Jimmy McGriff’s classic Christmas With McGriff. The group will also celebrate the holiday release at the Green Mill on December 1 and 2. —PETER MARGASAK v

FOOD & DRINK

RESTAURANT REVIEW

Steingold’s isn’t your bubbe’s deli

But don’t hold it against this North Center sandwich shop devoted to twists on the JewishAmerican culinary canon. By MIKE SULA

s many chefs and restaurant owners (and critics) will tell you: You can’t please everyone. There will always be people out there who won’t appreciate your vision, no matter how you execute it. There will always be people who think you can’t deliver. That’s life. The only option you have is to push through the trolls, amateurs, and professional againsters and keep at it. That’s the beauty of the restaurant industry. For all the risks and hard work—and the often toxic environment—it’s a career in which, frequently, love trumps hate. If that’s the kind of story you like to hear, you have to root for Aaron Steingold, a restaurant lifer, most recently general manager of the late Trench, who along with his wife, Elizabeth Abowd, has invested their life savings in an eponymous Jewish deli on carswept Irving Park Road

STEINGOLD’S OF CHICAGO | $$ R 1840 W. Irving Park 773-661-2469 steingoldsdeli.com

Steingold Classic with Ora King nova lox on an everything bagel ò DAN DE LOS MONTEROS

in North Center, a neighborhood arguably more deserving of one than restaurant-choked habitats like Logan Square, Fulton Market, River North, and the Gold Coast As the Tribune’s Louisa Chu pointed out in her recent look at the past, present, and future of the Jewish deli, it’s a famously difficult business model to sustain at our current place in time. We’ve seen valiant attempts to revive it before: Brendan Sodikoff shelved Hogsalt Hospitality’s ambitious and promising Dillman’s before it really even achieved its potential. Before that an established import, Steve’s Detroit Deli, sank in the same River North space. But there’s no question Chicago has a ravenous hunger for the life-affirming powers of bagels and smoked fish, matzo ball soup, and swole sandwiches piled with cured and smoked meats and tangy fermented vegetables. Steingold’s has all of these—except when it was running out of product in its early days—along with a few curveballs to give you the idea that this isn’t your zayde’s deli. Here are the elements: Steingold’s cures its own pastrami, corned beef, and lox, and you can order those by the pound or in a handful of signature sandwiches named for real (and one theoretical) family members. Steingold has outsourced his bagels and bialys to Max Stern, aka the Bagel Chef, the city’s latest bagel upstart, who’s operating out of Barn & Company’s kitchen and supplying impressively chewy bagels with crackly shells to a handful of spots around town. Sandwiches are built on Publican Quality Bread, which is always a good sign. The 900-pound gorilla in the room is the smoky Wagyu pastrami, which tends to disintegrate into an unstable but lusciously fatty hash that may contribute to the sense that the $22 “overstuffed” Reuben, aka the Uncle Rube, including Swiss, smoked sauerkraut, and Russian dressing, is overwhelmed by its otherwise marvelous grilled rye bread. This pastrami can also seem scant on the Sister-in-Law, where it does battle with pungent Chinese mustard and respectably spicy cabbage kimchi on a sturdy baguette. Likewise, there’s something a bit off about the Fat Alvin, a sandwich described to me at the counter on two different occasions as “crazy.” This brick of braised short rib melded with Swiss and a thick application of mineralrich chopped liver on rye needs a structural balance to support the meats that its J

NOVEMBER 23, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 39

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The Grandma Rachel is a precisely layered strata of red-cabbage coleslaw and roasted turkey breast oozing with melted Havarti and Russian dressing on thick toasted challah. ò HUGE GALDONES

continued from 39 sweet caramelized onions and sour shaved pickles don’t provide. The liver plays better on an open-face tartine, where its intensity is mitigated by pickled red onions and fresh parsley and dill. On the other hand, on my third and most recent visit a friend—who on his only previous stop had been soured by all the ways Steingold’s isn’t a traditional deli—was happily surprised by the Grandma Rachel, a precisely layered strata of red-cabbage coleslaw and roasted turkey breast oozing with melted Havarti and Russian dressing but still well contained within thick slices of lightly toasted challah. Similarly, I’m besotted with the Steingold’s Classic, a bagel of your choice shmeared with cream cheese embedded with tangy capers and topped with tomato and, in my case, a stack of lush sliced Ora King nova lox, a sandwich close enough to God that He might spare humanity just long enough to eat it. Other icons of the Jewish-American culinary oeuvre are both impressive and confounding. The wan, unseasoned matzo-ball broth surrounding an impressive sinker makes no sense on the same menu as the fatty, herbaceous, full-bodied chicken noodle soup. Oversalted smoked whiteﬁsh salad seems intended to compensate for the comparatively mild espelette-seasoned coleslaw and dill potato salad. Yet try to push aside the hard-fried latkes sprinkled with Maldon sea salt and served with labne and thin applesauce. And after a particularly square lunch one afternoon, I nevertheless found myself in my own kitchen with

my head thrown back, draping a half-pound take-out order of the lush pastrami-spiced smoked trout over my gaping mouth hole. When Steingold’s was announced last summer, it was spoken of in some circles as the Great Smoked Hope for a Chicago deli revival, and it was accordingly mobbed. But viewed through the unforgiving lens of my kvetching companion (an admitted pedantic nudnik), Steingold’s can only be a disappointment. Dinosaurs like Katz’s, Manny’s, and Langer’s —fully stocked with kishka and short ribs alongside piles of every cured and pickled sandwich filling, and overflowing refrigerated cases with beets, beans, and noodle salads— are a different animal entirely. Here you’ll find no irascible countermen slicing meat to order, customizing each sandwich to individual specs, and offering lagniappes alongside putdowns. Instead, Steingold’s is a sleek sandwich shop with deli-like ambitions, the Rare Tea Cellar kombu salt next to the counter an emblematic stand-in for the Sen-Sen and Binaca at the prototypical deli register. Judge it on those terms and it’s also a sandwich shop with enormous potential: It’s already slated to expand into a small take-out spot next to the Francisco Brown Line stop early next month, and Steingold told me he’s hoping to expand to more locations. Given the dearth of decent deli food across the city, he’ll be a hero if he can make that happen. I’ll be following his progress closely, pulling for him all the way. v

v @Mike Sula

○ Watch a video of David Park working with yuzu kosho in the kitchen—and get the recipe—at chicagoreader.com/food.

In preparing a “predessert,” Hanbun chef David Park started with a white chocolate cremeux (a French custard) and then added yuzu kosho to every other element. ò JULIA THIEL

Flower in the dessert By JULIA THIEL

UZU KOSHO is a sour, spicy, fermented Japanese condiment made from yuzu zest and juice, salt, and chiles (usually green bird’s-eye or Thai chiles). It’s commonly served with meat or fish—and DAVID PARK, chef at HANBUN in Westmont, has used it that way before. But when Joshua Marrelli of Bakersﬁeld Wood-Fired Grill (also in Westmont) challenged him to create a dish with yuzu kosho, he wanted to push himself a little. The most challenging application, he thought, would be dessert. “Heat in dessert is not something everyone is comfortable with,” he says. “I feel like it can be overpowering.” The dish Park came up with is something he’d been thinking about for a while as part of Hanbun’s seven-course tasting menu. (The restaurant is part of a food court and serves lunch a la carte daily, but a few evenings a week it also offers a ﬁxed-price dinner at a single table in the tiny space.) He calls

it a “pre-dessert”—something like a palate cleanser, served before the last course, but a little bigger. “The yuzu kosho elevated it,” he says. “I guess I got lucky in the first trial.” Park started with white chocolate cremeux (a French custard) and then added yuzu kosho to every other element. A paste of rice flour, water, and yuzu kosho, spread thin and dehydrated, became yuzu kosho crisps, fried to make them puff up like chicharrones. Pear butter (fresh pear cooked with sugar and water until caramelized) also got a dose of yuzu kosho—in this case, after the butter had cooled. (The flavor of cooked yuzu kosho is different from when it’s fresh, Park says, so he wanted both types in the dish.) The final element was a granita made with omija (a fruit also called “five-flavor fruit”), honey, and, of course, yuzu kosho. “The omija really brings this whole dish together,” Park says. “It helps balance the salt and spice, the

{

R U O Y AD E R E H

KEY INGREDIENT

tart ﬂavor of the fruit.” He garnished it with sorrel, Egyptian star flower, and dyanthis flowers, then sprayed the whole thing with yuzu juice. “It’s actually really cool, because you wouldn’t expect the yuzu kosho to shine that much,” he says. “The fat from the white chocolate coats your palate, the yuzu kosho leaves a tingling sensation at the back of your throat. You can feel there’s heat, there’s acidity, but it’s not overwhelming.”

Our readers are 1.7x more likely to be frequent restaurant diners, eating out 4 or more times in the past 2 weeks.

WHO’S NEXT:

Park has challenged KYMBERLI DELOST, who runs the pastry programs at ACANTO, THE GAGE, and THE DAWSON, to create a dish with CHUNJANG, a Korean fermented black-bean paste. v

312-222-6920

v @juliathiel NOVEMBER 23, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 41

TECHNOLOGY EXPEDIA, INC. has openings for

JOBS

the following positions in Chicago, IL:

TEST DESIGN ENGINEERS (JOB ID#: 728.2084):

SALES & MARKETING TELE-FUNDRAISING: LAST MINUTE EXTRA CASH FOR THE HOLIDAYS! Looking for a few old pros. Start today! Felons need not apply per Attorney General Regulations. Call 312-256-5035 ask for Cash.

General TECHNOLOGY ADVISORY MANAGER, APPLICATION TECHNOLOGY (MULT. POS.), PricewaterhouseCoopers Advisory Services LLC, Chicago, IL. Help clients determine the best apps. for bus. needs and integrate new and existing apps. into their bus. including Mobility integration. Req. Bach’s deg or foreign equiv. in Comp Sci, Info Tech, Bus Admin or rel. + 5 yrs post-bach’s progressive rel. work exp.; OR a Master’s deg or foreign equiv. in Comp Sci, Info Tech, Bus Admin + 3 yrs rel. work exp. Travel up to 80% req. Apply by mail, referencing Job Code IL1487, Attn: HR SSC/Talent Management, 4040 W. Boy Scout Blvd, Tampa, FL 33607.

PROGRAMMER/TECH LEAD/ BUSINESS ANALYST Zensar Technologies, Inc. has openings in Oak Brook, IL. All positions may be assigned to various, unanticipated sites throughout the US. Job Code: USOBIL149 Programmer (Computer Pro grams/Documents): plan, develop, test & document. Job Code: USOBIL150 Technology Lead (Business/ Functional Req.s): client liaison & perform analysis. Job Code: USOBIL151 IT Business Analyst (Req.s/ Acceptance): new req’s and deliverables. Mail resume to: Prasun Maharatna, 2107 North First St, Ste 100, San Jose, CA 95131. Include job code & full job title/s of interest + recruitment source in cover letter. EOE

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Consultants - IT for Chicago, IL location to develop & manage internal applications & packages w/a focus on business intelligence, finance systems & billing applications. Master’s in Comp. Sci. or Comp/Electrical Eng. + 2yrs exp. or Bachelor’s in Comp. Sci. or Comp/Electrical Eng. + 5yrs exp. req’d. Req’d skills: 2yrs w/ Hyperion (CAP), Oracle Hyperion Essbase (ASO/BSO), Multidimensional Expressions (MDX) script/queries, MaxL Scripting for Automation, Hyperion Interactive Reporting (BRIO), creating stored procedures & views in Oracle/SQL Server, Unix Shell Scripting, VBA Scripting. Send resume to: C. Studniarz, REF: JB, 555 W Adams, Chicago, IL 60661

Participate in all aspects of product development activities operating as the owner of quality.

TECHNICAL PRODUCT MANAGERS (JOB ID#: 728. 2108): Gather detailed business requirements from stakeholders and work closely with technology staff to translate requirements into functional designs and specifications. To apply, send resume to: Expedia Recruiting, 333 108th Avenue NE, Bellevue, WA 98004. Must reference Job ID# .

SOFTWARE EGENCIA LLC has openings for following positions in Chicago, IL:

SOFTWARE ENGINEERS (JOB ID#: 728.2593): Design, implement, and debug software for computer algorithms and data structures.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERS (JOB ID#: 728.2118): Design, implement, and debug software for computers including algorithms and data structures. May telecommute from home. To apply, send resume to: Egencia Recruiting, 333 108th Avenue NE, Bellevue, WA 98004. Must reference Job ID#.

Two openings: Job#1 Business Dvlpmt Manager, req. master’s in business administration, busine ss/rel.; Job#2 Financial Analyst, req. master’s in finance/rel. Resume to: Taos Global Group Inc, 2167B S. China Pl, Chicago, IL60616. Attn: Job#1 or #2 FINANCIAL REPORTING ACCOUNTANT: perform fin. func. in logistics for ground transp. firm. BS in acc. & 3 mo exp. req. Mail res: KLC Global Services Ltd, 2111 E Pratt Blvd, Elk Grove Village, IL 60007

REAL ESTATE RENTALS STUDIO $500-$599 CHICAGO, BEVERLY/CAL Par k/Blue Island: Studio $625 & up; 1BR $700 & up; 2BR $885 & up. Heat, Appls, Balcony, Carpet, Laundry, Parking. Call 708-3880170 76TH & HERMITAGE, Newly Remod Large Studio. $550.Heat & appliances incl. $350 Move-In Fee. 773-507-8534

STUDIO $600-$699 CHICAGO, HYDE PARK Arms Hotel, 5316 S. Harper, maid, phone /cable, switchboard, fridge, priv bath, lndry, $165/wk, $350/bi-wk or $650/mo. Call 773-493-3500

STUDIO OTHER

SOUTHSIDE, 1BR, VICINITY of 66th & Michigan, quiet building, carpeted, $550/mo + security. Call 773-978-3507, after 3pm.

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CLEAN ROOM W/FRIDGE & micro, Near Oak Park, Food -4Less, Walmart, Walgreens, Buses & Metra, Laundry. $115/wk & up. 773-637-5957

û NO SEC DEP û 6829 S. Perry. Studio. $465/mo HEAT INCL 773-955-5106

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$600$850. Section 8 welcome. 2BR, 1633 E. 83rd St., $800. 312-493-2344

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108TH & PRAIRIE: 1BR $690 & 2BR $785, Newly decorated, heat & appls incl. Section 8 ok. 888-2497971

1 BR UNDER $700

1 MONTH FREE South Shore Studios $600-$750 Free Heat, Fitness Ctr, Lndry rm. Niki 773.808. 2043 www.livenovo.com

7022 S. SHORE DRIVE Impecca-

CHICAGO - $299 Move In Spe-

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MIDWAY AREA/63RD KEDZIE Deluxe Studio 1 & 2 BRs. All modern oak floors, appliances, Security system, on site maint. clean & quiet, Nr. transp. From $445. 773582-1985 (espanol)

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7425 S. COLES - 1 BR $620, 2 1BR, 7910 S. Ridgeland,

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BR $735, Includes Free heat & appliances & cooking gas. (708) 424-4216 Kalabich Mgmt

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1 BR $900-$1099 118TH

AND

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Rehab 2 bed apt. Laundry in the apartment. Off street parking. New hardwood floors throughout. Move right in! Section 8 Welcome! call Kasha 773-260-2631 ONE BEDROOM APARTMENT near Loyola Park, 1329 W. Estes. Hardwood floors. Cats OK. Heat included. Laundry in building. $925$950/month. Available 12/1. 773-7614318.

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83rd & Loomis, large 1BR & 2BR apts, newly remodeled, hdwd flrs, appls & heat incl $750 & $850 plus $350 move in fee 773-507-8534. CHATHAM 708 East 81st(langley), 4 room, 1 bedroom, 1st fl $700+security. Please call Mr. Joe at 708-870-4801 for more info

1 BR $800-$899 2 MONTHS FREE 6600 S. Ingleside, 1 & 2 Bedrooms, $850-$1000 Free heat and Laundry Room, Sec 8 OK. Niki 773.808-2043. www.livenovo.com

1 BR $1100 AND OVER

ROUND LAKE BEACH, IL Cedar Villas is accepting applications for subsidized 1BR apts. for seniors 62 years or older and the disabled. Rent is based on 30% of annual income. For details, call us at 847-546-1899 ∫

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CHICAGO 5301 W POTOMAC 1BR Apartment for rent, Tenant pays heat & gas, newly decorated, Call 773-848-8667

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108th St., Lovely 4 rm, 1BR, liv rm, din rm, updated kitchen, heated Close to transportation. Available now 773-264-6711. NO SECURITY DEPOSIT NO MOVE IN FEE 1, 2, 3 BEDROOM APTS (773) 874-1122 ACACIA SRO HOTEL Men Preferred! Rooms for Rent. Weekly & Monthly Rates. 312-421-4597

HEART OF RAVENSWOOD 4883 N Paulina, Large 1BR 650SF completely remodeled apartment, brand-new kitchen/bath, new appliances, separate dining-room, ample closet space, floors sanded, painted throughout, mint condition, heat/ cooking gas included. Cable, storage locker, on-site laundry. Near transportation. Must be seen. Available immediately. $1200/mo. First Month Free! No security deposit. Call/text 773-230-3116 or call 773-477-9251, email: herbmalkind@comcast.net

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2 BR UNDER $900

2 BR $900-$1099 HERMOSA: 2 bedroom apartment, eat-in kitchen, living room, dining room, all new hardwood floors, stove, refrigerator, microwave included. $950/mo. Close to shopping. Contact Javier 773-4568294 DLX 1ST FLR, 2.5BR, hdwd flrs, ceiling fans, lg LR/DR & ktchen, 3 car gar. 83rd & Maryland. $900, Free heat & appl incl. Sec 8 welc. 773-412-0541 SECT 8 WELC, 71st & Wentworth, newly decorated, 2BR & $3BR, $850/mo, heat incl, lndry on site. Contact Frank, 708-205-4311 2BR nr 83rd/Jeffrey, heat incl, decor FP, hdwd flrs, lots of storage, formal DR, intercom, newly remod kit/ba. $1000. Missy 773-241-9139

2 BR $1100-$1299 DON’T MISS OUT on this BEAU-

TIFUL Newly remodeled 3BR located in the North Lawndale area. This apartment has ALL the Amenities you NEED: Appliances, Washer Dryer Hook-Up In-Unit, ADT, Parking, Wood Floors, Storage, Secure Parking and Back Yard.

MARQUETTE PARK AREA near 72nd/ Western Ave. Nice 2BR Bungalow, nr trans & shopping, appls incl. Sec 8 OK. $1100/mo 773-590-0116

2BR apt, Sec 8 Welcome, 3400 W Block of Fulton Blvd. $1116/ mo, heat incl, ceiling fans, mini blinds, hdwd flrs every room 773-4301435 BEAUTIFUL REMODELED 1, 2 & 3BR Apts, hdwd flrs, custom cabinets, avail now. $1000-$1200 /mo + sec. 773-905-8487. Section 8 Ok EVANSTON 2BR, BEAUT. new kit, SS appl, granite, oak flrs, spac. BRs, OS lndry/storage $1295/incl heat 773-743-4141 urbanequities. com AUSTIN AREA: NEWLY remodeled 6BR house, fins. bsmt, 2-car gar., available Jan 1st. Sec 8 welcome. $1600/mo. Call 773-877-9413.

BRIDGEPORT STUDIO , heated floors, utilities included. Floor to ceiling windows. Pool, appliances, 24 hour maintenance & security. $895/ mo. No deposit. Heated parking available. 773-924-7368, video@ bestrents.net

80TH/ASHLAND, Beaut. newly remod, 2BR w /ofc. Nr schls & trnsp. $800 /mo, ten pays all utils. $500 move in fee. Available now. 773-7754458

ELMHURST: Dlx 2BR, n e w appls & carpet, a/c, balcony, $1195 /mo. incl heat, prkg. OS lndry, 773743-4141 www.urbanequities.com WEST ROGERS PARK: 2BR, new kit. FDR, new windows, $1295 /heated, 773-743-4141 www.urbanequities.com

2 BR OTHER ROUND LAKE BEACH, IL Cedar

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42 CHICAGO READER | NOVEMBER 23, 2017

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EDGEWATER 2 1/2 RM STUDIO: Full Kit, new appl, dinette, oak flrs, walk-n closets, $850/mo incls ht/gas. Call 773-743-4141 or visit www.urbanequities.com

1 BR OTHER APTS. FOR RENT PARK MGMT & INV. Ltd. Hot Summer Is Here Cool Off In The Pool OUR UNITS INCLUDE HEAT, HW & CG Plenty of parking 1Bdr From $795.00 2Bdr From $925.00 3 Bdr/2 Full Bath From $1200 **1-(773)-476-6000**

APTS. FOR RENT PARK MGMT & INV. Ltd. SUMMER IS HERE!! Most units Include.. HEAT & HOT WTR Studios From $475.00 1Bdr From $550.00 2Bdr From $745.00 3 Bdr/2 Full Bath From $1200 **1-(773)-476-6000**

CHICAGO 7600 S Essex FALL SPECIAL 2BR $599, 3BR $699, 4BR $799 w/apprvd credit, no sec dep. Sect 8 Ok! Also Homes for rent available. Call 773-287-9999 Westside Locations 773-287-4500

WEST WOODLAWN, 6200 S. St. Lawrence, 2 & 3BR’s, $800-$995/mo, heat incl. Close to transportation. Section 8 Welcome. 773-8559916

$725 MO. 2BR 1 Ba, near 147th and

new I294 ramp. Remodeled kitchen, new windows. All electric. Tenant pays electric and cable. Section 8 welcome. 708-341-1229.

83RD & COMMERCIAL, 2 B R , 1BA, kitchen, LR close to schools & trans, $750/mo + $500 Move In Fee. Ten pays utils. 773-775-4458

Villas is accepting applications for Subsidized 2 and 3 bedroom apt waiting list. Rent is based on 30% of annual income for qualified applicants. Contact us at 847-546-1899 for details

APTS: 70th/Aberdeen. 2BR, newly remodeled, 1 mo rent + 1 mo sec. laundry rm, heat incl, hdwd flrs. Section 8 Welcome 773-651-8673 SOUTH SIDE - 6237 S. Evans. 4 Room Apt, heated, Close to L & bus lines. Call Milton at 773-590-1680 / 773-643-4778 CHICAGO - 72ND & TALMAN, Beautiful, comp rehab 2BR Apts, laundry on site. Sec 8 Welc. 312-375-6585 or 773-934-8796

3 BR OR MORE UNDER $1200

2BR APT FOR rent near 97th & Harvard, excellent condition $750/month plus security, 773-615-5698 CHICAGO, 6552 S. Marshfield, 3BR, 1st flr Apt. Tenants pay gas & lights. $750/mo. Section 8 welcome. Call Mitch, 630-788-7378.

HAMILTON PARK: Renovated building with 3 bedrooms, hardwood floors, ceiling fans, appliances, laundry room, and gated entrance. Tenant pays utilities. $925/ mo. Call 312-719-3308 or 312-3146604 SECTION 8 WELCOME Newly Decorated - Heat Incl

ALBANY PK 3100W 3BR, gran. ctrs, SS appls, wood flrs, OS ldry/ stor. $1495-$1575 + utils NO DEP. 773-743-4141 www.urbanequities. com Wrigleyville 1800 S.F. 3BR, new kit, private deck & yard, FDR, oak floors, sunroom, One Month Free! $1950/ heated 773-743-4141 urbanequities. com

ALSIP: LARGE 3 BEDROOM APARTMENT, 1.5BA, $1100/ month. Appliances, laundry, parking & storage. Call 708268-3762 CALUMET CITY, Spacious 3 bedroom, 2 bath, 2nd floor, AC, modern kitchen, well kept, $1000/month, 312-451-7495 OGDEN & KILDARE 2BR APT, appls incl. $825/mo. 1st and last mo req’d 773-727-7608 ROBBINS 3 lrg bdrm, 2nd flr Apt for rent. Very quiet area, laundry rm, Senior Discount. $850 + utils. Section 8 accepted. 708-299-0055

3 BR OR MORE $1200-$1499 AUSTIN: NEWLY REHABBED 3BR, lrg DR, hardwood floors, laundry, parking space, $1250/mo. Tenant pays utilities. Call 773-744-0763

W.HUMBOLDT PK 1500W remod spac. 1BR, new kitc/appls, OS lndry, storage. $825-$975 + util NO DEP 773-743-4141 www. urbanequities.com ALB PK 1600SF 3BR + den, new kit, SS appl, granite, oak flrs, onsite lndy, $1495/+ util. 773-7434141 www.urbanequities.com

be opening the waiting list for one, two, three and four bedroom apartments on November 28th to November 30th from 8:30am to 4:00pm. If you are interested please come to our management office at 3630 W. 51st Street, Chicago, IL 60632. Phone #773-767-7260.

CHICAGO SOUTH - YOU’VE tried the rest, we are the best. Apartments & Homes for rent, city & suburb. No credit checks. 773-221-7490, 773-221-7493

MAYFAIR 1600 SF 3BR, new kit, SS appl, granite, oak flrs, onsite lndy, prkg, $1495/+ util. 773743-4141 www.urbanequities.com

FAR SOUTH CHICAGO 2br+ house for rent, 1 bath.

3 BR OR MORE $1800-$2499 LARGE 3 BEDROOM apartment near Wrigley Field. 3820 N. Fremont. Two bathrooms. Hardwood Floors. Cats OK. $2175/month. Special! Sign a lease starting by December 1, get January rent free! Available 12/1. 773-761-4318.

OLYMPIA FIELDS Newly remodeled 4 bedroom, 2.5 bath house, full basement. Beautiful area. 708-935-7557.

3 BR OR MORE $2500 AND OVER GARY NSA ACCEPTING applications for SECTION 8 STUDIO & 2BR UNITS ONLY. Apply Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10am to 2pm ONLY at 1735 W 5th Ave. Applications are to be filled out on site. Adult applicants must provide a current picture ID and SS card.

3 BR OR MORE $1500-$1799 WRIGLEYVILLE 1800SF 3BR, Sunny New Kit, SS appl, deck, close to beach/ Cubs park, Ldry/ storage, One Month Free! $1995/ heated 773-743-4141 urbanequities .com

CHICAGO HEIGHTS, 4BR, 1BA, NEWLY REMODELED,

CHICAGO LAWN RENTALS will

APPLS INCL , SECTION 8 OK. NO SEC. DEPOSIT. 708-822-4450

77th/Ridgeland. 3BR. $875. 74th/East End. 2BR. $775. 773-874-9637 or 773-493-5359

11740 S. LASALLE, 3BR, 1st floor of 2 flat, hdwd flrs, stove, fridge, W/D, Newly remod. $1200 /mo. No Sec Dep. FREE heat. Will accept 2BR Voucher. Call 773-221-0061

7958 S KENWOOD, 5 B R , $1500; Morgan & 54th, 4BR, $1300; 88 Escanaba, 3BR, $900; Sec 8 welcome. 312-804-3638

GARY - SERENITY LAKE Senior Independent Living 2 Bedroom $559/ month Tax Credit Guidelines Apply 5601 E Melton Road 219-939-6000

Around 128th & Sanganom. Please call: 312-720-1264

GOODS

ADULT SERVICES

CLASSICS WANTED ANY CLASSIC CARS IN ANY CONDITION. ’20S, ’30S, ’40S, ’50S, ’60S & ’70S. HOTRODS & EXOTICS! TOP DOLLAR PAID! COLLECTOR. CALL JAMES, 630-201-8122

HEALTH & WELLNESS FULL BODY MASSAGE. hotel, house calls welcome $90 special. Russian, Polish, Ukrainain girls. Northbrook and Schaumburg locations. 10% discount for new customers. Please call 773-407-7025

NOTICE IS HEREBY given, pursuant to “An Act in relation to the use of an Assumed Business Name in the conduct or transaction of Business in the State,” as amended, that a certification was registered by the undersigned with the County Clerk of Cook County. Registration Number: D17152647 on November 8, 2017 Under the Assumed Business Name of REDDISH BRAND with the business located at: 3072 ST IVES LN, RICHTON PARK, IL 60471. The true and real full name(s) and residence address of the owner(s)/ partner(s) is: ALISHA LASHAWN APPLEWHITE, 3072 ST IVES LN, RICHTON PARK, IL 60471, USA

FRENCH DOG

BULLPUPS,10WKS

old,1F,2M,AKCreg,shots,$700,E-mail scottparw@aol.com 773-237-3898

ADULT SERVICES

NOTICE IS HEREBY given, pursuant to “An Act in relation to the use of an Assumed Business Name in the conduct or transaction of Business in the State,” as amended, that a certification was registered by the undersigned with the County Clerk of Cook County. Registration Number: D17152638 on November 8, 2017 Under the Assumed Business Name of WAY BACK WHEN JEWELRYwith the business located at: 40 E 9TH STREET APT 813, CHICAGO, IL 60605. The true and real full name(s) and residence address of the owner(s)/partner(s) is: JOHN JOSEPH MURRAY, JR 40 E 9TH STREET APT 813, CHICAGO, IL 60605, USA

ADULT SERVICES

COLLEGE GIRL BODY RUBS $40 w/AD 24/7

224-223-7787

NOTICE IS HEREBY given, pursuant to “An Act in relation to the use of an Assumed Business Name in the conduct or transaction of Business in the State,” as amended, that a certification was registered by the undersigned with the County Clerk of Cook County. Registration Number: D17152642 on November 8, 2017 Under the Assumed Business Name of FULLERTON FLOWERS with the business located at: 3442 FULLERTON AVE, CHICAGO, IL 60647. The true and real full name(s) and residence address of the owner(s)/ partner(s) is: JESSICA LYNN HALL 6952 30TH PLACE, BERWYN, IL 60402, USA

legal notices

Ave. Studio, 1 and 2BRs. Heat incl, nr park and great trans. $525-$875. 708-473-7129

{ { R U O Y AD E R E H

MARKETPLACE

SOUTH SHORE 6724 S. Chappel

51ST & KING DRIVE APTS. accepting applications on Friday, December 1, 2017 from 9 a.m. - 11 a .m. for subsidized 1, 2, 4, 5 bedroom apartments. Applications will be taken in person at: 3555 S. Cottage Grove ave., 1st Floor West. non-residential Applicants must have valid State I. D. All qualified applications will be SPACE FOR RENT Ideal for placed on the waiting list. Ques- body worker, chiropractor, naprapath, nutritionist, foot tions call: 773-373-3018 reflexologist or office space. Established Lincoln Park wellness center. Available 1/1/18. Call 773868-4062

OTHER

Westside locations 773-287-4500

CENTERS.

1301 W. 71ST PL. 5BR, 1.5BA, fin bsmt, alarm system, appls incl, near schools and trans, no dogs. Sec 8 OK. Call Roy 312-405-2178

GENERAL

3 BR OR MORE CHICAGO HOUSES FOR rent. Section 8 Ok, w/app credit $500 gift certificate 3, 4 & 5 BR houses avail. Call 708-752-3812 for

SELF-STORAGE

T W O locations to serve you. All units fully heated and humidity controlled with ac available. North: Knox Avenue. 773-685-6868. South: Pershing Avenue. 773-523-6868.

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312-222-6920 NOVEMBER 23, 2017 | CHICAGO READER 43

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44 CHICAGO READER - NOVEMBER 23, 2017

STRAIGHT DOPE By Cecil Adams q : Assume that money and animal-rights groups are no issue. What’s the dope on harnessing electricity from electric eels? —NANSBREAD1, VIA THE STRAIGHT DOPE MESSAGE BOARD

A : Never mind PETA—those eels can take care of themselves. Often reaching eight feet in length, an electric eel is capable of leaping out of the water to zap you with a charge of up to 600 volts, which probably won’t do you any permanent harm but may make you rethink some of your life choices. And you can’t just trawl for them, either. Electric eels (NB: not technically eels—Electrophorus electricus hails from a group of creatures called knifefish) tend to favor muddy river bottoms and swamps, so they’re not particularly easy to net. Given that we’re talking about the basins of the Amazon and Orinoco Rivers here, the eels may not be the only unpleasant critters splashing around down there. There’s also no track record for breeding them in captivity, so even if you were able to haul in enough starter stock for your state-of-the-art electric-eel farm, you might encounter difficulty sustaining a population. Honestly, just put in some solar panels. Theoretically what you’re suggesting is possible, I’ll concede, as evidenced by one aquarium in Japan that hooked up its Christmas tree to a couple of aluminum plates installed in the E. electricus tank. Eels generate electricity as they swim around—they use it like sonar to find their way, among other applications we’ll get to shortly. So when this one moved, the lights on the tree flickered. A neat demo, but also an illustration of one major drawback to achieving your goal at any kind of scale: the electricity is inconstant, and generated at the eel’s whims. You can’t just wire it up and flip a switch. This isn’t to say that electric eels don’t have anything to tell humans about electricity—but the real money is in figuring out how they function and trying to mimic it. Slice open an electric eel and you’ll find three electricity-producing abdominal organs, which collectively take up maybe 80 percent of its body. Lined up like batteries in a flashlight, these specialized juice-generating cells, called electrocytes, are synchronized to go off together on command and, famously, can be used to fend off predators or incapacitate prey. Electric eels regularly emit a weak charge as well, for navigation purposes, as described above, and to communicate among themselves.

SLUG SIGNORINO

WE ARE HERE TO HELP! NOT JUDGE!

So bioelectrogenesis, obviously, is a pretty cool trick, and one that, unfortunately for us, has evolved only in fish—the conductivity’s just better underwater. Still, humans have been looking for ways to to get in on the game:

•

Scientists in Shanghai reported last year that they’d used the structure of the eel’s electricity-producing apparatus as inspiration to create “flexible, stretchable, and weavable” fibers that double as high-voltage capacitors—storage devices for electricity. Couple these with fiberlike solar cells, the idea goes, and weave them into fabric, and pretty soon you’ve got a jacket that’ll charge your phone.

• Back in 2008 chemical engineers from Yale

designed an artificial biological cell that does what an electric eel’s electrocytes do, only better: their version could generate 28 percent more electricity, and convert food energy into electricity with 31 percent greater efficiency. In theory, anyway; as of 2014 it was apparently still in the conceptual stages. But the hope is that this might lead to the development of a “bio-battery” to power medical implants and prostheses—one big advantage over more conventional in-body power sources being that if the bio-battery breaks down, it won’t leave a bunch of toxic junk in your system.

As I say, it’s early yet for this kind of research. But of course generating electricity within the human body is the kind of notion certain online technophiles can’t help getting carried away over. I came across one excited blogger recapping that Yale project and imagining even further frontiers in people power: “Most in the Western world are experiencing an obesity epidemic, so we have plenty of chemical energy to spare for producing an electric potential.” Factory-farming humans for bioelectricity was also the plot of The Matrix, you’ll recall, but heck: We’re racing headlong toward dystopia in any case. Might as well burn off that excess belly fat along the way. v Send questions to Cecil via straightdope.com or write him c/o Chicago Reader, 350 N. Orleans, Chicago 60654.

SAVAGE LOVE

By Dan Savage

Is it cruel to be cruel in fantasies?

A woman aroused by humiliating others has ethical qualms, and more. Q : I’m a twentysomething

straight woman. About a month ago, I had a really vivid dream in which I was at a party and seriously flirting with a guy I’d just met. Then my fiance showed up—my real, flesh-andblood, sleeping-next-to-me fiance—who we’ll call G. In the dream, I proceeded to shower G with attention and PDA; I was all over him in a way we typically aren’t in public. I was clearly doing it to get a reaction from the guy I’d just spent the last dream-hour seducing. It was as if it had been my plan all along. Last night, I had a similar dream. This time, the guy was an old high school boyfriend, but otherwise it was the same: flirty baiting, followed by the use of G to reject and humiliate the other guy. I was really turned on by these dreams. In real life, whenever another woman has flirted with G, I get aroused—conscious of some feelings of jealousy but drawing pleasure from them. And when other men have flirted with me, I get similarly aroused for G. There is definitely a component in that arousal that wants to tease and mock these other men with what they can’t have, even though the teasing is just in my head. I would NEVER use another person like I do in these dreams/fantasies, because it’s cruel. But could this become a healthy role-playing outlet for me and G? Are there ethical implications to hurting strangers (albeit imaginary ones) for sexual pleasure? From what little I know of degradation/humiliation kinks, it’s important that the person being degraded is experiencing pleasure and satisfaction. Is it healthy to make someone’s (again, an imaginary someone’s)

unwilling pain a part of our pleasure? If G is into it, this would be our ﬁrst foray into fantasy/role-playing/ whatever. But I worry that I might be poisoning the well by pursuing something so mean-spirited. —MY EXTRAAROUSING MEANNESS

A : We watch imaginary

people being harmed—much more grievously harmed— in movies and on television and read about imaginary people being harmed in novels. Think of poor Barb in Stranger Things or poor Theon Greyjoy in Game of Thrones or poor Christian in Fifty Shades of Grey. If it’s OK for the Duﬀer brothers and HBO and E.L. James to do horrible things to these imaginary people to entertain us, MEAN, it’s OK for you and your boyfriend (if he’s game) to do much less horrible things to an imaginary third person to entertain yourselves. Just make sure he’s on board.

Q : My husband and I have

been together for 15 years, married for ﬁve. He is more sexually adventurous than I am, but I try to keep up. At his request, we have gone to a few sex clubs in our area to have “public sex.” He promised that it would be a onetime thing but insisted we keep going back. He told me that if I ever got uncomfortable, we didn’t have to go back. But when I told him I didn’t want to go to any more sex clubs, he came up with sex booths at porn shops. If I have to do sex in public, booths are best because they aren’t very popular and there is some privacy. But this wasn’t good enough for him. He wants an audience, he wants to see me with others, etc. I hate this. I hate how it makes me feel. He says all

the right things—he respects me, he knows a relationship is a two-way street, etc—but he is constantly furious with me about this, he tells me I don’t contribute anything to our relationship and that we don’t have a true partnership—all because I don’t want to have sex in public with him or with strangers. Right now, he’s storming around the house in a rage about this and I am tired of it. I react to his “public requests” with nausea and panic because I know he will be enraged for a week if we don’t go. I have even suggested that he go outside the marriage, but he wants me to be a part of it. Everything else in our relationship is great. We have a house, a child, and pets. I’m not sure if all that needs to be broken over this. —DENIAL

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ENRAGES SELFISH PARTNER AND I’M REELING

A : I’m running out of column

here, DESPAIR, so I’m going to be blunt. Your husband is a selﬁsh, emotionally abusive, manipulative asshole, and you should leave him. You gave his kink a try, and not only was it not for you, it makes you fucking miserable. You gave him the OK to ﬁnd other sex partners to explore this with, and that wasn’t good enough for him. He has responded not with the gratitude you deserve but with emotionally abusive behavior. And what’s his goal? To make your life a living hell until you consent under duress? That’s not consent, DESPAIR. Being served with divorce papers may open his eyes. If so, perhaps your marriage can be saved. If not, go through with the divorce. v Send letters to mail@ savagelove.net. Download the Savage Lovecast every Tuesday at savagelovecast. com. v @fakedansavage

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NOVEMBER 23, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 45

EARLY WARNINGS

CHICAGO SHOWS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT IN THE WEEKS TO COME

Never miss a show again. Sign up for the newsletter at chicagoreader. com/early

Darlingside ò CAMERON GEE

NEW

Arlie 3/10, 9 PM, Schubas, 18+ Boukou Groove 12/28, 8:30 PM, Wire, Berwyn Jonatha Brooke 3/16, 8 PM, City Winery b S. Carey 4/5, 8 PM, Schubas Benjamin Clementine 2/6, 8 PM, Metro b Darlingside 4/19, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Diet Cig 2/1, 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Ani DiFranco 2/24, 8 PM, Park West, 18+ Dorothy 1/6, 9 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ G Jones 1/26, 9 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Irish Christmas in America 12/17, 5 and 7 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b J Boog 2/28, 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Thomas Jack 12/30, 10 PM, the Mid George Kahumoku Jr., Led Kaapana, and Jeﬀ Peterson 2/16, 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b Keys N Krates 3/10, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, on sale Wed 11/29, 10 AM, 17+ Gladys Knight, Brian McKnight 2/22, 8 PM, the Venue at Horseshoe Casino, Hammond, on sale Fri 11/24, 10 AM Milk & Bone 3/10, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Thurston Moore 2/10, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ NBA Youngboy 12/24, 8 PM, Portage Theater Nightmares on Wax 3/3, 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band 4/21, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ PnB Rock, Toni Romiti 12/22, 7 PM, Portage Theater b Riot Fest 9/14-16, 11 AM, Douglas Park b

Romeo Santos 2/28, 8 PM, United Center, on sale Fri 11/24, 10 AM Shame 2/22, 8 PM, Schubas b Story of the Year 1/19, 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, on sale Mon 11/27, noon, 17+ Devvon Terrell 2/18, 6 PM, Subterranean Tortured Soul 2/8, 8 PM, City Winery b John Waite & the Axemen 5/24-25, 8 PM, City Winery b Whitney 2/14-15, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 18+

UPDATED Seaway 1/31, 6:15 PM, Cobra Lounge, canceled

UPCOMING Peter Bradley Adams 12/21, 8 PM, Schubas, 18+ Cyrille Aimee 2/15, 8 PM, City Winery b Alex Aiono 1/14, 7:30 PM, Lincoln Hall b Kris Allen 12/18, 8 PM, City Winery b Alvvays 3/23, 7:30 PM, Metro b Anti-Flag, Stray From the Path 1/17, 7 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Asleep at the Wheel 12/1, 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b Jessica Aszodi 12/10, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Dan Auerbach & the Easy Eye Sound Revue, Shannon & the Clams 4/2, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ Roy Ayers 12/20-21, 8 PM, the Promontory Barenaked Ladies, Better Than Ezra 7/13, 7 PM, Huntington Bank Pavilion Baths 4/11, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Rayland Baxter 1/20, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+

46 CHICAGO READER - NOVEMBER 23, 2017

Black Marble 12/12, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Night Beats 2/10, 8 PM, the Vic, 18+ Brave Combo 12/15-16, 9 PM, FitzGerald’s, Berwyn Brandi Carlile 6/15, 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre Carpenter Brut 4/26, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, 17+ Kelly Clarkson, Andy Grammer 12/5, 7:30 PM, Rosemont Theater, Rosemont b Clean Bandit 4/11, 7:30 PM, the Vic b Cloud Rat 12/30, 7 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Creepshow 12/15, 8 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint Crooked Colours 3/2, 9 PM, Schubas, 18+ The Darkness 4/11, 8 PM, Park West, 18+ Craig David 1/13, 8 PM, 1st Ward, 18+ Megan Davies 1/26, 9 PM, Schubas Dear Hunter, Family Crest 12/8, 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Districts 12/9, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Dixie Dregs 3/24, 8 PM, the Vic Do Make Say Think 12/8, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ Echosmith 4/14, 8:30 PM, Metro b Enslaved, Wolves in the Throne Room 2/23, 7 PM, Metro, 18+ Exhumed 12/5, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Brian Fallon & the Howling Weather 4/19, 8 PM, House of Blues, 17+ Melanie Fiona 2/7, 7 PM, City Winery b First Aid Kit, Van William 2/2, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ FKJ 12/7, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ Foster the People, Cold War Kids 12/1, 7 PM, Aragon Ballroom b Fratellis 5/11, 8:45 PM, Metro, 18+ Pierce Fulton 12/4, 7 PM, Schubas Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds 2/24, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre Ggoolldd 12/16, 9 PM, Empty Bottle

Hatebreed 12/3, 7 PM, Metro, 18+ Peter Hook & the Light 5/4, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ Inquisition, Nader Sadek 12/9, 8 PM, Cobra Lounge, 17+ Iron Chic, Oﬀ With Their Heads 12/1, 7 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Cody Johnson 1/13, 8:30 PM, Joe’s Live, Rosemont Tom Jones 5/12-13, 8 PM, House of Blues Freddy Jones Band 1/12-13, 8 PM, City Winery b K.Flay 2/2, 6 PM, Concord Music Hall b Killers 1/16, 7:30 PM, United Center Kimbra, Arc Iris 2/3, 7 PM, Concord Music Hall b Knocked Loose, Terror 3/24, 5:30 PM, Bottom Lounge b Kodak Black 12/7, 7 PM, Portage Theater, 17+ Ladysmith Black Mambazo 2/17, 5 and 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b Lane 8 2/1, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Lorde 3/27, 7 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont Machine Head 2/23, 6:30 PM, Concord Music Hall b Barry Manilow 12/5, 7:30 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont Marilyn Manson 2/6, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ Marked Men 12/8, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Nada Surf 3/13, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ No Age 1/20, 9 PM, Schubas, 18+ Nude Party 1/16, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Angel Olsen 12/9, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ Mark Olson 12/16, 8 PM, Szold Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b Orchestral Movements in the Dark 3/16, 7:30 PM, the Vic, 18+ Pert Near Sandstone, Miles Over Mountains 12/1, 8 PM, Schubas Pink 3/9-10, 8 PM, United Center Plack Blaque, Thoom 1/6, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Plain White T’s 12/2, 7 PM, Metro b Poi Dog Pondering 12/26-30, City Winery b Polica 2/22, 7 PM, Thalia Hall b Portugal. The Man 2/16, 7:30 PM, Aragon Ballroom b Radio Dept. 2/1, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Railroad Earth 3/9, 8 PM, The Vic, 18+ David Ramirez 12/2, 9 PM, Schubas Rapsody 12/10, 8 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 18+ Real Friends, Knuckle Puck 12/29, 6 PM, Metro b Rebirth Brass Band 1/12, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Residents 4/17, 7 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b Rhye 3/8, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+

b Chase Rice, Walker Hayes 12/14, 8:15 PM, Joe’s Live, Rosemont Rico Nasty 11/30, 6 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club b Andrew Ripp 12/22, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall b Romantics, A Flock of Seagulls 12/13, 7:30 PM, Joe’s Bar Lucy Rose 3/23, 8 PM, Schubas, 18+ Sabaton, Kreator 2/27, 7:30 PM, House of Blues, 17+ San Fermin 2/1, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Joe Satriani, John Petrucci, and Phil Collen 2/23, 7 PM, Chicago Theatre Scarface 12/8, 8 PM, Portage Theater, 17+ Screaming Females 3/10, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Secret Sisters 12/4, 8 PM, City Winery b Seven Lions, Tritonal, Kill the Noise 12/16, 9 PM, Aragon Ballroom, 18+ Shakira 1/23, 7:30 PM, United Center Harry Shearer & Judith Owen 12/10, 7 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Sheepdogs 2/27, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Shredders 2/3, 9 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Silverstein, Tonight Alive 2/24, 6 PM, Concord Music Hall b Sleigh Bells, Sunﬂower Bean 1/31, 8 PM, Metro b Sam Smith 8/15, 8 PM, United Center Spill Canvas 12/17, 7 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Spoon, Real Estate 12/10, 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre Squirrel Nut Zippers 1/16, 7 and 9:30 PM, SPACE, Evanston b St. Vincent 1/12, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre b Mavis Staples 2/3, 8 PM, the Vic, 18+ Strfkr 2/14, 7 PM, Concord Music Hall, 17+ Harry Styles, Kacey Musgraves 6/30, 8 PM, United Center Suicide Machines, Bad Cop/Bad Cop, Rebel Spies, Eradicator 12/31, 8 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 18+ Sza 12/20, 6 PM, Concord Music Hall b Tedeschi Trucks Band 1/25, 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre b Teenage Bottlerocket 12/17, 2 PM, Cobra Lounge b They Might Be Giants 3/17, 7:30 PM, the Vic, 14+ Thrice, Circa Survive 12/7, 6:30 PM, Aragon Ballroom, 17+ Thriftworks, Desert Dwellers 12/30, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Tokio Hotel 2/16, 7 PM, Concord Music Hall, 17+ Trans-Siberian Orchestra 12/28, 3 and 8 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont Tropical Trash, Crazy Doberman 12/3, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Tune-Yards 3/3, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+

ALL AGES

Typhoon 1/19, 9 PM, Metro, part of Tomorrow Never Knows, 18+ Umphrey’s McGee 1/14, 7 PM, Park West b U.S. Bombs 1/27, 8 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint Kate Voegele & Tyler Hilton 1/13, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Rufus Wainwright 12/3, 7:30 PM, North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, Skokie Walk Oﬀ the Earth 3/8, 8 PM, House of Blues b Walk the Moon 1/26, 7:30 PM, Aragon Ballroom b Wallows 2/22, 7:30 PM, Lincoln Hall b J. Roddy Walston & the Business 2/2, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ Sara Watkins, Sarah Jarosz, and Aoife O’Donovan 3/2, 8 PM, Thalia Hall b Aaron Watson 1/12, 8 PM, Joe’s Live, Rosemont Weather Station 12/2, 9 PM, Hideout Wedding Present 3/26, 7:30 PM, Lincoln Hall The Weeks 12/8, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Weepies 4/14, 8 PM, Thalia Hall b Weezer, Pixies, Wombats 7/7, 7:30 PM, Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, Tinley Park Erika Wennerstrom 12/14, 9 PM, Hideout White Buﬀalo 12/2, 9 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Why? 3/3, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ “Weird Al” Yankovic 4/6-7, 8 PM, the Vic b Brett Young 12/15, 8 PM, Joe’s Live, Rosemont Yung Gravy 1/26, 8:30 PM, Subterranean b Yung Lean & Sad Boys 1/31, 6 PM, Concord Music Hall b Zombies 3/19-20, 8 PM, City Winery b

SOLD OUT Brendan Bayliss & Jake Cinninger 12/15, 8 PM, Park West, 18+ Andrew Bird 12/11-14, 8 PM, Fourth Presbyterian Church b Borns 1/27, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre b Greta Van Fleet 11/30, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Guided by Voices 12/30-31, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Jesus Lizard 12/9, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ Lawrence Arms 12/14, 7:30 PM, Cobra Lounge, 17+ The National 12/12-13, 7:30 PM, Lyric Opera House b Robert Plant & the Sensational Space Shifters 2/20, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ Queens of the Stone Age, Run the Jewels 12/2, 7 PM, Aragon Ballroom b Quinn XCII 3/9, 6 PM, Concord Music Hall b Joe Russo’s Almost Dead 2/17, 9 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ Suicideboys 12/14, 8 PM, Metro b Brett Young 2/2, 8:30 PM, Joe’s Bar v

TOMORROW NEVER KNOWS

LINCOLN HALL / SCHUBAS / METRO / SMARTBAR DESTROYER + TYPHOON + ALLAN RAYMAN + HINDS RAYLAND BAXTER + NO AGE + DIANE COFFEE HELADO NEGRO + SONNY SMITH + MARK FARINA

SPECIAL GUEST:

WESLEY STACE (John Wesley Harding)

THIS SATURDAY! NOVEMBER 25 • VIC THEATRE

YUMI ZOUMA + CUCO + SNAIL MAIL + BEDOUINE ANGELO DE AUGUSTINE SLØTFACE + RON GALLO + BILL MACKAY & RYLEY WALKER STEF CHURA + BLAISE MOORE + VARSITY + BELLE GAME MELKBELLY + LIZ COOPER & THE STAMPEDE + RATBOYS + LOMELDA DIVINO NIÑO + CUT WORMS + MEGA BOG + LITTLE JUNIOR HELENA DELAND + OKEY DOKEY + SLOW MASS + YOKO AND THE OH NO’S PEEL + BUNNY + CAFE RACER + SPORTS BOYFRIEND + V.V. LIGHTBODY

COMEDY AT THE HIDEOUT JO FIRESTONE WHAM CITY COMEDY X HELLTRAP NIGHTMARE

NEXT THURSDAY! NOVEMBER 29 RIVIERA THEATRE

COMEDY AT THE KNITTING FACTORY JOSH FADEM + KATE WILLETT

SPECIAL GUEST:

JA N 17-21 20 18 T N K F E S T. C O M

HERON OBLIVION

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 9 RIVIERA THEATRE BUY TICKETS AT

NOVEMBER 23, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 47

Sculptor and Storyteller Now Open

Celebrate the holidays at the Art Institute. tute. Auguste Rodin. Adam, modeled 1881, cast about ut 1924. Gift of Robert Allerton.