Print Issue of December 7, 2017 (Volume 47, Number 10) 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 | D E C E M B E R 7, 2 0 1 7

How the Jesus Lizard became Chicagoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most beautiful noise-rock monsters 27

Mayor Rahm hands out TIF incentives the way Santa gives gifts. 10

Alle th

rage

Is the revolution in fashion a sign of a bigger revolt to come? By AIMEE LEVITT 12

2 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 7, 2017

THIS WEEK

C H I C A G O R E A D E R | D E C E M B E R 7, 2 0 1 7 | V O L U M E 4 7, N U M B E R 1 0

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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 MARKETING AND EVENTS MANAGER BRYAN BURDA DIRECTOR OF DIGITAL JOHN DUNLEVY ADVERTISING COORDINATOR HERMINIA BATTAGLIA

FEATURES

IN THIS ISSUE 4 Agenda The 25th anniversary of Hellcab, Twyla Tharp’s Minimalism and Me, Joe Biden at the Chicago Theatre, and more recommended goings-on about town

26 Movies Gary Oldman is the complete Winston Churchill, but Darkest Hour tells only half the story.

MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE CITY LIFE

FASHION

All the rage

8 Chicagoans A Chicago high school teacher started a Seinfeld club, and yada yada yada. 10 Joravsky | Politics Thanks to the mayor’s generosity with our taxes, Christmas may come early for Amazon.

Is the revolution in fashion a sign of a bigger revolt to come? BY AIMEE LEVITT 12

FOOD & DRINK

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ARTS & CULTURE

DISTRIBUTION CONCERNS distributionissues@chicagoreader.com

21 Media Why did WYCC sell for millions less than it was expected to? 22 Visual Art Bread and butter is artist Isabelle Frances McGuire’s medium. 23 Theater Remy Bummpo’s Puﬀ: Believe It or Not gets to the truth of lying. 24 Theater In Griﬃn Theatre’s Violet a scarred heroine sets out in search of a miracle.

CHICAGO READER 30 N. RACINE, SUITE 300 CHICAGO, IL 60607 312-222-6920 CHICAGOREADER.COM ---------------------------------------------------------------READER (ISSN 1096-6919) IS PUBLISHED WEEKLY BY STM READER, LLC 30 N. RACINE, SUITE 300 CHICAGO, IL 60607. COPYRIGHT © 2017 CHICAGO READER. PERIODICAL POSTAGE PAID AT CHICAGO, IL. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. CHICAGO READER, READER, AND REVERSED R: REGISTERED TRADEMARKS ®.

MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE

Third coming

ON THE COVER: PHOTO AND COLLAGE BY PETYA SHALAMANOVA. FOR MORE OF HER WORK, GO TO PETYAPHOTO.VIRB.COM.

38 Shows of note Angel Olsen, Andrew Bird, Say Anything, and more of the week’s best 41 The Secret History of Chicago Music An untimely farewell to wizardly industrial guitarist and sound engineer Jason McNinch

The Jesus Lizard, returning once again to their hometown, talk about why they chose Chicago—and how they became its most beautiful noise-rock monsters. BY KEVIN WARWICK 27

25 Dance Hubbard Street gifts us with an evening of works by Crystal Pite.

43 Restaurant review: Regards to Edith At Regards to Edith, oldschool Chicago eats in a changing neighborhood 45 Cocktail Challenge: Tomalley The Delta’s Adam Kamin considers the lobster guts.

CLASSIFIEDS

46 Jobs 46 Apartments & Spaces 47 Marketplace 48 Straight Dope Would it be possible to supply enough venison to make deer sandwiches a regular fast-food item? 49 Savage Love What happened to the early, funny Savage Love columnist? 50 Early Warnings Kool Keith, Pedro the Lion, John Prine, and more shows you should know about in the weeks to come 50 Gossip Wolf Dumpster Tapes showcases local Latinx talent at the second annual Demolición, and other music news.

DECEMBER 7, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 3

AGENDA R

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b ALL AGES

F as two gents renting a single apartment, unbeknownst to one another, is simply to fall in love with them. Susan Gosdick plays Bouncer, their landlord. —MAX MALLER Sat 12/9, 7:30 PM, Goodspeed Hall, University of Chicago, 1010 E. 59th, transgressivetheatre-opera.org, $30.

Barney the Elf ò CARIN SILKAITIS

Dec. 1 – Jan. 7

THEATER More at chicagoreader.com/theater Barney the Elf As a non-ChrisR tian, I have no brief for Christmas. But Other Theatre brings a whole cho-

rusful of gold lamé briefs to this oddly compelling holiday tribute. I say “oddly” because the 90-minute show sure as hell doesn’t follow the usual path to Yuletide cheer. Santa Claus has died, to start, leaving behind a widow and one grown son, Junior, who’s expected to follow in dad’s footsteps. But Junior is a jerk, bent on introducing efficiencies at the expense of joy. One of his first acts is to fire Barney, whose exuberance makes his fellow elves entirely too happy. That sends Barney to Chicago, where he meets drag queen Zooey and learns a few things about himself, while we get the best-ever explanation of what makes reindeer fly. The whole ensemble is jolly and deft, but Roy Samra’s Barney is incandescent, especially when singing a surprisingly unironic “O Holy Night.” Dixie Lynn Cartwright’s Zooey is endearingly wry. —TONY ADLER Though 12/30: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln, 773-4047336, greenhousetheater.org, $25.

There’s fun for the whole family this holiday season at Navy Pier. LEAR N M O R E AT N AVY P I E R .O RG

4 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 7, 2017

The Best of Days Writer and R director Christopher Ellis invents a contemporary pagan-centric Christ-

mas celebration. Juniper and Lark, enigmatic storytellers living in a remote cabin, relate three intricate folktales that illuminate the poignant, obscure origins of many Christmas traditions (broom-riding La Befana, for example, ﬂies through the night searching for the Christ child and bringing gifts to children until vainglorious Saint Nicholas muscles in on her turf). All the while the audience, seated at communal tables, feast on wine, wassail, Christmas pie, and sugar cookies. Performers DeZhané Rouse and Zoë Sapienza bring refreshing irreverence to their serious task. With more streamlined material, the stories could be as satisfying as the food. —JUSTIN HAYFORD 12/8-12/16: Fri-Sat 7:30 PM, Voice of the City, 3429 W. Diversey, 773-782-9471, facebook.com/ voiceofthecity, $45.

A Christmas Carol This is the R 40th annual edition of Goodman Theatre’s popular adaptation of Charles

Dickens’s classic tale, but there’s nothing tired or formulaic in Henry Wishcamper’s intensely emotional staging of Tom Creamer’s durable script. The production—rich in visual and dramatic texture—deftly balances sentiment, comedy, spooky terror, and moral gravity as it retells the familiar but ever-fresh story of a miserly, misanthropic moneylender offered a chance at redemption. The scenic design and special effects are stunning, the music (played live by a quartet of onstage actor-musicians) is alternately melancholy and merry, and the acting by a diverse 26-member ensemble is impeccable. Dickens’s theme that the wealthy have an obligation to help provide for the less fortunate is amplified here by some pointedly relevant commentary about religious bigotry. At the center of the show is actor Larry Yando’s smart, heartfelt portrayal of Scrooge, the skinflint whose spiritual transformation (prompted by some supernatural intervention) drives the story. It’s quite wonderful to watch Yando’s Scrooge edge painfully toward the change he finally, fully embraces. —ALBERT WILLIAMS Through 12/31: WedThu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 2 and 8 PM, Sun 2 and 6:30 PM (2 PM only 12/31); also Thu 12/7 and Wed 12/13, noon; Wed 12/20 and 12/27, 2 PM; and Fri 12/22, 2 PM, Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn, 312443-3800, goodmantheatre.org, $25-$111.

Hamlet It’s difficult to figure out which version of Hamlet director Alex Demetralis is hoping to educe in his reworking of Shakespeare’s tragedy. Aside from prodigious editing and plot tweaking (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are, curiously, on the castle’s night watch in the very first scene), he’s set the action on three holidays—Halloween, Christmas, and Valentine’s Day—and injected ample attendant foolishness: King Claudius first enters in a dime-store devil costume at a Halloween party, goofy holiday music accompanies every scene change. Yet he also has his cast play most everything with utter earnestness, resulting in a two-hour production continuously at odds with itself. Considering the cast’s unsuccessful efforts to conquer Shakespeare’s language, sticking with goofiness might have worked better. —JUSTIN HAYFORD Through 12/22: ThuFri 7:30 PM, Public House Theatre, 3914 N. Clark, 800-650-6449, pubhousetheatre.com, $10. Hellcab It used to be said that R every Chicago theater actor worth his salt has been in it, but the

Agency Theater Collective’s 25th-anniversary staging of Will Kern’s love letter to the lowly taxi driver is still heartfelt and hilarious, and it doesn’t look any worse for the wear. Rusty Schwimmer shines as the nameless cabdriver shepherding the rich, the poor, the lovestruck, and the out-and-out crazy around Chicago a few days before Christmas 1992. She plays the part with equal doses of weariness and wonder, allowing her passengers to star in their brief time in the backseat, as every experienced hack knows to do. Though the play is a collection of unrelated vignettes, by the end it nevertheless captures the patchwork nature of city life. Hellcab had been a mainstay of Proﬁles Theatre, so it’s worth noting that casting a woman in the leading role is a bit of poetic justice, going some ways toward

reclaiming it as a holiday classic the whole city can celebrate. Sommer Austin directed. —DMITRY SAMAROV Through 12/30: Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3 and 7:30 PM (3 PM only 12/30); also Sun 12/10 and 12/17, 3 PM, Den Theatre, 1329-1333 N. Milwaukee, 773-609-2336, wearetheagency.org, $20 suggested donation or pay what you can. Miracle on 34th Street: A Radio Play Using the script for a 1948 broadcast of Lux Radio Theatre’s adaptation of the popular 1947 movie, director Kayla Adams and her ensemble have crafted a production that captures the old film’s sweetness without slipping too often into its saccharine excesses. Truly, this is one of the shallowest of holiday favorites, lacking even the toothless social commentary of A Christmas Carol and It’s a Wonderful Life and instead urging blind faith in the existence of . . . Santa Claus. Still, it is entertaining. The production captures the hysteria of a live broadcast, and the performances are crisp and sharp. —JACK HELBIG Through 12/16: Sat 2 PM, Sun 3 PM, The Artistic Home, 1376 W. Grand, 312-243-3963, theartistichome. org, $20, $10 children 12 and younger. Pine December is not the time for site-specific outdoor theater. Especially if it runs over two hours. Arianna Soloway has a bright idea in staging Pine, Jacqui Honess-Martin’s Christmas-tree-lot workplace drama, in an actual Christmas tree lot, but she doesn’t take full advantage of the setting: with the audience arranged around a stage area, the production be anywhere (ideally somewhere less cold and loud), and the location comes across as a gimmick. The script is filled with typical postgrad anxieties; forceful, nuanced performances from Elise Spoerlein and Aria Szalai-Raymond provide the fire that warms this chilly production. (Blankets and heaters are provided, but dress warmly.) —OLIVER SAVA Through 12/10: Fri-Sun 6 PM, Uncommon Ground on Devon, 1401 W. Devon, 773-465-9801, uncommonground. com, $10 suggested donation or free with the purchase of a tree. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A Rock ’N’ Roll Musical A giant knight with a green body (Jack Wright),

A Gilbert and Sullivan Jewelry R Box An evening of Gilbert & Sullivan deep cuts in two parts, this is

the maiden voyage for Transgressive Theatre-Opera in collaboration with the Gilbert & Sullivan Opera Company of Hyde Park. The double bill opens with a tedious sort of tribute to two works from the tail end of the Savoy opera duo’s canon, The Grand Duke (1896) and Utopia Limited (1893). Adapter Aaron Hunt, also the company’s artistic director, salvages a decent 90-minute concert from what he describes, in his additional capacity as the show’s narrator, as a pair of ﬂops. But Cox and Box (1847) is another story. To see sopranos Teaira Burge and Celeste Peake go to work on this one-act farce

Hellcab ò BILL RICHERT

Best bets, recommendations, and notable arts and culture events for the week of December 7

Minimalism and Me ò JACK MITCHELL

interrupting King Arthur’s Christmas Eve feast, challenges Sir Gawain (Chris Causer) to knock his head off with a shiny ax. We’re in the Middle Ages, clearly. Gawain, who says “gramercy” instead of “thanks,” is a medieval kind of guy. He goes on quests, wards off the temptress Lady Grey (Caroline Kidwell), and keeps asking the way to a mysterious Green Chapel in the woods for a rematch with green face. And that’s fine. But what’s Causer doing singing hair metal? How come he and the indeed very green White, face paint and all, stop the play dead to do a cringeworthy Scorpions cover? As medieval pastiche, John C. Ashton’s show for Pearl Poet Productions takes itself too seriously. As a rock musical, it’s embarrassing. But as both together, it’s the weirdest thing on wheels. Nich Radcliffe directs. —MAX MALLER Through 12/17: Thu-Fri 8 PM, Sat 3 and 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, Raven Theatre, 6157 N. Clark, 773338-2177, pearlpoetproductions.com, $25. Twelfth Night Three factors R elevate this production of Shakespeare’s cross-dressing, love tri-

angle-centered comedy by Midsommer Flight: (1) the clever and well-blocked use of the twinkly light and garden bloom-filled Lincoln Park Conservatory show-room setting; (2) the frequent flute, violin, guitar, and vocal interludes, directed by Elizabeth Rentfro, that help fill the magnificent backdrop; and (3) the hefty pair of hedge shears director Dylan S. Roberts takes to the running time, which is mowed down to a slick and mostly comprehensible 100 minutes. Stylistically, Roberts and the young cast lean into the broad silliness inherent in the story—Amy Malcom’s Malvolio in particular is given license to ham it up to 11— which serves the story well even if there aren’t any revelations. —DAN JAKES Through 12/17: Thu-Sun 7:30 PM, Lincoln Park Conservatory, 2391 N. Stockton, 312742-7736, chicagoparkdistrict.com/parks/ lincoln-park-conservatory. F

DANCE Deeply Free Deeply Rooted Dance Theater closes its 20th season with works by South African choreographer Fana Tshabalala on Friday and selections from the company’s history on Saturday and Sunday. 12/8-12/10: Fri-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 2 PM, Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th, 773-702-2787, arts.uchicago.edu/explore/reva-and-david-logan-center-arts, $45.

Hubbard Street Dance Winter Series The city’s premier contemporary company presents a program of three works by choreographer Crystal Pite: A Picture of You Falling, The Other You, and Grace Engine. For more see preview, page 25. 12/7-12/10: Thu 7:30 PM, Fri and Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, Harris Theater, 205 E. Randolph, 312-334-7777, harristheaterchicago.org, $25-$110.

iO Theater, the Mission Theater, 1501 N. Kingsbury, ioimprov.com/chicago, $14. Jim Norton Stand-up without a ﬁlter. Norton pulls no punches when ranting about the state of the world and those he deems to be idiots. Fri 12/8, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport, 312-526-3851, thaliahallchicago.com, $30 in advance, $32 at the door. 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. Spoof! One act of the show is sketch comedy, and one act is improvised. It’s like peanut butter and jelly, if the jelly were concocted without a recipe. 12/812/29: Fri 8:30 PM, iO Theater, the Mission Theater, 1501 N. Kingsbury, ioimprov. com/chicago, $16.

Beth Stelling Minimalism and Me Twyla Tharp, whose choreography can be seen on New York stages and in films like Amadeus (1983), assembled excerpts from 20 of her pieces to create this performance in honor of the MCA’s 50th anniversary. 12/7-12/10: Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 2 and 7:30 PM, Sun 2 PM, Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago, 312280-2660, mcachicago.org, $45. The Nutcracker The Joffrey’s $4 million commission of The Nutcracker from director-choreographer Christopher Wheeldon returns to the Auditorium Theatre for a second season, and as spectacle, there’s surely no more lavish rendition of the holiday classic. Set in Chicago around the time of the Columbian Exposition, the production includes Polish folk dances to a thinned-out, brassier arrangement of Tchaikovsky’s score in act one and resets the national dances of the Kingdom of the Sweets in the fair pavilions in act two. Yet Wheeldon’s choreography feels overpressured by a desire to innovate, with unshapely lifts in the pas de deux and gratuitous deviations such as butt spins on the floor in a static and angular snow scene. Two inspired moments include transforming the Russian variation to a lasso-wielding Buffalo Bill and giving Mother Ginger a passel of cheeky nuts for kids. —IRENE HSIAO Through 12/30: Thu-Fri 7 PM, Sat-Sun 2 and 7 PM (2 PM only Sat 12/30), Auditorium Theatre, 50 E. Congress, 800-982-2787, joffrey.org, $34-$165.

COMEDY Bad Hombres Two Latino comedy groups, Spic & Tan and Mario, share the bill at this sketch show made up of alums from the Hispanic Harold team Heraldo. Through 12/29: Fri 10:30 PM,

Beth Stelling Fresh oﬀ her R appearance on Netﬂix’s The Standups, Stelling shares the bill with

the Puterbaugh Sisters in a reunion of the long-running Town Hall Pub showcase Entertaining Julia. Thu 12/7, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport, 312-526-3851, thaliahallchicago.com, $25 in advance, $27 at the door.

LIT & LECTURES Joe Biden Thank you, Joe Biden, R for sharing your forthcoming book Promise Me Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose with Chicago. It’ll be great to see you—more than you know. Mon 12/11, 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre, 175 N. State, 312-462-6300, thechicagotheatre.com, $39.50-$89.50.

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

VISUAL ART Buttons Over Bullets Button-O-Matic Release Party The ubiquitous Busy Beaver Button Company launches its new series of pins—each designed specifically to spread the message about gun violence. The new button series has been curated by Everytown for Gun Safety, a grassroots organization fighting the good fight to curb gun-related deaths. Fri 12/8, 5-9 PM, Busy Beaver Button Company, 3279 W. Armitage, 773645-3359, busybeaver.net.

Heated rides all season

Cosmic Characters Bizarre works by local artists Linda Kramer, Wayne Lent, and Julie Murphy are combined in this exhibit of “otherworldly morphologic beings” and “the illusory domains that they inhabit.” Through 1/13/18. By appointment. Miishkooki, 4517 Oakton St., Skokie, miishkooki.com.

MOVIES More at chicagoreader.com/movies NEW REVIEWS Flesh and Blood After serving a fiveyear prison sentence, a man hoping to rebuild his life returns to his mother’s home in a low-income neighborhood of Philadelphia. Mark Webber wrote, directed, and stars in this fictionalized portrait of his own family, alongside his mother, father, and half brother. His film addresses not only the plight of ex-convicts and the urban poor but also

Centennial Wheel ride included +!," $*(" 1!)" %"!.& '*2/ #!2,$. #02&$.1$-, ,!(/$,. SAVE AT NAVY P I ER .O RG Flesh and Blood Paul Muldoon Lauded poet MulR doon reads from Selected Poems 1968-2014. A winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and longtime New Yorker poetry editor, the Princeton University prof knows what he’s talking about. Thu 12/7, 7 PM, Poetry Foundation, 61 W. Superior, 312-787-7070, poetryfoundation.org.

drug addiction (the protagonist and his mother are both recovering alcoholics) and school bullying (the half brother, recently diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, is tormented at school). Webber forgoes any big messages, emphasizing character development; this is a touching depiction of people trying their best despite overwhelm- µ

DECEMBER 7, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 5

Theaters reopen Friday, January 5! Our theaters are closed for renovations in December. Join us for a special off-site screening On Location at the Chicago Athletic Association hotel.

AGENDA showtimes visit chicagoreader.com/ movies). Sat 12/9, 3:15 and 9:45 PM; and Sun 12/10, noon and 6:30 PM. Music Box.

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 10, 3:00 PM

KEDI

CHICAGO ATHLETIC ASSOCIATION 12 S. MICHIGAN AVE. Feeling feline inspired? Following the screening, Tree House Humane Society and Hyde Park Cats will be in attendance, educating on adoption with select kitties available to take home right away! If you aren’t in the position to adopt but still want to support, Chicago Athletic Association hotel will be accepting cat – and dog – food donations at the screening. Note that there will be live animals present.

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EARLY WARNINGS

chicagoreader.com/early 6 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 7, 2017

Una B ing social odds. —BEN SACHS 91 min. Fri 12/8-Thu 12/14. Facets Cinematheque. The Shape of Water This lavishly designed period fantasy from Guillermo del Toro (Hellboy, Pan’s Labyrinth) delivers a heavy-handed message about the value of tolerance. In the early 1960s, a mute cleaning woman (Sally Hawkins) at a top-secret aeronautical research institute in Baltimore discovers that one of its laboratories houses a humanoid aquatic creature recovered from the Amazon, and that a group of military men plan to shoot it into space. Appalled by the creature’s cruel living conditions, she rescues it from the lab with the help of her artist neighbor (Richard Jenkins) and a sympathetic coworker (Octavia Spencer). Del Toro appeals to contemporary sensibilities by idealizing the outsider heroes and making the villain (Michael Shannon) a cartoonish racist. The movie tells you exactly what to think and feel at every turn, encouraging a childlike passivity. In English and subtitled Russian and ASL. —BEN SACHS R, 123 min. Arclight, Century 12 and CineArts 6, Landmark’s Century Centre, River East 21. Wonder Wheel The opening sequence of a bereft beauty (Juno Temple) wandering around a Coney Island amusement park in the 1950s evokes Fellini, but this secondhand drama from Woody Allen takes most of its cues from the dead-serious Broadway stage, heavy on the O’Neill and Odets. Fleeing from vengeful gangsters, the young woman hides with her thundering father (Jim Belushi), his frustrated second wife (Kate Winslet), and their pyromaniac son in a dank apartment above the park’s shooting gallery; the wife has been sleeping with the local lifeguard (Justin Timberlake), but he takes a shine to the pretty guest, now trailed by a couple of mob guys (Tony Sirico and Steve Schirripa of The Sopranos). Winslet steals the show as the yearning wife, but the real star is veteran cinematographer Vittorio Storaro (The Conformist, Apocalypse Now, The Last Emperor). Wait for the video, turn down the volume, and watch the real drama of sunlight ﬂooding

a room. —J.R. JONES PG-13, 101 min. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Landmark’s Century Centre, River East 21. Una Guaranteed to raise hackles, this British indie drama concerns a broken young woman (Rooney Mara) confronting the family friend (Ben Mendelsohn) who deflowered her 15 years earlier, when she was all of 13. The man has served four years in prison for statutory rape and clawed his way back to normalcy with a stable job and marriage, all of which threatens to crumble when his former victim arrives unannounced at his industrial workplace on the day of a major layoff. Adapted by David Harrower from his play and directed by Benedict Andrews, this tense chamber drama takes a queasy turn as the main characters, secluded in the workplace after hours, revisit their flirtation years earlier and rediscover their physical attraction. Much of their dialogue revolves around whether their illicit relationship was (a) pedophilia or (b) a love that was meant to be; if you answered (b), report to the nearest Republican precinct immediately. —J.R. JONES R, 94 min. Fri 12/8-Thu 12/14. Facets Cinematheque. REVIVALS It’s a Wonderful Life The R film Frank Capra was born to make. This 1946 release marked

his return to features after four years of turning out propaganda ﬁlms for the government, and Capra poured his heart and soul into it. James Stewart stars as a small-town nobody, on the brink of suicide, who believes his life is worthless. Guardian angel Henry Travers shows him how wrong he is by letting Stewart see what would have happened had he never been born. Wonderfully drawn and acted by a superb cast (Donna Reed, Beulah Bondi, Thomas Mitchell, Lionel Barrymore, Gloria Grahame) and told with a sense of image and metaphor (the use of water is especially elegant) that appears in no other Capra ﬁlm. The epiphany of movie sentiment and a transcendent experience. —DAVE KEHR 129 min. Screens as part of a double feature with White Christmas (for

Love Actually “You know, the thing about romance is people don’t get together until the very end,” says a serious-faced boy in this British romantic comedy (2003), articulating its facile narrative strategy. Writer-director Richard Curtis (scenarist of Four Weddings and a Funeral) counts down the five weeks before Christmas among a wide array of meet-cute couples, fielding so many characters that their flirtations sustain the entire feature. Whenever it gets to be too much he cuts to Bill Nighy, hilarious as a washed-up 70s rock star who’s cynically pushing his Christmas record to the top of the charts. The fine cast includes Hugh Grant, Liam Neeson, Emma Thompson, Rowan Atkinson, Colin Firth, Laura Linney, and Keira Knightley, but Alan Rickman eclipses them all as a distracted married man whose secretary keeps promising him a big gift for Christmas. This is cloying, deceitful, and more or less irresistible. —J.R. JONES R, 135 min. Wed 12/13, 9:15 PM. Music Box. Miracle on 34th Street The Christmas perennial (1947), with Edmund Gwenn as a kindly old man named Kris Kringle who gets a job as Macy’s Santa Claus. It’s a highly professional piece of Hollywood sentimentalism. With Maureen O’Hara, John Payne, and little Natalie Wood; George Seaton directed. —DAVE KEHR 96 min. Thu 12/14, 7 PM. Music Box. Monte Carlo The silent verR sion of Ernst Lubitsch’s 1930 comedy. Dave Kehr called the sound

version “a wonderfully inventive early sound musical . . . in which a chorus of ‘Beyond the Blue Horizon’ is begun by the wheels of a train, picked up by a passenger (Jeanette MacDonald), and carried by the peasants in every field the train passes through. Great stuff, done up in high Paramount gloss.” With Jack Buchanan and ZaSu Pitts. 71 min. 35mm archival print. Jay Warren provides live organ accompaniment. Mon 12/11, 7:30 PM. Northeastern Illinois University, Auditorium. SPECIAL EVENTS Home Movies for the Holidays South Side Home Movie Project hosts a screening of holiday-themed films. Attendees are invited to bring their own home movies to be digitized. Sat 12/9, 3 PM. The Silver Room. F Films by Jean Patton Selections from the home movies of teacher and librarian Jean Patton, screening as part of the Vends & Vibes Arts Marketplace. Sat 12/9, noon-5 PM. Arts Incubator. v

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CITY LIFE Chicagoans

The Seinfeld expert

Jerry Pazin, 45, history teacher and Seinfeld Club advisor, St. Rita of Cascia High School

WHEN I STARTED teaching, I’d make Seinfeld references in class, and there would be ﬁve or six guys who’d laugh. Then a few years went by, and it would be only one or two guys who laughed, but I’d still do it. I have a pole in the classroom that used to hold maps, and for the holidays I’ll put it out and put “Happy Festivus” on it. Five years ago I had a kid in class, a junior, and at the end of the school year, he told me, S P E C I A L

A D V E R T I S I N G

“Mr. Pazin, I have a great idea for a club. I think you’re the perfect person to pull it off. It would be a Seinfeld club. We’d meet once a week and we’d watch an episode and we’d talk about it. You’d be great.” I said, “Why me? ’Cause I’m really funny?” He goes, “’Cause your name’s Jerry.” The next year, we implemented it. I promoted it a little bit, put a few signs around the school. I wondered if we’d get any kids to show

“The kids don’t walk the halls after club meetings saying ‘giddy-up’ or ‘yada yada yada’ or anything,” Pazin says, “but it’s a good way to build a little bit of camaraderie.” ò JAMIE RAMSAY

S E C T I O N

CHAMBER OPERA CHICAGO

TWO ONE-ACT FAMILY HOLIDAY SHOWS! The 12th anniversary production of the beloved tradition, Amahl and the Night Visitors, paired with The Miracle of Light! December 10 and 17. The Royal George Theatre. 312.988.9000 · chamberoperachicago.org

SECOND CIT Y

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8 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 7, 2017

CITY LIFE up, but at that ﬁrst meeting, there were like ten or 12. I was amazed. Now we usually get anywhere between six to ten kids. If I advertise that we’ll have pizza, we get one or two more. We meet about every other week. Usually at the start of the year, I’ll show the pilot episode, just so they can see the show evolve. Then as the year goes by, I’ll show two episodes from season one, the next time two from season two, and so forth, so you can see the arcs of some of the story lines. It’s a pretty easy club to be in. I don’t run a real tight ship. My goal is just to have a small group of kids after school in the middle of the week who are free for an hour, we sit and put on these shows, and then we go home. The kids don’t walk the halls afterward saying “giddy-up” or “yada yada yada” or anything, but it’s a good way to build a little bit of camaraderie. A couple times in each episode I’ll pause it and point something out, because I’ve

seen it probably 100 times. Like during one episode, George is trying to get ahold of a girlfriend, and I’m like, “Guys, this is called a pay phone.” Or the one where Elaine was dating the guy named Joel Rifkin, which was the name of a serial killer from New York, so I explain that. Or when Larry David is playing George Steinbrenner, I’ll pause it and say, “Do you guys recognize this guy’s voice?,” and some of them do, from Curb Your Enthusiasm. Sometimes I’m amazed at how hard they laugh at stuff. Last week we watched the Chinese restaurant episode, and they laughed really hard for most of that episode. They love the Soup Nazi episode too. Kramer tends to get the most laughs. The puffy shirt episode, or the one with the marine biologist—I always make sure that I show those. I’ve never shown the “master of your domain” episode, though. You just err on the side of caution. —AS TOLD TO ANNE FORD

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SURE THINGS

THURSDAY 7

FRIDAY 8

SATURDAY 9

% To gether We Rise The World Bicycle Relief program hosts this evening fund-raiser that includes testimonials from African children, virtual bike rides with kids in Africa, and food from Stephanie Izard of Girl and the Goat. 5:30-9:30 PM, City Winery, 1200 W. Randolph, worldbicyclerelief.org/en/event/ together-we-rise-chicago, $250.

The Ch aracter As sassinati on of Donald Trump Donald Trump is given a vaudevillian sendup—in the form of burlesque, slapstick, and plenty of jokes—in this satirical imagining of his impeachment proceedings. 8 PM, Collaboraction, 1579 N. Milwaukee, 312-226-9633, collaboraction.org, $15.

/ Goods fo r Good Craf t Fair Shop local at this afternoon hosted by 826CHI, a program promoting literacy among underserved youth. Vendors include Vichcraft, Tiny Bold Creative, and Reppin Pins. Plus, enjoy all the cider you can drink. Noon-5 PM, 826CHI, 1276 N. Milwaukee, 826chi. org. F

SUNDAY 10

MONDAY 11

TUESDAY 12

WEDNESDAY 13

M Speed Rack’s Al l-Female Bartending Competi ti on Support breast cancer research and imbibe one (or many) of 25 diﬀerent cocktails created by women mixologists across the midwest. 4 PM, Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport, thaliahallchicago.com, $25.

J WeFest Chicago’s queer female, nonbinary, and trans artists are on the bill at this semiannual performance party for diverse voices in the arts. A dance party closes out the night. 6:30 PM, Center on Halsted, 3656 N. Halsted, centeronhalsted. org, $10

* Just What I Needed Writer and Reader contributor John Corbett reads from his forthcoming memoir-slash-music criticism collection Pick Up the Pieces: Excursions in Seventies Music, and Oobleckians Diana Slickman and Terri Kapsalis perform part of the play featured in the book. 7 PM, Hopleaf, 5148 N. Clark, 773-334-9851, hopleaf. com.

÷ Liquor and Latkes Latkes, essentially really great hash-brown patties, abound at this annual interreligious Hanukkah performance hosted by Kevin Coval and featuring rappers, singers, comedians, graﬃti writers and rabbis—and the Reader’s very own Leor Galil. 8 PM, Victory Gardens, 2433 N. Lincoln, victorygardens. org, $8.

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

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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

DECEMBER 7, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 9

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

CITY LIFE

POLITICS

Rahm’s Christmas present to Amazon?

The mayor hands out TIF incentives the way Santa gives gifts.

By BEN JORAVSKY

f he ever gets tired of the entertainment business, Chance the Rapper should consider a career as a fortune teller. The civic-minded hip-hop star was remarkably prescient at a November 20 press conference, when he cautioned his youthful followers to keep their eye on taxes. “You guys don’t receive the same beneﬁts that a lot of other people do, and your parents pay the same money into the same government taxes,” Chance said. “These are people and things that have a big impact on your lives and

how you’re educated.” Sure enough, the next generation’s recently been hit with a double whammy. On the national front, Senate Republicans backed by President Donald Trump passed a bill that gives billions of dollars in tax breaks to the country’s wealthiest while socking future generations with uncertainty as to how social security, Medicare, and other essential government programs will get funded. And on the local front, it looks as though Mayor Rahm’s planning to create what Chicago most

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definitely doesn’t need: another tax increment financing district in a fast-gentrifying nearnorth-side community. The two matters are connected, but let me first deal with the local news. As Chance said, pay attention—this money will dictate your future. A TIF diverts property taxes that would otherwise go to schools and parks and other governmental bodies into bank accounts largely controlled by the mayor. The money is supposed to fund development that alleviates blight in poor communities, but thanks to loopholes in the state law just about every neighborhood is eligible for a TIF. At the moment, it looks like Emanuel’s planning to stick one in the industrial area on both sides of the Chicago River near North Avenue—one of the fastest-growing corners in town. It’s called the Cortland/Chicago River TIF District, and it would be located in the area between Webster on the north, North Avenue on the south, Clybourn on the east, and Elston on the west. The mayor’s already moved a city fleet facility out of there to Englewood to prepare it for upscale development. The TIF

would abet the process. Emanuel has taken a program intended for the poor and uses it to beneﬁt the rich. But at the moment, it’s not clear what the mayor’s looking to fund with the Cortland TIF. The city’s conducting a feasibility study to see if the area fits the state criteria for being TIF eligible. But again, the TIF law is so larded with loopholes that such studies are largely formalities. Alderman Brian Hopkins, whose Second Ward includes the proposed Cortland TIF, says the city hasn’t revealed to him what it’s up to. But he guarantees he won’t let them rubber-stamp the deal. “Any consideration of extending a TIF district or creating a new one in this area will be part of a public process that I will oversee,” Hopkins says. Peter Strazzabosco, a spokesman for the Department of Planning and Development, says the proposed TIF “is not related to Amazon.” It is, instead, “a continuation of the implementation” of plans to transform the area from industrial to retail and residential. 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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The Department of Planning and Development says the proposed Cortland/Chicago River TIF District “is not related to Amazon.” But, of course, that doesn’t mean the TIF can’t be used to lure the retail giant’s HQ2 to town. ò BEBETO MATTHEWS/AP

But of course that doesn’t mean the TIF can’t be used to lure Amazon to town. As you know, Chicago is vying with 200 other places to be the site of the retail giant’s second headquarters (aka HQ2). In October, Chicago and Illinois officials sent Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, one of the wealthiest men in the world, a proposal packed with tax and real estate

“incentives.” With the approval of Emanuel and Governor Bruce Rauner, the plan offered land in the proposed Cortland TIF area as one of eight locations for Bezos to consider. In mid-November, Amazon officials toured the site. In its request for proposals, Amazon made it clear that not only do competing cities have

to dole out incentives, local governments must guarantee there wouldn’t be any legislative roadblocks to making good on the incentives offered. In other words, Amazon won’t commit unless the suitor cities show them the money. With the Cortland TIF, it seems as if Christmas has come early for Amazon. It’s Rahm’s way of saying “I love you, Jeff Bezos.” Of course, the mayor’s generosity would be backed by money that could otherwise go to dead-broke public schools. (You don’t think Rahm would pay for this stuff himself, did you?) Even if Amazon doesn’t come to Chicago, the TIF can always fund some other residential or retail development. Any way you look at it, the city’s once again creating a TIF district in a gentrifying area that will divert millions in future property tax dollars from our schools and other taxing bodies such as the Chicago Park District. Just as the city’s been doing for the better part of the last 20 years. And you wonder why the schools are broke? Mayor Rahm wants you to think of a TIF as the city’s investment in itself. That is, you

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take property taxes from the schools today and invest the funds in development that may raise even more property taxes for the schools tomorrow. (It’s the same justification Rahm’s predecessor, Richard M. Daley, gave taxpayers.) In the abstract, I suppose that makes sense. But a TIF district lasts for at least 23 years. In this case, the Cortland TIF would be diverting property taxes from the schools until at least 2041. So the youngsters who may benefit from future increases in property tax revenues won’t be born for another five to ten years. As for the rest of you currently living, tough luck! In this regard creating another TIF district when the schools are strapped is like the Republicans giving a tax break to the wealthy while threatening to cut food stamps. It’s trickle-down economics: give the rich an ocean and hope a drop or two falls to everyone else. I understand why hard-hearted Republicans endorse such greed. But I can’t fathom why we should put up with it in Chicago. v

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the

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Is the revolution in fashion a sign of a bigger revolt to come?

rage

By AIMEE LEVITT PHOTOS AND COLLAGES BY PETYA SHALAMANOVA

12 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 7, 2017

STYLIST: MATTHEW ANCER MAKEUP+HAIR ARTIST: ANDREA C. SAMUELS / FACTOR ARTISTS MODELS: CAITLIN, MANA, CAM / FORD MODELS CLOTHES: JAMIE HAYES AND GERRY QUINTON

ooking at clothes is a form of time travel. In museum exhibits especially, where the clothes hang on headless mannequins, it’s entirely up to you to imagine the sort of woman who wore the narrow-skirted riding habit in 1880, or the man who wore the elaborately embroidered silk dressing gown—a banyan—in 1822, or maybe the girl who found it in the attic in 1910 and decided to appropriate it as her own. Or you can imagine yourself as all those people. How did it feel to lace your body into a corset every day and only be able to ride a horse sidesaddle? Did it make you feel weak and helpless? Or did the extra layer of support make you feel protected, like armor? Conversely, how did it feel to wear big leather boots and an enormous frock coat? Did it make you feel like the entire world belonged to you? Sometimes when I look at those clothes, I want a big pair of boots and an enormous frock coat too, and maybe a hidden layer of armor as long as it doesn’t hurt. I want to stride through the world, tall and terrible, and stomp on anyone—any man—who gets in my way with his groping hands or his belittling comments or his offer of 80 cents for my work when he would offer another man a dollar. I like looking at new clothes too, in department stores and online. It’s another way to imagine a different version of yourself. There are a lot of new companies that exist only online, and this year they’ve all started popping up in my Facebook feed: Everlane, Cuyana, Frilly, Toast. Somehow they’d gotten the message that I—and apparently every woman who shared my demographic proﬁle—wanted to be tall and terrible in ways that skinny jeans and crop tops don’t allow. There were wide-legged pants and long, sweeping coats and tall leather boots and a cape. Once I even saw chain mail. And one time I saw a virtual replica of my favorite sweater of all time, a baggy crewneck made of navy blue heathered wool that I wore from eighth grade through the end of college— when the elbows ﬁnally unraveled—and which always reminded me of one of the periods in my life when I felt most like myself. All summer long, on the train and on the street, I saw young women in their 20s wearing knee-length dresses that looked like enormous T-shirts, a look that announced, “You don’t get to ogle my boobs. And if you don’t like it, fuck you.” In the New York Times, the fashion critic Vanessa Friedman declared that the covered-up look was the style of the decade. “It’s not about power dressing in the old, battering-ram-shoulder sense,” she wrote, “but in the sense that when you feel secure and comfortable and protected, you feel stronger.” Did we not want to feel strong and secure before?

I wanted to blame the shift to power dressing on the rage that had overtaken the women of America after Donald Trump was elected president. “Changes in fundamental modes of dress,” the sociologists George Bush and Perry London wrote in the Journal of Social Psychology back in 1960, “indicate changes in social roles and self-concepts of members of that society.” But when I started asking fashion designers and historians about this, they told me that bigger clothes had first shown up on the runways about three years ago, even if it had taken a while for the look to filter down to the average woman on the el. It’s true that fashion is cyclical. A period of tight clothes will be followed by a period of looser clothes, just because the general public—though maybe not specific individuals—is always looking for an excuse to refresh its collective wardrobe. And fashion designers have begun to realize that there’s an enormous market for modest clothing, especially in Islamic countries. But we don’t have to embrace everything the fashion designers throw at us. And maybe we were angry when the bigger clothes first showed up and hadn’t realized it? What was going on?

ne thing designers are really great at is tapping into the zeitgeist before the general population does,” Jamie Hayes, a Chicago designer, told me. “We feel things in the collective unconscious. Sometimes those things come out as overt political statements, and sometimes more unconsciously.“ We sat at a worktable in the front room of Hayes’s studio in Logan Square, which she shares with Gerry Quinton, a corset maker. The space also functions as a showroom for Hayes’s clothing line Production Mode, Quinton’s corset label Morua, and Department of Curiosities, the lingerie brand they work on together; their supplies and collection of vintage sewing machines live in the back. Hayes was wearing a pair of wide-legged trousers she’d made herself: “My legs can breathe!” Hayes’s latest collection for Production Mode, which she unveiled in July, features lots of heavy fabrics and boxy cuts. This was, in part, because she wanted to wear clothes that felt warm and heavy and comforting but also strong and tough. “These are anxiety-producing times,” she explained. “I wanted a blanket. Cloth is the ﬁrst thing that replaces your mother: a security blanket or a teddy bear, soft tactile things that make you feel safe. I wanted that feeling in a way I haven’t wanted it for some time.” The clothes had a boxy shape for a practical reason too: the fabric she’d been using had been custom-made by the Weaving Mill,

a textile studio in Chicago, in collaboration with the artist Nuria Montiel. It was beautiful and expensive, a labor of love, and she didn’t want to waste any of it by cutting out intricate shapes. Instead, she used simple rectangles to create robes and tunics. The clothes had a gender-neutral aspect that she liked, like kaftans and kimonos and other traditional garments that had been worn for centuries. “If you go back far enough,” she said, “everyone was wearing a dress.” The fashion historian Valerie Steele wrote in Men and Women: Dressing the Part, “There is rarely a single meaning attached to each article of clothing. Instead, its meanings depend on the context—Who wears it? When? Along with what other clothes? What was the history of this garment? . . . The sociologist Fred Davis suggests that at various times in history certain social ambivalences become prominent and may be expressed sartorially.” A few months earlier, I’d seen a notice about a lecture given by the Rational Dress Society, which consists of two artists, Abigail Glaum-Lathbury and Maura Brewer. The RDS was founded in 2014, and its main project is a unisex jumpsuit, designed by Glaum-Lathbury and Brewer, that can be worn by anyone on any occasion. It comes in 248 different sizes, based on individual measurements and body type and whether the wearer wants it fitted in the chest or not. (Each size has a delightfully random name, like “quark” or “ooloi” or “jairzinho.”) Though production is stalled on the jumpsuit at the moment, Brewer and Glaum-Lathbury plan to resume taking orders in the near future. They also plan to make the pattern available as an open-source document so anyone with sewing skills can create their own jumpsuit. This isn’t a new idea, they told me when we talked. We were skyping; Glaum-Lathbury was in Chicago and Brewer was in LA, and both of them were wearing jumpsuits, as they do every day. “We didn’t want to act like our idea was the ﬁrst time anyone had ever done this,” Brewer said. “It’s important for us to establish our relationship to other artists and designers who used clothes to think through social change.” The history of protest fashion, or antifashion, began during the French Revolution, when the revolutionaries rejected the knee breeches of the aristocracy and began wearing long pants in solidarity with the peasants. They called themselves the sans culottes. Nearly a century later, in 1881, the original Rational Dress Society was founded in England and dedicated to the proposition that no woman should have to wear more than seven pounds of undergarments at one time. Society members distributed pamphlets that showed J

DECEMBER 7, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 13

Jamie Hayes's clothing line Production Mode features heavy fabrics and boxy cuts. “These are anxietyproducing times,” she says. “I wanted a blanket . . . a security blanket or a teddy bear, soft tactile things that make you feel safe.”

14 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 7, 2017

continued from 13 the difference between the Venus de Milo, with an ideal “natural” body, and a contemporary woman whose body had been “deformed” by a corset. They focused most of their efforts on women’s clothes because, in its founders’ opinion, men’s dress—having permanently adopted the long pants of the sans culottes— already was rational. Brewer and Glaum-Lathbury’s jumpsuit was inspired by the TuTa, a costume developed by Italian futurists just after World War I as a protest against having to buy a complete wardrobe in a precarious economy. Like the Rational Dress Society jumpsuit, the TuTa was intended to be worn by all people on all occasions, thereby obliterating class differences, and the pattern was available to everyone. Unlike the jumpsuit, the TuTa was gendered: the male version had pants, while the female had a skirt. Brewer and Glaum-Lathbury think their jumpsuit is aesthetically pleasing—they like its long, clean lines and futuristic look—but it too is a protest. “It was motivated by a desire to have a critical conversation within the space of fashion design about the way clothes are produced and disseminated,” Brewer said. “Fast fashion is a relatively recent phenomenon, and it’s a human rights and environmental disaster,” she said of the business model exempliﬁed by retailers such as H&M and Zara, which quickly manufacture and push to market styles that mirror runway trends. “People are able to buy massive amounts of cheap clothes that are made in sweatshops and are bad for the environment. I don’t think it makes anyone happy, but it’s addictive, a hit of adrenaline. The clothes are meant to last ten wash cycles.” “When was the last time you stared into your closet and said, ‘I have nothing to wear’?” Glaum-Lathbury added. “What are the problems? Your clothing isn’t signifying what you want it to signify. People are going into Forever 21 and thinking they’re expressing themselves through clothing, when really it’s Forever 21 expressing themselves through you.” After Donald Trump was elected president, the Rational Dress Society connected its work more overtly to electoral politics. Both Trump and his daughter Ivanka, Brewer and Glaum-Lathbury felt, epitomized the problems with the fast-fashion industry: in their stump speeches, they urged people to buy American, but they put their names on clothing that was manufactured as cheaply as possible in sweatshops in China and Bangladesh and Mexico. The garments themselves were made out of polyester and other synthetics that would just sit in a landﬁll forever. So they started an adjunct project for the Rational Dress Society: Make America Ratio-

Rational Dress Society produces a unisex jumpsuit that comes in 248 diﬀerent sizes.

ò LARA KASTNER

nal Again. They’ve issued a request for the women of America to send them their used Ivanka Trump-brand clothing, which they will recycle into special-edition jumpsuits, millennial pink with gold accents. The project received a fair amount of media attention and the initial response, they told the Huffington Post a few days after the project launched, was “tremendous! Huge!” They’ve also been collecting clothes on their own, in thrift stores and used clothing piles and on resale sites like Thredup (which, Racked reported, saw its listings of Ivanka Trump merchandise increase by 223 percent in 2016). “Professional women noticed that these clothes had been in their wardrobe,” Glaum-Lathbury theorized when we talked. “It was a thing that needed to be purged immediately from their homes and their bodies.” Now phase two, the recycling, is under way. They plan to work with the Weaving Mill, the same collective that made Jamie Hayes’s fabrics, and they’ve been raising funds by selling tote bags and special-edition posters printed on paper recycled from Ivanka Trump’s books. (The promo video shows

Glaum-Lathbury smiling beatifically as she feeds a copy of Women Who Work through a buzz saw.) Since the Rational Dress Society is rooted as much in the art world as it is in the fashion world, the Make America Rational Again campaign exists as much to make a point as it does to create recycled millennial pink jumpsuits—though those would be nice too, and so would proﬁts, which they intend to donate to the Garment Workers Center in LA, the only garment workers’ advocacy organization in the entire country. Rational Dress, to Brewer and GlaumLathbury, is really about democracy and equality, not just equality in terms of style, but equality for the people who make the clothes. Which, ironically enough, is the same line fast-fashion companies use to sell their designer knockoffs. “Democracy is agency and inclusion and an ability to have an active voice in something,” Glaum-Lathbury said. “What you have at the end of buying a Peter Pilotto for Target sweater is less money and an ugly sweater that’s a facsimile of something else that’s going to fall apart. How is that democratic?”

n order to learn more about clothing democracy and protest fashion, I went to the library, or rather the Fashion Resource Center at the School of the Art Institute. It’s a wondrous place, with one room filled with books and a century’s worth of fashion magazines and a second room, equally large, packed with vintage clothes, organized by designer. It feels like the world’s most fabulous closet—or it would if you were allowed to wear any of those clothes, which you are not. During one of my visits, a professor spent some time instructing her class on how to ﬁt a garment onto a display mannequin without ripping it. Alex Aubry, the director of the Fashion Resource Center, had pulled a pile of books for me to look at. He also gave me a Post-it note to stick on my laptop that read, “Identity by deﬁnition is protest.” “The relationship between clothing and identity becomes even more complicated in the context of a younger generation that doesn’t necessarily want to be placed into a neat box, because their sense of being is both complex and nuanced,” he told me. “As a universal medium, fashion can play a role in engaging in these larger conversations surrounding identity today because everyone can relate to clothing on some level.” One of the books Aubry had given me, Chic Thrills: A Fashion Reader, contained an account by an art historian named Kate Luck of fashion in the various utopian communities that sprung up in America in the 1820s. Most of these communities had been founded by men, who established the ideology and rules, which usually involved abdication of personal property and sharing of the labor and profits. (Somehow, though, the women still were in charge of all the housework.) Some of them also established dress codes that, for women, required a knee-length skirt over a loose pair of trousers. John Humphrey Noyes, the founder of the Oneida community, thought that this costume would make women more like men and protect them both from sexual assault and from displaying the sort of excessively feminine behavior that women use to attract husbands. In Oneida, everyone practiced free love (and also birth control). The women of Oneida hated their costume. It made them conspicuous as members of the colony. When outsiders looked at them, they didn’t think about the beauty of communal living. Instead they just thought about free love and how every woman who lived there must be slutty. Maybe the women also resented that the costume was a sign of how Noyes considered them inferior to men, and that he needed

DECEMBER 7, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 15

Right: Gerry Quinton’s label, Morua, produces corsets.

continued from 15

PROTEST CLOTHING: A TIMELINE

to “elevate” them by making them wear a ridiculous variation on men’s clothing. About 30 years later, Amelia Jenks Bloomer, an early feminist, began wearing a knee-length skirt over loose trousers gathered at the ankle, also known as “Turkish dress.” (A name so evocative of the harem couldn’t have helped its popularity much.) “When you ﬁnd a burden in belief or apparel,” she declared, “cast it off.” But even people who favored dress reform thought the costume looked ridiculous, and it never caught on; within ﬁve years, Bloomer herself returned to wearing conventional skirts. In the 1890s, though, the loose trousers, now referred to as a “divided skirt,” came back

1790s: Sans Culottes French revolutionaries who rejected the knee breeches of the aristocracy and adopted long trousers in solidarity with the peasants and craftsmen. The ﬁrst step in eliminating class distinctions through styles of clothing.

16 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 7, 2017

yet again (though without the overskirt), and this time they were embraced. Sort of. Women found them useful for riding bicycles and playing sports. But when they weren’t exercising, they went back to regular dresses, corsets and all. It seemed to me that they ﬁnally accepted the divided skirt because they could choose whether they wanted to wear it, and they did only when it served the practical function of letting them move more freely.

ne of the beauties of modern fashion is that it’s no longer controlled by an elite group of designers, stylists, and magazine editors—or chauvinistic utopian philosophers. Since the mid-20th

1820s: American Utopian Communities Leaders of some utopian communes insisted that the women wear baggy trousers with knee-length skirts over them. This was intended to liberate women from both sexual harassment and having to deploy the feminine wiles allegedly used to catch husbands. (These communities practiced free love, though you have to wonder how free the women actually felt.)

century, designers have been taking their inspiration—or stealing—from street fashion, but now with the Internet, the parade of new styles is constant and never-ending. Instead of two distinct seasons, spring and fall, stores roll out new items every week. Manufacturers have resorted to using cheap materials and cheaper labor not just out of greed, like the Trumps, but to keep up with demand. This is what led to the fast fashion that the Rational Dress Society is protesting. This is also why H&M and Forever 21 smell like plastic and why I feel depressed every time I try to spend any time there. But while the Rational Dress Society jumpsuit is deﬁnitely a, yes, rational alternative, I

1844: Invention of the modern sewing machine Originally invented in the UK, the sewing machine arrived in the U.S. two years later, and the era of mass-produced clothing began.

1851: Bloomers Amelia Jenks Bloomer, an early feminist, brings “Turkish dress,” a knee-length skirt worn over baggy trousers back to the U.S. from London. This time it’s a sign of women’s liberation from corsetry, but it looked so stupid even Bloomer gave it up after a few years.

also feel it will never be adopted wholeheartedly by the people of America, despite its accurate ﬁt, fair labor practices, and commitment to gender equality. I personally don’t want to wear it, at least not every day. (I’ve always disliked clothing that shows off my butt.) It feels too absolutist. Or maybe I feel that way because it would force me to conform to someone else’s vision. A few years ago, I read an interview with Michele Oka Doner, a sculptor who has worn variations on the same dress every day for more than 30 years. She started with just one dress, in white. “When I would go to get dressed,” she said, “over and over again it was what I wanted to wear. And over the next ﬁve, six, ten years,

1860s: Artistic Dress Inspired by artist and designer William Morris’s dictum “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful,” artistic dress favored clean lines based on the natural form of the body, as opposed to the corsets and crinolines that were popular at the time.

1877: First pair of Levi’s blue jeans Jeans would eventually ﬁnish what the sans culottes started: a universal style of dress that eliminated class distinctions (unless you look closely at the back pockets).

this was the go-to dress that made me feel so comfortable I never had to think about how I was going to look or what to wear with it.” So she asked designers and tailors to make copies for her in different lengths and fabrics, sometimes with pockets. Now she has 40 of them. There’s a German word for this (of course there is): Eigenkleid, or individualized dress. Josef Hoffmann, an Austrian architect, designer, and proponent of dress reform, argued in an essay in 1898 that women would be both happier and healthier if they rejected fashion altogether and adopted personalized dresses that were suited to their individualized tastes and bodies. How wonderful it would be to have an eigenkleid that suited me perfectly! How wonderful to be like Doner and have such a secure sense of style and self and maybe the state of the world to be able to identify your eigenkleid and never waver from it. But I think most of us aren’t so secure. Or we’re like Jamie Hayes, who did a project a few years ago designing two-dozen eigenkleider for herself and friends and colleagues. Hayes’s own uniform was a Chinese qipao dress inspired by the movie In the Mood for Love. But she couldn’t bring herself to wear it every day. “I found I love clothes too much to wear just one thing,” she said. And her mood has changed in the ﬁve years since she created her uniform. “Traditionally I’ve worn lots of dresses,” she said. “They work with my body type. Lately I ﬁnd myself not wanting to wear them. I don’t want to look like anyone’s little girl right now.” This reminded me of Hillary Clinton’s pantsuits, perhaps the most famous eigenkleid in modern history. “They made me feel professional and ready to go,” she writes in her memoir What Happened. “As a woman running for President, I liked the visual cue that I was different from the men but also familiar. A uniform was also an antidistraction

1881: The Rational Dress Society Founded by two Englishwomen, the society intended to make women’s dress more “rational” by decreeing they wear no more than seven pounds of undergarments at one time.

1898: Eigenkleid German term for “individualized dress.” The term was coined by Austrian architect Josef Hermann, who believed that women would be healthier and happier if they wore clothes customized to their personal needs and body shapes.

Universal Standard makes clothes that are ﬂatter and elegant, but most importantly, in sizes that have been traditionally ignored by most designers. ò SHANE LAVANCHER

technique: since there wasn’t much to say or report on what I wore, maybe people would focus on what I was saying instead.” Ha.

he Universal Standard clothing line is a bit of an outlier in the history of protest fashion. Alexandra Waldman didn’t start making clothes because of any political philosophy or theory. She started for the simple reason that, as a size-18 woman, she couldn’t find a damned thing to wear. In Tokyo, where she lived for seven years, plus-size clothing doesn’t exist. She got around the problem by buying men’s clothes and hacking off collars and buttons and playing with the ﬁt until she came up with something wearable. When she moved back to Manhattan, she thought things would be better. They were not. Her friend Polina Veksler, who wears single-digit sizes, didn’t believe it could be that bad. So Waldman took Veksler to the plus-size corner of what she’ll only identify as “a famous department store.” “Welcome,” she said, “to my corner of polyester hell.” Veksler looked at the selection of tent dresses, many covered with sequins, bows, and hideous

1919: TuTa Italian futurist designer Thayaht (the pseudonym of Ernesto Michahelles) proposed that everyone make and wear a jumpsuit based on a pattern he invented in protest of the high cost of clothes due to postWorld War I inﬂation.

“People are going into Forever 21 and thinking they’re expressing themselves through clothing, when really it’s Forever 21 expressing themselves through you.”

1943: Cab Calloway wears a zoot suit in Stormy Weather In the words of fashion historian Ted Polhemus: “The curtain parts and Cab Calloway makes his entrance. He is, in a sense, that ‘clown’ whom Malcolm X saw as undermining African-American dignity. But in his immaculate zoot suit, feathered fedora and spotless white shoes, he is also undeniably magniﬁcent. As such, he and his fellow Zooties constituted a direct, much needed challenge to that white, Western prescription that dignity and a resplendent, stylish appearance are incompatible elements of masculinity.” For the ﬁrst time, the fashion industry took its inspiration from street style instead of the other way around.

prints. “This cannot be it,” she said. “It can,” Waldman replied, “and it is.” Right then, the two friends decided to start their own business producing clothes that were flattering, elegant, well made, easy to wear, and all in sizes that have traditionally been ignored by most designers. Waldman would be in charge of design, while Veksler would handle the financials. They started with eight pieces in sizes ten to 28, a small wardrobe of shirts and sweaters, a skirt, and a dress that could be combined into 20 different outﬁts. In the two years since they’ve added many more pieces, including jeans and winter coats. They also plan to expand their size range in both directions. The clothes are made mostly of Peruvian cotton and are produced in factories that Waldman and Veksler have actually visited. They’re designed not to stretch or pill or fall apart in the wash, and they’re sized to accommodate a wide range of body types. A basic T-shirt costs $50, which is a lot compared to a fast-fashion outlet, but about the same as a similar shirt produced by Cuyana, a similarly ethically conscious online-only company that doesn’t make anything larger than size 12. (The Universal Standard J

1948: The ﬁrst presidential campaign T-shirt “Dew it with Dewey.”

1964: The monokini Created by designer Rudi Gernreich, the monokini was meant to end societal repression and allow women to go topless, just like men.

Late 1960s: The Black Panther uniform Could be assembled with items found in any department store.

DECEMBER 7, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 17

18 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 7, 2017

continued from 17 shopper is a woman who, like Waldman, has a solid income and not enough clothes to spend it on. Even if she were a size two, she wouldn’t be shopping at H&M.) I met Waldman and Veksler on the fourth floor of Nordstrom Michigan Avenue, where Universal Standard had a pop-up shop the last weekend in October. They were in the middle of a cross-country tour and had lost track of the number of cities they’d visited. Veksler was eight months pregnant. Part of our conversation took place in the women’s lounge, which seemed to emphasize an important point about women and anger: most of our venting happens in the bathroom. “A lot of women are chronically underserved and discarded, in terms of style,” Waldman told me. “They’re not allowed to participate. The message they get is, if you like fashion, don’t be fat!” According to a 2012 study by Plunkett Research, a market research firm, 67 percent of American women are size 14 or larger. And yet, according to a Bloomberg study, department stores devote less than 18 percent of their stock to plus-size women. (Nordstrom allows about only 8.5 percent.) “There’s a lot of rage,” Waldman said. “The tide is turning. Women accepted what was given before. But now they’re saying, ‘It’s not my fault. It’s your fault I don’t have clothes.’” But despite Universal Standard’s wide range of offerings, its endorsements by plus-size models (who, in one of the company’s initiatives, get to design three pieces of clothing they always wanted but could never find in their size), and the ego boost that comes from being labeled a small instead of an extralarge, Waldman and Veksler have still seen women come into their showrooms in New York and Seattle, look at their reﬂections in the mirror, and break down crying, either out of sadness or rage or a combination of the two. “They’re not seeing what’s there,” Waldman explained. “They want to see a better self. They say, ‘I’m a 20 now, but I started a vegan diet yesterday and yoga the day before that, so this is a temporary state, and I’m going to get rid of it.’ It’s like living with a bully in your head.” Which is something else women are ﬁghting whenever they put on clothes, no matter what size they are. Universal Standard is doing its best. It makes a deal with its customers: if they buy anything from a list of 21 items and change sizes over the course of a year, they can trade that piece in for an identical one in the new size. The used clothes will be donated to Dress for Success, a charity that provides work

clothes for impoverished women and has a shortage of plus-size items. But sometimes I would like to fight back against that bully, which I imagine to be the internalized voice of both fashion magazines and the sort of men who watch women and assign them numbers based on their looks. Maybe I could wear a robe that hangs from my shoulders so nobody can see what my body looks like. Nobody could tell how big my breasts are or if my stomach sticks out or my ass is the right shape, and nobody would look at me and make assumptions or judgments about my intelligence or lack thereof. I could just live. Then I remember how this was the strategy I used to get through grad school. I wore jeans and baggy T-shirts (which weren’t fashionable then; this was the era of the belly shirt) and cut my hair short and switched from contacts to glasses. People told me I looked like Harry Potter. For some reason, I thought my male professors—and all but one of them were male—would respect my intelligence more if I were genderless. I don’t know if they actually did, but I do know that I was one of the few women in my class they never propositioned. A few years later, after I graduated, I grew my hair out and got a job where I had to dress

nicely, and then I faced all the grossness that comes with being female again: the condescension, the close talking, the hands going where they have no business going. It was interesting to me that when I started interviewing people for this story, every woman understood exactly what I meant when I asked them if they felt there was more of a connection now between our collective anger and the clothes we’re choosing to wear. They had no proof that this connection existed, that this was how we were conveying our anger. There’s been no well-reasoned manifesto or call to arms, as there was for past antifashion movements. But they all felt it. “Clothing can act as a powerful tool for protection physically and psychologically,” said Petra Slinkard, the curator of costumes at the Chicago History Museum. “I think of clothing like armor. When I wear a blazer, it’s like going into battle.”

round the time I started asking these questions, the Harvey Weinstein story broke, and the flood of #MeToos followed. I was one of them, of course, and so was almost every woman I know. We talked about it constantly—in the office, over

drinks, on social media, in the bathroom. We didn’t press for details, but we listened if they were provided. We tried to be kind to one another. Sometimes, though, it was hard to keep control of my anger. I found it hard to be civil to men, even men I loved and trusted, even men who told me they’d had their asses grabbed too. One cold and rainy afternoon, I went over to Nordstrom Michigan Avenue, ostensibly for research, but really because I find high-end department stores intensely comforting. They remind me of my grandmother, who used to take me shopping in Highland Park when I was a little girl, and imparted to me the secrets of shopping the way I imagine other grandmothers taught their granddaughters how to identify a ripe tomato or sew a straight hem. You can always judge a store by its smell, she told me. To me, a department store that smells like expensive perfume represents unconditional love and approval, everything the world of #MeToo is not. I spent a few hours there, admiring soft leather boots and ingeniously draped coats, stroking mohair shawls and cashmere sweaters I’d never be able to afford. It was like admiring the suits of armor in the Art Institute, except the truth is, armor looks ridiculous and cumbersome now, and these clothes were exquisite. I tried on a military-looking cape made by an up-and-coming young designer and tried to make it swirl around me as I strode across the dressing room. (I could only really get in one stride, but I could still admire the effect.) These were clothes that could make you feel taller and stronger and smarter. A woman who wore them could never be scared away from her career, or made to feel small or stupid or unworthy. When she spoke, it would be with authority. The world belonged to her. She could call down thunder and lightning and make the earth shake just by saying “I AM.” Oh, hell, maybe what I really wanted was to be Diana of Themyscira in the movie Wonder Woman, who only discovers her true powers when she casts off her cloak, revealing her armor for the first time, and goes marching alone across No Man’s Land. It feels silly, almost superstitious, to ascribe that much power to a piece of clothing, something that without a human body to give it shape and meaning hangs limp from a hook or slumps in a heap on the ﬂoor. But clothes, after all, are our ﬁrst defense when we go out into the world. We might as well believe in them, because we don’t have much else. v

v @aimeelevitt DECEMBER 7, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 19

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!

“One of those truly rare family works that is immediately accessible on every level – by both children and opera novices – and yet is still meaningful to the most seasoned opera-goers.” (Dennis Polkow, Newcity Stage)

Tickets ($10-$20) at the Royal George Box Ofﬁce, 312.988.9000, or www.chamberoperachicago.org

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20 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 7, 2017

ARTS & CULTURE MEDIA

Why WYCC got sold for many millions less than expected

little more than two years ago, the Chicago Tribune published an editorial urging the City Colleges of Chicago to sell its public television station, WYCC, channel 20. Beginning with the assumption that WYCC was superﬂuous (given the existence of Chicago’s larger public television station, WTTW), the editorial argued that keeping it would be “daft,” since there was now “a chance to sell the channel in a government auction for as much as $474 million.” “You read that correctly: as much as $474 million for a community college TV station,” the Tribune wrote. Mayor Rahm Emanuel was resisting a sale because CCC students were getting what he said was valuable experience at the studio, on the Englewood campus of Kennedy-King

j DAVE BLEDSOE; PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY SUE KWONG

By DEANNA ISAACS

College, the editorial said. But there would be other ways to provide an updated learning experience and to stay on the air (by sharing another station’s bandwidth, for example), the Tribune argued. And CCC had only a little over a month to opt into the government auction that was providing this opportunity. “Everyone remembers the disastrous parking meter deal. This isn’t like that,” the Tribune concluded. By January 2016, CCC—under then chancellor Cheryl Hyman—had signed on for the auction, which started that March and took about a year to unfold. The results were announced last April: WYCC sold for $15.9 million. And City Colleges is still on the hook for a lease of the WYCC transmitter on the John Hancock Center that runs through 2029. Pay

that off, and the net gain for the cash-strapped CCC from the sale could be as little as $6 million. Station members and fans of its alternative programming (like Democracy Now!, In the Loop, and MHz Worldview) were shocked by the lowball price, but expected that, like many other stations in the spectrum auction, WYCC would continue operating by working out a channel-sharing agreement—most likely with WTTW. When it entered the auction, WYCC had said it would seek such an arrangement. But on November 27, the station went dark. What happened? Media watchdog Scott Sanders began looking into the sale as soon as the bewildering result was announced. Last week he published his ﬁndings on the video media and ﬁlm-industry trade publication Reel Chicago.

Even though the auction results in general failed to meet the high initial expectations, Sanders found that WYCC’s price was markedly lower than that of comparable stations, including those in the Chicago area. (WXFT, for example went for $126 million.) He concluded that WYCC should have sold for at least $100 million more than what it fetched. The auction was inspired by wireless companies’ need for more bandwidth for their rapidly expanding mobile businesses. The transition from analog to digital had created surplus bandwidth in the broadcast spectrum, and the expectation was that the wireless companies would pay a premium price for the licenses to use it and the government would pocket a big chunk of the proceeds. Authorized by Congress in 2012, the sale was promoted as a way to raise cash that would help reduce the national debt. But the structure of the sale was devilishly complicated. FCC spokesman Charles Meisch told me that to eliminate any chance of corruption, the government was to function as middleman, purchasing the bandwidth from the sellers and then reselling it to the buyers. To facilitate that, two separate auctions were set up: The sellers (that is, the TV stations) were assigned a “reverse” auction process that started with high prices (like the $474 million estimate the Trib quoted) and worked its way down to figures that would mesh with what buyers were willing to pay. The buyers participated in a more traditional auction, where prices gradually rose. So no buyer bought directly from a seller. And here’s an important point: If, at any juncture, sellers thought the reverse-auction price was getting too low, they could opt out. If a station did that, it would retain its broadcast license but might be moved to a different part of the broadcast spectrum. The cost of the move would be covered by the government, and there shouldn’t be any perceptible change for its viewers. This is significant in retrospect because, as the bids for WYCC dropped below $100 million and then much lower, City Colleges didn’t drop out but like the proverbial frog in the pot over a fire, hung in till it was cooked. Why were the bids for WYCC’s bandwidth so much lower than those for comparable stations? And why, when the bids began to sink, didn’t CCC pull the trigger and get out? “Those are the questions we all want answered,” says John Freberg, who—until last week, when all but four members of a staff that he says once numbered 36 were let J

DECEMBER 7, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 21

ARTS & CULTURE continued from 21

go—was WYCC’s director of engineering and operations. According to Freberg, “There’s no reason why WYCC would have been less valuable than other stations. From a technical standpoint, it should have been more valuable.” Station member, artist, and retired Northwestern professor Bert Menco has posted a petition at Change.org urging that the station, which he notes was especially valuable to people who don’t have cable, be kept alive. “How can a public asset be sold—basically given away—without any public input?” Menco asks. “At the least, it’s extremely incompetent.” WYCC recently filed a request for a three-month extension of the window allowed for setting up a channel-sharing agreement. A second extension is possible, but as it stands, if no arrangement has been made by February 22, its license to continue broadcasting will expire. CCC responded to questions about the sale and the station’s future with a written statement that said WYCC was “not a core part of the institution’s academic function”; that CCC will “save $2-$3 million per year” by getting rid of it; and that “If CCC had jumped out of the auction earlier, it would have received $0.” According to the statement, CCC and the city “raised questions with the FCC about the apparent differential in outcomes for stations that seemed similar,” and was told

22 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 7, 2017

VISUAL ART

Former City Colleges of Chicago chancellor Cheryl Hyman ò ASHLEE REZIN/SUN-TIMES

that “there was a difference in interference in the spectrum.” (Both Sanders and Freberg disagree with this explanation; the FCC says additional factors such as antenna properties were involved.) CCC says WTTW has approached it about acquiring the WYCC license, and City Colleges’ board of trustees will be considering channel sharing and asset-purchase agreements at its December 7 meeting. If that deal goes through, CCC says, all future programming on WYCC’s channels will be determined by WTTW. As for paying down the national debt: Meisch says the total bandwidth sale at the auction amounted to $19.8 billion. The government netted about $7.3 billion. The national debt is now $20 trillion. v

v @DeannaIsaacs

Isabelle Frances McGuire’s bread and butter By TAL ROSENBERG Isabel Frances McGuire, There Is Always Someone Working Harder Than You. I Am That Someone, 2017 ò COURTESY PRAIRIE

hen you hear the word “bread,” what do you imagine? A bakery? A sandwich? The beginning of a meal? Isabelle Frances McGuire, who rejects gender binaries and doesn’t seem to approach anything in a straightforward way, thinks of the artist’s own body. “I use bread and yeast and sugar . . . so that it will transform [my art] into something else,” McGuire says. “It’s about being constantly placed into roles that I feel are violent, especially a lot of things about having a woman’s body is extremely violent and oppressive.” McGuire, 23, holds a BFA in ﬁlm, video, and new media from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, but “Isabelle Frances McGuire: I’m a Cliché,” on view at Prairie Gallery in Pilsen through January 8, doesn’t exhibit much in the way of video or new media. The show instead features two kinds of works: bottles mutated by yeast and sugar, and tiny photographs, distorted by sugar-coated glass or plastic and framed with stale pieces of bread and insects. “I’m obsessed with bread, but the part of bread that I’m obsessed with is the science behind it: how yeast and bacteria can assist our lives,” McGuire says. “I use bread and yeast and sugar on the glass so that it will transform the piece into something else.” The title “I’m a Cliché” comes from the song “I Am a Cliché” by 70s British punk band X-Ray Spex, whose lyrics often dealt with feminism and anti-consumerism. Relatedly, the setup at Prairie Gallery is somewhat spartan—a small, windowless room whose walls and floor are

painted white. Prairie is a new gallery operated by Tim Mann and Jack Schneider. They hope to draw attention to local artists who aren’t being covered or shown much around town, in particular those who address ecology and identity in their work. Both those subjects are covered one mixed-media piece. McGuire prints “There will always be someone working harder than you” in small text, jammed into a frame made out of thin loaves of bread. The message seems to allude to capitalist culture’s relentless demand to always work harder, but at the bottom of the frame is a line written in the same font, “I am that someone,” an indication that McGuire’s frustrations are directed as much inward as at the culture in general. McGuire doesn’t want “I’m a Cliché” to be a conventional art show, so plans to add performance and musical elements to the exhibit. (McGuire describes “I’m a Cliché” as “an event in three acts.”) This Friday, McGuire will serve bread, butter, and fermented ginger ale. There will be a block of butter about the size of two laptops stacked on top of each other, and underneath the butter will be images, which people can see once they swipe the butter with their bread. What are these images? McGuire says you’ll have to come and eat some bread and butter to ﬁnd out. v R “ISABELLE FRANCES MCGUIRE: I’M A CLICHE” Through 1/8/18, by appointment only. “Act Two”: Fri 12/8, 7 PM, Prairie Gallery, 629 W. Cermak, prairie.website. F

v @talrosenberg

Kelsey Brennan and Joshua Moaney in Remy Bummpo’s Puﬀ: Believe It or Not ò NATHANAEL FILBERT

Q ANOTHER P

DICKENS CLASSIC FOR THE HOLIDAYS

t u •

THEATER

Getting to the truth in lying

By TONY ADLER

ugustin-Eugène Scribe would’ve felt right at home in today’s television industry. The most popular French playwright and librettist during a good chunk of the 19th century, Scribe anticipated the Hollywood writers’ room by maintaining a creative staff whose members assembled the hundreds of entertainments that appeared under his name. He also invented the well-made play, a template capable of generating endless variations within an ironclad set of narrative rules. Scribe was, as his 1861 New York Times obituary noted, “Less a dramatist than a manafacturer [sic] of comedies, vaudevilles and opera librettos.” And he turned out a quality product. Witness his 1848 Le Puff, ou Mensonge et Vérité— or Puff: Believe It or Not, as Ranjit Bolt calls his English translation, getting a smart, cynical world premiere production now from Remy Bumppo Theatre. Let’s deal with that unfortunate title ﬁrst. “Puff” in this context doesn’t refer to a drag, a dragon, or something a drag queen might

use to apply powder. It isn’t an exhalation or the white halo that forms on a dandelion when it’s going to seed. It’s more closely related to “puff” as in “puff piece,” but stripped of any mitigating sense of sincere flattery. It’s hype. Deception. Salesmanship. Self-interested, strategic, enthusiastically unprincipled lying. And, as César Desgaudets, the play’s

wise old philosopher of puff (not to say its most profound practitioner) suggests, it’s absolutely indispensable to survival in a society so fraught with contradictions that it can’t handle the truth. “Puff,” Degaudets asserts, “is king.” The play, being wellmade, consists of an elaborately plotted yet perfectly trivial love story centered on Albert d’Angremont, a titled French military officer who’s just returned to Paris after years of living in a tent in the middle of the Sahara, ﬁghting Algerians. All that time spent in cultural isolation has made a sort of human time capsule of him: Quixote-like, Albert cherishes old aristocratic values based on honor and truth and the willingness to die for stuff, which puts him utterly out of sync with the going social modalities of his peers back home. Then too, he cherishes Antonia de la Roche-Bernard, the younger sister J

Adapted and Directed by

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DECEMBER 7, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 23

ARTS & CULTURE continued from 23

of his good pal Maxence. The whole Algerian adventure, in fact, was his attempt to become deserving of her hand. Unfortunately for Albert, the notion of proving one’s worth through demonstrations of courage, fortitude, and martial skill has become as quaint to Parisians as truth itself. In the world of puff, matches are made for the sake of advantage and good optics. Albert’s reeducation begins when he happens to save Desgaudets from getting run over by a horse cart, and comes to a crisis when Antonia is contracted to marry the wealthy, frivolous Comte de Marignan in order to settle Maxence’s debts. There’s a huge number of twists, turns, and even double flips along the way, many of them resulting from the usual farce fodder—eavesdropped conversations, snooped diary entries, misinterpreted signals—but others attributable to nothing more than the quick pace of developments leaving people a scheme behind, which is only appropriate for a play spinning on the axis of perception. Unlike David Ives, whose adaptations of Molière and Corneille are ostentatiously anachronistic, Bolt is a quiet and fluid modernizer here; it’s only late in the game, after you hear someone say “I suffer from low self-esteem” or “It’s the way I’m made,” that you realize you’ve been listening to 21st-century tropes all evening. Nick Sandys’s direction, quiet and ﬂuid too—resisting

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what must’ve been a sore temptation to overplay the sense of many balls juggled, so that small gestures, like those of Christopher Sheard’s Comte de Marignan as he rearranges his public face after a miscalculation or Joshua Moaney’s Albert as he suffers a ﬁt of the moral dry heaves—can read as human as well as comic. It’s easy and apt to apply Puff to the state of our present-day union, Trumpian and otherwise. Kelsey Brennan has a great turn as César’s daughter, Corrine, a writer who’s weaponized the memoir genre so as to make herself a dangerous player. What’s more, Scribe and Bolt are remorseless, though far from moralistic, in their presentation of the lie as the essential currency of a literally fraudulent society. But we’d better be awake to the possible risks of identifying too closely with these characters. After all, the year of Puff’s original premiere was a year of revolution throughout Europe. In France it saw the toppling of one royal house and the establishment of the Second Republic, followed by the subversion of the republic by its own president, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte. v R PUFF: BELIEVE IT OR NOT Through 1/7: Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 2:30 and 7:30 PM (except 12/10, 1:30 PM), Sun 2:30 PM; also Wed 12/13, 7:30 PM, Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln, 773-404-7336, remybumppo. org, $48.50-$63.50

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Griﬃn Theatre’s Violet ò MICHAEL BROSILOW

THEATER

A scarred heroine in search of a miracle

hen we ﬁrst catch sight of her, waiting at a Greyhound Bus stop in the mountain hamlet of Spruce Pine, North Carolina (which actually exists, by the way), the eponymous 25-year-old heroine of Violet looks like any young woman on the verge of an adventure. What we can’t see is, ironically, what’s most obvious to the people she meets over the course of this 1997 musical set in 1964: a grotesque facial scar, the result of a freak accident she suffered as a child. Desperate, even somewhat delusional after a dozen years of watching people flinch at the sight of her, Violet is hopping the bus to Tulsa, where she hopes a TV preacher will give her the miracle of Gene Tierney eyes and a Grace Kelly nose. But of course it’s the journey that counts in situations like this, not the destination. Violet fights it out with her memories as she rides along, meanwhile striking up a wary, combative friendship with a pair of GIs, Monty and

Flick, whose preoccupations include Vietnam (Monty) and black skin (Flick). A good many things fail to ring true in this Griffin Theatre production. A certain romance, in particular, comes off seeming more necessary than believable. Still director Scott Weinstein and his strong cast get at the pain and longing present in Brian Crawley’s book and Jeanine Tesori’s Appalachian-inﬂuenced music. (Fans of Tesori’s better-known Fun Home will be interested in how much of that musical is preﬁgured here.) Set designer Lauren Nigri and choreographer Kasey Alfonso do wonders in a small space, and a gospel passage led by LaShera Zenise Moore pretty much stops the show. —TONY ADLER R VIOLET Through 1/13: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM, the Den Theatre, 1333 N. Milwaukee, 773-697-3830, griffintheatre.com, $30-$42.

v@taadler

DANCE

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Hubbard Street gifts us with a night of Crystal Pite CRYSTAL PITE’S EVOLUTION as a choreographer has been driven by a proverb: “Talk to a man about himself and he will listen for hours.” Theater audiences want to feel represented by the performers, and Pite seeks to create that connection through dance. The three works presented in Hubbard Street Dance Chicago’s Winter Series are a series of experiments exploring this idea through narrative. But those narratives aren’t set in stone. A new company of dancers means a new approach to each of these works, which debuted between 2008 and 2012. “Every time I restage a piece on a group of dancers, the works change,” Pite says. “It’s a living, breathing thing, and it wants to live and breathe through whatever body its inhabiting. I love ﬁnding out new things through new dancers. And ﬁnding out what the ideals and essentials are of what I’ve made. What things are necessary for the work to hold.”

Choreography isn’t a rigid framework for Pite. It’s a map with specific points that need to be hit, but one that still allows room for the dancers to create their own paths. “The trajectory and pathways of your body are prescribed, but you have space to approach it as an improvisation,” Pite says. “Everyone does better when they feel a sense of ownership over what they’re doing. They’re responsible for creating it in real time, and I want them to feel like they have agency and are a creative collaborator. That’s what makes it vibrate with life. Otherwise we’re just copying and something dies.” —OLIVER SAVA R HUBBARD STREET DANCE WINTER S ERIE S: AN EVENING OF CRYSTAL PITE 12/7-12/10: Thu 7:30 PM, Fri and

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Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, Harris Theater, 215 E. Randolph, 312-334-7777, hubbardstreetdance.com, $25-$110.

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written by Q BROTHERS COLLECTIVE (GQ, JQ, JAX, and POS) developed with RICK BOYNTON directed by GQ and JQ

A Picture of You Falling ò TODD ROSENBERG

312.595.5600 • WWW.CHICAGOSHAKES.COM

A Chicago Shakespeare production presented by CST and Richard Jordan Productions

DECEMBER 7, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 25

Get showtimes at chicagoreader.com/movies.

ARTS & CULTURE

Gary Oldman in Darkest Hour

MOVIES

We shall sweep the Oscars

By J.R. JONES

wards season has arrived, which means that for the rest of the year we can expect lots of big movies with big actors playing big people. Christmas weekend brings Hugh Jackman as circus mogul P.T. Barnum in Michael Gracey’s The Greatest Showman, Christopher Plummer (a last-minute replacement for Kevin Spacey) as billionaire J. Paul Getty in Ridley Scott’s All the Money in the World, and, in Steven Spielberg’s The Post, Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks as the Washington Post’s gutsy publisher, Kay Graham, and executive editor, Ben Bradlee. English actor Gary Oldman—who first made a name for himself in the U.S. playing such real-life figures as punk rocker Sid Vicious in Sid and Nancy (1986) and playwright Joe Orton in Prick Up Your Ears (1987)—may have landed the biggest whale of all with his role as Winston Churchill in Joe Wright’s Darkest Hour, chronicling the monthlong period, from May to June 1940, when Churchill was elected prime minister of Great Britain and rallied both its government and its people to fight Hitler to the death. Oscar oddsmakers are already handing the best actor award to Oldman, and Darkest Hour turns up among a half-dozen features favored for best picture. Weirdly, its biggest competition is another film covering the exact same period: Christopher Nolan’s epic Dunkirk, about the evacuation of Allied soldiers from the French port town of the title. This may be the first time two movies might reasonably share the statuette, because each of them supplies an aspect of the story that the other lacks. Darkest Hour invites viewers inside the heart and mind of a great leader but

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never really captures his deep rapport with the British people, which turned out to be one of his greatest political assets. Dunkirk takes a more populist approach, using an ensemble cast to dramatize the stories of ordinary Brits swept up in the great struggle, though the film gives little sense of how the evacuation fit into the wider war or how, back at home, some considered the UK already lost and pressured Churchill to sue for peace with Nazi Germany. Like Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012), Darkest Hour focuses on a time of great political trial for its subject, the better to expose his leadership’s essence. After Hitler’s invasion of Poland forced France and Great Britain to declare war against Germany in September 1939, a seven-month lull in major hostilities persuaded many in the UK that the conflict—mocked as “the Bore War”—would soon be resolved. But in April 1940, German forces landed in Denmark and Norway, and on May 10, Hitler launched an all-out assault against Holland, Belgium, and France. Darkest Hour opens in early May with a parliamentary debate over the Norway debacle that forces Neville Chamberlain to resign as prime minister and empowers Churchill, his secretary of the admiralty, to form a new government. Churchill’s first military test, beginning May 26, is the rescue of some 338,000 British, French, and Belgian soldiers trapped at Dunkirk; the movie climaxes with his heroic June 4 speech to the House of Commons, in which he promises Hitler, “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.” With his giant cigar and ever-present glass

ss AVERAGE

26 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 7, 2017

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of scotch, his frenetic energy and explosive temper, Churchill was a larger-than-life character, and more than 200 actors have played him onscreen. Oldman humanizes the man, capturing not only his fury (when his typist, played by Lily James, introduces a minor error into his correspondence) but also his compassion (when she reveals later that her brother died at Dunkirk). Churchill is delighted to learn that his bungled, backward V-for-Victory sign, captured in a now-famous newspaper photo, is a street gesture meaning “Up your bum!” His pugnacity endeared him to the British and inspired those around him; screenwriter Anthony McCarten need only quote Churchill’s actual words when the prime minister rouses his war cabinet to fight, declaring, “If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.” What actor could resist such a line? A highly verbal movie, Darkest Hour shows how the ability to articulate a nation’s ideals can become its own source of political power. Churchill’s remarks to the House of Commons, delivered after the near-miraculous Dunkirk evacuation, were published around the world and stood as a declaration of national purpose. “Even repeated by the announcer, it sent shivers (not of fear) down my spine,” the writer Vita Sackville-West remembered. “I think one of the reasons why one is stirred by his Elizabethan phrases is that one feels the whole massive backing of power and resolve behind them, like a great fortress: they are never words for words’ sake.” In Darkest Hour, even Churchill’s foreign secretary, Viscount Halifax (Stephen Dillane), whose advice to negotiate

with Hitler has been soundly rejected, recognizes Churchill’s oratorical gift, observing from the balcony, “He has mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.” Churchill’s resolve came partly from his own character but primarily from his faith in the people. “Churchill was never modest, yet he bridled at the suggestion that he had transformed Britons,” wrote historian William Manchester. “He believed the British race had ‘the lion heart’; he only supplied the roar.” Unfortunately for Darkest Hour, the time frame of the story offers no good opportunity to dramatize this. McCarten’s big gambit is a silly scene near the end of the movie in which Churchill, urged by King George VI (Ben Mendelsohn) to seek the people’s counsel, boards a subway train bound for Westminster and conducts a straw poll of the startled riders, an assortment of working-class Brits who unanimously endorse his position of taking the ﬁght to the Germans. (In fact, Churchill made his last trip on the London Underground in 1926 and was so confused by the intersecting train lines that, according to his wife, he got lost and had to be retrieved.) If you want to see the lionheart in action, the film for you is Dunkirk, in which Nolan restages the evacuation from the air (with Tom Hardy as a dashing RAF pilot), the ground (with Fionn Whitehead as a British soldier threatened by German air bombardment), and the sea (with Mark Rylance as one of the 850-odd British civilians who raced across the English Channel in private vessels to ferry soldiers back to the UK). Largely devoid of dialogue, Dunkirk (which has closed theatrically but debuts on DVD and streaming services December 19) is a supremely visceral experience, especially in the agonizing moments when ground soldiers brace themselves for the impact of bombs they can’t possibly escape. Yet the narrative is so localized that you may have trouble connecting the three stories to each other, let alone to the history of World War II. The brightest moment of illumination comes at the end, when one of the soldiers reads aloud a newspaper reprint of Churchill’s speech to the House of Commons. Dunkirk and Darkest Hour are like two halves of one brilliant war movie, but don’t expect a negotiated settlement on Oscar night. v DARKEST HOUR ss Directed by Joe Wright. PG-13, 125 min. For listings visit chicagoreader.com/movies.

v @JR_Jones

WORTHLESS

THIRD COMING The Jesus Lizard, returning once again to their hometown, talk about why they chose Chicago—and how they became its most beautiful noise-rock monsters. By KEVIN WARWICK

Jesus Lizard front man David Yow during a show at the Vic on October 8, 1994 ò BOBBY TALAMINE

DECEMBER 7, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 27

THE JESUS LIZARD ARE BACK

. . . AGAIN.

Chicago’s great 90s noise-rock agitators made their first return to the stage in 2009, ten years after splitting up. Their original label, Touch and Go, accompanied that reunion with Inch—a Record Store Day exclusive that repackaged remastered versions of all nine Jesus Lizard seven-inches it had released. Later that year Touch and Go reissued its Jesus Lizard albums: Down, Liar, Goat, Head, and the EP Pure. Resuscitated, the band played lots of festivals, including two incarnations of All Tomorrow’s Parties (in the UK and upstate New York) and Primavera Sound (in Spain). They also came back to their hometown for an explosive set at Pitchfork, then again on a pinpoint club tour. During the ﬁrst of their two November shows at Metro, front man David Yow fell crowd surﬁng and bruised his ribs, while during the second he still insisted on heaving himself (briefly) into the audience. His lack of restraint onstage will never go out of style. The Jesus Lizard signed off again with one final Metro blowout on New Year’s Eve 2009. Despite the whiff of mercenary motive suggested by the reissue campaign, I never felt a creeping dread that maybe they were in it for the wrong reasons. The whole thing was an enthusiastic celebration of the Jesus Lizard’s legacy: Yow, guitarist Duane Denison, bassist David Wm. Sims, and drummer Mac McNeilly reveled in knocking the dust off classics such as “7 vs. 8,” “Nub,” “Puss,” and “Fly on the Wall.”

28 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 7, 2017

The members of the Jesus Lizard were close, so the band’s breakup in 1999 wasn’t a fractious shitstorm. Rather they seemed resigned, even content, as though they knew that everything had run its course. (McNeilly left in 1996, replaced for the final few years by Jim Kimball of the Denison/Kimball Trio and then Brendan Murphy of the Wesley Willis Fiasco.) The Jesus Lizard Book, which came out in 2014, thoroughly documents not just the group’s original run from 1987 to 1999 but also those first reunion years. As was the case with so many 90s noise-rock acts, the Jesus Lizard formed under the influence of noise-rock engineer par excellence Steve Albini, who’d go on to work on many of their recordings (his late-80s band with Sims, unfortunately called Rapeman, was based in Chicago). The book includes an album-by-album breakdown that concludes with the Jesus Lizard’s polarizing jump to Capitol for Shot and Blue in the late 90s, as well as ode after ode from friends and peers to the band’s incredible, combustible presence on record and onstage. Not to mention all the crackling photos of Yow sloshing atop crowds, shirtless and deranged. Three-fourths of the Jesus Lizard came here from Austin, where they’d started the band in ’87 as a recording project with a drum machine—Sims and Yow played in Scratch Acid with Rapeman drummer Rey Washam, and Denison was in Cargo Cult with Randy Turner of the Big Boys. But because the Jesus Lizard had moved to Chicago by the time they added McNeilly and became a live band, they’re even more special to us. With each passing decade they further crystallize into a cherished relic of a bygone era, one that continues to exert an enormous pull on the Chicago rock community. Several important developments coincided here in the 90s: the rise of the Wicker Park scene had people speculating that Chicago would be the “next Seattle” in the alternative-rock sweepstakes, the emergence of the subgenre christened “postrock” provoked nose-thumbing from fans who didn’t think rock was quite finished yet, and the confluence of the city’s experimental jazz scene with its heady rock culture resulted in plenty of side projects and detours down unfamiliar rabbit holes. The Jesus Lizard thrived through it all. “Being into the Jesus Lizard was the hallmark of pretty much every decent musician I encountered in the 1990s,” Albini says in The Jesus Lizard Book. Today Yow lives in Los Angeles, Sims in New York, Denison in Nashville, and McNeilly in Evanston. But to honor the fertile era when they lived in Chicago together, I asked them to reflect on their time here. Much of the Jesus Lizard’s story has been told elsewhere—there is an entire book about them, after all— so I wanted to pose questions they hadn’t answered a hundred times. How did they interact with the city in between tours? How did they see the local music scene evolve alongside their band? And how often did they post up at the Rainbo Club? DUANE DENISON I was very excited and a bit apprehensive about moving to Chicago. It was a pretty big jump from Austin, and the sheer scale of the city was daunting. But for me the move was a now-or-never thing—and of course I don’t regret it. I was in a band called Cargo Cult that had an album on Touch and Go, so I had already met [label head] Corey [Rusk]. And then there was David Yow and David Sims. It was in my favor to make the move.

MAC MCNEILLY I met David Yow and David Sims when my Atlanta band 86 played Austin. Scratch Acid had just broken up or were in the process of breaking up. Yow and I traded numbers and said, “Maybe one day we could do something together.” A few years went by—we didn’t keep in touch or anything—and out of the blue he called to ask about playing drums with the Jesus Lizard. They planned to ditch the drum machine. They had made an EP but wanted to be a full-on band and travel and go to Europe. I’m like, “Uh, hell yeah, that sounds great.” DAVID WM. SIMS There was a culture shock. The climate, the food, the architecture. I’d only ever lived in Austin and Atlanta and had been outside the south for the first time three years earlier with Scratch Acid. Austin is an easy town to be wellliked in. Opposed to David Yow, who was an air force brat and moved a ton, I’d never moved much—so it was daunting to uproot myself. I did immediately step into the whole Touch and Go scene, which was a good place to land. DAVID YOW I was more excited just to get out of Austin, because I think I’d been there 13 years and it had become the kind of place where everybody had fucked everybody else. As far as I knew, I was moving up there to be Rey Washam’s drum tech for the band that he and David were in with Steve Albini. MCNEILLY At the time I was playing bass in Phantom 309 with Gary Held and John Forbes. That was fun, but I’m not a bass player. I was going up to Chicago to see if it was the right fit, but I didn’t get the impression [the Jesus Lizard] were auditioning a bunch of drummers. DENISON We moved into Humboldt Park, where all four of us lived in a three-bedroom place at 2722 W. Potomac. It was near Division and California, right on the edge of the park. David Sims and I stayed in that same building for ten years. SIMS I lived in Chicago for 12 years and was in that apartment the entire time, except for that first year. We moved there in 1989. I liked the neighborhood. Not as cool as Wicker Park, but it was close and a lot cheaper. MCNEILLY The building itself was this beautiful old graystone. When I drove up the first time, I came with my drums. I parked my Volkswagen van outside, and it got broken into immediately. I was like, “Are you serious?” Once [the rest of the Jesus Lizard] figured out, “OK, you’re in the band,” I left my drums and drove back to Atlanta and grabbed some clothes. It was that easy. I ended up buying a ’72 Chevy Malibu for $200 from a guy across the street. I was the last one to move in, so I got the couch in the living room. I didn’t mind. SIMS Because of the arrangement of the one-way streets, we had to drive down Evergreen one block north of Potomac to make the block back down to ours. Evergreen was a wide-open crack market. J

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The Jesus Lizard today: David Wm. Sims, Duane Denison, David Yow, and Mac McNeilly ò JOSHUA BLACK WILKINS

month every year. When we moved in it was $625 a month, and when I left 11 years later it was $675 a month. He made a calculation that it was better to have that steady income rather than to constantly be vetting and looking for new tenants every year. YOW The worst thing we did was get drunk as shit every day. Duane eventually moved into the basement, which was directly below. We all lived there until I moved in with my future wife and Mac with his. CONROY It says a lot about them that they took to the neighborhood quite easily. I didn’t know anything about the band when they moved in. When I ﬁnally saw them perform, I was amazed that such even-keeled, polite, quiet, and respectful people could be so wild onstage. My wife and I have owned the building for almost 30 years. We’ve had a lot of tenants come and go. Those guys are by far our favorites. [Editor’s note: John Conroy was a Reader staffer from 1978 till 2007—he famously broke the Jon Burge police torture story—and is now a senior investigator at Northwestern’s Roderick & Solange MacArthur Justice Center.]

continued from 28

DENISON It was a drive-through drug zone with competing gangs. Bodies would show up in the lagoon across the street. We’d go on tour and come back and count the burned-out shells of cars that had been stolen and torched for fun. I walked through a shootout one day in the park. It was the wild west. Our neighbors were all decent, but the gangs were out of hand.

THE JESUS LIZARD, DEAD RIDER Sat 12/9, 9 PM, Metro, 3730 N. Clark, sold out, 18+

MCNEILLY After a while it came back that somebody in the neighborhood said, “We didn’t know what to think at first, but pretty quick we ﬁgured you guys were just musicians and weren’t going to bother anybody.” We never got messed with.

YOW It was a little sketchy. I know of some bad things that happened to friends and acquaintances, but I was never unfortunate enough to experience any of that.

SIMS There was a point when activists in the neighborhood marched and raised hell that the police weren’t doing more about it. It was on the news and got some press. They did get it cleaned up to where you could drive down that block and not have kids running out and yelling at you to buy crack.

DENISON We got along surprisingly well, considering we were on top of each other all the time, those first five years especially. We had a landlord named John Conroy, who was a writer and wrote a book called Belfast Diary. I don’t think he knew what to make of us at first. We started showing up in the press, and being a writer, that impressed him. We laughed about the way the ad for the apartment had been worded: “Area popular with writers and artists.”

MCNEILLY It was like, no one else would dare live here, but if you’re an artist and don’t have any money, you might consider moving here. Comes with a built-in set of risks!

30 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 7, 2017

JOHN CONROY My wife and I bought that three-ﬂat in 1988 and moved in shortly thereafter. We were strangers to the business of being a landlord, and we were trying to ﬁnd tenants who didn’t mind living in a neighborhood that a lot of people thought was pretty rough but we thought had a lot of character. There was an active drug market, with one corner staffed at most hours of the day and night. Pistols came out for celebration on New Year’s Eve and the Fourth of July. One of our neighbors, thinking that a man in his house was an intruder, used a machete to slice into the stranger’s ear. Two other neighbors kept roosters, and you could hear them crowing occasionally—not something I had experienced in any other neighborhood. One of those men, who also collected for the neighborhood bolita, became a friend of ours. After I told him I was going to be gone for a few weeks, he became concerned, and he came over and offered my wife a small gun (I believe he called it “woman sized,” or words to that effect). SIMS If I ever get to a point where I’m someone’s landlord, I’ll model myself after John Conroy. Super nice and attentive when things needed attention and left you alone when they didn’t. He raised the rent on the apartment five dollars a

DENISON There was a little Polish place on the corner of Division and California called Mary’s Best Pierogi, but honestly, I’d drive the mile or so east to Wicker Park. I loved the comic-book store Quimby’s, and around the corner was Leo’s Lunchroom. I’d go to the Empty Bottle regularly on Tuesday nights, when Ken Vandermark’s groups would rehearse or do workshops. I’d nurse a beer and listen to those guys run through their sets. M CNEILLY I used to walk everywhere. We practiced for a while—god, we practiced all over—in Steve Albini’s basement at California and Irving Park. I’d walk from our place in Humboldt Park. I met a lot of interesting characters going up California. SIMS I lived there for years without a car, so I would walk to the bus that would go down Division—or sometimes just walk to that el line through Wicker Park. Probably the closest things that I did frequent in the neighborhood were the Rainbo, there on Damen and Division, the Gold Star, Reckless Records, and when it opened, the Empty Bottle. YOW We went to Dreamerz a lot. It was a club on Milwaukee where the venue part was upstairs. There was this wonderful girl named Michelle—her last name escapes me—who dated Pete Conway from Riﬂe Sport and Flour, but she also dated Steve Albini. There was this bachelor party at Dreamerz for a friend of Steve’s, and Steve doesn’t drink but that night he said he’d match everybody drink for drink. He got shit-faced and was downstairs leaning over the bar talking to Michelle, going “I alllways loooved you. I alllways loooved you the most.” And then I think he ended up passing out in his own vomit on the sidewalk. J

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DECEMBER 7, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 31

David Yow and Mac McNeilly at the Vic in 1994 ò

continued from 30

STEVE ALBINI David Yow and I used to hang out a lot, shooting pool or just being assholes. A favorite haunt of our circle was a dive bar under the Kennedy Expressway called Marie’s Riptide Lounge, whose geriatric namesake matriarch was prone to ball-breaking on a scale we all admired. One night at the Riptide, Marie showed David a joke involving him sliding pennies across the bar, with a different pun as a punch line for each one—something like, “You smell something? I was wondering where that scent came from,” and “What’s sweet as an apple? There’s a pear,” and so on. The puns stretched thinner and thinner. Eventually David slid the ﬁfth penny across the bar, and Marie asked, “You see any pussy? No! And you ain’t going to for ﬁve goddamn cents!” David liked that joke.

DENISON Rainbo on a Friday night in 1992 I’d probably see John Herndon, Casey Rice, Dan Koretsky, Doug McCombs, Stacy Sargent. Don’t forget Rick Rizzo, John Haggerty once in a while. I had a birthday party there probably in ’92 where I drank like 15 greyhounds. I got home somehow—and on the ﬂoor. After the Jesus Lizard broke up, I was in Nashville working with Hank III, and we came up. Then later [my band] Tomahawk played the Metro and Vic. After a Tomahawk show, I said to a couple of guys, “Let’s go to the Rainbo in Wicker Park.” [Tomahawk drummer] John Stanier was from New York, and Rainbo was like the Max Fish of Chicago. Similar kind of art, boho-guy kind of vibe. Some people I recognized seemed to be doing the same old things. Guys who were womanizers then still were, and it’s like, dude, you’re getting older and older and these girls are looking younger and younger.

MCNEILLY We’d go to Czar Bar, Empty Bottle, Lounge Ax, just looking for bands to hang out with. In the early days I remember there was a whole lot of going out and drinking. That was the sport, the context. Many a night was spent at the Rainbo Club.

YOW It’s funny, I didn’t go to the Rainbo nearly as much as my pals. Early on, before we lived together, I lived in Uptown near Clark and Wilson and worked near the Exit. I’d go to the Exit all the time. I worked Sunday night, so I’d get off and go straight there. I called it church.

SIMS I used to jokingly refer to the Rainbo as my second living room. I haven’t really re-created that experience since. But I could literally go there any night of the week and run into people I knew. The people in Pegboy, Tortoise, Eleventh Dream Day. Drag City people. Probably the people in Material Issue. There was also the appeal of getting home from tour and not having to go out. Going on tour is like going out for six weeks at a time.

SIMS It didn’t take much for us to get away from needing day jobs. We toured all the time and lived out of a van anyway. I really only had what you’d call a day job that ﬁrst year. I worked at a record distributor in Des Plaines called Kaleidoscope. It went belly-up while I was there. I was one of the last two or three employees. Everything of value that I learned about the music industry, I learned while riding Kaleidoscope down the drain. Why some people get paid, why some people don’t.

32 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 7, 2017

BOBBY TALAMINE

Why some people make money, why some people ship off their records to a distributor and never see their records again or any money from them. DENISON There was a local chain called Foodworks that was good about rehiring me when I came back from tour. It was a combination health food store and grocery—and they sold beer and wine. I worked at the one at Diversey and Sheffield. It was a real cast of characters who worked there—everyone was into something, whether art or theater or music. I also used to give guitar lessons out of the apartment. I put up flyers at places like Quimby’s and Leo’s. In those days you put up flyers. MCNEILLY I helped stuff records into sleeves over at Touch and Go when I first got to Chicago. Most of that time was spent hanging out with John Brannon [of Negative Approach] and watching old video clips of Alice Cooper. DENISON It seemed like a lot of the people who were part of the Touch and Go crowd used to go to [a restaurant called] Bangkok Bangkok, and the owner seemed to like them. So they presented the idea of putting on a show. It was Slint, the Jesus Lizard, and King Kong [in July 1989]. The owner seemed disappointed that no one was dancing. I think he was baffled by the oddness of the music, the way people looked, and that no one was treating it like it was a wedding. SIMS There was a place called Edge of the Looking Glass that we played early on. It was more of a performance space. We also played on the roof of where Martin Atkins lived. We J

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DECEMBER 7, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 33

David Yow at the Vic in 1994

continued from 32

probably played with Tar and Pegboy a fair amount. Those two stick in my mind because they were around at the very beginning of the Jesus Lizard but also into the mid- and late 90s.

ò BOBBY TALAMINE

MCNEILLY Those early shows were a little more experimental sounding. I think Steve Albini thought it was some kind of weird art-rock at ﬁrst.

DENISON We played a bit with a few different bands, but not that much in Chicago. Pegboy or U.S. Maple or [John Forbes’s band] Dirt—which later became Mount Shasta—or Tar. Eventually those bands developed their own things and played their own shows.

MIKE GREENLEES, DRUMMER IN TAR We had the same booking agent, and after we got on Touch and Go we went on tour together in 1992. I saw them play every night for a month—I’m talking every night. Neither band was interested in days off. Think about Yow. He’s not spending one-half to three-quarters of a random show in the audience—that’s every night for weeks on end. Think about trying to stay balanced while people are tossing you around, lifting you up, flipping you over, trying to pry the microphone out of your hand, pulling your hair, et cetera. And he’s delivering all the vocals. Then after the show he’s entertaining an endless stream of people backstage, while everybody else just kind of wants the evening to end. Off the stage, day to day on tour, they were funny as hell—David and Mac uproariously so, Duane with a really dry sense of humor—but were absolutely all business, especially David Sims.

“WHEN I FINALLY SAW THEM PERFORM, I WAS AMAZED THAT SUCH EVEN-KEELED, POLITE, QUIET, AND RESPECTFUL PEOPLE COULD BE SO WILD ONSTAGE.” —Former Reader writer John Conroy, the Jesus Lizard’s landlord in Humboldt Park

MCNEILLY Killdozer was fun, because I liked Michael Gerald’s voice. They had a cool dirge-y sound. We played with Laughing Hyenas once or twice. We played with Tar a few times, and those are good guys. We liked them a lot.

34 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 7, 2017

YOW We were good pals with the Didjits, with Pegboy. Killdozer wasn’t a Chicago band, but Mike had moved to Chicago by that time. We were friends with Urge Overkill before they became assholes. GREENLEES One night in Orlando at Beach Club, Yow needed a beer or something and afterwards gestured for the audience to carry him back to the stage. But there isn’t a stage—the bands were set up on the floor in a corner of the room. So when they deposit him, it’s a six-foot drop. Onto his head. He’s not moving. He’s out. Mac, David Sims, and Duane are almost not reacting. Like, “How long should we give him?” I’m sure they’ve been there before. Eventually Sims walks over when it seems like he’s not gonna get up. Yow struggles to his feet, goes down again. He’s too dizzy to stand. Somebody brings him a beer. He drinks it, gets back up, and they finish the set. At another point the guitar mike went out. Yow strolls over and pours beer on it, explaining later, “I don’t know, I thought it would be funny.” Like, “Maybe beer will help.” SIMS Lounge Ax was great. There wasn’t intrinsically anything about the space or the PA—it was the people who ran it. For bands used to driving from one college town to the next and from one dive bar to another, you get treated fairly brusquely or apathetically a lot. They created a welcoming vibe, without having much to offer in the way of great technical infrastructure. The ceiling was low. The backstage was a cramped little awful place. It was a small, narrow shotgun space—not ideal for acoustics. JULIA ADAMS, CO-OWNER OF LOUNGE AX They were one of my favorite bands to ever play Lounge Ax. David Yow set the stage on fire during one show. That was fun. Thankfully we were able to quickly extinguish it! Donny Osmond came to see the Jesus Lizard once, which seemed weird. I remember when David made it all the way from the stage to the sound booth by body surfing. Singing the entire time.

DENISON It was smaller, so it had a sort of a classic CBGB vibe. It could just get swelteringly hot in there. Plus you could smoke back then too, so it could get a little claustrophobic. With the Metro you had this nice big room—more like a theater, so you get a bigger sound, bigger stage. JOE SHANAHAN, OWNER OF METRO The Jesus Lizard played Metro regularly, and their shows in the early 90s were their most potent. The alchemy of their visceral live presence, local label (Touch and Go), and local agency (the Billions Corporation) made them can’t-miss events. The band always chose the right openers—from Tar (December 15, 1990, and October 19, 1991) to the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion for a sold-out show on October 30, 1992. Tickets were $8 to $10 for a night of messy, loud, and expertly played punk rock. No one ever left disappointed. YOW Many times we played Lounge Ax, it was full enough that climbing across the people was like climbing across a moving ﬂoor. And Lounge Ax wasn’t that big, so getting to the soundboard wasn’t that much of an achievement. MCNEILLY I think our fans through the 90s were very loyal, supportive, and ﬁerce. The people that liked us really liked us, and I think the people that didn’t like us really didn’t like us. We might’ve been the ugly stepchild, in a way. ALBINI On release of Head, the reviews were comical. Nobody got it. I presumed David would be at least a little bothered by this, but he was nonplussed. Their live shows were always packed and got bigger every lap around the circuit, and they had the respect of their peers. “Led Zeppelin got bad reviews,” he said. DENISON You’re aware of your celebrity. You’d have to be pretty dull not to notice. At the same time, we didn’t go out of our way to cultivate that. I worked my ass off playing in bands where I never got on anyone’s guest list. Keep in mind I J

DECEMBER 7, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 35

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continued from 34 was well past 30 by the time the Jesus Lizard started having real success. I appreciated every bit of it. YOW I remember when Down came out, I was sort of bummed because I thought it was our worst record. There are other punctuated memories. One time I got home from practice and I had figured out how I was going to sing “Seasick.” I was really happy with it. I remember telling my wife about it and just throwing her around the bed, singing the song. Throwing each other around the bed—it was really fun. MCNEILLY When we did Shot, there was this big backlash of corporate versus indie. People wanted to keep something for themselves and wanted variations of the same thing that they got that spark from. We weren’t trying to jump to Capitol to be rock stars. We were just trying to take it to the next level and get an advance and do responsible things like buy houses. We weren’t in our early 20s and were fortunate enough to get some of the ego out of the way. DENISON The first half of the 90s was almost like Chicago versus Seattle as far as rock presence. Then it flipped in the mid-90s and the English bands took the title back with Oasis, Blur, and Pulp. SIMS I think loud, in-your-face rock bands were not what people were looking for in the late 90s. It was looser and more improvisational and more about the flow and less about the impact. DENISON During that time, with what started to be called “postrock,” suddenly it seemed like everything but rock was popular. Everyone was an improviser with a capital I and into a Brazilian thing or an Afrobeat thing or an electronic thing. The Denison/Kimball Trio did some stuff with Ken Vandermark and Jim O’Rourke on a Sub Pop single. By the time the Jesus Lizard had run its course, I kind of felt like we were on the outside looking in. MCNEILLY Thrill Jockey became more viable. You had Trans Am and Tortoise, of course. To a degree Slint cracked open a wedge that people could drift into. They had rock instrumentation, and I guess you’d call them a rock band, but they almost created their own genre. DENISON I moved to Nashville in the spring of 1999. The band hadn’t officially broken up, but we were going to. Ten years—it was a good run. There was nothing keeping me in Chicago. I wasn’t married, I didn’t have

a family, I didn’t own property. And I feared that I would keep doing the same things with the same people if I didn’t leave. Nashville is a music town, and I can still get to other cities. I could sort of reinvent myself. SIMS I moved to New York from Chicago in the early 2000s. It felt like it was time for a change. I first went there in 1985 with Scratch Acid, and at that point I’d never been out of the south. I was fascinated from the get-go. Around 1998 or ’99, I started thinking, “Look, you’ve always wanted to live there.” I decided to make the plunge. Now I’m in Chelsea in Manhattan. It’s the people I miss the most about Chicago. And burritos at Tecalitlan and Father & Son Pizza. YOW I moved to LA in 2001. I was married at the time and my wife was born in Anaheim, and she sort of had a hankering to end up back here. And that was fine with me. I’d lived in Chicagoland for 15 years, and that was longer than I’d lived anywhere, so I was ready to go. I had done a little bit of acting in Chicago, and I thought it’d be cool to end up doing more of it. MCNEILLY My wife and I had two young kids, and I couldn’t make that work with the band for any combination of reasons. I felt like I had to pick between the band and family, so I picked family. It was a difficult time. Evanston was a good place for us to raise a family. You’re close to Chicago but not in there fighting for parking spaces, and it’s not as congested. It’s a progressive, arts-driven community with a good ethnic and racial balance. That’s what we wanted. ALBINI I don’t say this lightly: the Jesus Lizard were the best band of their generation. Personally, I can attest they were the best musicians, as a group, I’ve ever worked with. I feel profoundly privileged to have worked on their records. They had an unequal blend of precise musicianship and unhinged depravity. Their welding of the grotesque to the sublime was unique—and they were good friends. Three Texans and a Georgia peach, they were fish out of water for a while in a frigid northern city, but they adapted by remaking the city’s music scene in their image. Among other musicians they became a touchstone and an inspiration, a kind of ideal of the band they all wanted to be. They toured relentlessly, made records still hailed as masterpieces, and, for better or worse, never lacked the courage of their convictions. v

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DECEMBER 7, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 37

Recommended and notable shows and critics’ insights for the week of December 7

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ALL AGES

PICK OF THE WEEK

Angel Olsen proves her creative depth has been there from the start ONETIME CHICAGOAN ANGEL OLSEN showed signs of vast talent years ago, but the artistic growth, charisma, and self-possession she projected during her powerful set at this year’s Pitchfork Music Festival proved she’s the real deal. It’s illuminating to consider her development in the context of November’s Phases (Jagjaguwar), a collection of rarities and previously unreleased material from 2012 to 2016. Its songs may not appear on her official albums, but most artists would kill to produce anything as good as her outtakes. Among the recent recordings—including some fully formed songs cut from last year’s breakthrough album My Woman—is the gorgeously hypnotic “Special,” a Velvets-y incantation where Olsen’s sinuous phrasing conveys uncertainty amid slowly intensifying strumming. Her earlier selections are no less satisfying: “California,” a sublime love song she cut before signed with Jagjaguwar in 2013, is fueled by the euphoria of potentially blossoming romance as Olsen explores her full vocal range, from vibrato-heavy cries to low conversational entreaties. There are also several guitar-and-voice demos from the summer of 2015 and an intimate, deeply affecting cover of Roky Erickson’s “For You.” I had assumed the collection would show a movement from folkish simplicity to the more pop-leaning sound Olsen embraced on her previous album; instead it proves that she’s drawn from various threads of American music from the very start. But whether she’s playing with a full band or solo, her powerhouse voice ties them all together in something completely her own. —PETER MARGASAK ò VINH Q DO

ANGEL OLSEN, HERON OBLIVION

Sat 12/9, 9 PM, Riviera Theatre, 4746 N. Racine, $25. 18+

THURSDAY7 Larry Ochs, Nels Cline, and Gerald Cleaver 9 PM, Elastic, 3429 W. Diversey, $20. b

This rugged improvising trio is composed of musicians with extraordinarily disparate personalities who seek common ground while expressing their individual voices. Guitarist Nels Cline and saxophonist Larry Ochs both established themselves in California, the former in LA, where he added a punk ethos to his mixture of free jazz and fusion, and the latter in the Bay Area as a founding member of inﬂuential saxophone quartet Rova. These days, however, Cline lives in New York, where he’s spent most of his time shaping solos of textural richness and architectural concision as a member of Wilco along with exploring a lateblossoming interest in balladry, as heard on his gorgeous solo album Lovers (Blue Note). The gen-

38 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 7, 2017

esis of this trio was a 2014 duo gig Ochs played with drummer Gerald Cleaver, which inspired him to invite Cline to join in. Cleaver—one of the most versatile percussionists alive—is perfect for this configuration. He adroitly shifts gears between everything from feather-stroke delicacy to rocklike tribal thumping to direct flow-and-response to his partners. As heard on a live recording Ochs shared with me, the drummer masterfully feeds the trio’s front line, which enhances its proclivity for stealthily switching functions; Cline might shape a hovering drone only to counter the loosely coiled tenor spell cast by Ochs with a sudden surge of pedal-enhanced mayhem. Elsewhere the guitarist constructs lapidary patterns, injecting his tone with an acidic bite, yet progressing with a calming patience that is caressed and shadowed by terse sax ﬁgures. The pair’s steeplechase machinations develop with an organic ﬂow that is exhilarating as it moves from the lyric to the chaotic, the serene to the explosive. —PETER MARGASAK

FRIDAY8 Milo Scallops Hotel and S.al open. 9 PM, Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, $14. 21+ Rory Ferreira, the rapper-producer better known Milo, who also records and performs as Scallops Hotel, is an artist who pushes himself endlessly. As a lyricist he packs scathing wit, emotive historical references, and magnetic pathos into easy-flowing lines. As a performer he’s in his element, further perfecting the way he rounds his syllables while retaining a natural amiableness even at his most ferocious; when he rips into the ugliest aspects of contemporary society it’s with a spirit that encourages his listeners to seek out something greater. He also frequently releases new music—August’s Who Told You to Think??!!?!?!?! (released via his Ruby Yacht label) is Ferreira’s third full-length this year (though

the only one he dropped as Milo)—and he constantly tours, which enables him to provide for his young family on his own terms. In addition, he finds time to share bits about his life with his fans: for nearly every song on the Bandcamp stream of Who Told You to Think, Ferreira wrote roughly a paragraph to detail its inception, such as how he wound up using local producer Harris Cole’s spacey instrumental for “Poet (Black Bean)” after meeting him at ashow at Bric-a-Brac. These subtle touches have nudged me to dig deeper and pull back more layers of Ferreira’s music (an inevitability for many of his listeners), which often reveals elements in his songs I hadn’t previously picked up on. Beyond that, his work on Who Told You to Think stimulates me to critically examine the complexities of power dynamics, black life in the U.S., and—particularly as a white journalist who writes about music largely made by people of color—the role that I play in it all, and I’m still learning from the album. —LEOR GALIL

Milo ò SPENCER WELLS

Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/soundboard.

Charles Rumback, Jim Baker, and John tate 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $10. 18+ Versatility has long been drummer Charles Rumback’s calling card, but his empathic, elastic range—which has included feverish free jazz, elegant pop-rock, and exploratory groove music— and commitment to ensemble play have sometimes hampered his name recognition. In spite of that, Rumback’s rumbling, post-Paul Motian sound is easily recognizable, and I’m glad he seems to have found a working band that lets it resonate more clearly. His recent Tag Book (Ears & Eyes), the second album he’s released in 2017 with his ruminative trio with pianist Jim Baker and New York bassist John Tate, reinforces his complementary development as composer and leader. The recording features four reﬂective, spacious, and occasionally glacial originals alongside a tender, gently swinging reading of the Stanley Cowell classic “Equipoise.” While Baker’s patient lyric touch—equal parts luxuriant and circuitous, with harmonically ambiguous phrases that hang in the air like smoke—feels like the focal point by default, the entire album oﬀers a profound three-way exploration of high-level improvisation. Rumback doesn’t take any standalone solos but—as heard on the striking opening piece, “Convulsive”—every gesture, pattern, and oblique melodic phrase he plays feels both sponta-

neous and measured, and designed to be savored. Tate ultimately serves as the music’s anchor, playing thoughtful lines that give the trio its harmonic and sonic center. —PETER MARGASAK

SATURDAY9 Ill Legit Chris Crack, Ugly Boy Modeling School, T.Z. Duhh, Konsept the Emcee, Marshall Sinclaire, DJ Encyclopedia Brown, and DJ Cheno open. 10 PM, Subterranean, 2011 W. North, $8. 21+ Rapper-producer Ill Legit belongs to a class of locals who are more seasoned than most rappers grabbing headlines and who are underground by choice. They’ve got an affection for samples that impart a sense of history into their music, and for retro sounds and beats that have the kind of heft weightlifters aspire to handle. Ill Legit’s latest project is a collaboration with Awdazcate, a linchpin of that same underground Chicago hip-hop circle. As Bad Fight, Awdazcate handles the production while Ill Legit rocks the mike. Their self-released debut mixtape, April’s Bad Fight, is succinct and playful; Ill Legit gels so completely with Awdazcate’s animated, chunky music it feels as if Illy made it for himself. On “Popdis” Ill Legit rides an instrumental made out of guttural vocal bursts like a surfer on

choppy waters, mapping out a smooth passageway with rhymes that add more color to a song that’s already bursting with panache. —LEOR GALIL

Jesus Lizard See feature story on page 27. Dead Rider opens. 9 PM, Metro, 3730 N. Clark, sold out. 18+ It’s hard to imagine what the current state of noiserock would be like without the existence of the Jesus Lizard. Often imitated but never replicated, the heavily rhythmic and lyrically twisted Chicagoby-way-of-Austin four-piece drew the blueprint for every grimy, misanthropic outﬁt that popped up in the wake of its 1989 Touch and Go Records debut, Pure. Punk contemporaries such as Metz and Pissed

12.10-13

J UST A N N O U N C E D 1.15 1.30

ON SALE AT NOON THURSDAY 12.7 ON SALE TO VINOFILE MEMBERS TUESDAY 12.5

FUNKADESI CHICAGO JAZZ ORCHESTRA WITH SARAH MARIE YOUNG 2.14 BRANDY CLARK 2.20 KEREN ANN 2.28 SIERRA HULL W/ SCOTT MULVAHILL 3.1 DOYLE BRAMHALL LL 4.20-21 KEVIN NEALON 12.19-20

DON’T MISS BEBEL GILBERTO

12.14

Los Lobos 12.18

Kris Allen Somethin’ About Christmas

12.22-23

Michael McDermott Mischief & Mistletoe

Jeans are frequently compared to the Jesus Lizard, but even the best bands that get that tag come across as mere child’s play when stacked up to the real thing; it takes much more than a heavily distorted guitar and a yelling front man to channel the industrial throb of “Blockbuster,” the bad-vibes sludge of “Then Comes Dudley,” the explosive muck of “Seasick,” or the unsettling beauty of “Pastoral.” The Jesus Lizard’s initial reign of destruction ran from 1987 until 1999, and this tour marks their ﬁrst time playing together since a brief reunion stint that wrapped up in 2010. All four original members will be in place here: superloose singer David Yow, earth-rumbling bassist David Wm. Sims, heady guitarist Duane Denison, and drummer Mac McNeilly—who plays like John Bonham after taking a lot of sketchy speed. —LUCA CIMARUSTI

Pale Horsemen Faces of the Bog, Deathcult, and Hypnochron open. 8 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint, 2105 S. State, $10. 21+

On December 8, Chicago’s outstanding sludge doom-metal quartet Pale Horseman started another apocalypse with the release of their fourth fulllength, The Fourth Seal (Black Bow). The album ﬁnds new drummer Jason Schryver, who joined the band in 2016, adding muscular propulsion to the solid team of bassist Rich Cygan and twin gui- J

UPCOMING SHOWS 12.9

1200 W RANDOLPH ST, CHICAGO, IL 60607 | 312.733.WINE

MUSIC

SHEMEKIA COPELAND WITH CASH BOX KINGS DWELE

12.17

THE EMPTY POCKETS’ HOLIDAY WONDERLAND CONCERT

12.25

JOEL CHASNOFF PRESENTS: CHRISTMAS FOR THE JEWS

12.26-30

POI DOG PONDERING

12.31 & 1.1

BODEANS - NEW YEAR’S SHOWS

1.4-5

BILAL

1.6

TALIB KWELI W/ K’VALENTINE

1.7

AMY BLACK

1.8-9

STEVE EARLE

1.10

TOM COCHRANE

1.11

FLOBOTS

1.12-13 FREDDY JONES BAND W/ THE NADAS 1.16

TRACY NELSON & THE BEL AIRS

1.17

DAVINA & THE VAGABONDS

1.18

SANDRA ANTONGIORGI

1.20-21 LEE ANN WOMACK

DECEMBER 7, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 39

1800 W. DIVISION

Est.1954 Celebrating over 61 years of service to Chicago!

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

MUSIC continued from 39 tarist-vocalists Eric Ondo and Andre Almaraz. Pale Horseman’s live shows are generally pulverizing— and riff monsters like the record’s leadoff track “Final War” will be devastating onstage—but what really gives them depth is their ability to go beyond formula. “Aokigahara” (named for the notorious haunted Japanese suicide forest) breaks halfway through with a clean instrumental interlude that quickly gets filled by twisted, undulating guitar keening that creates an atmosphere of terror and unreality. No light slips through the cracks of the eight-minute “Bereavement” until the six-and-ahalf-minute mark, when psychedelic eﬀects begin to peel back the edges of its aural black hole. Tonight is the release party for The Fourth Seal, which should show off this rich beast to its best advantage: loud. —MONICA KENDRICK

Katie Von Schleicher See also Sunday. Districts headline; Sun Seeker opens. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $15. 21+ There’s an elliptical quality to the lyrics on Katie Von Schleicher’s terrific full-length debut, Shitty Songs (Ba Da Bing). She assays various strains of romantic and personal disconnect, using words to underscore frayed connections and muddied communication, but her honeyed, soulful vocals and the rich arrangements that surround them fill out the otherwise moody pictures with dazzling color. Her adventurous production recalls some of the experiments David Bowie conducted with Brian Eno during his Berlin years, but replaces their urban vibe with something more rustic and folksy. On “Paranoia” Von Schleicher sounds utterly twisted up in uncertainty, singing “Once I get it, it’s already gone” to convey a debilitating mistrust of her own instincts. Her lilting melodic phrases, distinguished by fluid swoops and leaps, echo that feeling of instability while plying the listener with deeply pleasurable, indelible hooks and layers of warming, electronically manipulated piano patterns over a churning, bass-heavy groove. “Life’s a Lie” is sung by a narrator with a sneaking sense that she’s a fraud, but the reality is little more than a lack of confidence exacting destruction on a potential love. Other songs have a dramatically different complexion: on the breathy “Soon” she immediately implores “Come on, we have a complicated love” over a washed-out, cycling beat and busted piano riff, and on “Mary” she hovers on a simple, clean electric-guitar arpeggio and nothing else. —PETER MARGASAK

SUNDAY10 Mars Williams Presents An Ayler Xmas 9 PM, Hungry Brain, 2319 W. Belmont, $10 suggested donation. 21+ After seven years of interpolating holiday favorites and classic material by free-jazz icon Albert Ayler— including the saxophonist’s screaming gospel fervor— in his annual December concert in Chicago, reedist Mars Williams is expanding the concept in 2017. To support Mars Williams Presents: An Ayler Xmas (Soul What), a raucous new release recorded last year at the Hungry Brain, he’s organized a tour around the

40 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 7, 2017

U.S. and Europe this month. The performances will feature a revolving cast of players from each locale, but as the new CD makes clear, it will be hard to top the rapport he has with his Chicago compatriots—the personnel of his long-running Ayler tribute band Witches & Devils, who not only know Williams’s improvisational ethos intimately but have helped him develop this wonderful hybrid. The album captures the band deftly underlining familiar themes from Christmas songs such as “Jingle Bells” and “Angels We Have Heard on High” as well as the Hanukkah classic “Ma’oz Tzur” while melding them with the indelible, keening melodies of Ayler staples like “Spirits” and “Truth Is Marching In” in extended medleys. Each one is performed with bruising intensity, feverish interplay, and cathartic, sobbing spirituality as the group chases Ayler’s singular marriage of overloaded joy and gushing release—an approach that transcends any seasonal limitations. The band includes the hurtling rhythm section of drummer Steve Hunt,

bassists Brian Sandstrom and Kent Kessler, and pianist Jim Baker. Cornetist Josh Berman and cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm (in his ﬁrst Chicago performance since he moved to Kingston, New York, this fall) join Williams in the wild front line. —PETER MARGASAK

Katie Von Schleicher See Saturday. Districts headline; Sun Seeker opens. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $15. 21+

MONDAY11

FIND HUNDREDS OF

READER-RECOMMENDED

RESTAURANTS EXCLUSIVE VIDEO FEATURES AND SIGN UP FOR WEEKLY NEWS CHICAGOREADER.COM/FOOD

Andrew Bird See also Tuesday and Wednesday. Joan Shelley opens. 8 PM, Fourth Presbyterian Church, 126 E. Chestnut, sold out. Bird plays through Thursday at the church, then Friday at the Hideout. b J

DECEMBER 7, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 41

bottom lounge ON SALE FRIDAY 12.8

MUSIC continued from 41

STAND TOGETHER 2017 - NIGHT ONE

12.09 EL FAMOUS

DEADSHIPS / RYNO / VCTMS / SKYLINES / INVICTUS

STAND TOGETHER 2017 - NIGHT TWO

12.10 EL FAMOUS

DAVLIN / SPEAKING WITH GHOSTS / ERABELLA SPIT / LOWCOUNTRY

12.17 THE SPILL CANVAS WILD / SUPER WHATEVR

‘SO MUCH BEWTEEN BETWEEN US’ 10 10YR YR ANNIVERSARY ANNIVERSARY

12.23 INEPT

DANGER IS MY MIDDLE NAME / THE HOODIE LIFE DANIEL WADE

12.31 MURDER BY DEATH THE LIFE AND TIMES

SILVER WRAPPER PRESENTS

01.06 DOROTHY

REACT PRESENTS

01.13 SAYMYNAME 01.17 ANTI-FLAG & STRAY FROM THE PATH THE WHITE NOISE / SHARPTOOTH

01.19 STORY OF THE YEAR REACT PRESENTS

01.27 MAKO

BOTTOM LOUNGE & KICKSTAND PRESENT

02.01 DIET CIG

GREAT GRANDPA / THE SPOOK SCHOOL

02.02 AVATAR

THE BRAINS / HELLZAPOPPIN SILVER WRAPPER PRESENTS

02.03 TOO MANY ZOOZ REACT PRESENTS

02.13 JOYNER LUCAS & DIZZY WRIGHT RIOT FEST PRESENTS

02.25 AMERICAN NIGHTMARE NO WARNING / SPIRITUAL CRAMP

02.28 J BOOG

JESSE ROYAL / ETANA

03.01 GABRIELLE APLIN JOHN SPLITHOFF REACT PRESENTS

03.03 NIGHTMARES ON WAX 03.17 CLAN OF XYMOX 03.24 KNOCKED LOOSE TERROR / JESUS PIECE / STONE THE NOISE PRESENTS

03.29 ICED EARTH

SANCTUARY / KILL RITUAL

04.21 FORTUNATE YOUTH TATANKA

RIOT FEST PRESENTS

05.19 FU MANCHU

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42 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 7, 2017

During his own migration season—roughly every Yuletide season—Los Angeles resident Andrew Bird brings his whistling songs and violin back to the city where he first took flight. He always seems to shine for the hometown crowd, and his four-night residency at downtown’s beautiful Fourth Presbyterian Church provides a large number of local fans the chance to see him in an intimate setting. The theme of the shows is “Gezelligheid,” a Dutch word that has no precise English equivalent, but means both fellowship and reunion with old friends. On Friday, things get even cozier at Bird’s sold-out, wait-listed Foundations of Music benefit concert at the Hideout, a venue that was one of his favorite nesting places before his following became too big to fit inside its snug perimeters. Bird is as prolific and inventive as ever; these performances will feature music from 2016’s accessible and open-hearted Are You Serious? and from the second installment in his site-specific instrumental Echolocations series, Echolocations: River, released this fall. Recorded while Bird was standing in the Los Angeles River, the latter shows his instrumental prowess to as great effect as its 2015 predecessor, Echolocations: Canyon, and brings the sensory aspects of the landscape together in its sound. His holiday homecoming concerts celebrate his whole career, so along with the recent material, expect to see lots of reunions, throwbacks, and deep cuts. —MONICA KENDRICK

Say Anything See also Tuesday. Radar State and Backwards Dancer open. 6:30 PM, Metro, 3730 N. Clark, $31, $26.50 in advance. b In the midst of numerous allegations of sexual misconduct and abuse within the emo and pop-punk community this fall—particularly the ones against Brand New front man Jesse Lacy—Say Anything front man Max Bemis announced on Twitter his group would no longer play their spritely, soulinfluenced track about sexual impropriety, “Wow, I Can Get Sexual Too.” Bemis wrote that the song, a B side from the 2006 reissue of their uncompromising 2004 rock opera, . . . Is a Real Boy, is “no longer appropriate,” and asked his (implicitly, but more specifically, male) followers to reexamine their relationships with others in the scene and do better: “We should all question the dynamics of sexuality and our role in this.” More than almost anyone else whose band emerged from the commingling of emo and pop-punk in the early 2000s, Bemis has a long history of challenging himself and asking tough questions that others would rather let fester under a rug. This is as responsible as his ambitions for his group’s audacious early records. For the next two nights Say Anything will perform its first three proper albums (Bemis has largely ignored the group’s 2001 self-released debut, Baseball). On Monday they’ll roll through . . . Is a Real Boy and the first half of 2007’s double album, In Defense of the Genre. On Tuesday they’ll play the record’s second half along with their tightest, most radio-friendly album to date, 2009’s Say Anything. Although In Defense was about upholding emo during its cultural nadir, Bemis and company also pushed back against the musical expectations of bands during that era, veering toward country (“That Is Why”) and electro-pop (“Baby Girl I’m a Blur”) while raging against, well, everyone. The album’s tenth anniversary is the

impetus for this tour, and . . . Is a Real Boy is the band’s high-water mark, but over these last few weeks, I often ﬁnd myself thinking about the quasi-symphonic single from Say Anything, “Do Better.” While these types of “album anniversary” tours can be rote at worst, Say Anything shows that revisiting our past is crucial in order to make for a better future. —LEOR GALIL

TUESDAY12 Andrew Bird See Monday. Joan Shelley opens. 8 PM, Fourth Presbyterian Church, 126 E. Chestnut, sold out. b Say ANything See Monday. Radar State and Backwards Dancer open. 7:30 PM, Metro, 3730 N. Clark, $31, $26.50 in advance. 18+

WEDNESDAY13 Andrew Bird See Monday. Joan Shelley opens. 8 PM, Fourth Presbyterian Church, 126 E. Chestnut, sold out. b Chikamorachi with Jeff Tweedy Lia Kohl & Haley Fohr open. 9 PM, Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, sold out. 21+ One of the less celebrated legacies of former Chicagoan Jim O’Rourke has been bringing together strong, idiosyncratic musicians who then forge lasting bonds. In 2001 he shepherded drummer Glenn Kotche, whom he had worked with extensively, into the Wilco fold. Four years later he lassoed the energy of drummer Chris Corsano and underground rock bassist Darin Gray (with whom he worked in Brise-Glace) as the rhythm section for his project with legendary Japanese saxophonist Akira Sakata. Since then Corsano and Gray have developed a remarkably strong connection that seems to have grown more telepathic and agile with time. As the duo Chikamorachi, much of their work is still confined to performances with Sakata (although they did play a galvanizing concert with Chicago reedist Mars Williams at the Hungry Brain in 2012). Next month the group will drop a fiery new album, Proton Pump (Family Vineyard). Along with Sakata, the album features another grey eminence of Japanese experimental music, pianist Masahiko Satoh, who locks into the flow of the trio’s sinewy yet visceral attack, laying down carpets of left-hand disruption, thunderous propulsion, and splintery melody. On “Bullet Apoptosis” Corsano and Gray ebb and flow like breath, achieving rumbling tumult that encourages Sakata’s acerbic alto to sail, pivot, and splay, while on “Chemiosmotic Coupling of Atom” they move between tiptoe scampers and martial fury as they accompany Sakata’s wild vocalizations, which range from whispers to screams. More recently Chikamorachi has been working with a new partner, Jeff Tweedy, a childhood pal of Gray’s. Together they performed a lacerating set at this year’s Big Ears Festival that was closer to noise than free jazz, and that’s the trio that will make its local debut tonight. —PETER MARGASAK v

FOOD & DRINK

REGARDS TO EDITH | $$$ 326 N. Morgan 312-763-6564 regardstoedith.com

RESTAURANT REVIEW

At Regards to Edith, old-school Chicago eats in a changing neighborhood Heisler Hospitality’s 12th restaurant is the latest breath into the Fulton Market District restaurant bubble. By MIKE SULA

’m not a fan of suicide, but if I could crawl into the chocolate churro souffle at Regards to Edith I would joyfully eat myself to death. With no regrets, I’d happily gaze down on the runner who snatches the plate away, delivering my remains to the dishwasher, who then blasts what’s left of me down the drain with a howitzer of hot steaming water. But more about this outstanding dessert later. Heisler Hospitality’s 12th joint is on the first floor of the erstwhile Cold Storage building, now the home of Google’s Chicago HQ. According to the restaurant’s backstory, the mysterious Edith in question is the addressee on an old photograph of Chicago heavyweight boxer Kingfish Levinsky, which would’ve been

Uncle Bill’s Boozy Sundae, with herbaceous chocolate-and-fernet ice cream and brownie bites; thin, flaky pizza puff, filled with liquid hot burrata and served with pepperoni oil ò JAMIE RAMSAY

cool to see blown up and hung on the wall somewhere. It’s the wish of every dreamer in town right now to open a restaurant in the Fulton Market District, a neighborhood so popular it’s killing its own rapidly diminishing industrial charm. At Regards to Edith raw brick walls and a pitch-black exposed ceiling are the only things remotely evocative of the space’s industrial history. Add to those a few towering green plants and from certain angles Regards to Edith feels a bit like a fern bar. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. On the other hand, the menu, developed by Jared Wentworth (who’s since left the company), nods toward a rougher Chicago. As executed by his successor, former chef de

cuisine Eric Michael, it features gussied-up makeovers of classic hometown foods. Some of these are listed under a category called Brown Paper, presumably because you’re so fancy you can only eat them with your head inside a bag. A shaved prime-rib sandwich wearing a thin Italian-beef disguise features thickly sliced (relative to real Italian beef) cow showered with uniformly diced, delicately oiled giardiniera (a variant that previously could not have existed in this dimension), and a small pitcher of Italian beef jus, to apply to your own speciﬁc taste. It’s a perfectly good beef sandwich, but I’m glad the decision was made not to call it an Italian beef (especially at $19). There’s also a pizza puff on the menu. Ew, right? Hold on now, this one is nothing like

those previously frozen ticking time bombs of molten processed cheese. The thin, flaky pastry shimmers with fat, but it’s crackly and light and barely contains a core of nearly liquid hot burrata. An application of pepperoni oil—simply diced, cured sausage and oregano suspended in olive and Calabrian chile oils—spells true redemption for this wretched snack. On the side of a perfunctory cheeseburger there are ﬂuffy, pale golden fries draped in a light cheddar Mornay sauce and scattered with pickled shishito, cayenne, and Calabrian chile peppers (the fries come with the beef sandwich too). A few other Chicago referents are scattered around the menu as well, among them a roasted half chicken with tiny potatoes, J

DECEMBER 7, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 43

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FOOD & DRINK

Shaved prime-rib sandwich served with fries draped in a cheddar Mornay sauce and scattered with chile peppers; churro souﬄe, a ramekin topped with a cinnamon sugar-dusted crust that when hit by hot dark-chocolate sauce implodes into a warm, sweet bog of queso fresco and cream cheese ò JAMIE RAMSAY

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44 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 7, 2017

carrots, and a few coins of preserved lemon— but without peas and a more serious application of lemon and oregano, which makes calling it chicken Vesuvio revisionist history. Four butterflied shrimp jacketed in an arresting green-colored herbal breading are certainly greasy enough for de jonghe, but look as if they sprang from the mind of Dr. Seuss. Less locally focused, an otherwise unobjectionable matzo ball soup advertised with shaved black truffle and foie gras schmaltz bears none of the former’s hallmark aroma or the latter’s livery richness. Other less thematic dishes excel on their own merits. Serviceably thin potato pierogi on a pool of smoked creme fraiche are bedecked with jewellike salmon roe and grated cured egg yolk. Pity the poor chef de partie who peels the grapes for a salad of red leaf lettuce, shaved apples, and creamy lavenderand-espresso-rubbed cheese, its overall sweetness cut with pumpkin-seed vinaigrette. Brilliant green arugula-infused pappardelle coil under a bolognese of mushrooms and root vegetables. A simple salmon ﬁllet is engulfed by an nduja-fueled bouillabaise teeming with clams, mussels, and shrimp. A tiny serving of pork-cheek pot roast melts amid baby carrots, onions, and mushrooms. It’s clear that the seasonal rather than the thematic elements on this menu work the best, and while there are plenty of likable

dishes in addition to a few that ought to be retired early, nothing really hits it out of the park until it’s time for dessert. Pastry chef Shawn Anderson-Calix’s fanciful options include a butternut hand pie with carbonated grapes, a triﬂe with moonshine-compressed apples, and a brownie sundae with herbaceous chocolate-and-fernet ice cream. But it’s the aforementioned churro souffle that seems likely to become the signature of Regards to Edith. An item not listed on the print menu that requires a good 20 minutes to grace the table, it’s the kitchen’s greatest weapon, a ramekin topped with a cinnamon sugar-dusted crust that when hit by a steaming stream of hot dark-chocolate sauce implodes into a warm, sweet bog of queso fresco and cream cheese that beckons like it’s alive. The beverage program, by former Publican cicerone Michael McAvena, features a few treasures like the wonderfully funky and dry local Prima farmhouse cider, and cocktails like the Deli Counter Fish, vegetal with shaved celery and bison-grass vodka along with a bitter kiss of Malort. I’m betting Regards to Edith will do a whole lot better in this spot than Smack Shack, the Minneapolis-based lobster pot that preceded it. That’s assured if the weaker entries on the menu catch up to the stronger ones. v

v @MikeSula

Hundreds of bar suggestions are available at chicagoreader.com/ barguide. Bottoms up!

○ Watch a video of the Delta’s Adam Kamin making this cocktail with tomalley at chicagoreader.com/food.

NEIGHBORHOOD

PHYLLIS’ MUSICAL INN // WICKER PARK

ò CHRIS BUDDY

REGGIES // SOUTH LOOP

Everyday: $3.75 Moosehead pints & $2.50 Hamms cans

$5 Absolut & Bacardi Cocktails Every Day special

BARRA Ñ // AVONDALE

SCHUBAS // LAKEVIEW

7 7 3 . 4 8 6 .9 8 62

The Tamale-Spiced Tomalley by Adam Kamin of the Delta

SPONSORED CONTENT

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$2 OFF Mojitos, $2 OFF Margaritas, Imported & Domestic Beers on special

$9 Tecate can + El Jimador Silver shot, $6 Heineken Draft, $6 Strongbow Draft & $5 Tecate can

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COCKTAIL CHALLENGE

Consider the lobster guts By JULIA THIEL

OBSTER TOMALLEY, also known as “the green stuff,” is a digestive gland in lobsters that performs the functions of the liver and pancreas. Or as ADAM KAMIN, beverage director and partner at THE DELTA, calls it, “lobster guts.” Challenged to create a cocktail with tomalley by Brandon Phillips of the Duck Inn, Kamin says his first worry was “justifying to my partners why I had to buy lobsters for their guts to mix into a cocktail.” Since tomalley isn’t sold separately, the first step in creating the cocktail was purchasing a couple of whole lobsters; the second was poaching them and removing the tomalley. Generally considered to be a delicacy, tomalley is usually eaten straight or used to thicken and add flavor to sauces. Kamin compares it to “green, slimy” fish butter, noting that it tastes rich and fishy. Because the Delta specializes in tamales, Kamin incorporated the tomalley into a corn puree seasoned with red-hot tamale spices. More spices—the ones used in the poaching liquid for tamales—went into tomato juice, an addition inspired by Clamato (tomato and clam juice). He chose the caraway-flavored spirit aquavit for its ability to stand up to strong spic-

es, and infused it with brown butter, a nod to the drawn butter often served with lobster. After he’d decided what to do with the tomalley, Kamin was left with the lobster meat. “All my staff wanted to eat it,” he says, “but I thought it would be best to incorporate into the cocktail.” He pureed the meat with saffron and a little of the poaching liquid and froze it in ice cube trays, serving the cocktail—which he called the Tamale-Spiced Tomalley—over a large lobster ice cube. TAMALE-SPICED TOMALLEY

2 OZ BROWN BUTTER-WASHED AQUAVIT 2 OZ TAMALE-SPICED TOMATO BROTH 2 OZ TOMALLEY-CORN PUREE Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker. Shake with ice and strain over a lobster ice cube.

WHO’S NEXT:

Kamin has challenged EMILY EYTALIS of BELLYQ to create a cocktail with BONITO FLAKES (dried, smoked tuna). v

v @juliathiel

$5 Jim Beam flavors, $5 Off Color Le Wood Biere de Garde pints & $7 HerbstCULT Marzen pints

I|O GODFREY // RIVER NORTH

Monday-Friday 4-7pm: $6 La Marca Prosecco I O G O D F R E Y. CO M

$10 Dos Equis can + El Jimador Silver shot, $7 Heineken Draft, $7 Strongbow Draft & $7 Dos Equis can

ALIVEONE // LINCOLN PARK

Wednesday: 1/2 price aliveOne signature cocktails ALIVEONE .COM

LAKEVIEW

TANGO SUR // 3763 N SOUTHPORT

T A N G O S U R G R I L L . C O M • 7 7 3 . 4 7 7. 5 4 6 6

Tango Sur, an Argentine Steakhouse offers a vast array of culinary delights and has been influenced by many different cultures, including Mediterranean, Italian and Spanish. BYOB.

“...offers an eclectic mix of a menu...” — THRILLIST

DECEMBER 7, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 45

SENIOR

JOBS SALES & MARKETING Telephone Sales Experienced/aggressive telephone closers needed now to sell ad space for Chicago’s oldest and largest newspaper rep firm. Immediate openings in Loop office. Salary + commission. 312-368-4884. TELEMARKETING/ FUNDRAISING: CHRISTMAS CASH! Albany Park area. Start Today! 847-863-2275

food & drink EXPERIENCED DELI HELP Wanted: Night Shift 11pm-7am. Also, Part-time weekdays & weekends. New York Bagel & Bialy, Email: rawwar5449@yahoo.com, Subject Line: applying for Deli Job.

General SR R&D ENGR, IPsoft Incorporated, Chicago, IL - Produce functional well-tested code using appropriate technologies such as: Java/ Spring/Guava/JDBC/Tomcat/Junit. Use open source software, such as M ySQL/NoSQL datastores, to implement complex data/relationship algorithms. Implement/maintain core transactional & messaging svcs in a Java & Spring IoC container environment. Define delivery schedules & metrics for performance assessment & meeting implementation targets. D evelop/maintain remote client API’s & implement/maintain core SOAP & REST + JSON API’s & interfaces (Apache CFX, Jersey and ExtJS). Re q.s: BS or equiv in CS or related; 6 yrs enterprise exp. working w/ Core Java; 6 yrs’ exp. w/ Java Spring/ Guava/JDBC/Tomcat/Junit; & 2 yrs’ exp. working with Apple or Linux OSes. To apply, contact Angela Scalici, IPsoft Incorporated, 17 State Street, 14th Floor, New York, New York 10004, Angela.Scalici@ipsoft. com

SOFTWARE

ENGI-

NEER. Chicago, IL. Develop, upgrade and support large scale ecommerce and social networking applications with emphasis on high availability and low latency. Create specialized tools to compute market analytics on merchant datasets. Work with: Languages: Python, Javascript, Common Lisp; Databases: MongoDb, Redis, PostGreSQL; Frameworks: asyncio/aiohttp, Django, Twisted, PyMC, Payment Processing; Cloud computing platform: AWS EC2, S3, Route53. Required: master’s degree in computer science/related. NO PHONE CALLS. Forward resumes to: SpotOn Processing LLC, Attn: Mr. Doron Friedman, 500 W Madison St, Suite 3130, Chicago, IL 60661

Sr. Android Software Engineer, BMW Tech Corp., Chicago, IL. Reqs: Bach (or for equiv) in CS, Eng., Math, PHYS, or rel fld, + 5 yrs post-degree exp in job offer or dir. rel., or MA (or for equiv) + 2 yrs exp. Exp must incl: Dev exp w/command of multi modern progr lang: Java, JS, & C++ or Objective-C); Android mobile app dev; Internet tech: web svcs, browsers for mobile devices, HTML5, XML, JavaScript, & HTTP; & dev Script Lang, VMs, Cloud Svcs, Mobile Widgets/Web Apps, Open Source & Agile. Resume to L. Ianchello, BMW, 300 Chestnut Ridge Rd., Woodcliff Lake, NJ 07677. No hh.

NORTHWESTERN MEMORIAL HEALTHCARE seeks Investment Operations Analysts for Chicago, IL location to reconcile transaction data & month end market values w/the investment & internal investment db. Master’s in Finance +2yrs exp OR Bachelor’s in Finance +5yrs exp req’d. Req’d skills-2yrs w/ automate processes; generate financial reports; manage large databases; reconcile data sets; Excel: Pivot Tables, V Lookup, VBA, SQL; Access: VBA, SQL. Bkgd check req’d. Apply at: http://jobseeker.nm.org/ Requisition ID: 0031129 EOE

Environmental Systems Design, Inc. seeks Project Engineers – Mechanical for Chicago, IL location to lead multiple HVAC projects for large-scale data centers & other facilities. Master’s in Mechanical Eng. + 2yrs exp. or Bachelor’s in Mechanical Eng. + 5yrs exp. req’d. Req’d skills: 2yrs w/HVAC design for data centers, AutoCAD, Revit, 6sigmaDCX, QA /QC best practices, ASHRAE 62. 1 & 90.1. Send resume to: J. Gudino, REF: NT, 175 W. Jackson Blvd, 1400 Chicago, IL 60604

SENIOR SOFTWARE DEVELOPER (Identity Management). Design, develop, debug, & support customer software & APIs; CyberArk AIM integrations. U.S. Master’s deg. or foreign equiv. (Applied Computer Science or related field) req’d. Min. 2 yrs’ exp. w/ MS SQL Server in software development req’d. Min. 1 yr. exp. w/ CyberArk AIM integration req’d. Great Software Laboratory, Inc., Chicago, IL. Full-time telecommute option available. Resumes to: Recruiting, Great Software Laboratory, Inc., 60 E. Monroe St., Unit 4301, Chicago, IL 60603.

BUS DRIVER - Six Hours Per Day. Cass School District 63, $17/hr. Passenger CDL Required Apply online at www. CassD63.org or call 331/4814000

SAP Technical Analyst: Resp for development & implementation of SW apps & modules for customized SAP-based ERP system for shared services division of int’l ad & mrktg comm’s company. Chicago, IL location. Req’s a BS in Comp Sci & 5 yrs post-degree progressive exp in job offered or SW Engr’g Team Lead. Send resume to: Lion Re:Sources, Inc., 35 W Wacker Dr, Chicago, IL, 60601. Attn: L. Baker. COMPUTER/IT: Gladius Capital Management LP seeks Director of Enterprise Infrastructure Svcs. in Chicago, IL. Apply exp. in VoIP sys. dev.; Network QoS mgmt; CentOS Linux based server dev. & sys. admin.; implement. exp. in VMWare virtualization; & server-side app. & web dev. Must have BSEE, Comp. Sci., related or equiv. + 5 yrs. E-mail resume to: Recruiting@ GladiusGroup.com. No calls. EOE.

SR. ANALYST, FINANCIAL PLANNING & ANALYSIS (CHICAGO, IL): MAIL RESUME TO ALYSSA BRADT,INTELIQUENT INC, 550 W. ADAMS ST, STE# 900, CHICAGO, IL 60661.

SALES MANAGER Managing Director – Hire/ supervise Construction/Property sales team recruiters. Reqs: 2 yrs exp as Corp Recruiting Mgr/

REAL ESTATE

Business Mgr in recruitment industry w/exp recruiting sr execs/ technical empl. in construction/ property industry. Work related writing sample required. Mail resume: Veredus Corp, Attn: K. Walts/Re: BUL, 4300 W Cypress Street, STE 900, Tampa, FL 33607. Jobsite: Chicago, IL.

RENTALS

Research Technologist 3. Northwestern University. Evanston, IL. Participates in desg & execution of research lab projs. Conducts experimental tests & procs incl cell cultures, ELISA, & real time-quantitative PCR & processes & analyzes data. Bach of Sc. degree in Biology, Microbiology or a rel field & exp work in a lab. Send resume to Northwestern University, attn: Lena Henderson, 2040 Sheridan Rd. Evanston, IL 60208

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 $700-$899 Newly decorated, carpeted, stove, refrigerator, Elevator, laundry room, Free Credit check, no application fee. 312-802-7301

STUDIO OTHER

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 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 1BR, 7910 S. Ridgeland,

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

$550/mo Heated. Steadman Rlty. 773-284-5822 After 5pm 773-835-9870

BEST PRICE BEST APARTMENT BEST LOCATION 1BR $650. 8416 S. Cottage. Next to Target & Nike stores. 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)

FALL SPECIAL - Chicago South

LARGE SUNNY ROOM w/fridge & microwave. Near Oak Park, Green Line & Buses. 24 hr Desk, Parking Lot $101/week & Up. (773)378-8888 CROSSROADS HOTEL SRO SINGLE RMS Private bath, PHONE, CABLE & MAIDS. 1 Block to Orange Line 5300 S. Pulaski 773-581-1188

Ashland Hotel nice clean rms. 24 hr desk/maid/TV/laundry/air. Low rates daily/weekly/monthly. South Side. Call 773-376-5200

1 BR UNDER $700 SAVINGS!

Spacious. $675/mo. Heated.

9107 S. LOOMIS. Large Studio.

Call 773-487-0053

FREE UTILITIES Studios. $675 & up.

FALL

63RD & PULASKI. 1BR. Modern &

NEWLY

Remod. 1 BR Apts $650 w/gas incl. 2-5BR start at $650 & up. Sec 8 Welc. Rental Assistance Prog. for Qualified Applicants offer up to $200 /month for 1 yr. (773)412-1153 Wesley Realty

7022 S. SHORE DRIVE Impeccably Clean Highrise STUDIOS, 1 & 2 BEDROOMS Facing Lake & Park. Laundry & Security on Premises. Parking & Apts. Are Subject to Availability. TOWNHOUSE APARTMENTS 773-288-1030 FALL SPECIAL: Studios starting at $499 incls utilities, 1BR $550, 2BR $599, 2BR $699, With approved credit. No Security Deposit for Sec 8 Tenants. South Shore & Southside. 312-656-5066 or 773-287-9999

Side Beautiful Studios, 1,2,3 & 4 BR’s, Sec 8 ok. $500 gift cert. for Sec 8 tenants. Also Homes for rent available. 773-287-9999. Westside Locations 773-287-4500

FALL SPECIAL $500 Toward Rent Beautiful Studios 1, 2, 3 & 4 BR Sect. 8 Welc. Westside Loc, Must qualify. Also Homes for Rent available . 773-287-4500 www.wjmngmt.com

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

CHICAGO 70TH & King Dr, 1BR, clean, quiet, well maintained bldg, Lndry, Heat incl. Sec. 8 Ok Starting at $720/mo 773-510-9290 Newly updated, clean furnished rooms in Joliet, near buses & Metra, elevator. Utilities included, $91/wk. $395/mo. 815-722-1212 BIG ROOM with stove, fridge, bath & nice wood floors. Near Red Line & Buses. Elevator & Laundry, Shopping. $121/wk + up. 773-561-4970 NICE ROOM w/stove, fridge & bath Near Aldi, Walgreens, Beach, Red Line & Buses. Elevator & Laundry. $133/wk & up. 773-275-4442

MAYWOOD, 2 & 3BR Apartments, new Stainless Steel appliancess, Section 8 Welcome, Available Now. Call 708-790-2354. 7425 S. COLES - 1 BR $620, 2 BR $735, Includes Free heat & appliances & cooking gas. (708) 424-4216 Kalabich Mgmt 6930 S. SOUTH SHORE DRIVE Studios & 1BR, INCL. Heat, Elec, Cking gas & PARKING, $585-$925, Country Club Apts 773-752-2200

1 MONTH FREE South Shore Studios $600-$750 Free Heat, Fitness Ctr, Lndry rm. Niki 773.808. 2043 www.livenovo.com Chicago - Hyde PARK 5401 S. Ellis. 1BR. $625/mo. Call 773-955-5106

232 E 121ST Pl.

BACK TO SCHOOL SPECIAL - $300 Move in Fee - Nice lrg 1BR $565; 2BR $650 & 1 3BR $800, balcony. Sec 8 Welc. 773-995-6950

CHICAGO 92ND AND M a r quette, Good location, 2BR, 3rd floor, quiet bldg, Nice! Heat included, $700 w/1 mo rent & 1 mo sec. 773-505-1853

7520 S. COLES - 1 BR $520, 2 BR $645, Includes appliances & AC, Near transp., No utilities included (708) 424-4216 Kalabich Mgmt NEWLY REMOD 1BR & Studios starting at $580. No sec dep, move in fee or app fee. Free heat/hot water. 1155 W. 83rd St., 773-619-0204

1 BR $700-$799 62ND & MAPLEWOOD , 4BR, 2BA ,$1200/mo, $850 move in fee, lrg LR/DR, utilities not included, No security deposit. Call 773406-0604

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

SECTION 8 WELCOME! South side, Recently renovated, 1, 2 & 3BR Apts. FREE HEAT! $800$1250/mo. Call Sean, 773-410-7084

1 BR $900-$1099 ONE BEDROOM APARTMENT near Loyola Park, 1329 W. Estes. Hardwood floors. Cats OK. Heat included. Laundry in building. $925$950/month. Available 1/1. 773-7614318. ONE BEDROOM APARTMENT near Warren Park. 1902 W. Pratt. Hardwood floors. Cats OK. Heat included. Laundry in building. Available 1/1. $900/month. 773-761-4318.

1 BR $1100 AND OVER 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. $1150/mo. First Month Free! No security deposit. Call/text 773-230-3116 or call 773-477-9251, email: herbmalkind@comcast.net

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** 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 ∫

Retail

BINNY’S IS HIRING! Binny’s Beverage Depot is the Midwest’s largest upscale retailer of ﬁne wines, spirits, beers and cigars, and due to our continued growth, we are now looking for dedicated individuals to join our team at the following locations:

Skokie Elmwood Park River Grove Lincolnwood

Grand Avenue Lakeview Lincoln Park South Loop

SEASONAL AND PARTTIME STORE ASSOCIATES We are seeking energetic, customer-oriented individuals to perform a variety of store functions. Qualified persons must be over 21 years of age, able to lift 40-50 lbs. and available to work flexible hours. Previous retail experience a plus, with cashier or stock experience preferred. Candidates must be able to work nights & weekends. In return for your skills, we offer growth opportunities and attractive compensation.

Please apply online at

binnys.com/careers

EOE

46 CHICAGO READER | DECEMBER 7, 2017

BINNY’S IS HIRING! Binny’s Beverage Depot is the Midwest’s largest upscale retailer of fine wines, spirits, beers and cigars, and due to our continued growth, we are now looking for dedicated individuals to join our team at the following locations:

Skokie Lincolnwood

PART-TIME STORE ASSOCIATES We are seeking energetic, customer-oriented individuals to perform a variety of store functions. Qualified persons must be over 21 years of age, able to lift 40-50 lbs. and available to work flexible hours. Previous retail experience a plus, with cashier or stock experience preferred. Candidates must be able to work nights & weekends. In return for your skills, we offer growth opportunities and attractive compensation.

Please apply online at

www.binnys.com/careers

EOE

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** FAR SOUTH SIDE - Newly rehabbed & spacious 1BR $950 & 2BR $1100. Appliances & heat incl. Near shopping & public trans. 773-716-7679

F PALOS HILLS -REALLY NICE! E 1 bedroom, Heat/water included. Laundry facility. Close to 294 & Rt. 83. Call 708-9744493 MOST BEAUTIFUL APARTMENTS! 6748 Crandon, 2BR, off street pkng 7527 Essex, 2BR, $850/mo and up. 773-947-8572 / 312-613-4424 CHICAGO - BEVERLY, large studio, 1 & 2BR Apts. Carpet, A/ C, laundry, near transportation, $680-$1020/mo. Call 773-2334939 SUBURBS, RENT TO OWN! Buy with No closing costs and get help with your credit. Call 708868-2422 or visit www.nhba.com ACACIA SRO HOTEL Men Preferred! Rooms for Rent. Weekly & Monthly Rates. 312-421-4597

CHICAGO, RENT TO OWN! Buy with no closing costs and get help with your credit. Call 708868-2422 or visit www.nhba.com

NO SECURITY DEPOSIT NO MOVE IN FEE 1, 2, 3 BEDROOM APTS (773) 874-1122

2 BR UNDER $900 BRIDGEPORT STUDIO , heated floors, utilities included. Floor to ceiling windows. Pool, appliances, 24 hour maintenance & security. $795/ mo. No deposit. Heated parking available. 773-924-7368, video@ bestrents.net

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 8324 S INGLESIDE 2BR $780/ mo & Studio $625/mo, newly remodeled, laundry, hrdwd flrs, cable, Sec 8 welc. 708-308-1509 or 773-493-3500 SOUTH CHICAGO- Near 82nd/ Ingleside, lrg. 2BR, all hrdwd. flrs. lrg. Kit/BA. Laundry. $800/mo. Tenant pays heat. 708-921-9506. CHICAGO SW 1516 W. 58th St. Updated 2BR, ceramic, intercom, encl. porch/yard, quiet cul-de-sac, close to trans., $725, 312-719-3733

CHICAGO 94-3739 S. Bishop. 2BR, 5 Rms, 2nd flr, appls, parking, storage & closet space, near shops/ trans. $900 + sec. 708-335-0786

CHATHAM 88TH/DAUPHIN. Bright, spacious 2BR.

Chicago, 9121 S. Cottage Grove, 2BR apt. $1050/mo Newly remod, appls, mini blinds, ceiling fans, pkng Sec 8 OK. Free Heat 312-915-0100

CHICAGO - 72ND & TALMAN,

2 BR $900-$1099

3 BR OR MORE UNDER $1200

CHICAGO, 74TH & Emerald, 2nd floor, 2BR Apt, dining room, stove & fridge, enclosed porch w/ closet space. $850/mo. , heat included. 773-848-1858 65th & WOODLAWN: large 1BR, stove, refrig., gas, light included. No security deposit. Section 8 ok. $875/ mo. Call 773-684-1166.

5215 W AUGUSTA BLVD 2BR $875, 5554 W Gladys 2BR $900 Heat included, Move-in special $399! 773-251-6652

2 BR $1100-$1299 EVANSTON: 2111 WESLEY, 2BR, near Northwestern, parking, storage, all utilities, A/C, laundry included. All wood floors, 2-flat. $1250/mo. Available January 2. 847-424-1885 or alanbirman@ hotmail.com

3BR, 2 BATH, LR, DR, Kitchen,

Free Assigned Parking Space, Laundry Room in Bldg. Newly remodeled, 82nd & Jeffery, Avail beg of Jan, $1150/mo (708) 567-3084

AVAILABLe NOW

ELMHURST 2BR, 1 MO FREE RENT 1100sf, spac eat-in kit, new a ppls/carpet, ac, $1175/incl ht, water, pkg. 773-743-4141 urbanequiti es.com

SENior citizENS 62+ yEarS

MILWAUKEE/BELMONT 1BR, 4 Rooms Newly remod, hdwd flrs,

Section 8 Eligibility-Low Rents 1 Br & Studio aptS 3939 S Calumet Ave 773-373-8480 or 373-8482 6225 S Drexel Ave 773-955-6603 or 955-7162

Offering Quality services for Senior Citizens 62 years and older • Wellmaintained, secure-gated parking • Close to shopping, restaurants, public transportation • On-site Internet center • Computer training • Movies • Arts & Crafts classes • Bible classes • free weekly transportation for grocery shopping • Coin-operated laundry machines • Vending machines • Secure mail system and more Get more information at the website: www.trinityseniorapartments.com

heat, cooking gas & hot water incl. Sec 8 OK. $1200. Call 773-758-0309

FOR SALE

Great trans, laundry on site, security camera. 312-341-1950

RIVER GROVE, 2BR Condo, 2BA, all brick bldng, open floor plan, all hdwd flrs, 3 blks from metra, bus at the front door, heated garage, $199k. 309-251-6232

Beautiful, comp rehab 2BR Apts, laundry on site. Sec 8 Welc. 312-375-6585 or 773-934-8796

SELF-STORAGE

CALUMET CITY 3BR, 1.5BA, 3rd flr, crpt, appls, wndw a/c, heat + cooking gas incl, $1100/mo+$1100 sec. $25 crdt chk fee. 708-9552122 WOODLAWN COMMUNITY (close to U of C campus) 3 BR, 1 BA, includes heat, Sec. 8 OK. $1,100/mo. 773-802-0422

3 BR OR MORE $1200-$1499

roommates CHICAGO 71st/Sangamon ($400) Quiet, Furnished Rooms, Share Kit & Bath. Call 773-895-5454

MARKETPLACE GOODS 855 W. MARGATE Terrace – CHATHAM! NEWLY REMODELED.HARDWOOD/LR/DR and

appliances. 3bd/1 No sec. dep. 650 Move in Fee. 1250/MTH 773-814-4301

ROBBINS - 3BR House, Crestwood

OVER

3 BR OR MORE

69TH & DAMEN, Single family,

OTHER

newly remodeled, 3BR, no pets, sec 8 welcome, $1250/mo. Contact Alma 708-699-4826

3 BR OR MORE $1500-$1799

spacious LR, 1.5 baths plus, many closets, first floor, near transportation. $1600 includes heat. Available now. Marty, 773-784-0763.

LAKEVIEW (LAKESHORE DR) HOUSE FOR RENT, 2 bedroom, 2 bath, kitchen, living room, dining room, yard, $1600. 773-824-7106

Gorgeous 8 room, 3 bedroom, 2 bath renovated apartment in attractive 3 unit building. Apartment features two sunrooms, large living room, dining room, new appliances, and A/C. $2200 includes heat. Chad: 312-720-3136 cjohnson@hallmark-johnson.com

Schools. Hdwd flrs, pvt fenced bkyd w/shed, front driveway, $1250 / mo. Sec 8 Welc 773-895-9495

ONE OF A KIND BUDLONG WOODS, 5500N/ 2600W. Three bedrooms plus, DR,

2 BR $1500 AND

SECTION 8 WELCOME. 3BR, 2BA BRICK HOME. GARFIELD RIDGE, 48TH & LAMON. HDWD FLRS, LRG UNF BSMT, 2 CAR GAR. $1650/MO CALL AL, 847-644-5195 10234 S. CRANDON, s m a l l home, 3BR, 1BA, kit & util room, totally ren a/c, all appls incl, nice bkyrd. CHA welcome. 773-317-4357 CHICAGO HOUSES FOR rent. Section 8 Ok, w/app credit $500 gift certificate 3, 4 & 5 BR houses avail. Call 708-752-3812 for Westside locations 773-287-4500

2 BR OTHER

COUNTRY CLUB HILLS 17458 Park Ln. 3BR, 2BA, dining rm, family rm & laundry rm, fenced yrd opens to park. $1750/mo. Seniors Welcome. 708-752-3065

ROUND LAKE BEACH, IL Cedar 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

SECTION 8 WELCOME No Security Deposit. 8022 S. Maryland Ave. Newly remodeled 2BR. 773-6182231 SECTION 8 WELCOME $400 Cash Move-In Bonus, No Dep. 225 W 108th Pl, 2BR/1BA . 7134 S. Normal, 4BR/2BA. ceiling fans, Ht & appls incl 312-683-5174

3 BED AND 1 bath condo @422 south Homan ave. in Chicago. Building is right off the 1-290 tollway Homan Ave exit. Building is a block away from the blue line. Call 7737446770 DOLTON/RIVERDALE - 4BR, 1.5BA, 2 car garage, unfinished basement, Section 8 OK. $ 1200/mo + security. 847-9091538

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 January 1, get January rent free! Available 1/1. 773-761-4318.

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

Cyril Court Apartments, a Section 8 Apartment Community located in the quiet South Shore Community, just minutes away from Lake Michigan. Enjoy living in our spacious studio and one-bedroom apartments designed for your comfort and convenience. You can enjoy an array of amenities including a clubhouse, elevators, laundry on site, and gated secure parking lot. We as well offer controlled access, and after hours emergency maintenance assistance. Residents enjoy monthly activities with their neighbors which creates a sense of community. Come in and ﬁll out an application and see why Cyril Court Apartments should be your new home.

CENTERS.

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.

3 BEDROOM $875 FREE HEAT AND COOKING GAS New Decor, Carpeted, Stove, Fridge, Dining Rm, Elevator, Laundry Facility, Sec 8 ok, No App fee. 773-919-7102 or 312-802-7301

CHICAGO, 11820 S. UNION, 3BR Apartment, newly rehabbed. Section 8 welcome. Available Now. Call 773-440-5801

SERVICES

non-residential

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

ALSIP: LARGE 3 BEDROOM APARTMENT, 1.5BA, $1100/ month. Appliances, laundry, parking & storage. Call 708268-3762

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

ADULT SERVICES

SOUTH SIDE- 5 BR, 1.5 BA, Living

THE WRITERS LOFT

IS THIS YOU? You want to write but you have no time. When you do find time, you just can’t drag yourself to the desk. If you do get going, your writing starts strong, but becomes such a mess you don’t know whether to keep working or dump it all and start something new. You write lots of bits and pieces, but none of them fit together into a meaningful whole. You have training (workshops, college courses, or even a degree in creative writing) but little or nothing you write gets published. You haven’t taken a class because you’re not sure where to turn or what to do first. One thing you do know is you want to get the right start so you don’t waste a lot of time working on things that don’t matter. GET SOLUTIONS to these and any other writing problems at Chicago’s legendary Writers’ Loft. Mary@Immediatefiction.com http://thewritersloft.com

GET PAID FOR your opinions! FRENCH BULLDOG PUPS,1M.1F,PUREBRED,VET ap proved,papers,11weeks,AKC,$700eac h,more pics Email watsonbit77@aol. com 773-549-2344

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HEALTH & WELLNESS

AKC BLACK & Red German Shepherd Pups - father is a newly imported IPO3 male & both maternal grandparents are imported. $1200, 260-593-0160 x 3

FULL BODY MASSAGE. hotel, house calls welcome $90

ADULT SERVICES

special. Russian, Polish, Ukrainain girls. Northbrook and Schaumburg locations. 10% discount for new customers. Please call 773-407-7025

/Dining rm. hdwd flrs. high ceilings, enclosed porch, pantry, bsmnt, Sec 8 OK. 708-612-1732

RICHTON PARK 3 - 4BR Ranch. Sect 8 OK. Call 708-625-7355 for info.

GENERAL 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 101ST/MAY, 1 & 2br. 77th/Lowe. 1 & 2br. 69th/Dante 3br. 71st/ Bennett. 2br. 77th/Essex. 3br. New renov. Sec 8 ok. 708-503-1366 SOUTH SHORE 6724 S. Chappel Ave. Studio, 1 and 2BRs. Heat incl, nr park and great trans. $525-$875. 708-473-7129

ADULT SERVICES

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

224-223-7787

BUILDING HAS A SENIOR PREFERENCE!!

Preference as well given to disabled, homeless or displaced. Applicants subject to HUD income eligibility and other screening requirements. Rent based on 30% of adjusted monthly income.

Call Now: (773) 588-7767 ext. 108 TTY (711 National Relay)

www.CyrilCourtApts.com Email: CyrilCourt@m2regroup.com 7130 S. Cyril Court, Chicago, IL 60649

DECEMBER 7, 2017 | CHICAGO READER 47

MEET SINGLES RIGHT now! No paid operators, just real people like you. Browse greetings, exchange messages and connect live. Try it free. Call now: 855-691-6328

legal notices

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

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: D17152798 on November 24, 2017 Under the Assumed Business Name of THE WOODLAWN with the business located at: 1200 EAST 79TH STREET, CHICAGO, IL 60619. The true and real full name(s) and residence address of the owner(s)/ partner(s) is: DONNELL DIGBY 6922 SOUTH PAXTON, CHICAGO, IL 60649, USA

legal notices 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

MESSAGES

STRAIGHT DOPE By Cecil Adams Q : Would it be possible to supply enough

REAL PEOPLE REAL DESIRE REAL FUN.

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312-222-6920 48 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 7, 2017

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ADULT SERVICES

venison to make a regular fast-food item, like if Arby’s wanted to have its venison sandwich available all year? Is it even legal for ordinary people to raise deer? —MDCASTLE, VIA THE STRAIGHT DOPE MESSAGE BOARD

A : For those of you who don’t keep up on

your fast-food marketing gimmicks, Mdcastle is referring to an autumn promotion at Arby’s in recent years, a special one-day-only venison-steak sandwich. So far the scheme seems to be working better than you might guess: the venison sells out within hours, sometimes minutes, and Arby’s gets, if not the widespread civil unrest inspired by McDonald’s Szechuan sauce, at least the spike in social-media chatter any modern business craves. Who knew there was such a hunger for deer? Makes sense when you think about it, really. Millennials, we never stop hearing, are driving American food culture toward more and more outre tastes, and we were bound to get around to game eventually. In October the food-delivery app Caviar reported that orders for game meat had risen 80 percent over the last two years. Deer’s also healthier and easier on the environment than beef. Plus there’s that rising passion for local eating; what could be more local than deer? None of the American butcher-shop staples—cow, pig, chicken—are indigenous to the continent. Deer, on the other hand? Like eating out of our own national backyard. In theory, anyway. In fact, Arby’s had to source its venison from New Zealand, where there’s a robust deer-farming industry; in the U.S., only 20 percent of the demand for venison is met by domestic supply. But yes, it’s legal to raise deer here, and lots of farmers are doing it. Back in 2007 an analysis from Texas A&M found that cervid livestock—not just your deer but also your elk, your reindeer—was one of the fastest-growing industries in rural America; fresher stats peg its growth at 25 to 30 percent annually. That said, waltzing into your local Taco Bell on any given day and ordering the whitetail fajitas remains a distant dream. Why? There’s a catch-22 in play, applicable any time you find yourself wondering why we don’t eat more [insert name of nonstandard meat here]. Taxpayers, vegetarian and carnivorous alike, foot the bill for USDA inspections of beef, pork, and poultry. Farmers of other animals, though, from rabbits to goats to deer, have to dig into their own pockets to pay for inspection. Meanwhile, with demand for venison still relative-

ly limited, lenders are leerier about fronting start-up costs for deer farming, seeing it as a higher-risk venture. There are also cervid-speciﬁc expenses, such as the eightfoot-high (i.e., unjumpable) fencing required in most states. So, in short: because venison’s a niche industry, it’s more expensive to get into; because it’s more expensive to get into, it’ll probably stay a niche industry. Now: Why the special fence requirement? That’s owing to the fact that captive deer are at risk for chronic wasting disease, a fatal relative of mad cow disease, and another obstacle to your aspirational deerburger. Conservationists worry CWD will spread from farmed deer to those outside the fence, decimating wild populations; a recent article in the magazine Petersen’s Hunting referred to deer farming as a “ticking time bomb.” But here’s where things get complicated. The captive deer the article focused on aren’t raised for venison. They’re raised as stock for private game preserves—an enormously lucrative part of this industry, and one with noisy detractors. Truly, the optics aren’t great. A 2014 Indianapolis Star investigation, for instance, told of a stud deer named X-Factor, “the product of more than three decades of selective breeding,” who’d been valued at a million, er, bucks owing to a set of antlers on his head too huge and heavy for his neck to easily support. That’s the dark side of the deer ranch, then: they’re breeding elaborately antlered deer to be easy quarry for weekend warriors. The odiousness of this whole setup has gained the wild deer powerful allies: so-called fair-chase hunters, represented by groups like the National Wildlife Federation, who’ve been ﬁghting various state proposals to reregulate deer as livestock rather than wildlife. And the fair-chase hunters have successfully fought proposals to liberalize the deer industry in states like Tennessee and Missouri. Arby’s needs to bear this complication in mind if its venison burger is ever to become something more than a novelty. 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

What happened to the early, funny Savage Love columnist? Dan deals with a depression that may or may not be seasonal. Q : I used to be a fan of your

column, Dan, but something happened to you. Maybe it’s stress, the current political climate, or some other issue—I don’t know. I used to look forward to your columns because they were fun, smart, and helpful— but I don’t enjoy what I’m seeing now. If something did happen to you, reach out for help. You’re on the verge of losing a loyal reader. —READER ENQUIRING ABOUT DAN’S ENERVATING RESPONSES

A : I’ve been getting letters

like yours—What happened to you, Dan? You used to be more fun—at this time of year, every year, for the last 25 years, READER. Maybe I get moody when the weather gets gloomy and that spills into my column annually. And perhaps the current political climate—a rather reserved way to describe the destruction of our democracy—is making my seasonal grumping worse. Another possible factor . . . I don’t know how long you’ve been reading, READER, but 25 years of writing a column is a long time. And back before the Internet came along and ruined everything for everyone, I used to get a lot of how-to/ what’s-that questions about sex acts and sex toys. A column explaining butt plugs to readers who knew nothing about them—and lacked easy access to butt-plug info— was as much fun to read as it was to write. But every sex act and every sex toy has its own Wiki page now, which means I don’t get to write fun columns about butt plugs anymore, READER, and you don’t get to read them. Now the questions all revolve around someone being deeply shitty or someone deluding themselves about how

deeply shitty they’re being. Columns filled with questions about and from people behaving badly are never going to be as delightsome as those butt-plug columns of yore. Still, I don’t want to lose you as a reader, so I’m going to make an effort to sunny things up a bit over the next few weeks. OK! Let’s see what else came in the mail today! Hopefully something fun!

Q : My signiﬁcant other and I

rarely have sex. A while ago, I had a sexual encounter with her daughter. We continued to have sexual encounters for some time. Now my significant other and I may be getting married. Her daughter and I broke it off, but it started up again after a week. I am attempting to break things off with my significant other’s daughter again, but I’m having a hard time. Please advise.

—RESTRAINING URGES IS NECESSARY

A : Ugh. Do you see what I

mean, READER? It’s hard to come through with jokes, erudition, and uplift when you’re responding to questions like this one. OK, RUIN. Marrying a woman whose adult daughter you can’t keep your dick out of . . . yeah, that’s a bad idea. (And her daughter is an adult, right?!? You’re not Roy Moore-ing it, are you?) Sooner or later, your significant other is going to discover what’s been going on, and your relationship with both of these women will be destroyed. You may be able to move out and move on, RUIN, but your former significant other isn’t going to be so lucky. My advice: Pull up your pants, cancel the wedding, and get as far away from your SO and her daugh-

ter as possible.

Q : I’m a middle-aged

married dude. Sex life with my wife is good, but I also masturbate because, you know, I’m a person. Sometimes I masturbate while surﬁng through pictures on Facebook of attractive women I know. These aren’t stolen nudes oﬀ of someone’s phone; they’re public pictures. I’m progressive when it comes to politics and gender issues. Face-to-face, I’m respectful and would never do anything to make these women— or any other woman—feel uncomfortable. I don’t leer, and I’m not a creeper. I know what I’m doing is pervy, but is it pervy bad? Am I crossing a line? —PEERING IS CREEPY,

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A : This one’s a little better,

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SOMETIMES

READER. It’s a little squicky, sure, but it’s not boil-youreyes-after-reading squicky. OK, PICS. Masturbating to someone is fine; masturbating at someone is not. (To be clear: masturbating to thoughts of someone without their knowledge is fine; masturbating at someone who does not wish to be masturbated at is not.) Our erotic imaginations are free to roam—and that includes roaming through Facebook. Provided you aren’t doing or saying anything to make your Facebook “friends” uncomfortable (no supposedly friendly but transparently thirsty comments, no tongue-hanging-out emojis), you’re doing something no one wants to think about, PICS, but you’re not crossing a line. v

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DECEMBER 7, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 49

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

David Bazan of Pedro the Lion ò COURTESY OF BILLIONS

NEW

Acid Mothers Temple, Melting Paraiso U.F.O. 4/14, 9 PM, Beat Kitchen, on sale Fri 12/8, 10 AM American Nightmare, No Warning 2/25, 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, on sale Fri 12/8, 10 AM, 17+ Trey Anastasio Band 4/20-21, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre, on sale Fri 12/8, 8 PM Banda MS 3/24, 8 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont, on sale Fri 12/8, 10 AM Beausoleil avec Michael Doucet 3/8, 7:30 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 12/8, 10 AM b Big K.R.I.T. 4/28, 7 PM, Metro b Blackalicious 1/21, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Blue Water Highway Band 2/17, 9 PM, Schubas, on sale Fri 12/8, 10 AM Doyle Bramhall II 3/1, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 12/7, noon b David Bromberg 4/14, 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, on sale Fri 12/8, 8 AM b Brandy Clark 2/14, 6:30 and 9 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 12/7, noon b Billy Cobham Band 3/29, 7 and 9:30 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 12/8, 10 AM b Conan 3/10, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Albert Cummings 3/25, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 12/8, 10 AM b Drive-By Truckers 4/6-7, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 12/8, 10 AM, 17+ Earthless, Kikagaku Moyo 3/24-25, 9 PM, Empty Bottle, on sale Fri 12/8, 10 AM

Sylvan Esso 7/23, 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre, on sale Fri 12/8, 10 AM b Foreigner, Whitesnake, Jason Bonham’s Led Zeppelin Evening 7/11, 7 PM, Huntington Bank Pavilion, on sale Fri 12/8, 10 AM Forq 2/18, 8 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint Fortunate Youth, Tatanka 4/21, 8:30 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Fozzy 3/28, 7 PM, Bottom Lounge, on sale Fri 12/8, 10 AM, 17+ Front 242, Cocksure 4/13, 9 PM, Metro, on sale Fri 12/8, 10 AM, 18+ Fu Manchu 5/19, 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, on sale Fri 12/8, 10 AM b Futuristic 3/8, 6:15 PM, Bottom Lounge, on sale Fri 12/8, noon b Gangstagrass 3/18, 7:30 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 12/8, 10 AM b Ghost of Paul Revere, Parsonsﬁeld 2/18, 8 PM, Schubas, on sale Fri 12/8, 10 AM Haunted Summer 2/20, 8 PM, Schubas, on sale Fri 12/8, 10 AM, 18+ Sierra Hull 2/28, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 12/7, noon b Hunna, Coasts 3/19, 7:30 PM, Bottom Lounge, on sale Fri 12/8, 10 AM, 17+ Charlie Hunter Trio 3/21, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 12/8, 10 AM b Intervals 1/19, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Josh Jacobson 2/2, 7 PM, Schubas, on sale Fri 12/8, 10 AM b Jimmy Eat World, Hotelier 5/8, 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre, on sale Fri 12/8, 10 AM b John 5 & the Creatures 2/18, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+

50 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 7, 2017

Juanes 5/1, 7:30 PM, Rosemont Theater, Rosemont, on sale Fri 12/8, 10 AM Joe Kay 2/24, 8 PM, 1st Ward, on sale Fri 12/8, 10 AM, 18+ Keren Ann 2/20, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 12/7, noon b Koﬃn Kats, Goddamn Gallows 4/22, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Kool Keith 12/21, 8 PM, Logan Arcade Lotus 2/9, 8 PM, the Vic, on sale Fri 12/8, 10 AM, 18+ Joyner Lucas, Dizzy Wright 2/13, 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, on sale Fri 12/8, 10 AM, 17+ Mammoth Grinder, Sick/Tired, Like Rats 2/24, 9 PM, Cobra Lounge, 17+ Manic Focus 3/10, 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre, on sale Fri 12/8, 10 AM, 18+ Declan McKenna 3/9, 7:30 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 12/8, 10 AM b Anna Meredith 2/6, 8 PM, Schubas, 18+ Missio, Welshly Arms 2/24, 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, on sale Fri 12/8, noon, 17+ Kevin Morby 4/28, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 12/8, 10 AM, 17+ Mowgli’s 2/24, 8 PM, Schubas New Politics 2/18, 7 PM, Metro, on sale Fri 12/8, 10 AM b John Oates & the Good Road Band 2/8, 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, on sale Fri 12/8 8 AM b The Oh Hellos 3/10, 5 PM, House of Blues, on sale Fri 12/8, 10 AM b Lindi Ortega 4/17, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, on sale Fri 12/8, 10 AM Pedro the Lion 8/24, 9 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 12/8, 10 AM, 17+

Pop Evil 4/5, 5:45 PM, House of Blues, on sale Fri 12/8, 10 AM b John Prine 4/27, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre, on sale Fri 12/8, 10 AM Propagandhi, Iron Chic 3/3, 8 PM, Metro, on sale Fri 12/8, 9 AM, 18+ Protest the Hero 3/23, 7 PM, Bottom Lounge b Radio Moscow 2/11, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Rag’N’Bone Man 6/12, 8 PM, Park West, on sale Thu 12/7, 10 AM, 18+ Tom Rainey Trio 1/27, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Jonathan Richman & Tommy Larkins 3/14, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 12/8, 10 AM b Rubens 3/15, 9 PM, Schubas, 18+ Ty Segall 4/8, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, on sale Fri 12/8, 9 AM, 18+ Jorja Smith 5/2, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 12/8, 10 AM b Son Lux 3/29, 7:30 PM, Lincoln Hall, on sale Fri 12/8, 10 AM b Southside Johnny & the Asbury Jukes 3/3, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 12/8, 10 AM b Robert Stevenson 2/27, 7 PM, Virgin Hotel, on sale Fri 12/8, 10 AM Subdudes 3/15-16, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 12/8, 10 AM b Timeﬂies 4/6, 6:30 PM, Concord Music Hall, on sale Fri 12/8, noon b Tiny Moving Parts 1/27, 7:30 PM, Lincoln Hall b Kali Uchis 1/13, 7 PM, Concord Music Hall, on sale Fri 12/8, 10 AM b Tessa Violet 1/26, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall b Ella Vos 3/16, 8:30 PM, Schubas, on sale Fri 12/8, 10 AM, 18+ Vundabar 4/7, 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Way Down Wanderers 3/17, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 12/8, 10 AM b Wild Child 4/15, 7 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 12/8, 10 AM b The Wind & the Wave 2/25, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 12/8, 10 AM b Steve Winwood 2/22, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre, on sale Fri 12/8, 11 AM Carolyn Wonderland 3/27, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 12/8, 10 AM b

ALL AGES

WOLF BY KEITH HERZIK

EARLY WARNINGS

CHICAGO SHOWS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT IN THE WEEKS TO COME

Yoke Lore 1/23, 8 PM, Schubas, 18+ Zafa Collective 1/28, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+

UPCOMING Roy Ayers 12/20-21, 8 PM, the Promontory Taylor Bennett 12/23, 7 PM, Metro b Calexico 4/25, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Lana Del Rey, Jhene Aiko 1/11, 8 PM, United Center Eagles 3/14, 8 PM, United Center Fetty Wap 1/25, 7 PM, House of Blues b Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds 2/24, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre Peter Hook & the Light 5/4, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ Niall Horan, Maren Morris 7/26, 7 PM, Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, Tinley Park Iced Earth 3/29, 7:30 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Syleena Johnson 2/23, 7 and 10 PM, City Winery b Kimbra, Arc Iris 2/3, 7 PM, Concord Music Hall b Lorde 3/27, 7 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont Macabre 12/23, 6:30 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ No Age, Melkbelly, Little Junior 1/20, 9 PM, Schubas, 18+ OMD 3/16, 7:30 PM, the Vic, 18+ Partner 1/26, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Residents 4/17, 7 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b Screaming Females 3/10, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Sleigh Bells, Sunﬂower Bean 1/31, 8 PM, Metro b Sam Smith 8/15, 8 PM, United Center Teenage Bottlerocket 12/17, 2 PM, Cobra Lounge b They Might Be Giants 3/17, 7:30 PM, the Vic, 14+ Think Floyd USA 1/20, 8 PM, Park West, 18+ U.S. Bombs 1/27, 8 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint Kate Voegele & Tyler Hilton 1/13, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Butch Walker 12/20, 8 PM, House of Blues, 17+ Wedding Present 3/26, 7:30 PM, Lincoln Hall Weepies 4/14, 8 PM, Thalia Hall b Andrew W.K. 5/12, 8 PM, the Vic, 18+ “Weird Al” Yankovic 4/6-7, 8 PM, the Vic b Yo La Tengo 3/29-30, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Yumi Zouma 1/17, 8 PM, Schubas, 18+ Zombies 3/19-20, 8 PM, City Winery b v

GOSSIP WOLF A furry ear to the ground of the local music scene IN OCTOBER 2016, Dumpster Tapes co-owner Alex Fryer debuted Demolición, an annual showcase of Latinx Chicago musicians that’s named after a 1965 single by Peruvian protopunks Los Saicos. On Friday, December 8, this year’s Demolición comes to the Auxiliary Art Center. “We wanted to showcase a whole new set of artists from across the city and the Latinx diaspora,” Fryer says. “Each of these groups are so talented.” The bill consists of neosoul crooner Lester Rey, powerpop band Laverne, dynamic DJ duo the Ponderers, garage-psych outfit Cafe Racer, and smoky desert-rock act Los Gold Fires. It starts at 7:30 PM, and part of each $7 cover goes to the Center for Popular Democracy’s Hurricane Maria Community Relief & Recovery Fund. At this summer’s Chicago Jazz Festival, Gossip Wolf was blown away by the Lowdown Brass Band, whose music combines New Orleans-style second-line rowdiness with hip-hop and reggae—it had a pavilion of folks shaking their rumps! In October the 11-member local groove machine dropped a video for the Specials-infused “Ghost Town,” shot aboard a boat in Alaska’s Prince William Sound on tour in July. On Friday, December 8, at Subterranean, Lowdown celebrate the new self-released Lowdown Breaks with guests from the album, including MC Ang13 and Dubasaurus singer Fada Dougou. They plan to have LP and CD copies at the show. This weekend the fine folks at Logan Hardware celebrate the seven-inch with a sale they’re calling the “Big Dig.” On Saturday and Sunday (with extended store hours) they’ll sling singles for cheap—and in a truly special occasion, they’ll open their basement to the public. DJs spin seven-inches all weekend; Sunday’s sets are all about the Gospels and Christmas, featuring All Natural owner Tone B. Nimble and Jam Productions VP Andy Cirzan (a Christmas music fanatic). The shop will also raffle off a 1960s Seeburg jukebox! —J.R. NELSON AND LEOR GALIL Got a tip? Tweet @Gossip_Wolf or e-mail gossipwolf@chicagoreader.com.

DECEMBER 7, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 51

VENDS + VIBES is a two-day winter marketplace of unique handmade products created primarily by South Side artists and creative entrepreneurs.

CTA GREEN LINE GARFIELD STOP

Along Garfield Boulevard: WEEKEND FESTIVITIES SOUNDTRACKED BY LOCAL DJS

Duane Powell, Selah Say, Joe de Presser, and AfroBang FAMILY FRIENDLY CREATIVE ACTIVITIES Healthy Holiday Food Demonstrations by Pilot Light Chef Justin Behlke Photo Booth with Brother Nick, Santa’s Little Brother Cocktail Demonstrations • Artists-in-Residence Open Studios Holiday Home Movies Screened by South Side Home Movie Project Gift Wrapping by A Social Life • and more! AT FOUR LOCATIONS:

BING READING ROOM 307 E Garﬁeld Blvd

Partners:

CURRENCY EXCHANGE CAFE 305 E Garﬁeld Blvd

ARTS INCUBATOR 301 E Garﬁeld Blvd

KLEO COMMUNITY FAMILY LIFE CENTER 119 E Garﬁeld Blvd