Print Issue of December 8, 2016 (Volume 46, Number 10)

C H I C A G O ’ 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 8 , 2 0 1 6

INVISIBLE INSTITUTE FOUNDER JAMIE KALVEN

17

NINETEEN CHICAGOANS IN THEIR OWN WORDS

2 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 8, 2016

l

l

THIS WEEK

C H I C AG O R E A D E R | D E C E M B E R 8 , 2 01 6 | VO LU M E 4 6 , N U M B E R 1 0

TO CONTACT ANY READER EMPLOYEE, E-MAIL: (FIRST INITIAL)(LAST NAME) @CHICAGOREADER.COM

EDITOR JAKE MALOOLEY CREATIVE DIRECTOR PAUL JOHN HIGGINS DEPUTY EDITOR, NEWS ROBIN AMER CULTURE EDITOR TAL ROSENBERG DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY DANIELLE A. SCRUGGS FILM EDITOR J.R. JONES MUSIC EDITOR PHILIP MONTORO ASSOCIATE EDITORS KATE SCHMIDT, KEVIN WARWICK, BRIANNA WELLEN SENIOR WRITERS MICHAEL MINER, MIKE SULA SENIOR THEATER CRITIC TONY ADLER STAFF WRITERS 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 EDITORIAL ASSISTANT CASSIDY RYAN CONTRIBUTING WRITERS NOAH BERLATSKY, DERRICK CLIFTON, MATT DE LA PEÑA, MAYA DUKMASOVA, ANNE FORD, ISA GIALLORENZO, JOHN GREENFIELD, JUSTIN HAYFORD, JACK HELBIG, DAN JAKES, BILL MEYER, J.R. NELSON, MARISSA OBERLANDER, LEAH PICKETT, DMITRY SAMAROV, DAVID WHITEIS, ALBERT WILLIAMS INTERNS ISABEL OCHOA GOLD, JACK LADD ---------------------------------------------------------------VICE PRESIDENT OF BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT NICKI STANULA VICE PRESIDENT OF NEW MEDIA GUADALUPE CARRANZA SENIOR ACCOUNT MANAGER EVANGELINE MILLER ACCOUNT EXECUTIVES FABIO CAVALIERI, ARIANA DIAZ, BRIDGET KANE MARKETING AND EVENTS MANAGER BRYAN BURDA DIRECTOR OF DIGITAL JOHN DUNLEVY ADVERTISING COORDINATOR HERMINIA BATTAGLIA CLASSIFIEDS REPRESENTATIVE KRIS DODD ---------------------------------------------------------------DISTRIBUTION CONCERNS distributionissues@chicagoreader.com CHICAGO READER 350 N. ORLEANS, CHICAGO, IL 60654 312-222-6920, CHICAGOREADER.COM ---------------------------------------------------------------THE READER (ISSN 1096-6919) IS PUBLISHED WEEKLY BY SUN-TIMES MEDIA, LLC, 350 N. ORLEANS, CHICAGO, IL 60654. © 2016 SUN-TIMES MEDIA, LLC. PERIODICAL POSTAGE PAID AT CHICAGO, IL. POSTMASTER: SEND CHANGE OF ADDRESS TO CHICAGO READER, 350 N. ORLEANS, CHICAGO, IL 60654.

ON THE COVER: PHOTO OF JAMIE KALVEN BY KEVIN SERNA. FOR MORE OF HIS WORK, GO TO KEVINSERNA.NET.

THE SURVIVOR 17

THE PROFESSIONAL GEEK 26

THE MAN WITH A LANTERN 19

NINETEEN CHICAGOANS IN THEIR OWN WORDS

THE GOOD COP 21

THE DAREDEVIL 24

THE CHEMIST 28

THE SPORTSWRITER WHO HAPPENS TO BE TRANS 29

THE BEAT-MAKING TRIPLE JUMPER 31

THE CRITIC 32

THE GURU OF HIPLET 35

THE MULTIDISCIPLINARY ARTIST 36

THE ARCHITECT 38

THE EXPERIMENTAL DOCUMENTARIAN 39

THE PHOTOGRAPHER 49

THE GEEK-COMMUNITY BUILDER 50

THE COMEDIAN 52

THE HIGH PRIEST OF THE BEER TEMPLE 54

THE KULTURA MAVEN 56

THE CO-OP ENTHUSIAST 57

IN THIS ISSUE 4 Agenda The Complete Deaths at Chicago Shakes, Jerry Seinfeld at Chicago Theatre, a release party for Russell Jaffe’s chapbook LaCroix Water, the film Don’t Call Me Son, and more recommendations

CITY LIFE

9 Street View Bathsheba Nemerovski anticipates a return to “punk, protest, expression, rebellion” under Trump.

9 Sure Things One perfect event for every day of the week 10 Space An author-puppeteer’s charming Ukrainian Village apartment doubles as a creative workshop.

12 Identity and Culture How Chicago activists sought to

“decolonize” Thanksgiving at Standing Rock 13 Politics Let’s ditch the Electoral College for the sake of minority voters.

14 Transportation Stop victim blaming pedestrians and cyclists fatally struck by drivers.

ARTS & CULTURE

59 Theater Neo-Futurists reject their founder’s attempt to blame Trump.

60 Theater There’s no limit to holiday cheer on Chicago’s stages.

62 Dance Choreographer Christopher Wheeldon attempts to crack “America’s No. 1 Nut” with his reimagined Nutcracker.

63 Movies Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea is a study in

grief, guilt, and responsibility.

MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE 65 Shows of Note Lizzo, Foodman, It’s a Wonderful Life with live CSO score, Olivia Block, and more 71 The Secret History of Chicago Music Unearthing influential Chicago proto-hardcore band Six Feet Under

FOOD & DRINK

77 Restaurant review: Intro: Japanese Trattoria Worlds collide with Intro’s Japanese-Italian menu.

80 Bar review: The Tasting Room at Moody Tongue Jared Rouben’s new Pilsen spot for his culinary

brewing is designed to be the bar where he’d most like to drink.

80 Jobs 81 Apartments & Spaces 82 Marketplace 83 Straight Dope What’s the deal with the new crop of bathroom-odorreducing sprays?

85 Savage Love How to recover from an abusive relationship 86 Early Warnings Modern English, Richard Thompson, Loudon Wainwright, and more shows to come 86 Gossip Wolf The Dark Matter Series returns to Elastic with two events about dance music, and more music news.

DECEMBER 8, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 3

AGENDA

R

READER RECOMMENDED

Send your events to agenda@chicagoreader.com

b ALL AGES

F Belmont, 773-975-8150, underscoretheatre.org, $17-$30.

THEATER

CHRISTOPHER WHEELDON’S

NUTCRACKER

THE NUTCRACKER PRODUCING SPONSORS

Margot and Josef Lakonishok The Searle Funds at The Chicago Community Trust Hancher Auditorium, University of Iowa

More at chicagoreader.com/ theater Beauty and the Beast Married performance artists Julie Atlas Muz and Mat Fraser, billing themselves as Oneofus, spend a none-too-subtle evening drawing parallels between the titular 18th-century fairy tale and their own romantic relationship.

Muz, a burlesque performer and onetime Miss Coney Island, is the beauty, while Fraser, a self-described disability artist with thalidomide-induced phocomelia (he calls his arms “small and perfectly deformed”) is, discomfitingly, the beast. For 80 minutes they alternately enact the fairy tale, ably assisted by clever puppetry and cunning scenic design, and recount the course of their romance. Neither story digs much below the surface, and neither performer has adequate chops to command a stage as large as MCA’s.

By the finale they’re nude and thrashing away in semi-simulated coitus.

Bully for them. —JUSTIN HAYFORD 12/1-12/11: ThuSat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM, Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago, 312-280-2660, mcachicago. org, $30, $10 students.

R

The Complete Deaths Toby (Toby Park) has had enough of “shallow buffoonery.”

He’s decided to get serious and confront his “well-fed bourgeois” audience (us) with not one, not 20, but all 74 onstage deaths in Shakespeare’s plays—from poor Matthew Gough, who buys it at the hands of a mob in Henry VI, Part II, to pretty much everybody in Hamlet. Of course, things don’t go as planned. The three other members of Brit theater troupe Spymonkey can’t take Toby’s newfound earnestness, and, besides, they’ve got agendas of their own: Aitor Basauri wants to work with bubbles, Petra Massey wants to play Ophelia, and Stephan Kreiss wants to play with Petra. The result is loads and loads of shallow buffoonery. At over two hours, the joke goes on too long, but there’s plenty of high-quality ridiculousness here, and no compunctions whatever about getting us to laugh at waggling penises or flies crawling up people’s noses. —TONY ADLER Through 12/11: Wed-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3 and 8 PM, Sun 2 and 6:30 PM, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, 800 E. Grand, 312-595-5600, chicagoshakes.com, $42-$58.

Pygmalion Remy Bumppo TheR atre Company’s superbly acted production of George Bernard Shaw’s

brilliant 1913 comedy bristles with intelli-

4 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 8, 2016

Pygmalion o JOHNNY KNIGHT gence, passion, and hilarity. Refreshingly free of the sentimentality of the play’s well-known 1956 musicalization My Fair Lady, Shawn Douglass’s in-the-round staging illuminates the complex, fiery relationship between curmudgeonly phonetics professor Henry Higgins and his pupil Eliza Doolittle, a Cockney street urchin who wants to learn to speak “like a lady” so she can get ahead in class-conscious Edwardian England.

As Eliza’s improved language skills stimulate her native intelligence, the play charts her painful path to emotional and intellectual liberation. Kelsey Brennan sparkles as Eliza—a model of the “New Woman” for whom Shaw and other progressive thinkers advocated at the dawn of the 20th century. Nick Sandys is a dynamic Higgins, whose admiration for his “creation” forces him to confront his own shortcomings, and David Darlow is wonderful as Eliza’s raffish rogue of a father. Intriguingly, Douglass frames the play as a flashback, adding scenes showing middle-aged Eliza returning to Higgins’s home after his death in the early 1950s. (The time is established by musical selections including Ella Fitzgerald’s 1951 “Smooth Sailing” and Dinah Washington’s 1953 “Wheel of Fortune.”)

—ALBERT WILLIAMS Through 1/8: WedFri 7:30 PM, Sat 2:30 and 7:30 (2:30 PM only 12/24 and 12/31; 7:30 PM only 1/7), Sun 2:30 (no show 12/25; 7:30 PM only 1/1), Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln, 773-404-7336, remybumppo.org, $42.50-$52.50.

The Rosenkrantz Mysteries: An Evening of Magic and Spirits There’s something decidedly amateur about this new show (slotted in at the last minute) at the Royal George Theatre.

Presumably inspired by or adapted from a class he teaches at Northwestern for medical students, Medicine and Magic, physician Ricardo Rosenkranz’s 90 minute one-man performance is full of fascinating bits, from our contemplation of Wittgenstein’s duck rabbit to Rosenkranz’s meditation on how medicine is, like magic, a performance art. Including many audience members in the show (so be prepared), Rosenkranz moves us through the illusion of health, the magic of empathy, the power of sympathy.

To be sure, there are some impressive

tricks here; still, it takes a seasoned performer—not just a gifted clinician and lecturer—to pull off a solo show.

—SUZANNE SCANLON Through 12/24: / thu-Fri 8 PM, Sat 2 and 8 PM (2 PM only 12/24), Sun 2 PM, Royal George Theatre Center, 1641 N. Halsted, 312-988-9000, therosenkranzmysteries.com, $40-$75.

Tonya and Nancy: The Rock Opera!

The kitschy premise behind Elizabeth Searle and Michael Teoli’s new musical—relitigating Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan’s 1994 Winter Olympics figure-skating fiascovia musical theater—sounds like the inspiration for a piano-only 45-minute late-night Annoyance or Upright Citizens Brigade set. At its heart, that’s what I suspect this Underscore Theatre Company production, directed and choreographed by Jon Martinez, more closely resembles, though this ensemble has the comedic and vocal chops to more than fill an hour and half on Theater Wit’s full-size stage. Amanda Horvath and Courtney Mack radiate as the titular ice queens, and Veronica Garza steals the show a handful of times doing double duty as each’s Shakespearean mothers. It’s a fabulously weird and legitimately experimental musical presented in a time when they’re too hard to come by.

—DAN JAKES Through 12/30: Wed-Sat 7:30 PM (no show Sat 12/24), Sun 4 PM (no show 12/25), Theater Wit, 1229 W.

Uncle Philip’s Coat The title garment is ratty old thing Uncle Philip schlepped with him from Ukraine (which he fled as a nine-year-old, after a pogrom) to Coney Island (where he died decades later, after a marginal life as a boardwalk peddler). Now that his nephew has inherited it, it’s a ratty old nuisance.

But in the course of this one-man show written by Matty Selman and performed by the estimable Gene Weygandt, the coat also becomes a way into Philip’s mind—an interesting place to be, given the trauma that determined his life and the sweet, cracked humor that helped him negotiate it. Weygandt and director Elizabeth Margolius make the visit as engaging as possible; Jews of Ashkenazi descent, especially, should find multiple points of communion. But they don’t solve basic dramaturgical problems that make what should be minor issues loom large. Nor can they avoid tripping over the odd bucket of schmaltz. —TONY ADLER Through 12/31: Wed-Fri 8 PM, Sat 2:30 an 8 PM, Sun 2:30 PM, Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln, 773-4047336, greenhousetheater.org, $34-$48.

DANCE

Honey Same Planet Different R World Dance Theatre presents a new work inspired by 70s disco. Through 12/11: Fri-Sun 7 PM, Dovetail Studios, 2853 W. Montrose, spdwdance.org, $22.

The Nutcracker Christopher R Wheeldon’s reimaging of the holiday classic for the Joffrey Ballet.

Read a preview on page 62. 12/10-12/30: Wed-Fri 7 PM, Sat-Sun 2 and 7 PM, Tue 7 PM; also Wed 12/21-Fri 12/23, 2 PM; Mon 12/26, 2 and 7 PM; and Tue 12/27, 2 PM, Auditorium Theatre, 50 E. Congress, joffrey.org, $35-$170.

The Nutcracker Ballet Chicago’s R annual holiday production of The Nutcracker. 12/10-12/18: Fri 7 PM, Sat 2

and 7 PM, Sun 2:30 PM, Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N. Southport, 773-935-6860,

Tonya and Nancy: The Rock Opera! o EVAN HANOVER

l

l

Best bets, recommendations, and notable arts and culture events for the week of December 8

balletchicago.org/nutcracker, $17-$42.

Vertical Gallery “xii/xii,” 12 artists are featured in this holiday-themed exhibit.

Opening reception Sat 12/10, 6-10 PM. 12/10-1/7. Tue-Sat 11 AM-6 PM. 1016 N. Western, 773-697-3846, verticalgallery. com.

COMEDY

The Mads Live Movie Riffing R The Mads—Mystery Science Theater 3000’s Frank Conniff and Trace

LIT

Beaulieu—screen a film to “riff” on. 7 and 10 PM, Logan, 2646 N. Milwaukee, 773252-0628, liveatnorthbar.com, $35.

J. Smiles Comedy Slam The R Atlanta comedian performs her stand-up. Fri 12/9, 7:30 PM, the Revival,

1160 E. 55th, 866-811-4111, jsmilescomedy. com, $10.

R

Laughs Trump Hate Alex Garday hosts this comedy benefit responding to the election of president-elect Donald Trump. A portion of the proceeds will be donated to ACLU of Illinois. Mon 12/12, 7:30 PM, MCL Chicago, 3110 N. Sheffield, mclchicago. com, $15.

Jerry Seinfeld o KEVIN MAZUR

R

Marlena Rodriguez Goes Long The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt writer performs stand-up. Sun 12/11, 7 and 9 PM, Bar DeVille, 701 N. Damen, 312-929-2349, bardeville.com. F

R

Martin Morrow and Friends The stand-up performs alongside local comics Jonah Jurkens, Ed Towns, Sarah Perry, and Heidi Butler. Mon 12/12, 8 PM, North Bar, 1637 W. North, 773-123-5678, liveatnorthbar.com, $8.

Artform Robert Williams hosts R this event celebrating the history of nightlife with a panel discussion,

Gretchen Corazzo, Osiris, part of “Cubism Collage Cybergrams Concrete” at the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art Sun noon-6 PM, 1655 W. Walnut, 800376-2860, hfas.org, $25.

Museum of Contemporary Art “Basim Magdy: The Stars Were Aligned for a Century of New Beginnings,” exhibition exploring the desire for a utopian future featuring paintings, photographs, and films by Egyptian artist Basim Magdy.

Artist talk Sat 12/10, 3-4 PM. 12/10-3/16.

Tue 10 AM-8 PM, Wed-Sun 10 AM-5 PM. 220 E. Chicago, 312-280-2660, mcachicago.org, $12, $7 students and seniors, free kids 12 and under and members of the military, free for Illinois residents on Tuesdays.

Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art “Cubism Collage Cybergrams Concrete,” a collaboration with the Chicago Bauhaus Foundation, this exhibition features four artists from Moholy-Nagy’s New Bauhaus school. Opening reception Fri 12/9, 6-9 PM. Gallery talk with curator T. Paul Young Sun 1/15, 2 PM. 12/9-1/29. Wed-Sun noon-4 PM. 2320 W. Chicago, 773-227-5522, uima-chicago.org, $5 suggested donation.

Uri-Eichen Gallery “A Voice for Victims,” the gallery’s fifth annual Human Rights Day Show examines the war in Syria. It features drawings by Kathy Weaver and photographs by Dr. Zaher Sahloul, head of the Syrian American Medical Society. Opening reception Fri 12/9, 6-10 PM. 12/9-1/6 by appointment.

2101 S. Halsted, 312-852-7717, uri-eichen. com.

Jerry Seinfeld What really is the R deal with airplane peanuts? Jerry Seinfeld comes to Chicago to perform

Kimberly Drew and Rashayla R Marie Brown Black Contemporary Art blogger Drew and artist-scholar

Brown discuss photography in the age of social media. Tue 12/13, 6 PM, Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago, 312-280-2660, mcachicago.org.

LaCroix Water release party R Damask Press celebrates the release of poet Russell Jaffe’s chapbook

LaCroix Water with readings by Ed Blair, Alison A. Ogunmokun, and Jennifer Steele. Fri 12/9, 7 PM, Volumes Bookcafe, 1474 N. Milwaukee, 773-697-8066, volumesbooks.com.

Mortified Shay Degrandis hosts R this iteration of the storytelling event where guests read from their

teenage diaries. Sat 12/10, 7 PM, Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln, 773-525-2501, lh-st. com, $20.

Reginald Gibbons and Alan R Shapiro The poets read from their new books, Last Lake and Life Pig,

respectively. Thu 12/8, 6 PM, Seminary Co-op Bookstore, 5751 S. Woodlawn, 773752-4381, semcoop.com.

Lindsay Tigue The poet discussR es her book System of Ghosts with author Jac Jemc. Wed 12/14, 7 PM,

Book Cellar, 4736 N. Lincoln, 773-2932665, bookcellarinc.com.

Women, Leadership and R Election Politics: Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr In honor of

Jane Addams Day, the American Association of University Women Chicago (AAUWC) hosts a panel discussion with Louise Knight, Annie Storr, and Kristin Lems. Sat 12/10, 1 PM, UIC Student Center East, 750 S. Halsted, chicago-il. aauw.net, $12.

MOVIES

More at chicagoreader.com/ movies NEW REVIEWS The Academy of Muses José Luis Guerin’s breakthrough feature, In the City of Sylvia (2007), was largely wordless, but this subsequent effort (2015) is fiercely verbal, an interminable colloquy conducted inside and outside a philology class taught by a forceful middle-aged academic (Raffaele Pinto). His course focuses on the power of the muse in art and literature, and the esoteric dialogue (Pinto is a professor in real life) creates a kind of surface flash, below which various seductions play out among the students and their balding, bespectacled pedagogue. Guerin has written that he focused on “the staging of word: to that infinite space opened through the confrontation between two faces.”

Those faces can be beautiful and meaningful, though they can be hard to appreciate amid the torrent of subtitled and highly abstract dialogue.

The film is demanding, intellectually voracious, and reminiscent of Last Year at Marienbad in its brittle aestheticism.

In Spanish with subtitles. —J.R. JONES 92 min. Facets Cinematheque

PERFORMS AT: PERFOR

50 East Congress Parkway Parkway, Chicago

Don’t Call Me Son R In this engrossing Brazilian drama, a slovenly 17-year-old

his stand-up. Thu 12/8-Fri 12/9: 7 and 9:30 PM, Chicago Theatre, 175 N. State, 312-462-6300, thechicagotheatre.com, $63-$175.

VISUAL ARTS Life Creative “Harlem Fine Arts Show,” the traveling show of art from the African diaspora stops in Chicago. Opening gala Fri 12/9, 6-11 PM, $75. Gospel brunch fund-raiser Sun 12/11, noon-4 PM, $50.

12/9-12/11: Fri 6-11 PM, Sat 9 AM-11 PM,

a photo slide show, and a loft party featuring DJs Ron Trent and Jerome Derradji. Sat 12/10, 9 PM, Elastic, 3429 W. Diversey, 773-772-3616, elasticrevolution.com, $15.

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

Don’t Call Me Son

boy questioning his gender identity (Naomi Nero) has his world rocked when police arrive at his lower-class home, allege that he was abducted at birth, and take him in for a DNA test, which reveals that his true family is a wealthy, conservative clan with strong ideas about who he should be. Meanwhile the woman who raised him (Daniela Nefussi) faces prison time, and his beloved kid sister, found to be an abducted child as well, is returned to her birth parents.

Writer-director Anna Muylaert (The Second Mother) mines this unusual situation for high comedy, as the W

WORLD PREMIERE

DEC 10–30 JOFFREY.ORG

312.386.8905 DECEMBER 8, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 5

AGENDA “One of the best resale shops in Chicago” —Time Out Chicago

DONATE

SHOP

SUPPORT

big-medicine.org

6241 N BROADWAY • CHICAGO MON-SAT 11-7 • SUN 12-7 773-942-6522

EARLY WARNINGS NEVER MISS A SHOW AGAIN

CHICAGOREADER.COM/EARLY

B boy begins cross-dressing to infuriate his new family, but there are also terribly painful moments as the smaller family is torn apart and the biological mother (Nefussi again), who’s been pining for her stolen son, finds him unreachable.

In Portuguese with subtitles. —J.R. JONES 83 min. Fri 12/9-Sat 12/10, 8:15 PM; Sun 12/11, 5:15 PM; Mon 12/12, 6 PM; Tue 12/13-Wed 12/14, 8:15 PM; and Thu 12/15, 8:35 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center Jackie “It wasn’t for Jack or his legacy,” murmurs Jacqueline Kennedy in this drama about her planning of the president’s state funeral in 1963. “It was for me.” Well, I’m glad we got that out in the open.

Screenwriter Noah Oppenheim follows the stunned Jackie around the White House in the weekend after the assassination as the new president’s men, fearing more violence, pressure her to cancel a planned funeral procession down Pennsylvania Avenue. Flashbacks show her and the president arriving in Dallas for the fateful parade, and the whole shebang is framed by a sequence set a few days later in which she pops off to journalist Theodore White. As the title character, Natalie Portman is flawless as a string of pearls, and Peter Sarsgaard lends valuable support underplaying Robert Kennedy, but the ghoulishness of reenacting the assassination for the millionth time overwhelms the film’s pretended merits. Chilean director Pablo Larraín, making his U.S. debut, brings a spectral, somnambulant tone to the story that often reminded me of his serial killer drama Tony Manero (2008). With Greta Gerwig, Billy Crudup, John Hurt, and Richard E. Grant. —J.R. JONES R, 99 min.

Landmark’s Century Centre Kate Plays Christine Tireless indie performer Kate Lyn Sheil (The Color Wheel) plays herself in this metadocumentary about Christine Chubbuck, the Sarasota newscaster who killed herself with a pistol on the air in 1974. Supposedly preparing to play Chubbuck in a TV movie, the actress arrives in Sarasota to visit the gun store where Chubbuck bought her pistol, get a spray tan so she’ll look more like a Floridian, and interview anyone remotely associated with the story.

Local broadcasters offer ghost stories about Chubbuck; a psychologist speculates on her state of mind; local actors in supporting roles sound off on the significance of her suicide. Director Robert Greene (Actress) interweaves scenes from the fake movie, climaxing with a suicide scene in which Sheil balks at pulling the trigger and denounces the audience for wanting to watch. The movie has been praised as a genre-bending experiment, though it’s more like a bottom-feeding exploitation movie masquerading as an art film. —J.R.

6 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 8, 2016

Jackie

JONES 112 min. Greene attends the Friday and Saturday screenings. Fri 12/9, 8:15 PM; Sat 12/10, 5:30 PM; and Mon 12/12, 7:45 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center Miss Sloane Does Jessica Chastain want to be George Clooney? She roars through this political drama, as glamorously cynical as his 2011 directorial effort The Ides of March, and plays a morally conflicted Washington lobbyist similar to the guilty corporate fixer he rode to an Oscar nomination in Michael Clayton. For years Miss Sloane has been known as one of the most formidable operatives in town, but when she’s ordered to help defeat a gun-control bill for universal background checks, an unexpected (and unconvincing) attack of conscience impels her to quit her blue-chip firm and hire on with a smaller outfit on the opposite side of the issue. The movie shares with other mainstream political dramas an easy notion of Washington as a hopeless cesspool of sellouts, paybacks, and heinous personal betrayals; naturally the whole thing is framed by a televised hearing on Capitol Hill, where the heroine defends herself before a star chamber of old white guys and terrible secrets are revealed to a stunned nation. John Madden directed; with Gugu Mbatha-Raw, John Lithgow, Michael Stuhlbarg, Mark Strong, and Alison Pill. —J.R. JONES R, 132 min. For listings visit chicagoreader. com/movies.

Office Christmas Party The title promises mayhem and sexual abandon, but this yuletide comedy is more like a Secret Santa gift you don’t want. Jason Bateman plays it relatively straight as the steadiest executive at a Chicago tech firm run by bickering siblings Jennifer Aniston and T.J. Miller; before leaving town, the sister orders her brother to lay off 80 people, but once she’s gone, he hatches a scheme to land a game-changing new client by showing him a good time at their annual holiday bash. The script isn’t very funny, but the directing duo of Josh Gordon and Will Speck (Blades of Glory) have collected a large ensemble of capable players: Olivia Munn, Jamie Chung, Vanessa Bayer, Rob Corddry, Courtney B. Vance, Matt Walsh, and Kate McKinnon, contributing her usual wild-eyed weirdness as the company’s uptight

HR director (“I know why you went on medical leave,” she warns one employee). —J.R. JONES R, 105 min.

Century 12 and CineArts 6, Cicero Showplace 14, City North 14, Crown Village 18, Ford City, River East 21, Showplace 14 Galewood Crossings, Webster Place

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.

Screening with a live performance of the film’s score by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, including portions discarded by Capra. Fri 12/9, 7 PM, and Sat 12/10-Sun 12/11, 3 PM. Chicago Symphony Orchestra Tampopo Juzo Itami’s R second comedy (1987) represents a quantum leap beyond his

first (The Funeral): without abandoning his flair for social satire, he expands his scope to encompass the kind of narrative free play we associate with late Buñuel. His subjects are food, sex, and death, roughly in that order, his ostensible focal point the opening of a noodle restaurant. Working with a venerable cast that includes veterans of Kurosawa, Ozu, Shinoda, and Terayama, he takes us on a wild spree through an obsession, winding his way through various digressions with a dark, philosophical wit that is both hilarious and disturbing.

Not to be missed. In Japanese with subtitles. —JONATHAN ROSENBAUM 114 min. Fri 12/9, 2 and 6 PM; Sat 12/10, 5:30 PM; Sun 12/11, 3 PM; and Mon 12/12, 6 PM; Wed 12/14, 8:15 PM; Thu 12/15, 6 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center v

l

l

Holiday

SALE

Sale Ends December 31st!

SKIS

Armada, Atomic, Blizzard, Dynastar, Elan, Fischer, Head, Icelantic, K2, Kästle, Line, Nordica, Rossignol, Salomon, Stöckli, Völkl

SAVE 30% TO 60%

**

ON PREVIOUS YEARS’ MODELS

While Supplies Last!

SKI packageS – Over 50 Ski Packages Available!

**Excludes carry-over 2016/17 models.

SKI BOOTS SAVE UP TO 50% ON PREVIOUS YEARS’ MODELS

Retail $534

PACKAGE

$

299

99

Without Boots

$

189

Völkl RTM Jr. ‘14/15 junior skis

with system 3Motion Jr 4.5 bindings Axis Speed Jr poles • Nordica GP boots

29999

Marker M10.0 EPS bindings Axis Speed poles

64999

Marker Griffon 13 bindings Axis Speed poles

Retail $705

$

Retail $1130

$

PACKAGE

Völkl RTM 7.4 ‘14/15 skis

SKI BINDINGS SAVE UP TO 40% ON PREVIOUS YEARS’ MODELS

Retail $980

PACKAGE

$

67999

Blizzard Black Pearl ‘1516 womens skis Salomon Z10 Ti bindings Axis Speed poles

Arbor, Burton, Capita, Gnu, K2, Lib Tech, Never Summer, Rossignol, Roxy, Salomon

While Supplies Last! board BOOTS SAVE UP TO 40% ON PREVIOUS YEARS’ MODELS ODELS

PACKAGE

Völkl Kendo ‘15/16 skis

SNOWBOARDS SAVE 30% TO 40%

ON PREVIOUS YEARS’ MODELS

Snowboard packageS – Over 30 Packages Available!

board BindingS

SAVE UP TO 30%

Retail $550

PACKAGE

ON PREVIOUS YEARS’ MODELS

$

34999

Rossignol Tesla ‘15/16 womens board Rossignol Justice bindings

Retail $610

PACKAGE

$

49999

Burton Clash ‘15/16 board

Burton Mission EST bindings

SAVE UP TO 60% OFF on ‘15/16 Apparel!

SKI & SNOWBOARD thru TUNING SPECIAL! Dec. 31st!

Regular Regu lar Pric Price

69.99

$

Apparel Sale thru December 31st!

now only $4999

P-Tex repairs extra, as required. Snowboard bindings must be removed by customer before tuning to avoid additional onal charges.

VISIT VIKING AT 2 GREAT LOCATIONS!

Chicago

3422 W Fullerton Ave

(about 1.5 miles west of Kennedy Expwy.)

Chicago, IL 60647 (773) 276-1222

Mon Tues Wed Thurs Fri Sat Sun

11am - 8pm 11am - 8pm 11am - 6pm 11am - 8pm 11am - 6pm 10am - 5pm 11am - 5pm

www.vikingskishop.com

Barrington

131 W Northwest Hwy

(on Rte. 14 just west of Rte. 59)

Barrington, IL 60010 (847) 381-1188

Mon Tues Wed Thurs Fri Sat Sun

10am - 8pm 10am - 8pm 10am - 6pm 10am - 8pm 10am - 6pm 10am - 5pm 11am - 5pm

*See store for details on price match.

Geared for Everyone!

Prices subject to change without notice. Discount percentages are calculated from manufacturers’ suggested retail prices. Specials not valid in combination with any other promotion. Sizes, colors and quantities may be limited to stock on hand. © 2016 Viking Ski Shop Inc.

DECEMBER 8, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 7

8 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 8, 2016

l

l

CITY LIFE Street View

Waiting for the other shoe to drop IT ONLY TOOK A COUPLE of designer Sonia Rykiel’s striped knit outfits to unleash Bathsheba Nemerovski’s passion for fashion. “I got them in the late 80s from my grandmother, hand-me-downs from a friend of hers. I looked crazy wearing them to school, no one dressed like that, but I was obsessed.” The fixation continues today. “I pretty much spend all my money on clothing, travel, and eating out. That’s why I’ll never [own] a house,” says Nemerovski, co-owner of the Sparrow salon in Logan Square, hairstylist to local stars such as Jeff Tweedy, and keyboard player for the rock band I Kong Kult, which just ended a three-year hiatus (see Gossip Wolf, page 86, for more). She says her sartorial choices tend to reflect the spirit of the times. “When things are easy, as they were the last few years under Obama, I don’t feel the need to make clothing such an outward expression of myself. Hello, normcore! But I think the Trump era is going to be a return to punk, protest, expression, rebellion.” Nemerovski’s already off

SURE THINGS ¥

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

THURSDAY 8

o ISA GIALORENZO

to an auspicious start with her silver Mary Janes by Toga Pulla, which she describes as “cheerful shoes for a gloomy era.” —ISA GIALLORENZO See more Chicago street style on chicagolooks. blogspot.com.

Z Chicago Zine Fest: Shameless Karaoke Sing your heart out and support local zinesters at this karaoke fund-raiser for the Chicago Zine Fest.

8 PM-2 AM, Beauty Bar, 1444 W. Chicago, chicagozinefest.org, $5.

FRIDAY 9

9 Irish Christmas Market The outdoor holiday market features traditional Irish music and dance, whiskey-spiked hot chocolate, and donation collections for the Common Pantry and the Friendship Center. 12/912/11: Fri 5-9 PM, Sat-Sun 10 AM-6 PM, Damen and Belle Plaine, irishxmasmarket.com. F

SATURDAY 10

O River N orth Donut Fest This indulgent event features some of Chicago’s best doughnut shops and bakeries.

Tickets include tastings and drink tickets. Noon-4 PM, Moe’s Cantina, 155 W. Kinzie, rivernorthdonutfest.com, $50.

SUNDAY 11

ô Christmas Double Feature & Singa-Long A screening of White Christmas and It’s a Wonderful Life, separated by a caroling intermission. 12/10-12/24: times vary, Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport, musicboxtheatre.com, $24.

MONDAY 12

5 Game Dev Holiday Mixer This mixer for game developers features a game showcase, a charity raffle, and a collection for toy donations. Proceeds go to University of Chicago Medicine Comer Children’s Hospital. 7 PM, Emporium Arcade Bar, 1366 N. Milwaukee, emporiumchicago.com, $5.

TUESDAY 13

¸ Sauced: The Night Market Before Christmas The monthly night market opens its holiday iteration, curating a collection of food and gift vendors.

Also in attendance: live art installations and a “Bad Santa.” 5-10 PM, Chicago Athletic Association, saucedmarket.com. F

WEDNESDAY 14

Ý No Match for a Good Blaster This celebration of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story features an exhibition of video games, lightsaber fights, a costume contest, and more. 7 PM-1 AM, Headquarters Beercade, 213 W. Institute, hqbeercade.com. F

Remember, when giving lottery tickets as gifts, doublecheck that your recipients are at least 18 years old.

For more information, resources, and tips about responsible gaming, please visit illinoislottery.com.

Play the Illinois Lottery.

Be Merry, and Bright.

Play responsibly. Must be 18 or older to play. If you or someone you know has a gambling problem, crisis counseling and referral services can be accessed by calling 1-800-GAMBLER (1-800-426-2537).

For more info or to exclude yourself call 1-800-252-1775 or visit illinoislottery.com.

DECEMBER 8, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 9

○ Take a video tour of Mary Robinette Kowal’s space at chicagoreader.com/space.

CITY LIFE

This page: Mary Robinette Kowal with some of her antique typewriters; Kowal's cats like to congregate around the fireplace.

Opposite: Kowal's sewing room; another typewriter; one of her puppets o KERRI PANG

Space

Setting the scene

An author-puppeteer’s charming Ukrainian Village apartment doubles as a creative workshop.

A FIRE IS ROARING in the fireplace and sprays of bright red winterberry adorn a vase on the deco mantel. The scent of hot cider wafts through the air. What Victorian-era storybook scene have I stepped into on this chilly,

gray day in late November? It’s the home of Hugo Award–winning author, audiobook narrator, and professional puppeteer Mary Robinette Kowal, a spacious and stately 1913 apartment in Ukrainian Village that she shares with her winemaker husband, Robert, and their two cats.

“In 2012, we were moving from Portland, Oregon, to Chicago for my husband’s job and were looking for a place that was comfortable and familiar,” says Kowal, 47. “Ukrainian Village was [described online as] the most

HAPPY HOLIDAYS a season of giving FROM AU T U M N G R E E N AT W R I G H T CA M P U S

Portland-like [neighborhood] of Chicago.

And it has, in fact, been very much like that.”

She and her husband rented the apartment sight unseen and have fallen in love with its stained-glass features, dark-wood beams, and built-ins. “We were just looking for someplace with trees, hardwood floors, a gas stove, and quiet,” she says. “We sent a friend here to see it, and he looked around, went through our checklist, and e-mailed us and said, ‘This is the nicest apartment I’ve been in in Chicago. Rent it now.’”

Most rooms of the house are dedicated to some sort of creative project. In Kowal’s sewing room, just off the front parlor, she’s busy working on a Regency gown out of blue shot silk (think Jane Austen), and a polar-bear costume for a children’s theater in Iceland.

The parlor, meanwhile, is home to the couple’s books and antique typewriters. “When I met Rob, I had a typewriter, singular, and he had a typewriter, singular, and then we went to a yard sale together and found a third typewriter,” Kowal says. “As soon as you have

Egg Nog and Holiday Cheer WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 14TH FROM 1:00–3:00PM Come Celebrate the Holidays with your friends at Autumn Green at Wright Campus.

Help us make a difference in a child’s Holiday! Bring in a Toy as we will be collecting for Toys for Tots. Enjoy some Egg Nog and stay for a tour!

CALL 773-257-7298 NOW TO RSVP AND TO LEARN ABOUT OUR JANUARY SPECIALS! I N D E PE ND E NT LI V I NG | AS S ISTE D LI V I NG 4239 N. OA K PA R K AV E NUE | C H I CAG O, I L 60634 WWW.S EN I OR LI FESTYLE.CO M

10 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 8, 2016

l

l

CITY LIFE

three of something, it becomes a collection.”

In the months before they were married, they found that all of their conversations had something to do with wedding planning, and it had become overwhelming. “What we did was establish one of the typewriters as the nuptial typewriter, and it had red and black ink. If one of us had a question—he was red ink and I was the black ink—we would switch it to our color, type the question or the thought, and then the other person could go and look at it. It meant that you only had to deal with wedding stuff when you were in the right frame of mind. It was really nice.” Suddenly, people started giving them more typewriters—“This was before the hipsters had discovered them,” she says—and now they have nearly 20. Kowal does not recommend starting a similar collection. “Moving with typewriters is a really terrible idea. Dusting typewriters is really horrible.”

A bookshelf in the master bedroom is home to copies of Kowal’s many novels—Shades of Milk and Honey, Glamour in Glass, Valour and Vanity, and several others—while the

back porch serves as her puppet workshop, aka “the dusty area.” “It’s where I have my bandsaw and drill and belt sander and those things,” Kowal says. “People in modern America tend to think of puppets as Sesame Street, but puppetry has this very long tradition, and a lot of them are made out of wood or fiberglass or papier-mache.” She’s currently building science-fiction-like puppets for the House Theatre of Chicago production of Diamond Dogs by Alastair Reynolds.

Ultimately, her home is a reflection of a many-pronged career. “A lot of times when people are talking to me, they’re like, ‘Wow, you do so many different things,’ ” Kowal says. “But I feel like I actually only do one thing: storytelling. And I just happen to have a couple of different mediums I use to tell stories—puppets, prose, costumes . . . My job is to have a daydream and to use whatever medium to communicate that daydream to you.” —LAURA PEARSON

Want to show off your space? space@chicagoreader.com

DECEMBER 8, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 11

Dakota Access Pipeline protesters gather on and around Turtle Island, a site they say is home to tribal burial sites. o NANCY TREVINO/AP

CITY LIFE IDENTITY & CULTURE

Standing with Standing Rock

Chicago activists try to “decolonize” Thanksgiving at the Dakota Access Pipeline.

By DERRICK CLIFTON

T

he fate of the Dakota Access Pipeline still hangs in the balance, despite what was heralded Sunday as a huge victory for water protectors.

Although the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers ruled against an easement to build the pipeline on tribal land, citing potential hazards to drinking water, Energy Transfer Partners says it will continue pushing for construction of the pipeline, which would route roughly 470,000 barrels of crude oil from North Dakota to a shipping point at the southern-Illinois village of Patoka. Residents of the Standing Rock Native American Reservation, which straddles the border between North and South Dakota, fear any leak or explosion from the oil pipeline proposed to run under the Missouri River could contaminate the water supply for 17 million people who depend on it.

That includes the 8,000 or so people who live on the reservation.

The Trump transition team, meanwhile, hasn’t committed to upholding the decision, saying only that it supports the pipeline and will review the situation after the inauguration.

Leaders at Standing Rock thus tempered their initial celebration of the ruling Monday, saying they aren’t planning to leave anytime soon. Developers have already bulldozed some burial grounds and architectural sites, despite legal objections from the Standing Rock Sioux.

The pipeline’s security detail, composed of local law enforcement and the Army Corps of Engineers, have acted aggressively against demonstrators to date, using tear gas and military equipment to subdue protesters, hundreds of whom have sustained injuries. North

12 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 8, 2016

Dakota law enforcement reportedly fired rubber bullets and sprayed water cannons at demonstrators protesting the pipeline in the frigid temperatures of early winter on the Great Plains.

Tribe members say this all violates the terms of the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, which established the boundaries of the reservation and encoded tribal sovereignty on the land. (The pipeline had previously been rerouted away from nearby Bismarck, North Dakota. Residents in the overwhelmingly white state capital didn’t have to put up nearly as much of a fight, as WNYC has reported.)

As protests continue, about a dozen Chicago activists count themselves among the ranks of people who’ve so far traveled to Standing Rock to engage in direct action, deliver supplies, and build coalitions among activists. While most Americans prepared for their holiday feasts, Teresa Pasquale Mateus, a trauma counselor and graduate student at the Chicago Theological Seminary, Alicia Crosby, codirector and cofounder of the Center for Inclusivity, and about ten others joined the Standing Rock protests in an attempt to “decolonize” Thanksgiving.

Pasquale Mateus and Crosby conceived of the trip during a conversation in October. They were both struck by the dissonance between the history of Native American genocide that informs the conflict at Standing Rock and the celebration of a holiday that whitewashes the oppression of Native Americans.

“I think it’s particularly important to note that this is happening on Lakota land,” says Pasquale Mateus. “Many of the landmark events through Native American history happened on Lakota land—including the

Wounded Knee Massacre—which led to the reservations . . . so this moment is part of that long story of decimation and reclamation.”

They timed their trip to coincide with the holiday and take advantage of the long weekend. Group members individually fund-raised or contributed $100 to help cover transportation and food expenses, so that the bulk of the funds raised would go directly to the Oceti Sakowin camp, which has served as a communal hub and spiritual space for organizing on the reservation. The activists also launched a crowdfunding campaign, which has raised nearly $7,000 since its October 31 launch.

They used the money to buy supplies for the camp’s Medic and Healer Council, kitchen staples, winter coats, and other vital resources requested by organizers.

“We wanted to go into the space with the intention of giving more than what we took,” Crosby says. “We didn’t want to just occupy within the space,” she adds. That runs in contrast to some reports of white protesters treating Standing Rock like the Burning Man gathering, or coming for a “voluntourist” cultural experience that drains resources from a community in crisis.

“It’s a neocolonialist posturing,” Crosby said of such behavior. “Some people assume that physical presence in the space is enough, but it’s not. If you’re there and you’re not doing anything, then what’s the point of you being present?”

As part of their preparations, Pasquale Mateus gathered information about the histories of engagement between indigenous peoples and the U.S. government. She also connected with various groups at Standing Rock, includ-

ing the Two Spirit Nation, a group of LGBTQ Native Americans, to better understand the challenges the groups face and figure out how to seamlessly fit into the inner workings of the camp.

Their cars reached the gates of the camp during the early morning hours of Thanksgiving Day, a few hours prior to curfew breaking at 6 AM. As the group entered the camp, they could see the glare of floodlights over an expansive field. The pipeline floodlights were erected facing the camp, Crosby says, she thinks as a mode of intimidation.

The group first attended a daily orientation for activists arriving on-site, where they were briefed on legal matters, made aware of updated camp needs, and asked to submit emergency contact info in case of arrests or raids.

During direct-action training, activists were warned that police often target some of the most visibly vulnerable people during demonstrations—including women, indigenous people, people of color, and queer individuals.

With that awareness, they rolled up their sleeves. Virtually every working group, they said, grounded their activity in prayer and reflection, with a strong sense of spirit resonating among people of various beliefs. Some worked in the kitchen. Others worked with the medics, including Pasquale Mateus, who served on the mental-health support team housed in a cluster of teepees and yurts. There, she says she found symptoms of warlike trauma among some of the activists.

“The environment creates a consistent undercurrent of trauma,” says Pasquale Mateus, whose professional experience includes providing therapy services for combat veterans.

“Helicopters fly overhead all day; there’s surveillance on electronic equipment, barricades at the border, and armed [officers] visible from where you live.”

Northwestern University graduate student Danielle Taylor was among the visiting activists who participated in direct actions. Taylor joined a few that week, including a demonstration on the nearby 1806 Highway, another at the Turtle Island burial ground being occupied by police officers, and a prayer circle demonstration at Bismarck’s Kirkwood Mall.

That gathering was met with hostility by police officers and some shopping patrons, she says. Groups of police officers were already stationed inside, she says, brandishing zip ties on their vests—a sign that arrests could be imminent. But there was no marching, no chants, just 60 or so activists formed

l

l

Detroit resident Vonettia Midgett awaits assistance as the massive recount began in Wayne County, Michigan, on December 6. o MAX ORTIZ/DETROIT NEWS VIA AP

Read Derrick Clifton’s columns throughout the week at chicagoreader.com.

in multitiered circles, praying aloud for the land, for each other, and for the people who were hurting them.

“Being a black person, I already am terrified of mob violence, especially in [rural, white] places like North Dakota,” says Taylor. “And a man next to me yelled, ‘This is private property. Arrest them and beat them!’” Soon after, she says, officers began pulling some people out of the prayer circles and tackling others, all while several mall patrons cheered on the police.

Group members say their time at Standing Rock will inform how they engage in activism and advocacy in the future. The emphasis on spiritual connection while pursuing justice and understanding one’s own relationship with the earth, they said, were hallmarks of the experience.

“Seeing the activism in this space was like water to my parched spirit,” Crosby says. “And I thank the community at Standing Rock and the elders there for the lesson to temper my activism within the sacred.”

For anyone who still wishes to travel to Standing Rock, Crosby advises being present for a minimum of two weeks, so as to not strain the time and resources of the camp. Otherwise, she encourages people who can’t make the trip to figure out how they can help from home. That could include divesting from the banks supporting the DAPL project, putting pressure on elected officials, raising awareness on social media, or donating directly to the camp.

As the resistance continues, Pasquale Mateus says she will stand with Standing Rock “until the whole fight is over” and plans to physically return later this month.

“I hope that we all do,” she says.

But be forewarned: Chicago activists embarking on supply-delivery trips may face legal risks in the coming weeks. North Dakota officials reportedly intend to issue fines of up to $1,000 for anyone caught bringing goods to the camp.

So much for American thanks and giving. v

ß @DerrickClifton

POLITICS

Electoral College dropout Let’s ditch the Electoral College for the sake of minority voters.

By DERRICK CLIFTON

F

or anyone still hoping beyond hope that Donald Trump won’t be POTUS come January, few avenues remain.

Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein fund-raised to start recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, but that’s a long shot. As Clinton campaign lawyer Mark Elias wrote on Medium, Trump’s margins of victory in those states “well exceeds the largest ever margin overcome in a recount.” There’s also the possibility that “faithless electors” could use Electoral College provisions to cast ballots against Trump when they meet December 19, even if they come from a state he won. But that would force a Republican-controlled House of Representatives to decide the election. And although retiring California senator Barbara Boxer recently introduced a bill that would bind electors into choosing the winner of the popular vote, it’s unlikely to pass.

So basically, don’t hold your breath.

You know what would’ve prevented this whole Trump-winning fiasco in the first place?

If the country had a much simpler, one-person, one-vote system, where the popular vote elects the next president. Had that kind of system been in place, Hillary Clinton’s margin of two

million votes would’ve carried her to the White House. (And, no, she didn’t achieve that margin with millions of so-called “illegal” votes, as Trump has asserted without a shred of proof.)

Axing the Electoral College could have another benefit too: it might help bring disenfranchised or disillusioned voters back into the fold. In the weeks since Election Day, I’ve talked to many voters who say either they don’t vote for president, or take part in presidential elections despite their lack of faith in the system.

Although a whopping 84 percent of the city chose Clinton, almost one-third of registered Chicago voters didn’t come to the polls this year. Matthew Davenport, a 36-year-old black man from Chatham, was one of them.

“I don’t feel the political system is set up for all people to fairly participate,” says the former marine, who has been disaffected by presidential elections ever since the hot mess that was Bush vs. Gore in 2000. That’s the last time—and only other time since 1888—when a candidate won the popular vote but lost the election based on the Electoral College.

Davenport says he doesn’t feel his vote matters, and that the results of the election would have been the same whether he voted or not.

“The [Electoral College] is a reason I was turned off to politics in the first place,” he says.

“The system is set up to be confusing, and it’s not representative of the American people.”

Here’s a not-so-fun fact: It was also set up to give slave states more influence. As Yale professor Akhil Reed Amar told Vox, the south would have lost in a direct-election system because a huge portion of its population were its slaves. The Electoral College allowed slaves to be counted as three-fifths of a person, despite their brutally enforced disenfranchisement.

The slavery bias was preserved, Reed Amar said, despite Constitutional amendments. In essence, the Electoral College was created in the service of an economic order that depended upon the free labor and political repression of black people.

So it’s not hard to see where Davenport is coming from. Under the Electoral College’s winner-take-all system, Illinois has been a reliably blue state for decades, precluding the votes of Republicans, Libertarians, or Green Party members from having a direct impact on the outcome of presidential elections. When a candidate loses the popular vote, voices from underrepresented and minority groups become a nonfactor.

The Electoral College also discourages some

people from engaging in the political process beyond voting—in party organizing or volunteering—because in a blue state like Illinois, such efforts are perceived as going to waste.

No presidential candidate—not even Jill Stein—appealed to 28-year-old Green Party voter Tasha Bradley-Smith of Logan Square.

Although she skipped the vote for president, she voted in every down-ballot race, and thinks that if the country switched to the popular vote, it’d be better for third parties.

“I don’t feel comfortable voting Green in presidential elections when we have an Electoral College,” Bradley-Smith says. “People tend not to vote for third parties because they know it could hurt their next potential choice.

So I think [getting rid of the Electoral College] would be a good thing.”

If attempts to change the Electoral College prove successful, she says she would even consider volunteering for Green candidates.

There is one glimmer of hope on the horizon: Groups like National Popular Vote have advocated for a shift towards a popular-vote system. Already, ten states and the District of Columbia have adopted the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, an agreement for each participating state to award its electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote. At present, 165 of the total possible 538 electoral votes are bound within the interstate compacts.

Illinois signed on in 2008. Glad to know our politicians are already part of the solution.

And as NPV has pointed out, it would be nice if the state got more attention during presidential elections than, say, Trump paying lip service to Chicago.

“In the campaign we just went through, two-thirds of it took place in six states, and 90 percent of TV ad spending took place in 12 states,” says Vermont state rep Chris Pearson, a National Popular Vote board member. “Our system as it stands routinely takes for granted people who live in at least 35 states.”

Of course, a shift to a national popular vote wouldn’t be a cure-all. In most states, people in prison can’t vote—some states bar convicted felons from voting altogether—and some Republicans continue to target AfricanAmericans and Hispanics with voter-suppression tactics. Ditching the Electoral College won’t solve those problems. But if the goal is to make sure every living person of voting age can fully participate in their democracy, it’s a real fine place to start. v

ß @DerrickClifton DECEMBER 8, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 13

CITY LIFE A teen driver fatally struck Janice and Mark Wendling while they were biking near southwest-suburban Morris. o COURTESY OF THE WENDLING FAMILY

TRANSPORTATION

Stop the victim-blaming When motorists kill pedestrians and cyclists they need to be held accountable.

By JOHN GREENFIELD

O

n June 21 middle-school math teacher Janice Wendling and her husband, Mark, a power plant engineer, were training for an upcoming charity bike ride near the southwest suburb of Morris.

As they pedaled down the shoulder of a two-lane highway around 7 PM, a 16-year-old boy—who happened to be a former student of Janice’s—struck the couple from behind with an SUV. Mark was killed instantly; Janice was pronounced dead at a hospital shortly afterward. Police concluded that the crash was unintentional, and the teen was cited for failure to reduce speed to avoid a crash.

Some commenters on an ABC report of the tragedy were quick to blame the Wendlings for their own deaths. “Wear bright colors and a helmet,” one person wrote. “I no longer cycle on the two lane roads. . . It is not worth dying by riding out in rural areas.”

“That is a bad stretch of road, and the cyclists often ride three or four abreast, and

14 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 8, 2016

block the whole lane,” wrote another commenter. “They have no business on those twolane country roads, and should ride on the bike paths. They are just a nuisance on the road!”

And yet, the Morris Herald-News reported that, earlier that month, the boy had been clocked by police doing 87 in a 55 mph zone on I-80. And earlier on the day of the crash, he’d been ticketed for driving 24 to 36 miles over the speed limit in nearby LaSalle County.

This kind of horrendous victim blaming reminds me of what often happens to victims of sexual violence. When a woman is a victim of a assault or rape, there’s a tendency for people to blame her for the attack. They often callously argue that she should have conducted herself differently, that she shouldn’t have been in that place at that time, or that she was wearing the “wrong” clothing. In 2011, for example, Toronto police officer Michael Sanguinetti infamously remarked that “women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized.” The ensuing backlash sparked the international SlutWalk movement calling for an end to rape culture.

Just as there’s been a growing movement to raise awareness that rape and assault are the fault of the perpetrator and not the victim, we need to change the prevailing tendency to blame traffic violence victims for their own deaths.

When a motorist fatally strikes a person walking or biking, there’s often relatively little attention paid to whether the motorist may have been speeding or distracted. Piloting a vehicle that can easily kill people should require an increased level of responsibility.

In reality, unless drivers are intoxicated or flee the scene, it’s unusual for them to face serious consequences.

For example, in December 2013, hospital administrator Robert Vais fatally struck Hector Avalos, a former marine and aspiring chef, as Avalos was biking in Douglas Park.

Although Vais was found to have nearly twice the legal blood-alcohol level, he was sentenced to a mere 100 days in prison. Incredibly, Judge Nicholas Ford mentioned that Avalos was wearing dark clothing at the time Ford hit him as a reason for the light sentence.

Commenters often argue that fallen cyclists like Avalos were foolish to be riding on city streets or after dark, cruelly nominating them for the so-called Darwin Awards. The dead cyclist “was asking for it,” their logic goes.

But this is obviously faulty reasoning. If you’re driving a multiton vehicle, it’s your responsibility to pay sufficient attention and travel at such speeds that you can brake in time to avoid taking a life.

Victim blaming is also common with pedestrian fatality cases, such as the recent death of 23-year-old Phillip Levato Jr. On Sunday, November 20, Levato was in a crosswalk at Chicago and LaSalle when SUV driver Kyle Hawkins, 26, struck him and fled the scene.

Hawkins, who turned himself in a few days later, was charged with a felony for failing to report a crash resulting in a death.

One commenter on my story on the case wrote, “Some pedestrians are fully or partially responsible for their deaths. . . . Very few drivers intentionally hit another human being with their car. THE PEDESTRIANS ARE UNSEEN TO DRIVERS.” Instead of traffic calming or “road diets” to deter speeding on overly wide streets like LaSalle, the person advocated for using “barriers, footbridges, and tunnels” to keep pedestrians out of motorists’ way.

Sometimes the victim blaming comes from the media outlets themselves. For example, in early September, in response to the first four recent Chicago cycling deaths of the year, all allegedly caused by reckless drivers, the Tribune ran an editorial that put the onus on bike riders to be “particularly cautious” in order to prevent crashes. The piece even suggested that cyclists are usually to blame for such tragedies: “Some may think they shouldn’t have to obey the same rules of the road as motorists.”

A few days later the paper ran an antibicycling rant by DePaul adjunct lecturer John McCarron, arguing that motorists shouldn’t be expected to check for bicyclists before making

right turns, although two of the crash victims had been killed by right-turning drivers.

It’s even fairly common for government-sponsored safety campaigns to include bike and pedestrian shaming. Even the Chicago Department of Transportation hasn’t been completely immune. In 2012 the department launched a fairly effective, if grisly, ad campaign featuring graphic images, such as a body sprawled across a shattered windshield or an intubated crash victim in a hospital bed, to remind motorists of the consequences of reckless driving. But they also installed yellow diamond-shaped decals on sidewalks with a rather patronizing message for pedestrians: “Think before you cross.”

So how can we get the public to stop automatically blaming vulnerable road users?

Changing the way we talk about crashes could go a long way toward addressing this issue. News outlets generally refer to collisions as “accidents,” implying that they’re unavoidable, even in cases where the driver was clearly at fault.

Media reports also often use passive language that leaves the driver out of the equation, stating that the victim “was hit by a car.” In advocacy circles, we refer to this as “robot car language,” because it suggests that the vehicle acted of its own volition, so the person who was supposed to be controlling it shouldn’t be held responsible.

The good news is that as more and more communities recognize the importance of lowering the pedestrian and bike death toll, there’s a growing understanding that when people are struck, the problem is often due to driver error and/or unsafe street design.

And then there are activists, like the participants in the Critical Mass bike ride, who take over the streets each month to make the statement that people should be able to bike safely on any surface road, at any time of day, while wearing whatever they wish. That’s already the situation in bike-friendly cities like Amsterdam and Copenhagen. In that sense, Critical Mass functions like the SlutWalk of cycling advocacy.

So, in summary, we need to hold drivers accountable when they kill vulnerable road users by giving them appropriately stiff sentences.

And we need to change our thinking about who’s at fault in these cases. The victim blaming has got to stop. v

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

l

10am - 5pm

SPLIT A BOX WITH A FRIEND! RESTOCK YOUR LIBRARY! STOCK UP EARLY FOR HOLIDAY PRESENTS! TEACHER DISCOUNT AVAILABLE WITH VALID ID

z 905 W. 19 FILL A BOX FOR $40

PILSEN LOCATION!

W. 19TH

(ABOUT 30 BOOKS FOR THE PRICE OF 10.)

(SUCH A DEAL!)

TH

ST. S. HALSTED

FICTION • NONFICTION • KIDS

DECEMBER 10-11

S. PEORIA

20,000+ BOOKS

BOOK SALE

S. SANGAMON

l

OPEN BOXES

ALL SALES HELP SUPPORT OUR LITERACY PROGRAMS

WWW.OPEN-BOOKS.ORG DECEMBER 8, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 15

16 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 8, 2016

l

l

CAMIELLA WILLIAMS THE SURVIVOR

Inter view by B EN JOR AVSK Y Photo by WHIT TEN SABBATINI

In the past two decades, Camiella Williams has lost 28 family members and friends to gun violence. Now Williams, 29, is an antiviolence activist and a behavior specialist at a south-suburban alternative school.

I WAS BORN November 3, 1987—right here in Chicago. Grew up on the southeast side— roughly 67th and East End, right off of Stony Island.

My mother, Yolanda Williams, worked at Cook County hospital. My dad, Archie Williams, had a florist company. My parents got divorced when I was young. But even though my parents were divorced, my dad took care of the house—made sure we had a roof over my head. He was still a father.

He died of AIDS. I was ten. He was only 35 years old. So I didn’t get to ask him all those kinds of—what did you do when you was growing up questions.

When I was young, I went to Saint Sabina grammar school—Father Plfeger’s church. I went to a lot of high schools. I didn’t graduate. I got my GED. Back then, I didn’t follow politics—I followed gangbanging and drug dealing. I ain’t trying to sound like a cliche. But that’s what you see when you’re growing up on the underserved parts of Chicago.

I played basketball. But I didn’t go to no YMCA—I played basketball in the alley. I taught myself how to shoot and dribble. I was an Allen Iverson and Tracy McGrady fan. I watched And One mixtape videos. Everyone was intrigued with the And One mixtapes.

I had aspirations to be in the WNBA. I had my WNBA players I liked—Lisa Leslie. Marion Jones is still one of my favorite athletes.

These were the women who inspired me.

Unfortunately, I didn’t stay in one school long enough to make my name in basketball.

I got in trouble. I got suspended all the J

DECEMBER 8, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 17

fro9

CLOTHING Jewelry

9e;i5 o

curiosities

?h e

6"

e is 6oC Cher hi e r

1967

Accessories

PEOPLE ISSUE

& gifties

OPEN

- 1:8! : ?//@ CB<< 2+9:!

Socks Sunglasses & Readers 100

Handbags Curiosities & Gifties :

& 3/:CD/# 5:#1 5:!/! ( 'B% 7:"! & 0:6<8 0:6B5A#/ !/C! & ,45@/C C44<! ( .4CC</ 4%/6/#! & =B6! & C4C/! & C/: C4?/<! & ?:<</C! & 'B% 7:"! & !4:% & >:B# :55/!!4#B/! & @/8 $47! & 5B":#/CC/) 5:#1 5:!/! & *<:!@! &0/C:< C#B99/1 "<:!! 74;/!

,%.(", # /01+%0, # ,+.-)', %.*, # !$**'1, # &"0)',

! !

please

for

Extended holiday hours

steps from the Dempster El station

Polar Adventure Days Sponsored by Clif Kid

NORTHERLY ISLAND Saturday • December 10 • January 21 • February 25 • Noon - 4pm Northerly Island at 1521 S. Linn White Drive, on the Museum Campus.

Parking is available for $3, cash only.

It’s winter in Chicago - come out and enjoy it!

Have fun while enjoying all the wonders of nature.

For more information: Visit www.chicagoparkdistrict.com or call 312.742.7529 or 312.747.2001 (TTY)

City of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, Mayor Chicago Park District Board of Commissioners Michael P. Kelly, General Superintendent & CEO 18 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 8, 2016

Camiella Williams continued from 17 time. Looking back, it was the trauma. It was overwhelming. The trauma of losing my father and not knowing how to articulate what I was feeling. Of not having the space to open up about things. It stays in you, ’cause it’s got nowhere to go.

I used to have to fight every morning before school and then after school. I wanted to fight ’cause I was angry. I couldn’t articulate that.

My father had died. Then my mom found out she had breast cancer. I was trying to figure out, why me? Why, why, why?

I fought with everybody. Including teachers. I told this one teacher, “I’ll hit you upside the head with a bottle.” She gave me a detention slip. I tore up the detention paper in her face. I told her, “I ain’t doing shit.” I was terrible. I’m not proud. At that point, when you’re angry, you don’t see nothing. You don’t see rationality. You can’t see past the anger or the violence you’re feeling.

There’s just so much violence. You can’t really calculate the impact of the violence.

The trauma is real. I know I have PTSD. Who wouldn’t? So many people I know have been killed. As of today, 28 loved ones. Cousins, family, friends. I know the people who have been killed, and I know people who killed them. I know them both. How you gonna just deal with that—like it’s not real?

My second-grade teacher was killed. Shirley Tharpe. I researched the story recently to see what happened. They say she died in a struggle when she was stabbed. All I know is that I came to school one Friday and someone told me she had been killed. We were second-graders. How are second-graders supposed to deal with that? They brought in a counselor to talk to us. But that counselor didn’t stay long. And you’re supposed to just go back to your life? After a while you think, That’s just the way it is.

A lot of the guys caught up in [the gang life]

are smart. I know, ’cause I grew up with them.

I’m thinking of this one guy right now. I won’t give his name. He’s affiliated with gangs. He sells drugs. But he liked physics. He liked science. This guy could have been a scientist.

He was into Star Trek. I remember when it came out, he was telling me, “You gotta go see it.” We actually went to see it together.

He was explaining it to me—“This is the way the future’s gonna be, with flying cars.” But guys like that, their dreams are killed before they’re old enough to achieve them.

I turned it around for myself about ten years ago. I got pregnant. Being a mother, I knew I had to do something different. Or my son was going to go down the same path as me.

I got my GED. I enrolled at Prairie State College. Got my bachelor’s in criminology.

I work at a school in the south suburbs. And I work with Congresswoman Robin Kelly’s violence-prevention task force. And I’ve worked with Black Lives Matter and the Blair Holt Memorial Foundation. Saint Sabina. You name it.

My son is ten now. He’s growing up totally different than I grew up. Much more stable.

He’s in fifth grade, never been suspended once. By the time I was in fifth grade, I couldn’t tell you how many times I was suspended.

People ask me, why the violence? You can’t say it’s because of any one thing. It’s a combination of so much. People say [it’s caused by a] lack of jobs and resources. That’s a big part. But we have to deal with the trauma. We have to ask ourselves, How do we deal with the dreams that were deferred when people were young?

I know this ’cause I lived it. I remember being dead on the inside but alive on the outside. And when you’re dead on the inside, you can’t do anything. You understand? There’s a trauma to this life. Until we deal with that, we ain’t doing nothing. v

l

l

J A M I E K A LV E N THE MAN WITH A LANTERN Inter view by M ICHAEL M INER Photo by KEVIN S ERNA

Head of the wryly named and increasingly visible Invisible Institute, based in Hyde Park, Kalven was instrumental in prying loose from the city past misconduct complaints against Chicago police officers in order to identify the rotten apples sheltered inside the CPD. Kalven went after the autopsy report and video that showed Laquan McDonald, shot 16 times, was walking away from police when officer Jason Van Dyke gunned him down. Kalven’s revelations won him a George Polk Award for local investigative journalism and helped spark an ongoing U.S. Department of Justice investigation into CPD. Two months ago Kalven released “Code of Silence,” a 20,000word report—first published by the Intercept—on two cops the CPD turned against because they’d tried to expose officers who were aiding and protecting drug dealers in Chicago housing projects.

I FIRST HEARD the name Laquan McDonald from a whistleblower who contacted a colleague of mine. Two or three weeks after the [October 2014] shooting, I stood at 41st and Pulaski, the shooting site, and asked myself, “What happened here?” Over time I found a civilian witness who was very credible, and ultimately I got the autopsy report, and began to piece together the story. We often use the term “code of silence,” but it’s really a matter of narrative control. From the moment Laquan McDonald lay bleeding out on the ground, a narrative was forming about what happened, and within hours the city put out an account that was completely false about an aggressive, erratic young man who threatened the police. In order to sustain that false narrative, it proved necessary to intimidate witnesses, destroy evidence, falsify police reports, withhold public information from the public, stonewall the press, and, ultimately, pay out a $5 million settlement to the family in an effort to keep the video from coming out. Yet in the end, the official narrative utterly and completely cratered, and with it the political power of various actors—the mayor, the state’s attorney, the superintendent of police—creating a whole new political landscape in Chicago. A space was created for truth telling about the underlying conditions that allowed the shooting.

I think “cover-up” is not the right description of what happened. A cover-up is a discrete set of conspiratorial and criminal acts. This was standard operating procedure. The J

DECEMBER 8, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 19

IN THE CIRCUIT COURT OF COOK COUNTY, ILLINOIS, COUNTY DEPARTMENT, CHANCERY DIVISION ABBY ANDRICK & LAURA HOMAN ) Individually and as Representatives of a ) Case No. 13 Class of Similarly Situated Persons, ) CH 24899 Plaintiffs, ) v. ) The Honorable HILLCO REALTY MANAGEMENT, ) Michael T. INC. & LAKESHORE LAND ) Mullen VENTURES LLC-2930, ) Defendants.

NOTICE OF CLASS ACTION AND PROPOSED SETTLEMENT

YOU MAY BENEFIT FROM READING THIS NOTICE. TO: Those persons who have entered into a rental agreement with Defendants for an apartment located at 2930 N. Commonwealth, Chicago, Illinois 60657 on or after November 5, 2011.

IF YOU WISH TO RECEIVE A PORTION OF THE CLASS SETTLEMENT YOU MUST RETURN THE FORM AT THE END OF THIS NOTICE BY MAIL, FAX, OR EMAIL POSTMARKED ON OR BEFORE JANUARY 18, 2017 *If you do not wish to be part of the settlement, you must submit a written request for exclusion pursuant to the instructions below* WHAT THIS CLASS ACTION LAWSUIT IS ABOUT On November 5, 2013, Plaintiffs, Abby Andrick and Laura Homan, filed a class action complaint in the Circuit Court of Cook County, Chicago, Illinois. The class action complaint alleged that Defendants violated the Chicago Residential Landlord Tenant Ordinance (“RLTO”) Section 5-12-170 by failing to provide Tenants with a current RLTO Summary and RLTO Separate Summary when their rental agreements were initially offered and/or renewed. The complaint sought statutory damages against Defendants equal to $100.00 for each tenant plus reasonable attorney fees and costs.

The Plaintiffs and Defendants have reached a proposed settlement of the lawsuit. The Court has preliminarily approved the settlement, has appointed attorneys Aaron Krolik Law Office, P.C. and Mark Silverman Law Office Ltd. as counsel for the class (“Class Counsel), and has approved this notice. This notice explains the nature of the lawsuit and the terms of the settlement, and informs you of your legal rights and obligations.

THE FAIRNESS HEARING: A hearing will be held by the Court to consider the fairness of the proposed settlement and to decide whether to issue a final approval of the settlement. At the hearing, the Court will be available to hear any objections and arguments concerning the fairness of the proposed settlement, including the amount of the attorneys’ fee awarded. The hearing will take place before the Honorable Michael T. Mullen on February 21, 2017 at 2:00 P.M. in Room 2510 of the Richard J Daley Center, Chicago, IL 60602.

YOU ARE NOT OBLIGATED TO ATTEND THIS HEARING BUT MAY DO SO IF YOU PLAN TO OBJECT TO THE SETTLEMENT. THE PROPOSED SETTLEMENT Summary of the Benefits Under the Settlement: Class Members who submit timely proofs of claim shall receive a rent-credit or cash payment of $80.00. All co-tenants on a single lease are treated as a single Member of the Class for purposes of determining entitlements to participate in the Settlement.

Recovery to Plaintiffs: Subject to Court approval, Plaintiffs shall receive an incentive award of $5,000.00.

This agreement reflects both the sums that Plaintiff claimed as a member of the Class as well as an incentive award in connection with Plaintiff ’s services as the representative of the class. Additionally, Plaintiffs had a individual claim against Defendants pursuant to RLTO Section 5-12-080(d) for the return of their security deposit.

Attorney’s Fees & Costs: Class Counsel Aaron Krolik Law Office P.C. and Mark Silverman Law Office Ltd. have requested that the Court award them attorneys’ fees payable

by Defendants in the amount of $20,412.00, and the costs administering the case to be determined. This request is based on the litigation costs incurred and the amount of hours worked by Class Counsel at their normal hourly rate.

Unless you exclude yourself from the settlement, you will be part of the Class and Bound by the Settlement. Regardless of whether you submit a Claim Form, if you stay in the Class you will release the Defendant for all claims that you may have, as of November 5, 2013 arising out of your relationship with Defendant (except for claims of bodily injury), including claims arising under Chicago RLTO. WHAT TO DO IF YOU WISH TO RECEIVE MONEY FROM THE SETTLEMENT: If you wish to obtain the benefits of the Settlement, and you are a Class Member, then you must submit a completed claim form,

by U.S. mail, fax, or email, postmarked no later than January 18, 2017 to Class Counsel, Mark Silverman Law Office Ltd., 225 W. Washington Street, Suite 2200,

20 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 8, 2016

Chicago, IL 60606 or mark@depositlaw.com. To fax your claim form, please fax to (312) 256-2055. If you submit the claim for by email or fax it must be received no later than January 18, 2017.

REPRESENTATION BY CLASS COUNSEL – OR YOUR OWN ATTORNEY: As a member of the Class, your interests will be represented by the attorneys for Plaintiff without any additional charge to you. If you wish to participate on your own or through your attorney, an appearance must be filed with the Clerk of the Circuit Court, Chancery Division, by January 18, 2017. If you participate through your own attorney, it will be at your expense.

WHAT TO DO IF YOU OBJECT TO THE SETTLEMENT: If you object to the settlement and do not wish to exclude yourself from the class action, you must submit your objection in writing to the Clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County, Chancery Division, Richard J Daley Center, Chicago, IL 60602. The objection must be mailed to the Clerk of the Circuit Court postmarked on or before January 18, 2017 Your objection must include the name and case number. On the same date that you mail your objections to the Clerk of the Court, you must also mail copies of that objection to Class Counsel and to the attorney for Defendant, as follows: Class Aaron Krolik Law Office, P.C., 225 W. WashCounsel: ington St., Suite 2200, Chicago, IL 60606 OR Mark Silverman Law Office, Ltd., 225 W. Washington St., Suite 2200, Chicago, IL 60606 AND Defense Mr. Cary G. Schiff & Associates, 134 N. Counsel: LaSalle St., Suite 1720, Chicago, IL 60602 Your written objections must include detailed reasons explaining why you contend that the settlement should not be approved. It is not sufficient to simply state that you object. Provided that you have submitted a written objection, you may also appear at the fairness hearing.

WHAT TO DO IF YOU WISH TO BE EXCLUDED FROM THE SETTLEMENT: You have the right to exclude yourself from both the Class and the settlement by submitting a written request for exclusion to Class Counsel postmarked (or by fax or email) on or before January 18, 2017 Your request for exclusion must state your name, address, and the name and number of the case.

WHAT IF THE SETTLEMENT IS NOT APPROVED? If the settlement is not approved, the case will proceed as if no settlement had been reached. There can be no assurance that, if the settlement is not approved, the Class will recover more than is provided in the settlement or, indeed, anything at all.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: The description of the case in this Notice is general and does not cover all of the issues and proceedings thus far. In order to see the complete file, including a copy of the settlement agreement, you may visit the office of the Clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County, Chancery Division, Richard J Daley Center, Chicago, IL 60602, Room 802, where you may inspect and/ or copy the court file for this case at your own expense.

In addition, you or your attorney may direct questions to Class Counsel PLEASE DO NOT CALL THE JUDGE’S CHAMBERS. ANDRICK & HOMAN vs HILLCO REALTY MGMT, INC. & LAKESHORE LAND VENTURES LLC-2930 CASE NO. 13 CH 24899 -CLASS MEMBER CLAIM FORMIf you are a class member and you want to participate as a member of this class action settlement and receive $80.00 (by cash or credit against your rent at 2930 N. Commonwealth), please fill out this form and promptly mail, fax, email, and/or deliver it back to Mr. Mark Silverman, Mark Silverman Law Office Ltd., 225 W. Washington, Suite 2200, Chicago, IL 60606, PHONE (312) 775-1015; or you can return your completed form to FAX (312) 256-2055 and/or by Email: mark@ depositlaw.com or aaron@securitydepositlaw.com If you return this by mail, it must be postmarked no later than January 18, 2017. If you send it by email or fax it must be received by that date.

Please write the word “Hillco” on the envelope.

Current Name (First) Your Current Address:

(M.I.)

(Last)

Your Current Telephone Number(s): Your Current Email: By signing and returning this form you are representing that you are a Class Member in this Class Action, and that all of the statements made on this Claim Form are true and correct to the best of your knowledge.

Signature:

Date:

PEOPLE ISSUE

Jamie Kalven continued from 19

“

ALL OVER THE WORLD THERE ARE PEOPLE IN REPRESSIVE SETTINGS WHO F I N D W AY S TO LIVE AS FREE HUMAN B E I N G S , AC T I N SO L I DA R I T Y WITH THEIR NEIGHBORS, A N D FA S H I O N S T R AT E G I E S TO RESIST S TAT E P O W E R .

”

press likes to describe everything as a crisis, but in this instance the crisis is that there is no crisis. A crisis is a departure from the norm, and what we’re contending with is the norm.

It’s our increased clarity about the underlying nature of the institutional racism we’re confronting that is so daunting and challenging, and at the same time such an opportunity. If we can tell the truth about these conditions, we gain power to fix them. In that sense, this is a moment of great opportunity—and also peril.

The election of Trump certainly increases the peril, but it may also increase the clarity we need to be effective. I’m among the legions of people who were shocked by the election.

We woke up Wednesday in a different country.

I’m pretty strategic—my inclination is to think one door closes, another door opens—but it’s important now to take time to absorb what’s happened and to grieve. I’ve spent the last 20 years writing about people living under a de facto apartheid justice system in abandoned neighborhoods on the south side of Chicago.

There’s something strangely familiar about this moment of joining the disenfranchised.

The big danger is that we will normalize what’s happened. I want to resist that. We should assume Donald Trump means what he says. Think of all the columns written in recent days speculating that he will govern differently than he ran for office. I’m not going there. I’d love to be proved wrong, but my assumption is that we’re going to be living under a classic authoritarian regime.

With this election, we’ve joined the rest of the world. Think of all the other nations that live under moronic, venal leadership. There are models for honorable political lives in those circumstances, but those models are quite different from our dominant notions of citizenship in which we follow politics as a spectator sport and occasionally vote. All over the world there are people in repressive settings who find ways to live as free human beings, act in solidarity with their neighbors, and fashion strategies to resist state power.

We’re going to need to get good at practicing that kind of politics.

One of the dangers is that people will instead become demoralized and retreat into denial, that they will seek refuge amid the pleasures and fulfillments of private life. That would give carte blanche to power. There was

l

l

PAT H I L L THE G O O D CO P

Inter view by MAYA D UKMASOVA Photo by KEVIN S ERNA

Sixty-five-year-old Hill was once Mayor Harold Washington’s bodyguard and a beat cop in some of the city’s toughest neighborhoods. She retired from the Chicago Police Department in 2007, after 21 years on the force. Now she’s a vocal advocate for criminal justice reform. She’s also got advice for the activists fighting the city’s police culture—if they’re willing to listen.

I GREW UP in Chicago, in North Lawndale, and then we moved to 35th and King Drive.

My mother was a laborer, my father was an auto mechanic. Back then, the police were the last people you called, because it was kind of embarrassing. It would show that you didn’t have control over your household—you didn’t know how to manage your business.

The first [police] encounter I can recall: I worked for a pharmacist, and I would deliver prescriptions in his late-model Cadillac convertible. I remember being pulled over by the police in Woodlawn. They suspected I had stolen the car. I felt like, here these people are with all this authority, I would think they would be smarter. I was able to demonstrate that I was doing what I said I was there to do.

They treated me pretty well.

In 1974 I took the exam for the police department, but also for Chicago Public Schools. There was such a disparity. In the police job the salary was like $7,000 a year, there was no union, there was no job security.

The teaching job with CPS was like $10,000 a year, you had a union, you worked ten months out the year. So I taught high school J

DECEMBER 8, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 21

PEOPLE ISSUE

Jamie Kalven continued from 20

Pat Hill continued from 21

a term used in central Europe to describe those who opted to retreat into private life under totalitarianism. They were called “internal emigres.” That is certainly tempting at a time like this: to live one’s life in the wholly private realm, enjoying the company of friends, good food and drink, the pleasures of literature and music, and so on. Privileged sectors of our society are already heavily skewed that way. It’s a real danger at a time like this. If we withdraw from public engagement now, we aid and abet that which we deplore.

The sea change at the national level comes at a moment of extraordinary opportunity in Chicago to address fundamental issues of racism in our institutions and culture. It’s a question whether we will rise to the occasion.

I think that the changes in Washington—I’m looking for a word besides catastrophe—do, in ways we have yet to fully understand, reconfigure the field of play in Chicago. It’s highly unlikely the Department of Justice will do more than issue a report based on its investigation of the Chicago Police Department. The prospect of vigorous federal oversight embodied in a consent decree has largely evaporated.

It’s hard to imagine Trump’s Justice Department being interested in negotiating reforms of the Chicago Police Department.

We can expect increasing militarization of the police. Nationally, the political gravitational field is going to be dominated by powerful law-and-order themes, lock-’em-up themes, support-our-police themes. There will be very little interest in a reform agenda. So even if there was a disposition by Trump’s Justice Department to oversee reform in Chicago, it’s not clear we’d want that.

The truth is that much of the relatively well-spoken, “responsible” Republican establishment in Congress has been just as racist, but they’ve abided by a set of political conventions. Now we clearly see the nature of the forces we’re contending with. The Trump phenomenon has put race—the great unresolved blood knot of racial inequality—front and center. It’s released appalling toxins into the body politic. But at the same time it’s allowed for greater clarity on the part of those with the will to resist what’s coming. v

physical education for 12 years, and I began to notice how dependent the black community was on the police. The gangs were flourishing, people seemed to feel helpless, and they were always calling the police. And they were not being treated well. It was as if you were imposing on the police when you called them, as if you don’t deserve service. A lot of my students were involved in gangs, and many of them had gotten killed.

Then I started hearing this rumbling that we were looking to elect a black mayor. I thought, Wow, maybe I want to try to be a police officer again, ’cause I want to work for the first black mayor of Chicago. I was given the opportunity to become a bodyguard for Mayor Harold Washington.

City Hall changed overnight—the city opened up. The police were still predominantly white, but Washington appointed the first black police chief [Fred Rice]. That set a tone. His whole tenure, his effort was to try to hire more blacks. Community-police relations were better. Police officers were more cooperative. It was clear that the police department was there to engage in the community.

One of the men that was promoted during the time of Harold Washington became a commander in Cabrini-Green, and he was looking for a neighborhood-relations officer.

This was the second highlight in my career.

At the time Cabrini had more drive-by shootings by juveniles than any other area.

Going back to the premise that athletics is a deterrent for crime and juvenile delinquency, I decided that we needed to create a massive athletics team—a baseball league. And ultimately there was a book written called Hardball that later became a movie, that was based on my program. It had a lot of national attention. I’m convinced that if you’re determined and you’re serious, and you apply the proper mechanism to these things, you can stop any crime.

After that a new commander came in who did not share the same philosophy. I asked to be transferred, and I didn’t care where. I was transferred way south to the city limits, to Altgeld Gardens. And then I volunteered to

22 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 8, 2016

go to Englewood, one of the pilot districts for community policing, the CAPS program.

We really gave the community policing philosophy and practice to Englewood. I was able to instruct a lot of young officers. We created a mentor program. We were the first to get out of our car, walked the beat. Our officers would organize basketball games with guys who didn’t go to school. We were able to get information. We were developing a different culture of policing.

I got suspended a lot, because as the head of the African American Police League—sort of like a black union, to improve the relationship between the police and the community—I was challenging a lot of the policies in the department. First of all, there’s a lot of sexism and racism, so I fit the bill being a black woman. I was wearing a spiritual symbol in my ear called an ankh. The rules changed, the department said women could not wear earrings. They decided to suspend me for disobeying orders. I filed a lawsuit, won that, and was able to keep wearing it. I was suspended for almost half of the year.

That was the first time. I was suspended probably about six or seven times. They tried to fire me twice.

We suspended the league in 2012 because of a lack of interest. I had retired in 2007; I was becoming obsolete. The league was important because it demonstrated that when you had black officers, black people got better service. The killings and treatment of blacks today is more egregious than it was then, so it shows that having the league had some effect. It’s not necessarily about more black police officers, but more police officers that want to be black.

If you get more black officers, there will be a change.

When you join the police department, if you don’t have an identity, it’s gonna give you that blue identity. And these officers buy into it, many of these black officers, they’re still with the Blue Lives Matter. It’s really a setback. It’s a different type of blacks who’s becoming the police. Every time I see them, I challenge them one-on-one, ask them, “How are you involved in standing up to protect the community?”

I just got back from Oxford [University, in England]. I spoke at the Oxford Union, and on the panel with me were Deray [McKesson] and [Brittany Packnett], the young lady out of Ferguson. They believe that we should just abolish policing altogether. Well, one day, maybe. But not today. There are some people who are incorrigible. Who’s going to enforce the standards of our community if you abolish all the police?

I told these activists: You don’t understand the police. They don’t have conversations with individuals such as myself, who can tell you some of the inner machinations of the policing system. My intent was to go into the policing system and to address this stuff with an organization. The policing system in America is an organized system—an organization has to compete against an organization, not individuals. And that’s why the police department, they’re not really afraid of [activists], they don’t feel threatened by them.

These events are institutionalized. Why are the police killing so many young black men? The culprit is white supremacy. It’s about white privilege, it’s about white dominance. We have a black superintendent, but the mayor is running the department. The [fact that Eddie Johnson’s black] is irrelevant. He’s not carrying this out like a real black man would. He’s carrying the party line. You have to get into structural changes and [the police] have to be under civilian control.

I do unofficial recruiting—if you don’t like what’s going on, become the police. You can’t complain if you’re not going up in the system. I’m a prime example of the fact that background investigations couldn’t find everything. They saw a teacher with three children in a home with a white picket fence and neighbors that said I was a good neighbor.

But they didn’t find a young Panther sympathizer, they didn’t find a black nationalist.

And had they known that, I would never have had that opportunity, ’cause they don’t want any dissenters. So I’m telling these young people: if you’re gonna do it, you gotta go in with the intent of helping the community.

And we’ll help you! We will support you. v

l

l

presents

Shop Local this Holiday!

Sun 路 Dec 18 2016 路 11am-6pm 路 Chicago Plumbers Hall 路 1340 W Washington A curated event featuring 80 vendors.

FREE T O THE PUBLIC | FREE PA RK ING AVA IL ABLE | #M A DEINCHIC AGO For more information, visit ChicagoReader.com/MadeInChicago Vendors: for information, please contact Bburda@chicagoreader.com

DECEMBER 8, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 23

E T H A N S WA N S O N THE DAREDEVIL Inter view by RYAN S MITH Photo by B ILL WHITMIRE Swanson has tackled the herculean obstacle courses of the NBC game show American Ninja Warrior for three consecutive seasons. This fall, the 26-year-old became the course manager of the new Junior Ninja Warriors Chicago gym in Albany Park. He also regularly posts videos of his stunts online, which drew the attention of GoPro. A 2014 ad for the camera maker Swanson starred in shows him leaping from a rooftop near the Armitage Brown Line stop to a neighboring roof and landing on a spiral staircase. The clip has been viewed nearly eight million times on YouTube.

IT’S LIKE I WAS BORN without the ability to be afraid of heights. Maybe it’s genetics? I don’t know. Before I could even walk, I was climbing on everything. My mom had to put a doggie door on top of my crib because when she’d leave the room, I’d climb out and drop from three feet. When I was like six or seven years old, I started jumping off the roof of my parents’ two-story house in the south suburbs. I’d climb out of my bedroom window and jump off the ten-foot-tall section. Finally, my dad caught me. He was eating breakfast and saw a flash through the window. He sees me rolling around in the grass and goes, “What are you doing?” I say, “I was jumping off the roof.” He tells me I can’t do that, but I’m just a kid and I don’t know what’s supposed to be acceptable. Eventually he made a deal with me: “You can jump off the roof as much as you want, but you gotta come get me first.”

It’s funny because I got highlighted in the alumni magazine for Eastern Illinois University a couple of years ago, but when I was going to school there I almost got kicked out for rappelling off the eighth floor of an upperclass dorm. I got caught on the security feed from an elevator, and they told me they were going to put me on disciplinary probation for breaking the code of conduct. Why? For throwing things out the window. They said technically, I was throwing my body out the window. I’m like, “C’mon, seriously?”

I like being in Chicago because whenever I’m walking around I’m always looking up, trying to find the next spot for a stunt. Every now and then I’ll pull my phone out and put a marker down as a mental note to come back to

24 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 8, 2016

l

l

PEOPLE ISSUE

"*'0)'6(*0'3*6 /3*1,*-3*&

12O’CLOCK

TRACK SERIES A SIDE OF JAM WITH YOUR

)/&.+;'& -27(+;23- #2/ )/&.+;'& 1&217& +/66751!-*: ,((!5<!8': 48. $74=9 &!5*01*. 23#0"71"*546# 48. >#6871"*546# (75 ,./=13

THEBLEADER.COM

6.! 80 -<.1&=5 7)-%

LUNCH EVERY WEEKDAY

see if I can feasibly do a jump or a stunt off the top of some scaffolding or a building. I don’t want to get arrested, so I try to ask permission or won’t go in if there are signs that say no trespassing. But there are a lot of places that don’t have signs, so I’ll go in and mess around. Once there was this large crane near the triple intersection of Halsted, Grace, and Broadway, and a friend and I climbed up to the top, 20 stories off the ground, and I hung from his arm by one hand. I loved it, but the next day he says “it was kind of messed up” from his perspective because if he’d opened his hand, he just killed somebody.

For the GoPro commercial, I found a place right next to the Armitage Brown Line stop—a gutted building with nobody around.

So I jumped off a four-story building, over the peak of an adjacent A-frame roof, hit the opposite side, slid another story, then landed on a spiral staircase next door and walked down to the ground. I’d worn two pads on my arms and legs, but in between the pads my skin was a bit cheese-grated from sliding down the shingles. That was my craziest stunt ever because it involved so many different factors: foot placement, jumping, and timing. For the slide off the roof, I had to be in the perfect position to hit the stairwell right. It’s the kind of thing that’s impossible to practice in a controlled environment, so ultimately, you just have to train yourself to react quickly to whatever the situation is.

My main activity right now is American Ninja Warrior, which I’ve competed on for the last three years. This most recent year I did really well and was one of only 17 to make it to the second stage during the Vegas finals. There are four stages in the show, and if you beat all of them in the fastest time, you get a million dollars. So far, in eight seasons, only two guys have ever beaten all four. So it’s very, very difficult. Am I capable of doing it? I don’t know. I think I’m still getting to my physical peak. I’m currently training with ninja warriors who’ve been on the show, and they’ve said I’m getting stronger. It’s a jack-of-all-trades sport. Part of what makes it difficult is that it’s one and done, which means if you fall off an obstacle you’re out. So you have to be good at everything and really need to be prepared for anything they

throw at you. The show is very secretive about what’s going to be in the course, so you don’t know what you’re going to be up against until the last minute. So you better be able to figure things out quickly.

I studied mathematics in college and worked as an actuary for three and a half years, and most recently as a health-care consultant. But a few months ago, I got in touch with the people at the Junior Ninja Warriors gym and got an offer to work as a course manager. I thought about it, and decided I’d be upset with myself if I didn’t try it. I spend more hours working here than any job ever— but it’s because I want to. Not every kid we work with wants to be the next ninja warrior, but every kid wants to have fun.

I’d love to be a movie stuntman. My number one idol as a kid was Jackie Chan, but I don’t have any fight choreography experience and have never worked on a set before. The term is “ninja warrior,” but combat isn’t part of it.

When I first told people about Ninja Warrior, they’re like, “Oh what, you’re going to fight people?” Nope, I’d get my butt whupped.

In the meantime, I’m a dunker for the Chicago Bulls. You get out there during halftime or a third-quarter stoppage and jump off mini trampolines and do choreographed dunking.

For instance, Benny the Bull may throw it to you and you’ve got to grab it with one hand behind your back and dunk it. It’s so much fun. Regardless if the Bulls are playing well, people are watching idiots like me jump off trampolines and dunk a ball and they get very pumped. Especially if you get a couple dunks in a row, people are lit up and excited. I’m not a superstar like D-Wade, so when you’re out there with packed stands cheering you on, it’s an amazing feeling.

It’s very important to tell the kids I train at the gym that everything I do takes a lot of preparation and work on my body. When I’m doing my stunts, I spend most of my time calculating and figuring out angles and testing out landing and takeoff points. It’s very mental as well as physical. I try to look at every obstacle as a puzzle and my body as the piece that I have to fit in the right way to reach the solution. It’s a very useful philosophy that transfers into every piece of my life. v

;7041*. !8 &7)817)8 %-483178

:$"4:""4*9$, !!!4-7%)27+3#45,-7%)27+3# $7,.45,-

"*$0 !&(%% "*$0 '/-0*1 +&0.0&&01 +&(#-10& !-,)2 +&0.0&&01 +&(#-10&

Never miss a show again.

EARLY WARNINGS

chicagoreader.com/early

Chamber Opera Chicago Presents Two One-Act Family Holiday Operas!

Gian Carlo Menotti’s

The 11th 10th 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 11 at 3:00pm • Sunday, December 18 at 3:00pm The Royal George Theatre, 1641 North Halsted Street, Chicago Paired with the world premiere of Victoria Bond’s new one-act children’s opera, The Miracle of Hanukkah!

“First rate.... The parting of mother & son at the work’s close was moving indeed.”

Richard Covello, NIB Foundation

Tickets ($10-$20) at the Royal George Box Office, 312.988.9000, or www.chamberoperachicago.org DECEMBER 8, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 25

K E I S H A H O WA R D THE PROFESSIONAL GEEK

Inter view by RYAN S MITH Photograph by KEVIN S ERNA Howard founded the women-centric videogaming community Sugar Gamers in 2009. She left a career in real estate earlier this year to create the digital marketing agency the BlazeBreakers and this month started an intro to futurism after-school program at South Shore International College Preparatory High School. She recently delivered a TED Talk about how video games can be a teaching tool in dealing with failure.

WHEN YOU HEAR about violence in Chicago, it’s mostly happening on the south and west sides, and that’s where I grew up and lived: Englewood and a little neighborhood called Brainerd on the south side. My family was worried about me, so my curfew was 5:30 PM on school nights. I didn’t go outside to play or have parents taking me to soccer practice or ballet class, so my escapism was video gaming and geek culture. It was playing Super Nintendo, watching cartoons and anime, reading books—that’s how I became a nerd. It was a way of bonding with my older brother, who was my only playmate at the time.

Because I knew all these collegiate-level words and spoke well and got good grades, it set me apart from my peers. I used to get teased and bullied at school—they’d say “You talk like a white girl.” By the time I was 14, I told myself, “This is the world I’m in, and I’m always going to be apart from it, so I’ll just do what I want to do.” That set the course for me to choose this road of knowledge, curiosity, and adventure instead of trying to fit in.

Eventually I made friends—it was just later on in life.

I used to want to be a real estate extraordinaire—the next Donald Trump. All I knew about him was that he was a hugely successful real estate person. I didn’t do my research or have any opinion of him except for that. It’s crazy to think about a decade later. But then the recession hit in 2008, and the company

26 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 8, 2016

l

l

PEOPLE ISSUE

I worked for closed, so I started looking for other options. I tried out for a [reality TV] show in 2009 called WCG Ultimate Gamer.

This was pre-Gamergate, when female gamers were still unicorns and special in some weird way. I was a finalist for the show even though I didn’t play games all that well—they wanted me on for “diversity reasons.” I came back to Chicago with the idea of forming a cool group of female gamers—five to ten superbadass women, like [all-women pro teams] the Frag Dolls or PMS Clan, to compete in games online.

When I first started Sugar Gamers at the end of 2009, I realized, however, that I found online gaming to be incredibly distracting and had a whole host of other problems with them, especially as a woman. I liked the idea of a real-life interaction instead. So I found all these casual and social gamers, and Sugar Gamers mutated very quickly into this social gaming community. We still ended up being badasses—just in the way of adult women meeting each other, networking and collaborating on projects all over the common interest of video games. That ended up becoming more valuable to me. I’ve met my best friends through Sugar Gamers and learned so many additional skills just by taking that plunge. It’s been amazing.

Sugar Gamers never paid anything, so I was still working in the affluent, high-end real estate business to get by, but left in March because I wanted a career that felt more socially impactful. I started my own digital marketing business called the BlazeBreakers. People think I have all these technical skills, but really what I do have is a great network [of people] that possess the skills to complete basically any project that people throw at me. I’m also involved in after-school and mentorship programs at South Shore International High School. I’ve got an intro to futurism program I’m starting there. I’d been volunteering for three years but finally had an accepted proposal

that actually paid a reasonable amount. But because of CPD budget cuts, the program’s funding got cut by 75 percent, so I’m still basically doing it for almost no money. I’m working with these kids on tech and games, not through coding or programming but by teaching critical thinking and having kids deconstruct what they’re consuming. For example, I taught a class over the summer where everyone loved playing Pokémon Go, but they didn’t know what augmented reality was or what other applications of that technology was outside of catching Pokémon.

It’s cool that augmented reality can be used for gaming, but it can be used to help teach someone to dissect a cadaver—or for other educational or health reasons.

The buzzword I’m connected with right now is “transformative technology.” It’s something I still nerd out on. I’m tired of geek culture’s obsession with consumerism. I get that nerd culture is essentially pop culture.

Everyone’s a nerd now. But my problem is that so much of it is “Are you going to buy this new Iron Man movie? Or Final Fantasy 27?”

It’s like, how many Batman movies do I need to see to know what Batman is? “Are you excited about the new Star Wars?” No. Or “How about you take Thor, but he’s a woman now!”

I’m like, “It’s still fucking Thor! We can’t create a new story?” I’m a fan of geek culture but not of consuming the same incrementally improved things over and over. It’s like we stay trapped in nostalgia. I want to create a space where people can create something new instead of waiting for someone else to include them in the next Batman. That’s why now I’m studying ideas of futurism and how people can create or influence or shape what the future will look like through their work, knowledge, and research. The things we learned in geek, nerd, and gamer culture are amazing, but now I want to go to that next level and apply it to brand-new things. v

DECEMBER 8, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 27

S I R F RA S E R STO D DA RT THE CHEMIST

Inter view by AIMEE LEVIT T Photo by DANIELLE A . SCRUGGS On December 10, Stoddart, a native of Edinburgh and now a professor at Northwestern, will be in Stockholm to receive the 2016 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. For the 74-year-old, chemistry is intimately bound up with art and culture: the interlinked Borromean rings, which appear in art all over the world, inspired him to create mechanical molecular bonds in his lab. The Nobel finally got him his own parking spot on campus, but he hopes it will also give him a pulpit to extol “the beauty of chemistry . . . the excitement of it, the fun.”

I WAS BROUGHT into chemistry not by bangs and smells and the sort of thing that I think is very negative. I was brought in (not to begin with—the art, that came later) by just the fascination with the fact that here was something that I could make like an engineer that allows you to express your creativity. Do you see what I’m saying? In a way that you don’t have in the other sciences. The other sciences—and even chemistry itself, of course— much of it is finding out what the secrets are.

But chemistry is different insofar as you can construct things just like an engineer. So it’s the “making” component that makes, for me, chemistry pretty unique.

I do feel that the micromachine aspect has been moved too much to the front by Stockholm. I mean, who am I to debate this with them? But the title of my Nobel lecture, which I’m still working on, is “Design and Synthesis of Molecular Machines Based on the Mechanical Bond”—certainly I’ve got molecular machines there, but the last phrase, “the mechanical bond,” is really where I think [my colaureate Jean-Pierre] Sauvage and I have brought something totally new to chemistry.

This is not a chemical bond, it’s not a sharing of electrons, it’s not an attractive bond— J

28 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 8, 2016

l

l

CHRISTINA KAHRL THE SPORTSWRITER WHO HAPPENS TO BE TRANS

Inter view by K ATE SCHMIDT Photo by CARLY R IE S

A Californian who originally came to Chicago to study history at the U. of C., Kahrl has since shaped history herself, both as a cofounder of the stats bible Baseball Prospectus and as a leader in the LGBTQ community, among other things working with the Center on Halsted and conducting sensitivity-training workshops with local police departments. Now that she’s been “kicked up to” a position as senior editor for ESPN, she and her wife will be moving from their beloved Rogers Park home to Bristol, Connecticut, early next year.

I GREW UP outside of Sacramento and, yes, I’m an A’s fan. I do have sort of an existential issue there—I don’t know if I’m an A’s fan because my favorite color is green, or if green is my favorite color because I’m an A’s fan.

I went to the University of Chicago anticipating or hoping that I might someday become a professor of history. I hadn’t yet learned the life lesson that if you want to teach people about the Diet of Worms, you’ve only predicted what you’re going to live on.

But I love history as a subject. I think it is the mother of all the social sciences, the one that combines all the benefits of each one of them in a way that essentially allows us to explain our world through the experiences of the people who lived before us—and of course it dovetails very nicely with baseball, since we love our history in baseball. But it’s also something where it can be a pretty tough racket to make a living in.

Working [at the Oriental Institute] was in some sense the perfect starter job. I don’t have an archaeology background, but I did have Chicago Manual of Style training, and so I was there as both an assistant editor and as kind of a business manager of the publishing house. And you’re in a beautiful building, on a beautiful campus, with a view of Rockefeller Cathedral right out the window—because we didn’t have a cubicle. [Laughs.] But it also had flexible hours, so I could go to grad school, and the fact that I could hold that job, and get my MA, and launch BP, all at the same time . . . I was a busy bee in the 90s.

J

DECEMBER 8, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 29

PEOPLE ISSUE

Sir Fraser Stoddart continued from 28

it’s a physical bond. Sauvage was the person who used the first component of molecular recognition. He used a metal line in order to bring two components together. And then we were working all through the 80s, and we used another approach without the metal, and we made, quite surprisingly, a mechanically interlocked pair of rings in a very, very high yield very easily. And that was really quite transformative.

Molecular machines are not really doing very much yet, in terms of the artificial ones we are trying to make. The natural ones that are of course around inside us, in the billions I guess, are sustaining life. And so we know that they are capable of absolute magic in terms of sustaining us as living human beings. Every time I move my muscles or we take our eyelids and flash them, or whatever you want to say, or move our fingers, our heartbeat—everything is related to molecular machinery that has been constructed by nature over zillions of years.

And so there’s been a body of us that said, “If nature can do this, surely we can find out in the course of time how to do it ourselves.”

Both myself and colaureate Ben Feringa very often use the analogy of flight. If you wind the clock back, at the end of the 19th century, somebody as eminent as physicist Lord Kelvin was saying there would never be manned flight. And about 20 years after that, of course, the Wright brothers came along, and we started to get movement and get things off the ground. At the moment, I am reading a book by this man, Bill Bryson, One Summer, and it’s about America in 1927. And it tells the whole story about these very different aviators that were pioneers insofar as they were trying very hard to get these contraptions into the air.

And they were not always successful. I mean, the death rate was high. And so, you know, 20 years on from the Wright brothers, not a lot of progress had been made. So if you want an analogy, that’s where I think our artificial mo-

30 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 8, 2016

lecular machines are today.

But fast-forward. Two weeks ago, I came back from Frankfurt on one of these Dreamliners—and you know, you’re just blown out of your mind. You’re sitting on this thing that’s sort of as big as this building. And effortlessly, it takes off into the air. Totally amazing. And so all I can say is, there’s going to be developments as a result of getting the equivalent of these molecular machines to where flying machines were in 1927. There’s going to be developments over the next maybe 90 years that are going to be mind-boggling. Actually being able to put my finger on them and say they’re going to cure cancer or they’re going to do this or that, I wouldn’t wish to do that, because I think that would be in the realm of hype. That would be in the realm of asking maybe too much of these machines at the moment. Well, I could be wrong. I have been wrong many times, of course. That wouldn’t be the first time.

I like to say that the prize is not just recognition of me as an individual. It’s much more the recognition of almost 400 young people over 50 years that have been very close to me, and maybe hundreds of others who have been on the periphery. I often say that I am first and foremost a professor who teaches and mentors, and that is what my legacy will be. It will be my students. It will not be the prize.

No, maybe I shouldn’t say that. But if it is the prize, a lot of these young people have, to varying extents, a component of it, the right to it. You know? They can have that sliver at 11 o’clock as you look at the medallion, if you like, and say, “That was me.” It’s all about teamwork. It’s not so much about one person. It’s, as I say, close on 400 that have been close to this activity. And you know, I’m taking 40 or 50 to Stockholm. So it won’t be much of my, what do you call it, prize money left at the end of that exercise, because that’s going to be costly.

And I don’t mind. I mean that. People mean more to me than cash. v

Christina Kahrl continued from 29 Part of me will always look at my time at Baseball Prospectus as the coolest thing I was ever involved in, because it still does what it did when we founded it 20 years ago. I’ve always likened it to Saturday Night Live—it’s a rotating cast of talent, where the people there get to take the show, as it were, the direction they want to go, they do the things they’re good at, and show off their abilities, and it ends up being a kind of seedbed for writers, analysts, talent.

I mean, look at [former BP staffer] Nate Silver’s Fivethirtyeight venture. That’s entirely about taking some of the things that maybe we thought we might take for granted and applying it to the wider world, and doing the kind of journalism that I think I would love to see more journalists thinking of, which is that you have to speak stats, you have to speak in the language of information, you have to be able to master the numbers. When I get particularly high-blown, I’ll say BP was essentially founded on Age of Reason principles and has always operated from them.

When I came out in 2003, I did it my own way. I didn’t have a press conference and announce that I was out. [Laughs.] I didn’t want to become known as “the transsexual sportswriter.” I’m a sportswriter; I just happen to be transsexual. I’m not afraid of that, I’m totally happy to talk about that, but my day job . . . I am an out-loud trans person, but I’m also a working professional in sports. I got lots of infotainment television offers, and it was like, “No, because I know exactly how you’ll talk about me and how you’ll position the segment. I am not here to be your freak of the week.” From my perspective, my focus was on coming out and living happily ever after. I didn’t want the 15 minutes of fame; I wanted the next 15 years and more.

As I got comfortable with being out, and having, essentially, achieved myself, I got more involved, working [at the Center on Halsted], working with the folks at [the safe-space

community group] Genderqueer Chicago. My engagement is really about making sure that trans people get full civil equality. We’re not asking for anything more, we’re not asking for anything different, we’re just asking for the same basic deal as everybody else. And you’d think that would be really noncontroversial, but for some people—some people really feel that’s a problem.

I wish I could sugar-coat it, but there’s no doubt whatsoever that what the next four years holds is frightening. I mean, if you talk about what having fundamentalist Christians in charge of the Department of Education means for, not just science education, but for the bullying of LGBT kids in school . . . We’re talking about physical danger to kids. And when I think about the violence that already gets directed, particularly at trans women of color, not just in this city but across this country . . . If anybody expects that the Department of Justice under Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III is going to do the right thing, well, I want to be that kind of optimist. But so much of the basis of equality that trans people achieved under the Obama administration relied upon executive orders or departmental policy. And all of that’s going away. It’s a dangerous and scary time.

My wife, living in Chicago for seven-plus years has been the longest stretch that she’s lived anyplace in her life, and for her, like me, it’s home. I love the lake. The two teams. My neighborhood is everything I would ever want from a neighborhood—everything is everybody-friendly in Rogers Park, across every conceivable line of diversity that there is. And then to be able to get to Wrigley in like 25 minutes. Does it get any better than this?

It’s hard to give up, but, you know, when ESPN comes a-calling, you say yes. Still, if I had the freedom to choose where to live, I would choose Chicago. It’s not like I have some fantasy of, like, I wanna live on an island paradise. No, I wanna live in Chicago. v

l

l

T R OY D O R I S THE BEAT-MAKING TRIPLE JUMPER Inter view by LEOR GALIL Photo by SCR APPERS FILM GROUP

Doris represented Guyana in the men’s triple jump at the 2016 Olympics, placing seventh in the finals.

The 27-year-old records music as a hobby, producing house songs under the name Good Junk and footwork tracks as Allblack.

I’M THE YOUNGEST of three. My oldest brother, Dionte, ran track, and he’s always been a good role model to my middle brother and myself. I just wanted to follow whatever he did.

My middle brother, Ryan, was like, “All right, we’re gonna do this together. We’re gonna hold each other accountable for what we do, and then we’re gonna see how good we can get at it.” It was an obsession since I was 15—just that one bit of influence from my oldest brother turned into a huge dream that came true.

I didn’t have the most straightforward path.

I had to go to junior college, and then I had coaches in junior college that helped me train, but it was still very independent. Then I finally got to University of Iowa—I’m finally getting some structure, and I’m getting caught up to what it actually means to be a proper athlete.

My coach at my junior college got a call from University of Iowa. He [Iowa coach Clive Roberts] sent the brochure. We had our first conversation on the phone, and he was about to hang up—I was like, “Hey, I got a question.

Where you from?” He was like, “I’m from Canada.” I was like, “OK, but where are you from from?” He’s like, “I’m from a country called Guyana.” I was like, “I knew it—I could hear it in your voice. I knew it!” We instantly connected; we had a longer conversation, talking about family, and he was really adamant about getting me to the University of Iowa.

We moved from California to Chicago when I was six. All my family from Guyana—aunts, uncles—nobody was born in America. My grandma lived on the south side; she passed a few years ago. My uncle lives four houses down, and then my aunt lived across from my grandma’s house. I could either be at my grandma’s house, my uncle’s house, or my auntie’s house, and I was always exposed to our culture. We had our community; we had our family parties. Food was a big thing, so we were always cooking. If it wasn’t for that block that we had on the south side, the family wouldn’t have that strong foundation of making sure J

DECEMBER 8, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 31

A DA G R EY THE CRITIC

Inter view by TONY ADLER Photos by WHIT TEN SABBATINI Grey, 12, is a veteran theater critic (since the age of four) and actress (beginning at five years old).

Aside from one day at preschool (“ hated it”), she’s homeschooled in Rogers Park. Her reviews always begin “once upon a time” and evolve from Socratic dialogues with her mother. They can be found online at Ada Grey Reviews for You (adagrey.blogspot.com). Grey can be seen onstage now at A Red Orchid Theatre, in the company’s youth ensemble production of The Haven Place.

MY DAD IS an actor, and I was seeing his plays, and I just loved expressing my opinion.

I had very strong opinions as a four-year-old.

I wrote reviews to tell my grandparents and my entire family how I felt about art exhibits and shows I saw. Then I did a review of SpiderMan: Turn Off the Dark, and a comic book website found it and posted it all over social media. Then a bunch of people started following my reviews.

As a little four-year-old I thought that every story had to start with “once upon a time,” and I thought that was a great way to start a review because I feel—and I felt then—that a review is a story. It’s a story of what my mind was thinking during the show.

But it also explains another story—a story within a story. And I thought that “once upon a time” would be fitting for that.

If I say something that doesn’t really make sense, my mom will say, “Hey, that doesn’t make sense. Elaborate what you’ve just said.” It’s a discussion between us. I will sometimes express my opinion and she’ll say, “That’s a little bit too harsh.” Or, “Is that really how you felt about this?” That’s helped me a lot. I’ve learned that you want to dive deeper into each topic. You want to think about other people’s opinions and also think about what the process was instead of just, I liked this, I didn’t like this.

Going to see shows is a very big part of my daily life. There have been weeks where I’ve gone to seven shows in seven days. Those days are pretty crazy. But on a normal week, probably three, four shows.

32 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 8, 2016

l

l

PEOPLE ISSUE

I have a very wide range. I like anything from musicals to Chekhov. And I also like to experience new types of work. If there is a modern piece with dancing tomatoes, I would want to go and see that because I would be intrigued by it.

My responsibility is to get my opinion across and try and convey to my readers if they would like this show. I want to tell my readers my opinion truthfully without any . . . gobbledygook, I guess! I couldn’t think of a good word. Yeah. Gobbledygook.

Straightforward, but not rude. Yeah.

I’ve had a few people [respond to] my reviews, “Hi, I’m 12 and I live in Wisconsin and I like your reviews.” Stuff like that.

But mostly I have found that it is adults in Chicago theater and in New York theater or theater anywhere. I usually am addressing a very large amount of people. I try to express a mature opinion on whatever play I’m seeing, and I want it to be accessible to kids and adults. People say, “Oh, she’s so smart because she writes these reviews and she’s really insightful.” But I like to try and write as a person, not as a 12-year-old.

There have been people who have said, “Hey! You liked that show! I hated it! How dare you like this show!” And I’ve said—to myself, I haven’t said this to them—“That’s not the point of reviewing. I get to say my opinion and you get to have yours.”

Anyone can understand any type of play as long as they really pay attention and try to see inside what the playwright was thinking.

There have been some very strange plays that I know weren’t directed toward 12-yearolds, but I still try to understand them to the best of my power. I haven’t just learned about reviewing. I’ve also learned about being a person in the real world and in life.

There have been mistakes where we didn’t know something was going to be inappropriate when it was. I’m not going to name any names because I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, but there was a show where there was somebody completely naked onstage and my parents just told me to cover my

eyes. But then there was another scene that was even more inappropriate and I was like six at the time and my mom said, “Look at the program! Look at how interesting the program is! Isn’t it so interesting?!” But it’s never scarred me permanently. There is no scarring from plays. Not that I know of.

Acting! Another thing I do! That started when I was five. My first show was I and My iPhone, for Collaboraction Sketchbook. It was about a girl whose friend had been texting and driving and got into a car accident and died. I got to stand up on a table and yell at everyone. I get to do a lot of that. I get to yell at people. I get to creep people out. Yeah.

My parents never pushed acting on me. I went to see the A Red Orchid youth ensemble’s The Iliad, which was an all-girls production. And afterwards the director came up to me and said, “Hey, do you want to do a play?”

And I said, “Yes!” And my parents are like, “Whoa! Whoa! Slow down there.” But then I did end up doing the show, and I’m really glad I did that. I don’t think my reviewing would be the same if I didn’t take that part.

I wouldn’t have the same view because I wouldn’t have an inside look on what the process is like.

There’ve been shows I haven’t liked that somebody I know was in, but they usually can’t tell. Which is kind of weird. They’re like, “Oh my gosh! Thank you so much for giving me that great review!” Well, OK. You’re welcome. I try to get my point across in a nice way, and I guess I’ve done that. But I’m sometimes worried that I’m going to go into a room one time and somebody’s going to be mad at me for giving them a bad review.

I have an agent, and she sends me in for TV, film, and also theater. I love doing TV and movies, but I’ve always loved theater so much and there’s nothing like having the audience there and having an opinion right there in front of you. There’s nothing like feeling a mood in the room. Feeling how an audience feels. I don’t think that there will ever be anything as beautiful as theater.

Yeah. v

Troy Doris continued from 31 my mom, my uncles, and their kids grew up as Guyanese. We know who we are.

My grandma, she sent her kids one by one.

She had one of my aunts—she wasn’t the oldest, but she was the most mature—stay in Guyana. My grandma came here, then my aunt stayed with the younger kids. Then she sent the older kids over to Chicago first, so my aunt was taking care of the younger kids. It was a long process, to send eight kids to America one by one. She didn’t give up. She did it. I think about if my mom couldn’t come—who knows what would’ve came from that.

All three of us were in band, and we played instruments for years. So my brother Dionte— the one that got me into music—he played the trombone. Ryan played the trumpet. We always had a sense of music—we knew how to read music. I played the saxophone from sixth grade to senior year. We were always into collecting records. I’m still into collecting records—I get my samples from records.

I started on Fruity Loops. Once YouTube was introduced, I would go on YouTube, and people started posting tutorials. I met so many musicians on MySpace. I had some involvement in people’s lives that were really pushing to make music. I always knew for me it was a hobby, but it was a hobby that I obsess over.

I like the futuristic sound of dance music.

What goes into making music, it really has to come from inside, so it’s not like you just press buttons and then make a song—it really has to come from how you’re feeling. I’ve never seen one person hear house music—hear that fouron-the-floor rhythm—and just sit there. You dance a little bit, it hits you—I’ve never seen anybody just disregard a house track. It’s fun; it brings people together.

I’ve never really been one to reach out, but I have made connections. My friend Garrett [Shrigley, aka Adulture], who’s a resident at Smart Bar, he makes house music. He was one person that really taught me how to structure a song—and introduced me to Ableton, which really shifted gears for me. Seeing his appreciation for what he does, it made me appreciate

music more. I wouldn’t say he’s the reason why I kept making music, but I think if I didn’t have those interactions—going to his house, hanging out—I wouldn’t be as invested in it.

After college, I got invited to the Olympic training center in San Diego. If I didn’t have the support of the U.S. Olympic training center and my coach—Jeremy Fischer, that recruited me—if I didn’t have that support . . . it puts people’s dreams on pause, or just throws it out the window. I did that for three years. I applied for my Guyanese citizenship in 2012, at the first Olympic trials—I didn’t get my passport till 2015. I was like, “Well, I have my passport. Not to bail out of an opportunity, but the U.S. team, let’s be honest, is very hard to make—and this is the opportunity that I wanted. I wanted to represent Guyana since 2012 for my family.”

I took it. When I got back to Chicago, I had no idea what I was gonna do. I made a plan—I got in touch with my coach that’s here now [Andreas Pavlou], and we started training.

At the ceremony, being in the stadium— walking in, it was a cloud of white noise. I’ve never been so awed. I’m looking around and everything was silent. The same thing happened for me in the competition—I don’t know if it was very loud while I was competing, or if it was just me tuning all the other noise out.

My brothers, my family, and my coach, they were on the sideline—they were close. I would go up to them, and I would try to communicate, and I would just be like, “I can’t hear you.” I’d have to just walk off. That is something I’ll never forget, because I’ve never felt that way.

It’s the best feeling I’ve ever had.

It was my sophomore year when I learned more about triple jump. There’s the hop phase, the step phase, and the jump phase. Once you have a long—or a good enough—first phase, a second phase that’s manageable, and then a long third phase, then it feels like that consistent floating motion—like that bouncy, skipping-a-rock-smooth motion. Once you first do it properly, you panic. I do remember that. You panic in the air—it feels different.

And then you get used to it. It feels like you’re flying. It’s the closest thing I can get to it. v

DECEMBER 8, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 33

'-.,'& 1',)!% 1+#1"& -) %/, '-(/%2 0$% %/," 1', 1+#1"& *'1(-+,2

Check our website for road sharing tips.

0/-#0!"&0,0/%*(!$'.)&'-+

34 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 8, 2016

ota.org

orthoinfo.org

l

l

H O M E R H A N S B R YA N T THE GURU OF HIPLET

Inter view by D E ANNA I SA AC S Photo by SCR APPERS FILM GROUP

More than two decades ago, Bryant invented the fusion of hip-hop dance and ballet he calls “hiplet,” and he’s been teaching it in his Printers Row dance studio ever since. This year the wider world finally discovered him, and now the 66-year-old head of the Chicago Multi-Cultural Dance Center and his students, the toe-dancing Hiplet Ballerinas, are an international sensation.

I WAS BORN in Saint Thomas, Virgin Islands.

Going to Catholic school, and to the basketball court, a friend and I would stop and watch the girls in the dance-studio window.

After a couple weeks, the teacher came out and said, “I’m going to call the police.” I said, “But I really want to dance.” She gave us some papers and said, “Have your parents fill these out.”

My mom was a single mom, and I have one brother and two sisters. She said, “You must be crazy, boy—we can’t afford dance lessons.”

But my friend, his mother signed my paper.

Two days later we were both there in dance class with the girls, having a great time.

This was tap and jazz. My teacher said, “You know what? You guys are really talented. You need to start studying some ballet.”

It wasn’t until she passed away that I agreed.

She had arranged for me to go up to Massa-

DECEMBER 8, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 35

M A R I A G A S PA R THE MULTIDISCIPLINARY ARTIST

Inter view by TAL ROSENBERG Photo by WHIT TEN SABBATINI Gaspar, 36, is an assistant professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a multidisciplinary artist whose work combines performance, sound, sculpture, and installation to address the various politics of local individuals and communities.

I WAS BORN in Chicago, in Little Village. My childhood was very creative; my mother had a large part to do with that kind of creative experience. She was a professional clown.

She did that for a couple years when I was a little kid, and then she was a community-radio DJ at an old station in Little Village called WCYC that was part of the Boys & Girls Club.

I performed with her as a kid—I was a little clown. I had the same exact outfit that she had, just a smaller version. She mostly did parties in the neighborhood. She works at a school—she’s been a teacher’s aide for 45 years—and so she often would get requests from parents to do the kids’ parties. Performance art and sound from her radio days really set a kind of groundwork for what my interests would be later, and a community kind of aspect of her work, because radio is a way to distribute information.

I did piano for a couple years, dance, and all that stuff that little kids do. And then I got into the art stuff more heavily when I was a teenager. I did my first mural when I was 14, and that led later to a lot of public artwork. There’s one up at Paderewski School, which was closed, unfortunately, during the closings of the 50plus schools a couple years ago. But it still sits on Millard and Cermak Road.

I went to Whitney Young [High School]. We had a pretty strong art department. It was a really wonderful school, but I didn’t fit into the academic setting. I wasn’t the best math student or the best science student, and that was their focus. So I found my safe space in the art department. I was doing pretty typical high school art—a lot of drawing, a lot of painting.

Then I went to Pratt [Institute in New York]. I lived in New York for four years; 9/11 happened the year I was graduating. I had a really hard time, because I came from

36 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 8, 2016

l

l

PEOPLE ISSUE

watching artists engage in communities, be really inventive with resources—teaching art classes out of church basements, doing really radical work in many ways—and then I got to this institutional setting where there wasn’t a lot of radical things happening. In fact, it felt so conservative. But the way I responded to that was starting the Latino organization that ended up lasting for the years I was there and beyond. And then inviting artists of color to come speak through funding I was able to get through the school. So my response was, “Well, there should be more visibility here, so like, how do I do it?” The organizing piece of my work started to become more prominent at that time.

I was excited to come back to Chicago and see what people were doing, how the city had developed, and how I could contribute. I needed time to really experience what it’s like to be a working artist. I had an opportunity to come back and work at the National Museum of Mexican Art’s youth program, right after college. They have a youth program called Yollocalli—I worked there as both an instructor for arts programming and an organizer for this very old program called Youth Net, which was a city program. I took five years and then I applied to graduate school.

I got an MFA in studio arts at UIC. I did mostly sculpture and performance art in grad school. Through the support of a couple of people I started to teach at SAIC in the fall when I graduated. And that later led to a teaching position in a couple of other departments. I have this awesome class of students at the Art Institute right now that are doing work about being undocumented, about motherhood and gender and race, and it’s so exciting to see all the many ways that they’re implicating themselves and collaborating with others to produce work. When I think about my students’ work, I think they’re brave.

A couple years ago I did a workshop-slash-residency at Vocalo called a Storytellers Workshop. I produced my first audio documentary, and I loved figuring out what questions to ask and then getting folks

to share their stories. But I was also listening to my mom for so long. I’ve always felt a connection to sound because I’m so interested in how it connects to the body. I’m interested in the politics of the body, but also the material aspects of the body: thinking about voice, and giving voice, or creating a platform for voice, for people who don’t feel like they have a voice or visibility.

In a political sense, I take a lot of cues from the ways that people self-organize. I’ve always been inspired by the way that communities who have been marginalized are able to then self-mobilize and create opportunities for themselves. I think a lot about immigration and how people are resilient and create their own spaces and lean on each other in community spaces. There is something very tender about that way of living, because it’s about human connection. And so what is human connection about? It’s about love and joy and tenderness and creativity and all these beautiful things. What can I learn from that? On a cultural level, migration patterns, or what people have brought with them, what people create, and what the city then offers.

Then I think about my own family, their own kind of resilience, and then what they’ve offered to the city. A lot of my family—and I just sort of realized this a couple years ago— they’re all kind of working in service of the city in some kind of way. They’re teachers—I have a police officer in my family, a lot of military family—but I have a lot of people involved in education that are politically active. So I think about it as a sort of civic duty too, that there’s a lot of people involved in not only offering something to their neighbors but offering something to the entire city.

Art in Chicago has always been good. And maybe now there are more eyes looking at the city. And I’m glad that they are. But there is something really exciting about coming from a city that’s so rooted in a certain kind of artistic rigor that is based in craft and creativity and art, but also in a politic. Artists that are putting those things together in various ways, I feed off of that. v

Homer Hans Bryant continued from 35 chusetts to Jacob’s Pillow. And everybody there was into heavy ballet. These guys were jumping and spinning and doing all kinds of flying leaps, and I’m like, “Oh my God, this is what dance is all about.” I didn’t want to go back to Saint Thomas, because I had so much to learn. So my mama arranged for me to stay in Brooklyn with my cousins and an uncle.

In 1968, when Dr. King was assassinated, Arthur Mitchell decided to start the Dance Theatre of Harlem. In 1969, he took like ten dancers up to Jacob’s Pillow for a lecturedemonstration. I’m sweeping the stage at Jacob’s Pillow, and these beautiful black people step off the bus and come into the theater, and I’m like, “Who is this? I gotta be a part of this.”

I asked to take class that evening, and long story short, by the end of 1969, I was at Dance Theatre of Harlem on a scholarship. And that’s how my dance career took off. I was understudying everybody, and I got better at it, and before you know it I was a company member.

In 1978, I took a break, and did the Wiz movie with Michael Jackson and Diana Ross. I also did Timbuktu! on Broadway with Eartha Kitt. Then I came to the Drury Lane Water Tower, in Evolution of the Blues. We performed there for almost a year. During the day I would go over to Chicago City Ballet, and take classes with Maria Tallchief. When the show closed, I was invited to join her company. That would be the early 1980s, till 1984.

I got married in ’78, to Rhonda Sampson, a ballerina with Dance Theatre of Harlem. In 1981, our daughter was born, with cerebral palsy. Alexandra Victoria. They told us she would die at five years old. They were wrong; Alexandra lived to be almost 30. And she was a blessing. I learned so much from her. I used to bring her to ballet class, and she would sit in her wheelchair and move her fingers.

And I would tell the students, “You see that?

There’s a dancer inside of her.”

In 1990, I opened my own school. We’ve been in this building [Dearborn Station] for 26 years. I’m also the assistant artistic di-

rector for Giordano Dance Chicago. That’s my day job. I get to work with older people. Then at night, I come and work at my own school, with the children.

I started rap ballet back in 1994. We went around to Chicago public schools. It was classical ballet music, and the guys would come out and lift the girls, and spin them, and then the rap music would start. When rap changed to hip-hop, I just changed it to “the hip-hop rap ballet.” And in 2007, I got a trademark on the word “hiplet.”

Over the years, I’ve sent dancers I trained to Cirque du Soleil, Alvin Ailey—all over the place. But right now, social media has propelled us into another dimension. The kids put me on Instagram, and I started posting little things, and then the Só Bailarinos in Brazil started posting some of our stuff. It was a big controversy over there, and it went to eight million views. That was maybe last April or May. And then BuzzFeed picked it up and called us, Huffington Post came in and shot the kids, and Good Morning America called. It’s almost 100 million views right now. We got a call from Mercedes-Benz. They flew us to Germany; we shot a commercial at the Mercedes-Benz museum in Stuttgart.

And then we went to New York for Vogue magazine. And out to San Francisco—did a TED Talk. The phone has not stopped ringing.

But these kids are 12 to 18, and I keep pulling them out of school. That’s a problem.

We’re turning down a lot of stuff. The world is calling, and everybody’s on hold. I need money to start a company. I would really love to be able to hire ten dancers, or even seven, right now.

Of course, we have our critics. Anything new, people are going to be upset by it. I tell people this is edutainment. It opens a place where kids of color can come and study this art form, knowing that they have to train in classical ballet, five, six times a week.

My mom passed away in 2006; my wife passed away in 2008; my daughter passed away in 2010. I am married to my school and these kids. v

DECEMBER 8, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 37

MARSHALL BROWN THE ARCHITECT

Inter view by TAL ROSENBERG Photo by ZAKKIY YAH NAJEEBAH Brown owns and operates Marshall Brown Projects, an urban design and architecture studio in Bronzeville. The 43-year-old is also an associate professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology, a member of Chicago’s cultural advisory council, and a frequently published author. “The Architectural Imagination,” an exhibition of his work, recently appeared at the 2016 Venice Biennale and opens at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit in February.

I KNEW I WANTED to be an architect ever since I knew what it was. I had this instinct that this was what I wanted to do. And I was fortunate that I had the vocation—rather, the aptitude—for it. You have to be curious.

You have to be analytical. You have to have a formal sensibility. You have to, well, enjoy making things. There are a lot of skills you need for architecture, because it’s a very generalist practice. Of course, I can draw, and I can do all those other conventional things.

And I could do all that from a very young age.

I was born in New Jersey, in Newark—in the city, around there. We bounced around a lot when I was a kid, but I grew up mostly in New Jersey. I finished high school in Georgia, and then I went to Washington University in Saint Louis. I went for the university in general, but they do have a very good architecture program. At the time, in the early 90s, the school was very broad-based. So I had a studio professor who was an artist, who taught us how to draw, how to think about drawing. There was one time we would just draw lines for a week, or something like that. Pretty old-school.

Of course, any architectural school in the midwest takes a requisite field trip to Chicago at some point, so we did that. I remember actually not being that blown away by Chicago in my first visit—in fact, I didn’t like it that much.

When people come to Chicago for the first time, they go to the Loop. Which is not nearly “real Chicago.” And this was the Loop in the early 90s; so it’s also changed since then, quite a bit. I remember trying to take the el several times and not being able to figure it out. After I finished school, I had friends who moved J

38 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 8, 2016

l

l

D E B O R A H S T R AT M A N THE EXPERIMENTAL DOCUMENTARIAN

Inter view by PETER MARGASAK Photo by CARLY R IE S

A multimedia artist and UIC associate professor, Stratman is best known for her work in experimental documentary film and video. The 49-year-old’s output covers a wide range, including an abstract appreciation of Foley artists (Hacked Circuit), a sprawling, sideways look at Illinois history (The Illinois Parables), and a meditation on individualism, gun culture, and nationalism (O’er the Land). She has often embedded herself in outsider cultures, observing drag racers on the west side of Chicago ( The BLVD) and tightrope-walking Uyghurs in China (Kings of the Sky). Her work has always been an act of inquiry. As she told Bomb magazine in 2015, “I want to come at things from a place of unknowing. I make because I don’t know.”

I GREW UP in the midwest, in Illinois. I was born in D.C., but I moved to Illinois when I was like a year and a half or two, and I grew up in the western suburbs—between Naperville and Aurora. I moved to Chicago in the mid-80s.

I went to CalArts for grad school. That was when I first left Chicago. I was there for three years, and then I moved to Iceland, where I lived for about a year and a half, working on From Hetty to Nancy. And that film was definitely a reaction to Los Angeles. Even just the desire to go to Iceland—I had to go someplace that really pushes against everything that LA is, as much as I love LA. I think the film I made in Iceland was definitely a product of the influence of the professors I worked with there.

I mean Betzy Bromberg and Thom Anderson and James Benning.

And then after Iceland, that’s when I was based in Riga with Juris Poškus, a filmmaker I was partners with at the time. From there I lived in Copenhagen for a while, cutting the Iceland film. Then we were in Russia working on his film, so it was like Riga was a base we were coming back to, and then either going together or going separately to other places to work on stuff, and back to Riga and back to the States.

I’m definitely a curious lady, and that’s one of the things that I love the most. I think it’s art making in general, I don’t think it’s J

DECEMBER 8, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 39

PEOPLE ISSUE

Marshall Brown continued from 38 here, and I would come visit them, and I developed an appreciation for it.

I went to Harvard get a master’s degree in architecture, but then I decided to get a concurrent degree in urban design—not really to become an urban designer, but to become a better architect. Architects are a dime a dozen, but urbanists are rare, especially good ones.

I almost moved to Chicago. But I went to New York because I had the sense that if I went to Chicago I would stay and never have the experience of living in New York. And so I decided to move to New York; I stayed for almost exactly four years, and then left. I created a project called the Yards Development WorkShop. We were trying to hijack a project developed by Frank Gehry and his developer, Bruce Ratner, for the Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn. I was living in Fort Greene at the time, so I was basically living a couple blocks away from the site. And so I worked with then City Council member Letitia James, who is now the public advocate in New York. There was no basketball court in our plan, because we thought it was just ridiculous.

And there was no use of eminent domain, so we were proposing to build over just the railyards. We were also proposing to use multiple developers, multiple architects. So we were proposing a different process.

I left New York in 2005 to start a teaching job at University of Cincinnati, and I was there for three years, so I didn’t get to Chicago until 2008. So I was kind of working my way back in this direction.

Marshall Brown Projects was officially established in 2011, after I got licensed to practice architecture in Chicago. I’d say that my practice is probably a bit more diverse: in the kind of work that I do, the kinds of places where I show my work, or where my work ends up; also the scales at which I work, and the kinds of projects that I work on. I consider it all architecture, but people interpret it in different ways. Art is an easy one. Art and architecture have always had crossover. We just share a lot of the same techniques: we draw, we make things. So it’s not a new thing for architectural

40 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 8, 2016

drawing—or, I do work with collage—to make its way into the art world, or even the art market. There’s a long history of that.

We have all of the good architecture. Chicago is definitely the architecture capital of America, definitely one of the—if not the— modern architectural capital of the world.

Some cities have, like, a Mies Van Der Rohe building; we’ve got a slew of them. Some cities have a Frank Lloyd Wright building; we’ve got, like, all of them. Well, not all, but a lot. Daniel Burnham, Louis Sullivan, Bertrand Goldberg, now there’s Jeanne Gang—it goes on and on and on. I think another thing that distinguishes Chicago is that there’s a huge fan base for architecture. The average Chicagoan can probably name up to five architects. That’s about three more—four more—than most Americans. I mean, really. Everyone knows who Mies van der Rohe is, everyone knows who Frank Lloyd Wright is, a lot of people probably know who Jeanne Gang is, they’ve heard of Daniel Burnham, they’ve heard of Louis Sullivan.

That’s like five, maybe six or seven in these cases. Architecture is not respected in the same way in many other cities.

I think we’re in a moment where Chicago’s architecture scene is really lively again, becoming more and more diverse. I think we’re getting really interesting, new, creative talents here, where the city I think for some time had been dominated by the more established firms and practices. So, it’s an interesting time for Chicago architecture. There’s also the biennial, which is a great thing, and it makes a lot of sense for us.

But I think we have to diversify the ways that we view this city in its urban fabric. Because the city is vast—it’s over 200 square miles in area. And so the idea that you should do the same things, that you should develop the same way downtown or on the north side as you do the south side or the west side—I don’t think it’s necessary or even desirable. I think we have to look at the different conditions we have in the different neighborhoods, and develop different ideas. Expand our bandwidth. More imagination. v

Deborah Stratman continued from 39 just film—that it gives you license to just drop into a field that you have no background in.

Because you’re making this project about it, it gives you license to be, “Well, I’m making this project, so of course I can work with this geologist or this sound designer or whoever or whatever their field of expertise is.”

I understand how it’s related to journalism and/or ethnography, but to dip into other ways of being and thinking and living, it’s very seductive. Sometimes it’s confusing, like on films like The BLVD, where you surround yourself with this lifestyle. I get totally interested in it and get totally into the cars, and who are the people, and what are the conversations, and what’s the scene. But it doesn’t go both ways. I mean, they welcome you into their family, but it’s not like suddenly all those guys are coming over every weekend, hanging out and knowing what your life is outside of it—so it’s a bit of a strange negotiation.

Sometimes I think it’s really problematic and has a weird kind of privilege to it, to just come in and stamp a situation—or a culture, for that matter—with your take on it. Because that’s what you do; you’re coming in and you can’t help but be you. It’s not like I haven’t been completely doubt-addled about it.

Research drives the work, no matter what it is, and it can be on really different levels.

Sometimes it’s research for a day and just being super curious about, “Wow, you have 72 birds of prey in your backyard? What? Can I film you?” It doesn’t have to be ten years of research, but just loving how weird people are, or how unusual certain architectures are. Or geothermal stuff is crazy.

I’m easily excitable. I was back in Chicago, and I was antsy and I wanted to go somewhere. I had read somewhere that the most inland place in the world was right where the Uyghurs live, further from the ocean than anyone. And I thought, “That’s kind of cool.

What happens there because of that and what kind of culture develops there?” And then learning that the Silk Road went through there, so it’s a huge trade route. There had

always been Russia and China and the Middle East and this crazy confluence there—just deep, deep historical confluence of pretty different cultures rubbing up against each other. That seemed kind of curious, and it just made me want to read more about the area.

It’s just random casting into all these different ponds. And I read something about their sports—there are two sports and they both sound awesome. One was tightrope walking, which is the Uyghur national sport. And the other was, they ride horses—it’s kind of like polo or lacrosse or something, but they’re on horses and they throw a sheep between them.

And I was like, “Oh, that’s so cool. I could totally make a film about this.”

The place is the first interest, and that leads to an interest in the culture and the sociopolitical, and then it’s like, “What’s the hook, or what other thing can be enough of a thread to drape a film on?” And so I started reading about tightrope walking being their national sport. I was like, “That’s great—it’s really metaphorical, because these people are very oppressed.” Not that I didn’t have a panic attack on the plane—like, “Jesus, what the hell am I doing?”—but I still felt like, “Well, something will come out of it.”

Why am I going to China? I don’t speak Uyghur. I don’t know anything about their culture. This is so presumptuous of me. How am I going to be able to show this thing that’s so not me? But on the other hand, I feel like the gap between my reality and theirs is sort of what helps you see it—that’s actually what makes it fair and/or what gives you perspective. If the gap’s there between you and that thing, you can actually see the outline of it.

I used to feel like it’s really important that I show somehow who I am—that I’m not a Uyghur or that I’m not a drag racer, I’m not a black person. But now I think my style says that enough that I don’t have to necessarily put myself in the film. Or I’m already showing my hand, just by how I choose to cut and how I choose to frame things, and hopefully people realize: “That’s not her realm, but she’s interested in it.” v

l

l

S

P

O

N

S

O

R

E

D

S

E

C

T

I

O

N

Portraits of the power of passion and innovation embodied by fourteen dynamic Chicagoans who represent the pulse of 900 North Michigan Shops and this magniďŹ cent city.

I

A

M

C

H

I

C

A

G

O

.

C

O

M

DECEMBER 8, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 41

I AM C H ICAGO 2016

VA L E R I E GROTH Non-Profit Founder, Ryan Banks Academy

V

alerie Groth is a former Chicago Public School social worker and now the founder of Ryan Banks Academy, a nonprofit dedicated to building the first residential school for underserved youth in Chicago. The Academy will open its doors in time for the 2017-2018 school year and seeks to impact the lives of students through a rigorous college and career preparatory education, a supportive boarding program, and a focus on

personal development in a positive environment. In addition to her work with Ryan Banks Academy, Valerie also runs a life coaching practice where she works with clients from around the world on overcoming fear, gaining self-confidence, and making massive positive transformations in their life. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology, Master’s in Social Work, and Master’s in Educational Leadership.

I A M C H I C A G O . C O M

42 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 8, 2016

l

l

DOMINICK & DONNA MONDI

D

Financial Executive and Interior Designer

S P O N S O R E D

onna Hall is the founder and principal designer of Donna Mondi Interior Design, a high-end, luxury design studio. Donna started the firm based on her love for design and a determination to cultivate a different, thoughtfully personalized, client experience. Dominick Mondi is the President of Capital Markets and a Senior Managing Director for the Institutional Sales and Trading group at Mesirow Financial. He is responsible for leading, coordinating and maximizing

the efforts of various departments within the company. While these two are great individually, they are even better together. As the story goes, after a little courage and a lot of persuasion, Donna and Dominick met on a blind date arranged by a mutual friend. A year and a half later, the couple was relaxing after a hectic weekend when Dominick surprised Donna with a Cartier box and said, “It’s time.” With a wedding planned later this fall, we can’t wait to see what’s to come from this power couple.

S E C T I O N

DECEMBER 8, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 43

I AM C H ICAGO 2016

MICHELLE HARRIS Director of Entertainment at the Chicago Bulls

M

ichelle was born and raised on the North Side of Chicago into a large Filipino family. At the age of 17, she left to attend New York University, and graduated with degrees in Marketing and Management at the Stern School of Business.

During that time, she got her start in sports by dancing for the New York Knicks, and then worked her way up to becoming the Director of Entertainment Marketing. Michelle has

been with the Chicago Bulls since June 2013.

It’s her team’s job to make sure that 22,000 fans are energized, entertained and having a memorable time at each and every home game. She has also implemented most notably Benny the Bull and the Luvabulls. When Michelle is not at work, she enjoys spending time with her manfriend, Chris, doing yoga, working out, cooking and boating out on the lake with her friends.

K I M B E R LY E V E T T S Luxury Realtor

K

imberly started working in Chicago as a bartender. After meeting thousands of people and getting to know Chicago, she made her way into the luxury real estate market. She works for Chicago’s

Property Shop specializes in the Downtown Market and can help any client find their perfect home! When she isnt working, you can find Kimberly hanging out with her dog, Biggie, or on a yoga retreat.

I A M C H I C A G O . C O M

44 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 8, 2016

l

l

T R EVO R H E F F E R NA N CEO of Chicago Helicopter Experience

T

revor is the founder & CEO of Chicago Helicopter Experience, the city’s first, privately-owned heliport. His next major achievement will be the 2017 groundbreaking for the new, permanent home of Chicago Helicopter Experience. With this, the route for Chicago’s water taxis will be extended to actually dock at the heliport –allowing tourists to experience Chicago via land, water

and air in a seamless fashion. Trevor has been featured in the Chicago Tribune, Aviation Week, CS Modern Luxury, Chicagoist, and on every major television station, including ABC, NBC and WGN. When he’s not brokering a deal with an exciting new partner, or soaring over the Chicago skyline, you can find him working on his family’s farm, playing the piano, boating on the lake, or riding horses.

CARRIE MEGHIE Co-President of Becker Ventures, General Manager at Hard Rock Hotel & Founder of Jackson Chance Foundation

C

arrie has over twenty years of business experience. She is the co-founder of Becker Entertainment and the General Manager at the Hard Rock Hotel. In addition, Carrie and her husband founded the Jackson Chance Foundation (JCF). The foundation enriches the lives of families with babies in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) by allowing them to spend

more time with their critically ill baby. JCF created the NICU Transportation Program to partner with hospitals and alleviate the transportation expenses of all families each and every day their child in in the NICU. The programs are fully funded by JCF and currently benefit the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago with the hope of expanding to more hospitals.

S P O N S O R E D

S E C T I O N

DECEMBER 8, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 45

I AM C H ICAGO 2016

MICHAEL TYLER Author of “The Skin You Live In”

M

ichael Tyler is a freelance writer specializing in social, political and commentary. He is the author of the award-winning children’s book “The Skin You Live In”, the first book ever published by the Chicago Children’s Museum. Tyler has also authored: “Water for the Soul: A Father’s Hope for His Son” (a collection of life-lessons and observations), “Sow the Seeds: A Composition in Verse” (a poetry journal) and was

the ghost-writer for “Fries, Thighs & Lies: The Girlfriends Guide to Getting The Skinny On Fat”(Deborah Arneson, clinical nutritionist).

He is currently placing his novel trilogy, Take My Hand, for publication, as well as advancing eight children’s book manuscripts, three television pilots and two screenplays into publication and production. When Michael is not writing, he is baking delicious treats or spending time with his two sons, Sascha and Ziggy.

K ATA R I N A V I S N E V S K A DJ and Electric Violinis

K

atarina Visnevska, better known as KAT V, is a genre-bending electric violinist and DJ. Her sound is unpredictable and distinctly modern, yet still grounded in the traditional sound of the violin. KAT joined the DJ movement and since has been entertaining audiences with dynamic sets fusing a blend of favorites and best new indie artist works. Her sets are a one

of a kind experience especially when KAT elevates the performance with the electric violin solo. KAT has been a featured performer for a range of venues including the Art Institute of Chicago, House of Blues, Lincoln Hall, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and North Coast Music Fest. KAT V’s debut EP, Opus One, is now available on iTunes, Amazon and Spotify.

I A M C H I C A G O . C O M

46 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 8, 2016

l

l

B E L L A & C H A R L I E ROY Father-daughter duo whose family has served in Chicago’s public service for generations.

F

ather-daughter duo, Charlie and Bella have Chicago roots dating back to the early 1900’s. Charlie’s career started at the age of 21 when he graduated from the Fire Academy. Throughout the years he has risen in rank from being a Lieutenant to Captain to Chief & now currently Deputy District Chief.

Charlie has been married to his wife, Lena, for 19 years and they have 3 children, including

Bella. Bella will be starting her senior year of high school at Trinity High School in the fall.

She plans to attend DePaul University once she graduates (as 12 of her family members did) and major in education with a specialization in special-ed. Bella grew up being a city girl and looks forward to continuing her family traditions in Chicago. Charlie and Bella’s love for the city of Chicago remains strong and constant.

S A U D I A D AV I S Founder of Smarty Pants Are Leaders

S

audia Davis was born in San Francisco and raised in Mill Valley, Northern California. Saudia’s diverse background includes working as an actor on stage, in commercials, and on television in Los Angeles, New York and Chicago. Most recently she was co-host of HGTV’s Splurge & Save.

After Saudia moved to Chicago, she founded a non-profit youth empowerment organiza-

tion called SMARTY PANTS ARE LEADERS (SPAL). Smarty Pants Are Leaders teaches leadership skills through Art and Gardening to children in underserved urban environments. Saudia has a BA in English from St. Mary’s College of Moraga California. She is a proud union member of the Screen Actors Guild and Actor’s Equity. She enjoys riding horses and practicing yoga.

S P O N S O R E D

S E C T I O N

DECEMBER 8, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 47

I AM C H ICAGO 2016

APRIL STRONG Make-up artist & Event Planner

A

pril Strong has held many titles to go along with her array of talents. She is currently a Channel Development Manager for Nimble Storage, a Makeup Artist and owner of April Strong Artistry. In addition, April has also been in the event planning industry since 2007 as well as a former lifestyle model. April’s experience also spans into the pageant industry as a competitor and a local and state pageant assistant. Her

most recent accomplishment was placing 1st Runner-Up to Miss Illinois USA 2014. Tying into her pageant experience, it was through Miss America she discovered her voice as a sexual abuse survivor by working with Chicago organizations such as Women At Risk International and Dream Catchers. Outside of her career and many passions, April enjoys traveling, yoga and the company of her fiancé, family and friends.

JUSTI N JACOBSON President & Head of Design and Marketing for Platinum Events

J

ustin is the President & Head of Design and Marketing at Premium Events.

He formulated his company while attending the University Of Miami. What started as a promotional nightlife company led to numerous marketing events during the “boom” in South Beach. In 2005, Justin made his first business acquisition purchasing a Chicagobased entertainment company. Within a few years, Justin rebranded the business,

# S H O P 9 0 0

48 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 8, 2016

transforming it from a mobile DJ company, to a nationally recognized, award winning event production, event marketing & event entertainment firm. Since the expansion, Justin has been rapidly producing events all over the country. With Platinum Events headquartered in Chicago, it allows Justin to reach both coasts and Midwest cities simultaneously without missing a beat!

/

# L I V E 9 0 0

/

I A M C H I C A G O . C O M

/

S P O N S O R E D

S E C T I O N

l

l

L A T O YA R U B Y F R A Z I E R THE PHOTOGRAPHER

Inter view by AIMEE LEVIT T and DANIELLE A . SCRUGGS Photo by DANIELLE A . SCRUGGS In form, Frazier’s black-and-white photographs echo the work of 1930s social documentarians.

But, she says, “I’m not a social documentarian, I’m an artist speaking through photographs.” Unlike those older photographers, she belongs to the world she’s documenting: the body of work that generated her 2014 book The Notion of Family and won her a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2015 is an intensely personal look at how the departure of the steel industry decimated her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania. Frazier, 34, came to Chicago to take a teaching job at the School of the Art Institute, but the prospect of greater racial segregation and economic inequality under a Trump administration makes her want to stay: “I understand why I’m here now.”

I ALWAYS KNEW that The Notion of Family was going to be a book. I knew that it needed to be part narrative, part documentary, so that’s why the work kind of, when you’re looking at the images, whether they’re of me and my mother or me and my grandmother, they kind of fluctuate in terms of feeling like a narrative and storytelling and also being documents of our human condition.

It became very natural to me to start with myself and my family as the content and subjects since I knew it so intimately and so well. Braddock, Pennsylvania, is, today, predominantly African-American working class and elderly. And starting that work as a teen, maybe by 2008, I realized that there was no real history or record of women, what happened to women after the steel industry collapsed and went overseas, what happened to the African-American community and population after we faced the crisis of social and economic disinvestment at the local, state, and federal levels. Once I realized that, it became very clear to me that this was bigger than me, it was bigger than my mother, J

DECEMBER 8, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 49

M I C H I T R O TA THE GEEK-COMMUNITY BUILDER

Inter view by L AUR A PEARSON Photo by B ILL WHITMIRE Trota is a community organizer, writer, speaker, fire spinner, president of Chicago Nerd Social Club, and managing editor of Uncanny: A Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy (for which she was the first Filipina to win a Hugo Award). The 38-year-old is also committed to promoting inclusivity in geek culture and fandom, discussing issues of diversity and representation on her blog (geekmelange. com), at C2E2 panels, and beyond.

WHEN IT COMES to cultivating geeky interests, I was doomed from birth. Both my parents loved comic books. They loved fairy tales.

One of the very first movies they ever took me to see was Fantasia. Star Wars on VHS is one of the first movies I actually remember seeing.

It’s been a lifelong thing.

I was born in Lombard, in the western suburbs of Chicago, in 1978. When I was younger, I was very privileged—and I’m using that word specifically—to attend a school for gifted children called Avery Coonley. The school’s whole ethos is based on imbuing students with a sense of civic responsibility and encouraging curiosity, creativity, and independent thought.

I was there from [kindergarten] through [eighth grade], and I’m always going to be thankful for being able to benefit from that kind of education. It was basically a school full of nerds. My friends and I would LARP— live-action role play—before “LARPing” was a term. I was writing fan fic before I knew what fan fic was.

Both my parents passed away when I was young. My mom died right before my 12th birthday. She had multiple sclerosis—a rapidonset, continually degrading condition. My father had a stroke two years later and died as well. I moved in with my mother’s oldest brother and his wife, while my kid brother went to live with relatives on the opposite end of the country. I was in Pennsylvania; he was in California. Then I went to college in Boston, where I lived for ten years. That’s where I met my husband, Jesse, and then dragged him back here with me.

Jesse and I moved to Chicago in 2006, and I spent a good half decade or more getting to know people and figuring out who my commu-

50 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 8, 2016

l

l

PEOPLE ISSUE

nity was. My husband had found some nerd meetups—not all of them were to our tastes.

Nerds are not a monolith, which is both the blessing and the bane of geek culture. There are people who’d prefer it was a monolith because then they wouldn’t have to deal with anyone unlike themselves. I was very lucky to start building a community of other women who identified as geeks—other people of color, people across a lot of marginalized identities—where we were able to talk openly about the things we were going through and find commonalities and go through a lot of personal growth.

I used to be one of those women who thought that I was special and different because I was a geek, because “Oh, women aren’t into nerdy stuff,” which is a lie. A bald-faced lie. But it’s one that a lot of us tell ourselves because internalized misogyny is a thing.

Internalized racism is a thing. I was becoming friends with women who were really kickass—who knew their comic books, who’d seen Star Wars from day one—but were also comfortable with makeup, who liked dressing femme. Becoming more exposed to a variety of expressions—that was sort of a tipping point.

In 2011 I went to Wizard World and went to a panel that just had me spitting mad. It was about using your nerdy passions to be a professional. Every single person on that panel was a man and, with the exception of the moderator, a white man. And while there was a good discussion, when I got up to ask what would their advice be to women who want to use nerdy passions to break into different industries, like gaming or graphic design or writing . . . that did not go well. Answers from the panelists ranged from staring at me like a deer in headlights to one saying that because he had never seen it, there wasn’t sexism in his industry. Another said that it’s really wonderful seeing how women in cosplay at these conventions carry themselves with so much confidence, and if they’d just carry that confidence into the real world, that would be superhelpful! My best friend was at the convention with me and we were like, “This is shit.” We said, “Why are we letting other people de-

termine the boundaries and focus of these discussions? Why can’t we do it ourselves?”

We started thinking about what we wanted to do and how much we wanted to push the feminism-in-geek-culture thing.

Our first panel at C2E2 in 2012 was about being creative women and how our geeky interests influence our creative pursuits. The panelists were primarily women of color and included a burlesque dancer-slashcontortionist, a media consultant, a writer, a photographer, and a belly dancer-slashsinger-songwriter. It went better than we expected, especially for a Friday at 6 PM. C2E2 had good feedback and wanted us to submit the next year.

That summer was when the whole “fake geek girl” thing blew up, and we had another “fuck this shit” moment. Our C2E2 panel in 2013 was called “Exorcising the Spectre of the Fake Geek Girl.” A line for that panel was out the door about half an hour ahead of time, which was a Sunday at, like, 10 AM. When we got there, I burst into tears. I had no idea what kind of reception we were going to get. Some really wonderful women were involved in that discussion, and we started doing more panels that were very well received. I started doing more work with Chicago Nerd Social Club and volunteering with the Chicago Full Moon Jam. All of this started ticking my profile up. Because science fiction and fantasy is a really tight-knit community, people notice when you’re doing things. That’s how I met Lynn and Michael from Uncanny magazine. That was 2014, and now it’s 2016, and I have a Hugo Award.

All of the work that I do is somehow connected to fostering inclusive communities. It’s important to understand what makes them welcoming and what can be barriers to participation. Things that have spurred me to do the work I do include being pissed off and wanting to succeed out of sheer stubborn spite. You want me to go away because “Women don’t do x”? Or “A Filipina person doesn’t do x”? Don’t get me wrong, I’m also motivated by joy. Part of the reason I got into geek culture, part of the reason I fire spin, is that there’s nothing that makes me happier than bringing people together. v

LaToya Ruby Frazier continued from 49 it was bigger than my grandmother. It was about rectifying and reclaiming history and then rendering us visible into a very largely patriarchal history and society. [“Flint Is Family,” my photo essay on the water crisis in Flint, Michigan,] was proposed to me through Robbie Myers, the editor in chief at Elle. Had I been following it? Of course, I was obsessively following Flint, because what’s happening to Flint has already happened in Braddock, for decades, and no one has ever addressed it. And so I think I had something to say about the situation, and obviously [my subject] Shea Cobb had something very powerful to say, and I wanted to use my access and talent and technique to be able to uplift her voice and make her a visible part of this mainstream narrative that seemed to overlook someone’s everyday fight and plight.

So in that body of work what you see is the day-to-day living of Shea Cobb trying to protect her daughter, Zion, from this manmade disaster and from poisoned water, but also Shea having to come to terms with, in order to protect her daughter’s life and to make her have a better relationship with water, she has to leave Flint, leave her family behind, leave her community behind, everything she knows.

So there was a lot at stake. So the story’s also about reverse migration, something that is quietly happening that isn’t really being addressed in headline news. You have a large population of flight, of African-Americans going back to the south.

But what’s interesting with all the plants closing and the factories closing, white flight happening, segregation having a very volatile effect because we’re looking at gentrification and redevelopment of the rust belt, there is no place for families of color or immigrants or working-class people or single-parent households or elderly people. This is going to be a very big part of this historic moment that we’re living in. I believe that my images are already trying to archive that. That’s why I’m here. That’s what I do.

One valuable lesson I learned from my mentor, Kathe Kowalski [of Edinboro University in Pennsylvania]. Before she passed, I remember asking her, “How will I know if I’m doing the right thing? How will I know if my work is maturing?” And she looked at me and told me, “You’ll know because the work will start to speak back to you. It’ll start to take you places.” I wouldn’t feel comfortable just up and going to East Germany or steel-mill towns in Russia. I didn’t even know these places existed. But people saw the work. People started to see themselves in my work. And this is why I’m saying the work is bigger than me and my mother and my grandmother. If people from other countries, other societies, other walks of lives, can see themselves in my artwork, then it is doing its job.

I ended up in Belgium recently. I ended up in the coal-mine towns because I was invited to come there. Now once I got there, it was, of course, my decision to either make it a backdrop and make it all about me or to actually use this opportunity to have something to say by addressing those coal miners who felt that after all the labor and all the illnesses they got and all the losses they suffered, that they had not been honored. And so I would get up early in the morning, and I would go to all these different coal miners’ houses in the Borinage, and I would talk to them from 10 AM till seven o’clock. So we’re eating meals, drinking coffee, and it moved from them being skeptical and me being a stranger to us having this profound emotional connection.

And it’s because I’ve spent the time to listen to them and not make it about me, but to come in and say, “I have this opportunity, I see that there is no commemoration for workers in this town, what do you think about that? How would you like to make some images to remember the labor and everything you went through?” I know that I am crafting the narrative, the framework, and the story is being made collaborative with the person that appears in the work. And it is ultimately for their visibility and their voice and message to be heard. v

DECEMBER 8, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 51

MEGHANA INDURTI THE COMEDIAN

Inter view by B RIANNA WELLEN Photo by CARLY R IE S Indurti, 23, and her family moved from Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh, India, to the United States in 2001. She studied business at William & Mary, but eventually moved to Chicago to pursue her real passion—comedy. Now by day she’s an advertising copywriter, and by night, weekend, and any other free time she has left, she’s onethird of Team Us Comedy (along with Tyler Fowler and Vik Pandya), a local group that performs together and produces the comedy showcases Laugh Near Minimalist Furniture, Bad People Good Comedy, and Cocktails & Humor.

I FIRST MOVED to America when I was eight years old. My family and I just got our green cards last month.

We moved an hour outside of Boston, and it was a bad year to be in America for a brown person, because it was the year 9/11 happened. I remember my mom explaining to us, “Make sure if anyone asks, tell them you’re not Muslim.” We’re not Muslim, but she just didn’t want us to be hazed.

When I grew up in Worcester, outside of Boston, definitely there was a lot of xenophobia in America at that point, and me and my brother were bullied a lot as kids. My parents didn’t tell us the extent of it, but I’m sure it was not that great for them. It was a really confusing time for me, because I didn’t understand racism or what it really was or that someone could hate me just because I’m brown or think that I was a terrorist. I remember my teacher explaining 9/11 to us and she said, “And just because Meghana’s brown, doesn’t mean she’s a Muslim.” That’s a classic example of a good-intentioned white person just saying the wrong thing. Like, “She’s not Muslim, don’t be worried!” No, J

52 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 8, 2016

l

l

lve g o n v i e t r o ppo e t u m s i t r . fo s n Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s s a d r o te th e e v m d r e ou ir a p m i spine

# BACKVETSUP VISIT ORTHOINFO.ORG/BACKVETSUP

spine.foundation

orthoinfo.org

DECEMBER 8, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 53

CHRIS QUINN THE HIGH PRIEST OF THE BEER TEMPLE Inter view by PHILIP M ONTORO Photograph by B ILL WHITMIRE Quinn, 39, runs the Beer Temple (3185 N. Elston), which he founded in 2013 with his wife, Margaret.

By insisting on freshness and emphasizing education, the shop has played an important role in advancing Chicago’s beer culture. In 2011 the Quinns began producing the Beer Temple video podcast, and in 2015 the store launched the Insiders Roundtable audio podcast, which also airs Thursday nights on Lumpen Radio (105.5 FM). Next spring the Quinns plan to expand the Beer Temple by moving next door.

I WAS COMING of drinking age during the first craft-beer bubble. When I first had a beer and was like, “Something is happening that I think is important, and I want to learn more about it,” it wasn’t till years later—probably 2007.

I was at a bar that had so much variety from so many different breweries from all over the country, and the bartender—who I believe was Phil Kuhl—was so excited about it. My family comes from a bunch of wine people, and wine is amazing, but unless you live in one of a very few places on earth, your local product isn’t going to be world-class. With beer, it was so interesting to me that people all over the place were making these outrageous beers.

I started reading extensively, going online. I traveled a little bit, and that’s where the inspiration for the store came from—my wife and I were in Belgium in 2009, and we went to this small chain called De Bier Tempel. It reminded me more of a wine shop for beer. A couple days later, my wife was like, “It’d be cool if we had a place like that.” To be truthful, that’s why I got my cicerone certification. When you’re opening up a store and you have absolutely no industry experience, how do you tell a banker that you know enough about beer?

I’m amazed at how far-reaching the Beer Temple name is—I’ve been a thousand miles from here and had people recognize me. Every single day we have people from out of state.

People have heard that we have a curated beer selection and an education-focused mentality— not to mean that we’re going to lecture you, but we’re into helping you find whatever you need.

We’ve had food- and cheese-pairing events, we’ve had discussions with brewers, we’ve done oral histories. We also do ingredient-focused classes, like a hops class or a Beer 101 class. We

54 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 8, 2016

l

l

PEOPLE ISSUE

do off flavors, draft quality, everything. People come and say, “Well, all right. I’m here! Help me out.” Which we love. I understand that for this business to be viable, they have to pass multiple liquor stores to get to this store.

Rare beer, as a whole, is not rare. We always have something that people are clamoring for.

I try to remember that I might’ve had someone come in and ask me for the latest Mikerphone beer or the latest beer from whatever hot brewery a hundred times that day, but that person’s likely only asked once. Unless it’s one of these people who’s going from store to store on a quest to hoard as much as possible—this kind of Pokémon-ification of beer, where the hobby is in the chase and then displaying your trophies on social media. Rather than, “Why is this beer worth getting?” There’s so much great beer that you don’t need to wait in line for. There’s more great beer now than there was before there were lines all the time.

Sometimes a local beer is going to taste better because—for example, I had a beer dropped off yesterday that had been canned that day. That can only happen with local stuff.

I also think that local beers are more diverse, sometimes, than the big guys—they’re more nimble, they’re smaller.

These larger craft breweries have gotten to a certain size—almost always, I would say— because the quality is there. I think Half Acre is absolutely killing it. They’re one of the best breweries in Chicago. When they first opened up, the beer was not up to the quality—nowadays, I don’t think they would’ve survived if they released the beer that they were releasing then. So it’s tough. Do you give people a shot?

It’s a shame, because there are local breweries that are struggling, and we’re saying, “You’ve got to make better beer.”

Donn Bichsel [director of sales at Revolution Brewing] had me speak at a summit where he invited a bunch of his distributors.

Freshness is what he wanted me to talk about.

There was a little bit of pushback from some of the distributors—like, “You can’t just send stuff back. You can’t just reject the beer if it’s not this old. You have to keep it on the shelf.”

Afterwards Donn said, “I don’t know if you’re aware of how you started doing things has had an effect on people—you deserve some credit

for that.” That was awesome. If there’s fresher beer for people in the Chicago area because of one little store—for some distributors, I was sending back a quarter of all the beer that they would ship me, week to week.

I stuck to my guns, and every time I reached out to the brewer, they almost always had my back. These brewers are putting their heart and soul into these beers. And for me to then put on my shelf a dead example of that beer—I’m not helping them at all. I’m helping nobody but the distributor. I’d rather have an empty space.

It’s almost like a fresh-market approach.

You come in, and it’s not “I need to get this beer,” it’s “I want this style, and I want a great, fresh example of it—what do you have today?”

We have filters on our windows to protect the beer from UV light and from the spectrum of visible light that skunks beer. Same with our overhead lights and the lights in the coolers— we put in LED lights that are meant to minimize the effects of light on the beer. If you’re gonna talk the talk, you should walk the walk.

We’re running out of room in our current space. It just so happened that the building next door became available, and we’re building that space out. The beer shop is going to be expanded. There will be a small outdoor space.

Really the most innovative feature is going to be in the bottle shop. I’m working with multiple engineers and HVAC specialists—it’s about storing the beer properly. We’re also going to have a bar in there. It’s going to be a separate entity. I don’t want to drink beer in a beer store; I want to drink beer in a bar, and I want to shop for beer in a beer store.

We’re going to have beers pouring at optimal carbonation, optimal temperature. You can wait for your beer to warm up, let’s be real—we don’t want it to be this fancy-pants, hoity-toity thing. Beer is still something that everyone should feel comfortable about. We’re just going to do it, and hopefully people will realize that they have a more enjoyable experience because we really cared for the beer.

My hope is to broadcast the radio show from there as well. If I have someone come in from Avery Brewing, then she sticks around and we tap a special beer and the talk continues. It’s all about connecting with each other over a shared love. v

Meghana Indurti continued from 52 they shouldn’t be worried about Muslims.

It’s annoying, because I consider myself American. The majority of my life I’ve spent here, I’ve grown up here; I’ve watched The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, I know the rap. That should be on the citizenship test—that’s how you know you’re American. Every year I have to renew my driver’s license, get fingerprints, get my blood drawn, all that stuff to keep the paperwork updated. According to my passport it still says I’m an Indian citizen just visiting America.

As a kid I was kind of our neighborhood gang leader. I would tell really good funny stories and tell the other kids that they were real. There were dumb, funny punch lines— all dad jokes, basically. But I never thought of it as stand-up. I always wanted to write for TV. I wrote this terrible story about four friends who get sucked into a cave and are under this spell. It was basically a copy of Harry Potter and The Lizzie McGuire Movie. I would write stuff like that all the time.

I lived in New York briefly, and I took improv classes at [Upright Citizens Brigade], and then I moved to Chicago kind of on a whim. March of my senior year I came here for this creative competition for advertising and my team came in third. Part of that was to get a shot at an interview at Leo Burnett for an internship, and I crushed my interview. That internship was amazing. That’s how I met Tyler [Fowler]. He wasn’t involved in comedy, and I was like, “Let’s do improv.”

Then, “Let’s do stand-up.”

I was just at the Boston Comedy Festival and one of the comics there said, “I love your set, it’s so feminist.” I was like, “Thank you”— but I don’t necessarily consider it feminist.

Different people consider things differently.

In the south me making a joke about gay marriage is more like a political statement, but here it’s just another opinion. I have this bit about gay marriage, about how my parents were afraid to talk to me about gay marriage and a lot of parents are afraid, but I think it’s stupid because kids will believe anything. It’s a larger bit about dumb stuff that I used to believe in as a kid and how gay marriage would not have been a stretch. That bit usually goes

over really well; it did not really work that well in Greenville, South Carolina. I wanted to say something like, “Oh yeah, you guys all voted for Trump!” But I didn’t want to be attacked.

I had this one set that I wrote about being depressed. I wrote it last November and I shared it with Vik [Pandya] and Tyler, and they were like, “That was amazing.” They are the reason that I performed that set, and it’s probably one of my better sets, but it’s also terrifying to perform. I performed in front of 200 people in January about being suicidal and depressed in college, which was scary. They were like, “That went so well, you need to keep doing that joke.” It was such incredible support. They’re both really good at making sure that there are sketches with female writers and actors and females on the lineup of our shows. And they’re learning too.

I think as a dude you’re naturally sexist and you don’t even know it. But they’re both really good at listening to me when I say, “That’s sexist,” or, “Don’t say that.”

I want to transition into a comedy job, but I think it’s going to take me some time. I do want to eventually write for TV—that would be ideal. I wrote a pilot for the first time this year, and I’m working on a musical now. I joke that I have a nine-to-five and a five-to-nine.

Sometimes I stay late at work, and I can’t go to an open mike, so I have to go home and rehearse myself or else I won’t be prepared for a show the next day. I treat comedy like it’s a job. [Team Us has] business cards, we dress up—it kind of seems douchey, but it’s also like, we’re professional. We try to do a show or an open mike every night—it forces you to be better. At the end of the day even if you’re exhausted, you’re fun exhausted.

I’m still very much like, “Do I deserve to be here?” Every time I’m on a lineup, every time someone says I’m really good, I’m like “Oh, thanks.” But what if I disappoint them the next time? I’m constantly questioning myself. It’s a creative thing, it’s a female thing, but also I think if you’re not questioning yourself you’re not improving. I’ve always been underconfident, but comedy has made me more confident and more outspoken. In spite of being scared, I’m like, “Fuck it.” v

DECEMBER 8, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 55

S A R A H LY N N P A B L O THE KULTURA MAVEN

Inter view by ROBIN AMER Photo by DANIELLE A . SCRUGG S Pablo, 38, is the cofounder of Filipino Kitchen, a media and events group whose mission is to connect Filipino-Americans to their heritage through their food.

BOTH MY PARENTS are from the Ilocos region [of the Philippines]. My mom’s parents were farmers. We have a farm there still. My mom came over in the 60s. She was a nurse.

My dad was a navy cook. He didn’t know how to cook small. There was always a big pot of something in our fridge.

Growing up in Des Plaines, I was confronting my identity all the time. There were some minorities there, but certainly not a lot of Filipinos, or really Asians in general. I think about our Thanksgiving table. It had typical American fixings, but then there was also lumpia—egg rolls—there was pancit—rice noodles, because those things are always at the [Filipino] feast table.

[My favorite dish was] probably chicken adobo. Adobo is a braise—typically soy sauce, vinegar, bay leaves, black peppercorn, and garlic. Sometimes they add coconut milk, which is typical of the southern regions.

Sometimes you add Thai chiles to give it a little kick. Sometimes there’s turmeric, for a beautiful yellow glow.

Natalia [Roxas-Alvarez], my business partner, often describes Filipino cuisine as history on a plate. Adobo is a Spanish name that was given to an indigenous dish. You see it in the ingredients that Spain—by way of Mexico through the galleon trade—brought to the Philippines. [And in those brought by] our ancient trading partners, the Chinese, and from Indonesia and Malaysia. And then the Americans! They were in the Philippines from 1898 to 1946. You see Spam on the menu.

Filipino spaghetti. It’s got cut-up hot dogs and banana ketchup—ketchup made from bananas. It was developed during World War II. American soldiers craved these foods, and they couldn’t get tomatoes—there was a shortage. So they were like, “What else is abundant? Bananas!”

[Before I started Filipino Kitchen], I wanted to be a travel writer. When I wasn’t trav-

56 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 8, 2016

l

l

KEVIN MONAHAN THE CO-OP ENTHUSIAST

Inter view by J ULIA THIEL Photo by Z AKKIY YAH NAJEEBAH

A member of the Dill Pickle Food Co-op’s board of directors since 2008, Monahan has served as secretary and treasurer and is its current president. Before he steps down next year at the end of his third three-year term, he expects to see the co-op’s new, larger location, which is currently in the works, open at 2746 N. Milwaukee, near the Logan Square Blue Line stop. The 39-year-old lives in a housing co-op in Logan Square that he cofounded several years ago with four other people, and in his day job works in graduate administration for the University of Illinois at Chicago.

IN 2005 I’D NEVER heard of co-ops before. I had just changed careers, was not making a lot of money, and I had to shrink my budget a lot, so I started buying more in bulk, cooking more. When I read an advertisement for a local buying club, which is also a co-op, in the Reader’s classifieds section, I thought, Maybe I can find other ways to streamline my budget. It turned out to be way more.

I met lots of really great progressive-minded individuals, and two years later I started hearing about the Dill Pickle. I’d always dreamed about the buying club becoming a store. I made my investment as an owner in 2007 and was appointed to the board of directors in the fall of 2008, a year before we opened. There was no staff yet, it was just a ragtag bunch of people. I was asked to chair a product selection committee. We didn’t know what was going to be on the shelves: we were deciding whether we would have meat, what kinds of cheese we’d carry. We had tastings—I remember hosting a chocolate-andcoffee tasting one morning with half a dozen fellow owners and members of the community.

Holy cow, was that a caffeinated good time.

We really timed it well. When we opened in 2009, the natural-food sector in the grocery industry was still up-and-coming. Stores in the market already, like Whole Foods, were doing hand-over-fist sales, growing by double-digit percentages, and we caught that wave. I think that was a nationwide trend that has leveled off a lot as traditional grocers have moved into that sector, giving more of the store to organic and natural goods. They know what’s trendy, they know what sells.

J

DECEMBER 8, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 57

PEOPLE ISSUE

Sarahlynn Pablo continued from 56 eling, I was writing about the food that I was cooking at home, which was often Filipino food. It was literally . . . me on the phone with my mom, asking, “How much soy sauce goes in this? ‘Oh, just a little bit.’ Well, how much is a little bit?”

Then I saw how people reacted to these recipes. They were so emotional. Lugaw, rice porridge, was one of the first recipes I wrote up. I had people commenting, like, “I’ve been looking for a recipe like this for years, the way that my mom made this with cooked rice, and she’s no longer with us.” I didn’t expect that. It became clear to me that this needed its own space.

At the same time I noticed that there were not a lot of Filipinas writing about this from a Filipina-American perspective. I think for the most part [media] portrayals are good, but you’re at the mercy of these editors, and the gaps in their history that they may not even know that they have. So it always felt just a little bit abbreviated. Somebody would write about [Filipino food], but then that would be it for like a year. There would be no ongoing conversation.

I developed the brand for what Filipino Kitchen would be while I was at a travel writers’ conference. Our mission is to connect people to their heritage through their food. And obviously, having phrased it that way, it’s specifically for Filipinos and Filipino-Americans, but anybody who’s interested in Filipino food, come to the table! Part of the mission we have is to build community within Filipinos, but also between Filipinos and their larger communities.

Kultura Festival is our biggest event of the year. It’s a food and arts festival, and it starts off Filipino-American History Month, which is in October. This past year it was at Emporium in Logan Square, and 600 people came.

We wanted to give people who grew up eating the food something to get excited about. So for example, Manilla Social Club was there.

Chef Björn DelaCruz and his family had their ube doughnuts. Ube is purple yam. It’s a very subtle flavor, but it’s got this distinctive deep purple color. He also brought a $100 golden Cristal ube doughnut, with vintage champagne and ube. Each one is handmade with 24-karat gold leaf. It was an extraordinary item, a very polarizing item. The Philippines

58 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 8, 2016

is not a rich country. But at the same time, people buy it to celebrate important things in their life. It’s not like people say, “I want a doughnut today, I’ll drop a hundo on it!”

We also do pop-up events during the year.

There’s a chef we’ve worked with from Long Beach, California, named AC Boral. Our first pop-up was with him in September 2014. It was called Rice & Shine. He did a FilipinoAmerican spin on [fried] chicken and waffles.

So he served it with bagoong, a fermented shrimp paste, [mixed into] butter to give it more of a savory thing. He marinated the chicken in an adobo-esque [sauce] and then did a deep-fry.

There’s a chef in New York named Paolo Española. We did a dinner with him in New York last June, and the premise was: What if Spain had never come to the Philippines? What would our food look like? There were certain ingredients that he didn’t want to use—like tomatoes, because tomatoes were brought by the Spanish.

On our blog, we’ll highlight the stories of these chefs, and the stories of people who love Filipino food. There’s a feature we run called Pinoy Food for the Soul. We’ll ask them for their favorite food memory, and it evokes these amazing stories about childhood— some of them good, some of them bad. There’s this one chef we work with from Stockton, [California], called Rob Menor. He remembered the incredible whirring sounds—like shhhh shhhh—of his uncles torching a goat to get the skin off before they could go on with the cooking and butchering. He remembered the sound of the goat screaming. That’s not really a story you see anywhere else!

My current obsession? To continue to find out about Filipino food in Chicago and in the greater midwest. A couple of days ago I had somebody text me like, “Hey, there’s this bar in Milwaukee that’s got sisig and pancit on the menu.” Sisig is like a sizzling platter of pig’s face, ears, and sometimes brains. It’s delicious! It’s spicy—something that you eat while drinking. There’s a pop-up food truck in Saint Louis that I’ve been meaning to visit.

In Detroit, there’s a group called Sarap Detroit I’d like to visit. I’m just trying to really understand the midwest experience. Like, in New York City, Hawaii, California—there are huge communities there. But since I’m from here, I want to tell these stories. v

Kevin Monahan continued from 50 Through the buying club not only did I learn about Dill Pickle, I also met one of my future best friends and next-door neighbor in the housing co-op where I live. We bought a spacious, beautiful 1899 building on Kedzie Boulevard in 2011 as [a group of] five people. It has six units, so we rented [out] one for a year.

We’d been working on it for two or three years before that. We had to decide on our search criteria, what kind of building do we want? We came to common agreement. Maybe everyone didn’t get everything they wanted, but I think we all got mostly what we were looking for. We wanted to be limited equity, to keep a place in the neighborhood that was affordable to future residents and create an intentional community around thinking about our carbon footprint.

Before condo law existed in this country, all multiunit buildings were co-ops. That’s why New York City is loaded with co-ops. They were building multiunit buildings before the rest of the country was really getting into that.

What’s different is that you don’t own your unit. You can’t just turn and sell it to anyone you want to. You have to cooperate on the policies you bought into, which is that when you sell, your fellow owners get some voice.

I thought it was such a cool thing, when I joined the buying club, that I owned a business, even if it was a tiny speck of business.

And now, as a Dill Pickle owner, I own a grocery store—along with 1,900 other people, but there’s a really exciting feeling I get from that.

With the co-op model, you can vote, you can be elected to the governance, you can volunteer.

Within two years of the store opening, I was talking to the board about how we needed to get a new space going. It’s this beautiful little store, but we never intended to build a corner store. We wanted it to be a full-service grocer with this robust offering of products.

Eventually, conversations with owners turned into a charge by the board to start the search.

That took years. The real estate market was starting to recover in Logan Square, and we’re not a very old business. We don’t have deep reserves we can throw into a project like that.

I’ve been the president [of the board of directors] for the last three years—until yesterday, when we elected our officers for the next year. Last year I decided this would be my last term, and I thought my last year should be one where I wasn’t an officer and could just

support new leadership. The beauty of co-ops is that they’re democracy in action, and there should be a lot of turnover, especially in the elected governance.

I stayed on the board because I wanted to see the new store built. It’s really hard for me to pull away from something if it’s not finished. I considered it. Fund-raising, having no prior experience—none of us had prior experience—is a very time-consuming endeavor. It’s a lot of outward energy to engage our owners, convince them we’re not insane, we’ve done the research and it’s a good investment. To be honest, the last year has been so challenging that there have been moments where I’m like, I don’t know if I can continue doing this. But I felt worse stepping away and not seeing this thing through to the end.

It’s not an overstatement to say that Dill Pickle is the flagship food co-op in Chicagoland. It’s the revitalizing brick-and-mortar face to what we’re doing here in rebuilding the movement in Chicago. Now there’s Sugar Beet in Oak Park, which opened last summer. In Ravenswood, we’ve got Chicago Market—that’s pretty far along. Rogers Park has one they’re working on.

I think there’s one in Pilsen. The suburbs have a few. This is a major movement that’s bubbling.

It’s a mystery to me: Why does Chicago lack a robust food co-op history? You go to Madison, Bloomington, these beautiful smaller cities have decades of multiple food co-ops in their cities. There’s a long period of nonexistence in Chicago. Hyde Park Food Co-op went out of business the year before I joined the board [of Dill Pickle], and we had no storefront food co-op in Chicago for a year.

From the time we opened the store, I have heard from random people how this has helped them eat better, and that makes me so happy.

People have met and married their partners, other people have met and started businesses through the community of Dill Pickle. How many grocery stores can you say have created that much of a robust change in people’s lives?

When an individual creates a masterpiece of design or product, it’s done. When a co-op creates something, it’s intended to be a living creation. As new people get involved, it extends further. I like that about co-ops. I think about generations beyond me, not just what I’m living in today. And I’m really proud that I helped create two living creations that people I’ll never meet will appreciate and benefit from. v

l

l

ARTS & CULTURE

A 2014 performance of Too Much Light o JOE MAZZA

THEATER

Neo-Futurists reject their founder’s attempt to blame Trump

By DEANNA ISAACS

A

t 6:15 PM on Sunday, December 4, in the middle of the season’s first real snowfall, there was already a line snaking down the block and around the corner at Ashland and Foster, awaiting entry to the Neo-Futurists’s second-floor theater and another sold-out performance in the 28-year run of Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind.

The long line for the 7 PM show wasn’t unusual, but many in this crowd were spurred by a sense of urgency: four days earlier, the local ensemble, which consists of 12 actors, a small staff, and a large contingent of alumni, had learned that they’ll be losing the rights to their signature show of “30 plays in 60 minutes” at the end of this month. Their founder, Greg Allen, had stunned them with a public announcement that he wouldn’t be renewing their license, but would “rebrand the show with a new diverse ensemble that embraces a specifically socially activist mission.”

And he blamed Donald Trump. Faced with the pending inauguration, Allen said in his statement, “I could no longer stand by and let my most effective artistic vehicle be anything but a machine to fight Fascism.” His new company “will be comprised entirely of people of color, LBTQ+, artist/activist women, and other disenfranchised voices in order to combat the tyranny of censorship and oppression.”

That explanation was received with ire and disbelief by Neo-Futurists company members, current and past, who say the troupe is now more diverse than it’s ever been, and the breakup is not political but personal—rooted in a long-suppressed history of problems between Allen and the theoretically democratic ensemble that he formed. When Allen decided not to renew the Chicago group’s license (there are separate Neo-Futurists ensembles in New York and San Francisco), he also blew the lid off ensemble members’ festering discontent, which was quickly on display in social media.

In 1988, given the opportunity to create a latenight weekend show at Stage Left, Allen, then 26, came up with a concept he’d been thinking about since he studied Italian futurism at Oberlin College. His idea was to create a permanent format for an ever-changing menu of very short experimental plays, drawn from the lives of the playwrights and performed by them, with honesty and artistic freedom as core values. Ticket prices (determined by a dice toss) would be variable and cheap, to make the show accessible.

The concept was idealistic, and so was the company Allen formed to produce it: a democratically functioning artistic collective. (He acquired the title of artistic director, alumni say, only because the group came to the point where they needed to name one on a grant proposal.)

And the show was a rapid success: it moved from Stage Left to Live Bait, and, in 1992, to the Andersonville space it still occupies.

Allen didn’t respond to requests for an interview, but alumni say the collective deci-

sion-making quickly became a sticking point.

As former ensemble member Dave Awl wrote in a Facebook post: “From the beginning, there was always a gap between the rhetoric and the reality. Like a lot of revolutionaries, Greg Allen had the ideals of an egalitarian, but the controlling impulses of an autocrat. . . . What he really wanted was for us to have a boisterous discussion—and then vote to ratify whatever it was Greg wanted us to do.”

Alumni I spoke with say they found Allen difficult to work with: controlling, divisive, and more interested in promoting his own work than that of the group. In 2003, after ensemble members say they complained to the board, Allen’s title was changed to founding director, a position with more of a focus on lecturing, teaching, and being the public face of NeoFuturists. According to alumni, in 2011, after a dispute over a play Allen didn’t want the group to produce, he was suspended from the active ensemble, with the option of petitioning to rejoin after a year. He didn’t petition, they say, and except for a 25th anniversary event in 2013, hasn’t performed with the ensemble since.

Alum Ayun Halliday said via e-mail that if she were to write a Neo-Futurists style play about all this, “I might dress Greg Allen in an expensive sailor suit and place him at the head of a lavish table, heaped high with hundreds of toys and cakes. There’s plenty to go around, but whenever one of the guests—aka the ensemble, who by the way, baked the cakes and made the toys—attempts to take a bite, or play with a toy, Greg snatches it out of their hands, shouting, ‘Mine! Mine!’ I’d title it something along the lines of ‘Big Surprise Party.’ ” The ensemble is now scrambling to assemble a replacement for the production that’s always been the anchor of their roughly $500,000 annual budget (and a season that includes prime-time shows and outreach).

They’ve also reopened a fund-raising campaign, and are seeking to raise $28,000 by the end of the year. But they’re definitely not planning to fold. “We have our schedule, we have our space, we have a process for creating short Neo-Futurists work,” artistic director Kurt Chiang said in an interview last week.

He reiterated that message to the Sunday night audience: Come January, “It’s not going to be Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind,” Chiang said, but the loud, fast, sloppy, silly, rude, poetic, and occasionally profound show will go on. v

ß @DeannaIsaacs DECEMBER 8, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 59

ARTS & CULTURE

FIND HUNDREDS OF

READER-RECOMMENDED

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

Barney the Elf o CARIN SILKAITIS

THEATER

No end of holiday cheer

By READER STAFF

L

ast week we gave you eight holiday-show reviews; here are eight more—including some for Hanukkah—with still more bounty to come. —TONY ADLER BARNEY THE ELF I think it’s a safe bet that the Other Theatre Company’s raunchy, adults-only holiday parody revue Barney the Elf got a massive rewrite a couple weeks ago—in fact, I’d venture to pin this down to just after midnight on November 8. Some of the modifications to our traditional take on Kris Kringle and his minions were probably in place to begin with: Santa’s elves are, let’s be real, slave labor in a freezing facility with no vacations or benefits, and a past iteration of the show contained the rough outline of Barney’s expulsion from the polar assembly line for being gay. Nonetheless, as Santa’s thin-skinned brat son takes over for him when he dies, supplanting his clearly much more qualified mother, Mrs. Claus, and instituting a set of new optimizations to the

60 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 8, 2016

factory to slash regulations left and right, we know that, whatever else this year’s Barney is, it’s gonna be “yuge.” —MAX MALLER Through 1/1: Thu-Sat 8 PM (no show Sat 12/24), Sun 3 PM (except 1/1, 7 PM; no show 12/25) Greenhouse Theater Center, 2657 N. Lincoln, 773-404-7336 , theothertheatrecompany.com, $25.

CHRISTMAS AT CHRISTINE’S This sweet, lighthearted holiday cabaret, written and performed by Christine Bunuan, weaves together holiday songs, some familiar, some not, with Bunuan’s recollections of Christmases past. Bunuan has a lovely voice and a winning onstage rapport with her laconic accompanist, Ryan Brewster, and her song selection, though mild, is diverting (a Jewish parody of “Santa Baby,” called “Moishe Baby,” is one the high points) . But it’s her deceptively simple stories about life in theater or visiting her extended family in the Philippines that make this Silk Road Rising show a cut above your average holiday revue. It helps that Bunuan has a very likable, relaxed stage presence and a born raconteur’s ability to make even the most mundane tale riveting. —JACK HELBIG Through 12/23: Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 4 and 8 PM, Sun 4 PM (except 12/4, 2 PM); also Tue 12/20 and Wed 12/21, 7:30 PM, Silk Road Rising, 77 W. Washington, 312-857-1234, silkroadrising.org, $25, $20 students.

THE CHRISTMAS SCHOONER John Reeger and Julie Shannon, creators of this facile, treacly Christmas musical, implant a purportedly rhe-

l

l

R

READER RECOMMENDED

b ALL AGES

F

Christian Bunuan in Christmas at Christine’s o CRIMSON CAT STUDIOS

torical question at its center: Why would Michigan sea captain Peter Stossel risk his life sailing his schooner laden with Christmas trees 300 miles to Chicago across a stormy November Lake Michigan in 1882 just so that others “can know the joy of Christmas?” Here’s my answer. Stossel, singled out in the show as an astute businessman, chops down 2,500 trees without paying for them, then sells them for 50 cents a pop. He and a skeleton crew score $1,250—roughly $30,000 in 2016 dollars—for five weeks of work. Profit is a singular motivator, especially when you can mask it behind Jesus and tradition. Bring the whole family! —JUSTIN HAYFORD Through 12/31: Wed 8 PM, Thu 3 and 8 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 3 and 8 PM (3 PM only 12/3), Sun 3 PM (no show 12/25), Mercury Theater, 3745 N. Southport, 773-3251700, mercurytheaterchicago.com, $30-$69.

GOY TO THE WORLD AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR If you grow up Jewish in America, part of your birthright is an endless supply of raw material for sketch comedy: nagging mothers, cantankerous grandfathers, tense holiday dinners, summer camp, Hebrew school, south Florida, awkward bat mitzvah speeches, middle-aged ladies who play mah-jongg, Woody Allen, Seinfeld, matzo.

The five-member cast of Goy to the World has dutifully included all of these elements in their hour-long show. And yet, they also manage to render most of it completely unfunny. Part of it is cliched writing and weak punch lines. Part of it is poor timing and an overreliance on bad

accents. As cantankerous old zaydes say, Meh. —AIMEE LEVITT Through 12/18: Sat 8 PM, Sun 7 PM, Public House Theatre, 3914 N. Clark, 800650-6449, publichousetheatre.com,$10.

HOME FOR HANUKKAH WITH BUBBE What fresh mishegoss is this? While I suppose I should be grateful for any acknowledgement of the Jews’ little corner of December, I can’t help feeling we can do better than this 60-minute hodgepodge. ComedySportz introduces us to Bubbe and Zayde (“grandma” and “grandpa”), who are throwing a Hanukkah party for the loose ends in the family: grandchild Samuel, whose parents went to Acapulco without him; grown son Bradley, who should only find a nice girl; and Uncle Sal, who tells cornball jokes (“Did you hear about the bagel that got attacked on social media? It was a shmear campaign”). The group generates some goodwill (particularly Cynthia Kmak’s beatific Zayde), but no interest inasmuch as the gathering turns out to be little more than a context for playing improv games, often tediously. —TONY ADLER Through 12/21: Wed 8 PM, ComedySportz Theatre, 929 W. Belmont, 773-549-8080, comedysportzchicago.com, $15.

R

THIS WAY OUTTA SANTALAND (AND OTHER XMAS MIRACLES) Mitchell Fain bookends his eight holiday-season run performing the David Sedaris’s 1992 comic tour de force “The Santaland Diaries” at Theater Wit with this casual, heartwarming chatback chronicling J

DECEMBER 8, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 61

ANTIQUE & VINTAGE MARKET

ARTS & CULTURE

December 10 & 11

9-4 SHOW HOURS: SATURDAY SUN. 9-3 / $7

Plus! ACCENT ON:

HOLIDAY COLLECTIBLES

Anais Bueno

• LAKE COUNTY FAIRGROUNDS •

GRAYSLAKE, IL

o TODD ROSENBERG

1060 E. PETERSON RD.

DANCE

ZURKO 715-526-9769 www.zurkopromotions.com $1.00 off w/this AD!

A Nutcracker for our town

Twelfth Night o COURTESY MIDSOMMER FLIGHT

12O’CLOCK

TRACK SERIES A SIDE OF JAM WITH YOUR LUNCH EVERY WEEKDAY

THEBLEADER.COM

continued from 61 his experiences over the monologue’s lifespan. Alongside musicians Meghan Murphy and Julie B. Nichols, the self-deprecating Fain ribs and reads the audience, pours drinks for his stage partners, and recounts memories from his own family, both nuclear and in spirit. At the center of the story is the complicated but beautiful relationship actors have with their craft. A consummate showman, Fain interweaves prepared bits with freewheeling conversation and keeps any creeping mawkishness at bay with just the right cabaret number. —DAN JAKES Through 12/23: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM; also Wed 12/21, 7:30 PM; Fri 12/23, 9:30 PM, Theater Wit, 1229 W. Belmont, 773975-8150, theaterwit.org, $25-$34.

TWELFTH NIGHT “Love thoughts lie rich when canopied with bowers,” says Duke Orsino, Illyria’s resident voluptuary, and few could disagree after taking in Midsommer Flight’s Twelfth Night at the Lincoln Park Conservatory, where big-finned palms and gadding vines nod you all the way to your seat. The sumptuous garden atmosphere bleeds into the play, which is well acted and endearingly staged by director Beth Wolf. Nick Loumos is an excellent, princely Orsino; Meredith Ernst is also wonderful as the humble Viola, in disguise as his page boy. As Orsino

62 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 8, 2016

futilely attempts to woo the countess Olivia (Kanomé Jones), the courtly intrigue offsets the earthy repartee of the play’s underclass.

Chris Smith sounds all the proto-Falstaffian notes in his fine reading of Toby Belch, while Alex Mauney, who sings beautifully, is a touch oversexed as Feste. —MAX MALLER Through 12/18: Thu-Sun 7:30 PM, Lincoln Park Conservatory, 2391 N. Stockton, 3312-7427736, midsommerflight,org. F YU LETI DE G E NOCI D E Th is quest ionably named holiday version of Stage 773’s biannual one-act festival features ten-minute alternate takes on classic holiday stories from six local theater companies. Kicking off the evening with the strongest piece is host Stage 773, presenting The Gift of the Magi.

After Della comes home with her horrendous haircut, excited to give Jim a chain for his prized pocket watch, we find out that Jim sold off his most prized possession—not his watch, actually his penis—to buy her combs.

Indie Boots’ Little Women-based same-sex love story is a little too sweet surrounded by generally unimpressive perversity, though Anthony Whitaker is enjoyably dry in New American’s It’s a Holiday, Charlie Brown.

—MARISSA OBERLANDER Through 12/16: Thu-Fri 8:15 PM, Stage 773, 1229 W. Belmont, 773-3275252, stage773.com, $15. v

AFTER NEARLY THREE DECADES, Robert Joffrey’s Nutcracker, which debuted in 1987, was starting to show its age—its opulent sets and costumes were quite literally falling apart.

Artistic director Ashley Wheater admitted as much to the Reader nearly a year ago; “America’s No. 1 Nut,” as the annual event was once branded, was overdue for an upgrade. The Joffrey scored a coup in hiring Christopher Wheeldon, Tony Award-winning director-choreographer of the 2015 Broadway smash An American in Paris as well as an eminent choreographer of contemporary ballet. What could Wheeldon do with a $4 million budget?

Quite a bit, as it turns out. To begin with, Wheeldon’s Nutcracker, crafted with the help of Brian Selznick (a Caldecott Medal winner for the 2008 children’s book The Invention of Hugo Cabret), is grounded in a story line that’s much more socially conscious. While Joffrey’s version was set in a posh New York household, this “working-class version” is set in Chicago during the winter before the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition—a savvy home-grown selling point if you happen to be competing with the likes of the Goodman’s A Christmas Carol. Here the heroine, Marie, the daughter of a poor, immigrant single mother, longs for a complete family. A magical visit from a mercurial impresario is more than enough to make that happen.

The Joffrey didn’t stop at Wheeldon. Puppeteer Basil Twist, a 2015 MacArthur fellow, was also brought on to give the production more of a fantasy feel, along with Tony Award-nominated set and costume designer Julian Crouch and Tony Award-winning designers Natasha Katz (lighting) and Ben Pearcy (projections). As upgrades go, the Joffrey’s new Nut is pulling out all the stops. —MATT DE LA PEÑA R THE NUTCRACKER 12/10-12/30: Wed-Fri 7 PM, Sat-Sun 2 and 7 PM, Tue 7 PM; also Wed 12/21-Fri 12/23, 2 PM; Mon 12/26, 2 and 7 PM; and Tue 12/27, 2 PM, Auditorium Theatre, 50 E. Congress, 800-982-2787, joffrey.org, $35-$170.

l

l

164 North State Street

MANCHESTER BY THE SEA sss Directed

ARTS & CULTURE

by Kenneth Lonergan. R, 137 min. For venues visit chicagoreader.com/movies.

Between Lake & Randolph MOVIE HOTLINE: 312.846.2800

FIRE AT SEA

DON’T CALL ME SON

"An energetic and enlightening look at tangled family ties" – Hollywood Reporter

December 9 - 15

Fri., 12/9 at 2 pm and 6 pm; Sat., 12/10 at 7:45 pm; Sun., 12/11 at 5:15 pm; Mon., 12/12 at 8:15 pm; "Beautiful, mysterious Tue., 12/13 at 6 pm; and moving" Wed., 12/14 at 6 pm; Thu., 12/15 at 8:15 pm – The Guardian

December 9 - 15

Fri., 12/9 at 8:15 pm; Sat., 12/10 at 8:15 pm; Sun., 12/11 at 5:15 pm; Mon., 12/12 at 6 pm; Tue., 12/13 at 8:15 pm; Wed., 12/14 at 8:15 pm; Thu., 12/15 at 8:30 pm

THROUGH DECEMBER 15 • TAMPOPO • “THE GREATEST OF ALL FOOD FILMS” BUY TICKETS NOW

Casey Affleck and Lucas Hedges in Manchester by the Sea o NICOLA DOVE

MOVIES

You’re gonna carry that weight

By LEAH PICKETT

This review contains spoilers.

T

he three films written and directed

by Kenneth Lonergan—You Can Count on Me (2000), Margaret (2011), and his latest, Manchester by the Sea—all deal with grief, guilt, responsibility, and connection. But Manchester, which already has garnered some serious awards buzz, is the most explicit in threading these ideas together. Its protagonist, a directionless janitor named Lee (Casey Affleck), is haunted by a tragedy in his recent past when he returns to the title Massachusetts town to bury his older brother and learns that he’s been named legal guardian of his 16-year-old nephew, Patrick (Lucas Hedges). Margaret may be the more lyrical film, and You Can Count on Me is more straightforward in its telling, but Manchester is the most daring of the three for the way Lonergan paints a fresh layer of grief over an existing one: the death of Lee’s brother (played in flashbacks

by Kyle Chandler) from congenital heart ssss EXCELLENT

sss GOOD

failure comes as no surprise, but it proves doubly painful for Lee, compounding the tragedy in his past. Lonergan rejects the platitudes about grief offered by more formulaic films, opting instead for messy, open-ended journeys that trade in life’s mundanities and uncomfortable truths. Manchester by the Sea, like Lonergan’s previous films, suggests that the only meaning to be found in tragedy is the wisdom that it’s meaningless, that grief is not to be overcome, but to be borne.

Trauma shapes all of Lonergan’s protagonists, who grapple with the horror and injustice of life while reaching out to others, often unconsciously, to fill their emotional void. In You Can Count on Me, grown siblings Terry (Mark Ruffalo) and Sammy (Laura Linney) are bound by their parents’ death in a car crash years earlier, struggling to comprehend the role grief played in forming them. In Margaret, 17-year-old Lisa (Anna Paquin) attempts to deal responsibly with the role she played in a stranger’s accidental death and, in doing so, learns that adults can be as irrespon- J

ss AVERAGE

s POOR

•

at

www.siskelfilmcenter.org

EARLY WARNINGS NEVER MISS A SHOW AGAIN

CHICAGOREADER.COM/EARLY

WORTHLESS

DECEMBER 8, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 63

ARTS & CULTURE RSM

R

Get showtimes and more reviews at chicagoreader.com/movies.

www.BrewView.com 3145 N. Sheffield at Belmont

Movie Theater & Full Bar $5.00 sion admis e for th s Movie

18 to enter 21 to drink Photo ID required

Sunday, December 11 @ 6:00pm Fri, Mon-Thr, Dec. 2, 5-8 @ 6:30pm

Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children

'$& -!#,* &%-*&)) $"&, ! - %) +* %% ./

Sunday, December 11 @ 8:15pm Fri, Mon-Thr, Dec. 9, 12-15 @ 8:45pm

Keeping Up With The Joneses

Sunday, December 11 @ 4:00pm

Elf (All ages matinee) Sunday, December 18 -

Doors open at 4pm

Nightmare on Elm Street 2

(7pm) with star Mark Patton in Person! John Carpenter's They Live (9pm) & The Thing (5pm) Tix available at http://bpt.me/2722444

+,( ),"',

#2/ .%2(+$4'. 03) 0)*03,' +$,"'+.1 *$.$+ +%'!2&03+%'0+/'-,24

“‘MISS SLOANE’ IS A

GLORIOUS KNOCKOUT!” MATT DONATO,

“ONE

OF THE YEAR’S

BEST MOVIES!” SCOTT MANTZ,

!!!!!

“

”

RAMA TAMPUBOLON,

#MissSloane

DIRECTED BY JOHN MADDEN

© 2016 EUROPACORP – FRANCE 2 CINEMA

STARTS FRIDAY, DECEMBER 9 IN THEATRES EVERYWHERE! 64 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 8, 2016

Casey Affleck in Manchester by the Sea o NICOLA DOVE

$"&, %' - %# +* %(0'( ./ continued from 63 sible as children. Lee also wrestles with guilt, grief, and responsibility—his three young children have died in a house fire caused by his carelessness—before realizing that he’ll never get over what happened. “People don’t want to move on from their feelings of loss, exactly,” Lonergan explained in a recent interview on National Public Radio. “You feel like you owe it to the people that you’ve lost to remember them, and to carry that pain around with you in some form.”

His characters may nurse their grief, but they try to process their guilt by punishing other people—and themselves. Terry commits petty crimes, Sammy sleeps with her married boss, Lisa seduces one of her teachers, and Lee, the most blighted of them all, drinks and fights. Lonergan’s characters ring true in the way they talk around their emotional issues, baiting others into an emotional response of their own or simply talking over them to drown out things they don’t want to hear. Lee chooses to surround himself with people, but whether he’ll appease or provoke them depends on whether he happens to be numb or overwhelmed by pain.

A playwright originally, Lonergan understands that people rarely say what they mean, especially if their feelings are raw, and both Lee and Patrick protect themselves with tough talk. This posturing keeps their feelings in check, and when this pretense fails,

their encounters are more clumsy than cathartic. In a humorous scene, Patrick breaks down over a piece of meat in the freezer that reminds him of his father’s refrigerated corpse, and Lee kicks in Patrick’s bedroom door to offer awkward consolation. Later, Lee explains to Patrick in four simple words that his anguish precludes him from staying in Manchester: “I can’t beat it.” Though thankful for each other’s presence, Lee and Patrick would rather keep their emotions capped.

Still, they seem to know—like Sammy and Terry in You Can Count on Me and Lisa and her mother in Margaret—that their connection, fortified through loss, is the one true constant in their lives.

By contrast, Lee’s unexpected connection with his ex-wife, Randi (Michelle Williams), drives him over the edge. Near the end of the film, they bump into each other on the street, standing over a stroller that holds Randi’s newborn child by another man. In a rush of overlapping dialogue, Randi unspools her grief, and Lee denies his own, clenching and coiling into himself. She tells him that they’ll never get over what happened, that their hearts will always be broken. By the end of Manchester by the Sea, Lee has accepted that his grief is too powerful to overcome. Instead of shedding their losses for some sugarcoated sense of peace, Lonergan’s protagonists learn how to carry them. v

ß @leahpickett

l

l

MUSIC

Recommended and notable shows, and critics’ insights for the week of December 8 b

ALL AGES

F

Foodman

PICK OF THE WEEK

o COURTESY THE ARTIST

Lizzo’s powerful self-love anthems are built for the Beyhive

THURSDAY8 Foodman, DJ Fulltono Foodman headlines; DJ Fulltono, Traxman, and Diamond Soul open.

9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $10.

o JABARI JACOBS

LIZZO, DIZZY FAE

8 PM, Subterranean, 2011 W. North, sold out. 17+

COCONUT OIL IS a widely used homeopathic cure-all. The same could be said of singer-rapper-songwriter Lizzo’s 2016 EP Coconut Oil, a DIY-spirited, glittery-leotarded feminist antidote to the overarching air of oppression many face given the political unfoldings of late, though she probably didn’t predict that her lyrical mantras concerning inner strength and natural beauty would become such a welcome musical tincture. There’s much to glean from this six-song extended play, her first for Atlantic Records imprint Nice Life—“Good As Hell” and “Scuse Me” are powerful self-love anthems with sticky hooks built for the Beyhive, and party jam “Phone” extols the mental health benefits of a wild night out. The real joy for the Minneapolis alt-rap scene vet, however, is in her live performances, which often include her friends. (Need proof? Google “Lizzo on Samantha Bee.”) Her musical medicine, best served with a group of besties clinking glasses and igniting the dance floor, is good fun, to be sure. But it’s also an uplifting neon strobe light through the dark clouds of uncertainty—and a needed reminder that our power remains within. —ERIN OSMON

Last month Columbia College’s Hokin Project Gallery opened its footwork art exhibit “In the Circle” with curatorial help from dance collective the Era, and one of the most engrossing pieces to have emerged is the large, multicolored map that connects the producers and dancers who’ve transformed a culture born in Chicago into a worldwide phenomenon. Said map shows a mess of players from across Europe, but a sizable portion of it is devoted to Japanese aficionados—chief among them (at least in my book) Foodman and DJ Fulltono, who both perform tonight. Known as the godfather of Japanese footwork, Fulltono (birth name Koichi Furutono) has helped document his country’s growing interest in native juke, footwork, and ghettotech since launching his Booty Tune imprint in 2008; his latest release, last year’s My Mind Beats, Vol. 2 EP, welds footwork’s blown-out hi-hats and palpitating pulses to subterranean melodies that sometimes squeal with acid-house synths. Fulltono is also behind the reissue of My Mind Beats, Vol. 1 for U.S. audiences through Orange Milk Records, an experimental label with a strong interest in footwork, and one that’s long been behind Japanese producer Takahide Higuchi, aka Foodman.

Employing a practically Dadaist approach to footwork, Foodman wins over foreign fans by melding whizzing, toylike sounds with vaporwave-infected smooth jazz and a range of synthesized bleeps and bloops stripped from decades of video games, combining the noises into repeating collages that approach something resembling dance music. May’s Ez Minzoku (Orange Milk) shows well how Foodman can hook you in just before spiking the moment with an unexpected burst of arrhythmically layered percussion or an unsettling silence. —LEOR GALIL

Lizzo See Pick of the Week. Dizzy Fae opens.

8 PM, Subterranean, 2011 W. North, sold out. 17+

Rock, Pop, Etc Embassies, Ulta, DJ Sonny Mountain 9 PM, Whistler F Roger Hodgson 7:30 PM, also Fri 12/9, 8 PM, Arcada Theatre, Saint Charles b Lawrence Arms, Dead to Me, Bollweevils 8 PM, Double Door, 17+ Lybria, I Made You Myself, Domestic Men, Lower Automation 8:30 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ New Oceans, Drafts, Fieldmates, Well-Worn Professional 9 PM, Quenchers Saloon Party Time Lounge, Scotch the Filmmaker, Faintlife 9 PM, Burlington Mary Schmich & Eric Zorn’s Songs of Good Cheer 7:30 PM, also Fri 12/9, 7:30 PM; Sat 12/10, 3 and 7:30 PM; and Sun 12/11, 4 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music David Singer & the Sweet Science, Bora Bora 9 PM, Hideout Marty Stuart & the Fabulous Superlatives, Colin Elmore 8 PM, City Winery b The War on Peace, Saint Aubin 8 PM, Schubas, sold out We Make Thunder, Prairie Hawk, Stakehorse 8:30 PM, Township Pete Yorn 8 PM, Park West, 18+ Hip-Hop Trapo, Supa Bwe, DJ Vic Lloyd 6:30 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club b Dance Don Diablo 10 PM, the Mid DJ Pierre, Farley Jackmaster Funk, Roy Davis Jr., Czboogie 10 PM, Smart Bar Ekali, Electric Mantis 10 PM, 1st Ward, 18+ Folk & Country Devil in a Woodpile 6 PM, Hideout Blues, Gospel, and R&B Old Salt Union, Growler 8 PM, SPACE b River Valley Rangers, Found Hounds, Joyce Boys 8 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint Jazz Jimmy Bennington, Leah Shoshana, Robinlee Garber 8 PM, Red Line Tap Rajiv Halim Quartet 9:30 PM, California Clipper John Hanrahan Quartet 7:30 PM, PianoForte Studios Keefe Jackson & Jason Adasiewicz; Michael Zerang Duo 9 PM, Elastic b

J

DECEMBER 8, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 65

66 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 8, 2016

l

l

Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/soundboard.

MUSIC

®

My Gold Mask o JASON CREPS

SPECIAL GUEST:

BROWNOUT

continued from 65

Jeremy Pelt Quintet 8 and 10 PM, also through Sat 12/10, 8 and 10 PM; Sun 12/11, 4, 8, and 10 PM, Jazz Showcase International Devon Brown & Love This 9 PM, Wild Hare Classical Chicago Symphony Orchestra with Vadim Gluzman Neeme Jarvi, conductor (Glazunov, Prokofiev, Sibelius). 8 PM, also Fri 12/9, 1:30 PM and Sat 12/10, 8 PM, Symphony Center Fifth House Ensemble 8:30 PM, Constellation Stafford James Strings, Percussion & Horns Ensemble 8 PM, Edge Theater

FRIDAY9 It’s a Wonderful Life See also Saturday and Sunday. 7 PM, Symphony Center, 20 S. Michigan, $45-$145. b No matter how many times you’ve sat through director Frank Capra’s 1946 film It’s a Wonderful Life, you’ve probably never seen it as it was intended. That’s because the original music by major Hollywood composer Dimitri Tiomkin—whose name is still prominent in the credits—was all but totally dumped before the movie was released, ostensibly to lighten the mood for holiday consumption.

While recognizable non-Tiomkin songs like “Buffalo Gals” and “Auld Lang Syne” remained, 40 minutes’ worth of his material was excised, leaving the film with long stretches devoid of any musical component, including some of its most dramatic scenes.

This weekend members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the CSO Chorus rectify that. Under the baton of conductor Justin Freer, they’ll perform the full Tiomkin score as the movie screens.

—DEANNA ISAACS

THIS FRIDAY! DECEMBER 9 PARK WEST 9:00pm • 18 & Over

DECEMBER 28 • PARK WEST

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 3 PARK WEST

MAY 9 • VIC THEATRE

8:00pm • 18 & Over

Charles Curtis 8 PM, Logan Center for the Performing Arts, University of Chicago, 915 E. 60th, free with RSVP at smartmuseum. uchicago.edu. b The exquisite technique and discerning ear of cellist Charles Curtis have made him a key player in some highly disparate settings. Currently a professor of contemporary music performance at the University of California, San Diego, he’s played comedic indie rock with King Missile and Christian hymns with opera singer Kathleen Battle, and blasted lunar noise with Borbetomagus guitarist Donald Miller.

His sparse solo discography includes a CD of Bach’s solo cello suites and a double album of sine waves, vocal recitations, and downtempo rock grooves composed so that you can play any combination of sides simultaneously. And he’s the go-to cellist for minimalist composers like La Monte Young and Eliane Radigue—both of whom have composed pieces specifically for him—as well as Tashi Wada, who used Curtis and his student Judith Hamann to record the LP Duets (Saltern). Wada recently performed in town at a concert put on by local nonprofit Lampo; at this show closing out its season, Curtis will play Wada’s piece “Valence” along with “Rice and Beans,” by Fluxus artist Alison Knowles, and a pair of compositions by Alvin Lucier: “Glacier” for solo cello and “Slices” for solo cello and prerecorded orchestra. —BILL MEYER

My Gold Mask New Canyons and Wingtips open. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $12, $10 in advance.

Since local goth-pop three-piece My Gold Mask dropped 2013’s Leave Me Midnight they’ve steered their chilly sound toward pop without shedding the darkness. On this year’s Anxious Utopia (Moon Sounds) they flesh out their instrumentals— J

8:00pm • 18 & Over

ON SALE THIS FRIDAY AT 10AM!

7:30pm 18 & Over

ON SALE THIS FRIDAY AT 10AM!

BUY TICKETS AT

DECEMBER 8, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 67

MUSIC

Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/soundboard.

The Bug o COURTESY NOT NORMAL TAPES

JACOB COLLIER

LAMBCHOP

02/14

03/24

CHICANO BATMAN

ANDY SHAUF

04/07

05/13

GUEST

GUEST

79.5 + SAD GIRL

JULIA JACKLIN

12/31 @ LINCOLN HALL

ar e Y w e N Y

HAPP

THE HOOD INTERNET

AIR CREDITS, CELINE NEON, AND DJ MANNY MUSCLES

12/30 + 12/31 @ SCHUBAS

DIANE COFFEE

MODERN VICES (12/30) + YOKO AND THE OH NO’S, THE VOLUPTUALS (12/31)

SUSTO

BUSTY AND THE BASS

02/04

02/14

CEREUS BRIGHT

WHITNEY ROSE GUEST

02/20

68 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 8, 2016

GUEST

THE DIG

NICO YARYAN

04/01

continued from 67

guitar notes echo as if they were recorded in an empty cathedral, ethereal synths rise from the distance and evaporate—to provide a strong, dazzling foil for the voice of front woman Gretta Rochelle.

Her clipped, direct vocals on “Dissipate” and yearning, drawn-out singing on “Dangerous” are clear signs that My Gold Mask are not only aiming for taller pop heights but also able to achieve them.

The group released Anxious Utopia back in March; tonight’s show celebrates the arrival of the album’s vinyl version. —LEOR GALIL Rock, Pop, Etc Attlas, Evan Ireland 10 PM, Schubas Bad Bad Hats, Flint Eastwood 9 PM, Beat Kitchen Big City Burn, the Punch, Trick Shooter Social Club, Bishop’s Daredevil Stunt Club 8 PM, Metro, 18+ Condtion Critical, Manic Outburst, Spare Change, Smash Potater, Texas Toast Chainsaw Massacre 9 PM, Cobra Lounge, 17+ Cooler by the Lake, Nobodys 9 PM, Township Dog & Wolf, Avenues, Bigger Empty, Airstream Futures 9 PM, Quenchers Saloon Lara Downes 6 PM, PianoForte Studios Gramps the Vamp 8 PM, Emporium Arcade Bar Hacky Turtles, Ben Marshall Band, Adjacent Cruise, Bob Shirley 8 PM, Elbo Room Roger Hodgson 8 PM, Arcada Theatre, Saint Charles b Dan Hubbard, Ryan Arnold 7 PM, Schubas Idiots, Moreheads Blind Trust, Dry Look 8 PM, Red Line Tap King of Mars, Fall Classic, Local Motive, Human Bloom 8:30 PM, Martyrs’ Lasers and Fast and Shit, New Dougs 9 PM, Burlington Lawrence Arms, Worriers, Dowsing 8 PM, Double Door, 17+ Merit Badge, Mover Shaker, Joyboy, Droughts 10:30 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Mr. T Experience, Nobodys, Reaganomics, Timmys 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, sold out, 17+ Panda Riot 10 PM, Cole’s F Queensryche, Armored Saint, Midnight Eternal 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, 17+ Mary Schmich & Eric Zorn’s Songs of Good Cheer 7:30 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music Sin Anestesia, Sugar Free Guns, Hyperplane, OD Jo 8 PM, Cubby Bear

Sister Hazel 8 PM, also Sat 12/10, 8 PM, House of Blues 17+ Sunjacket, Elsinore, Namorado 9:30 PM, Subterranean Dance DVS1, Olin 10 PM, Smart Bar Goodsex, Richie Olivo, Dbot, Dangerwayne 10 PM, Primary Nightclub Martinez Brothers, Lee K 10 PM, the Mid Martinez, Clovis, Max & Mantas 10 PM, Spy Bar Marc Stout, DJ Spin 10 PM, Sound-Bar Folk & Country Wonky Tonk, Littlebirds, Wilem “Hurricane” Simmons 8 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint Blues, Gospel, and R&B Billy Branch 8 PM, the Promontory b Shawn Holt, JB Ritchie 9 PM, Buddy Guy’s Legends Chaka Khan, Howard Hewett 8 PM, the Venue at Horseshoe Casino Demetria Taylor Blues Band 9 PM, B.L.U.E.S. Nellie “Tiger” Travis Blues Band, Joanna Connor Blues Band 9 PM, Kingston Mines JW Williams Blues Band, Shirley Johnson Blues Band 9 PM, also Sat 12/10, 9 PM, Blue Chicago Jazz Big James & the Chicago Playboys 9:30 PM, Rosa’s Lounge Stanley Clarke Band 7 and 9:30 PM, SPACE b Karl Denson’s Tiny Universe, Brownout 9 PM, Park West, 18+ Jazzwords with Sarah Marie Young 9:30 PM, Andy’s Jazz Club Jeremy Pelt Quintet 8 and 10 PM, Jazz Showcase Matt Wilson’s Christmas Tree-O 9 PM, also Sat 12/10, 8 PM, Green Mill Experimental Jessica Aszodi & Jenna Lyle, Samuel Dunscombe & Curt Miller 9 PM, Elastic b Helen Money, Bruce Lamont 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ International Ire Elese Abure 8:30 PM, Szold Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b Radio Free Honduras 10:30 PM, California Clipper Tropics 9 PM, Wild Hare Classical Chicago Symphony Orchestra with Vadim Gluzman Neeme Jarvi, conductor (Glazunov, Prokofiev, Sibelius). 1:30 PM, Symphony Center Joyce DiDonato 7:30 PM, Harris Theater

J

l

l

PRESENTED BY

TO M O R ROW

N E V E R

K N OWS

JA N UA RY 11TH -15TH

BadBadNotGood + Tortoise + Title Fight + Into It. Over It. CEREMONY + JEFF The Brotherhood + Ezra Furman Caroline Smith + WAND + Tensnake + Big Thief + Pile + Weaves Pianos Become The Teeth + Foxtrott + Open Mike Eagle The Hotelier + IAN SWEET + Sam Evian + Mattson 2 + The Black Madonna Bayonne + Psalm One + HOOPS + Mother Evergreen + Acid Dad + Chastity Negative Scanner + In Tall Buildings + Muuy Biien + Overcoats + Flaural + Femdot Monobody + Cloakroom + Campdogzz + Savile + Dream Version + Joe Bordenaro Woongi + Morimoto + CRASHprez + HOGG + DJ Rachael

V I E W F U L L L I N E U P AT W W W.T N K F E S T. CO M

1035 N WESTERN AVE CHICAGO IL 773.276.3600 WWW.EMPTYBOTTLE.COM THU

12/8

FOODMAN [ORANGE MILK; JAPAN]

DJ FULLTONO [BOOTY TUNE; JAPAN] TRAXMAN • DIAMOND SOUL HARD COUNTRY HONKY TONK WITH

FREE

FRI

12/9

THE HOYLE BROTHERS

MY GOLD MASK (

RECORD RELEASE

)

NEW CANYONS • WINGTIPS

DJ PHILLY PEROXIDE

12PM - FREE

SAT

12/10

SUN

12/11

6PM FREE

HANDMADE MARKET ‘MIRRORED’ SERIES FEAT. BENJAMIN VERGARA QUARTET

9PM

8 -YEAR ANNIVERSARY

12PM - FREE

DAY LAPSE FEAT. DJs

WED

12/14

93XRT THE BIG BEAT WELCOMES

FRI

SAT

12/17

AMERICAN WRESTLERS

12/12

EXIT VERSE CAMPDOGZZ • PEOPLE OUT THERE

FREE

LIFESTYLES • HEAVY DREAMS

THE CURLS (

TOUR KICKOFF

)

DAN RICO • THE WRAP DJPTSD

FREE

12/16

MAKO SICA

CHRISTMAS BRIDE

12/15

HARD COUNTRY HONKY TONK WITH

THE HOYLE BROTHERS

MINOR CHARACTERS FURR • GREAT MOON

BOTTLE HOP III :

ROCK & SOUL HOLIDAY PARTY FEAT.

THE CONGREGATION WARM ONES • THE LAUREATES @ BOHEMIAN NAT’L CEMETERY (5255 N. PULASKI RD.)

VARSITY • LAVERNE

MON

FEAT.

MARDOU • COURTESY • TAPHOPHILE

THU

WINDY CITY SOUL CLUB

BRENT HEYL, ERIK KELDSEN, SCOTTIE McNIECE PLUS MICHAEL GOLAS [LIVE LAP STEEL SET]

BENEFIT FOR ACTIVE TRANSPORTATION ALLIANCE

TUE

12/13

SAT

12/17

BEYOND THE GATE

WILLIAM BASINSKI MIND OVER MIRRORS • ROBERT BEATTY FEAT.

12/18: TEDS DANCIN, 12/19: EMPTY BOTTLE 2017 CALENDAR RELEASE PARTY FEAT. SKIP CHURCH (FREE!), 12/20: WATER IS LIFE BENEFIT FEAT. DAYMAKER, 12/21: GLITTER CREEPS: PINK FROST, 12/22: SILVER ABUSE, 12/23: A HOLIDAY EXTRAVAGANZA FEAT. JIMMY WHISPERS, 12/27: DOGS AT LARGE, 12/28: 12TH ANNUAL ALEX CHILTON BIRTHDAY BASH, 12/29: POST ANIMAL, 12/30-31: EMPTY BOTTLE & GOOSE ISLAND BEER Co. PRESENT HIGH ON FIRE, 12/31 @ LSA: WINDY CITY SOUL CLUB, 1/1: EVERYONE’S HUNGOVER 2017 (12PM; FREE!), 1/2: SARAH SQUIRM (FREE!) NEW ON SALE: 1/7: BLIZZARD BABIES, 1/27: BLACK MARBLE, 2/4: LAST PODCAST ON THE LEFT, 2/10: THE LIFE & TIMES, 2/17: 93XRT WELCOMES RIVER WHYLESS, 3/31: XIU XIU, 4/6: MODERN ENGLISH, 4/9: SIX ORGANS OF ADMITTANCE

DECEMBER 8, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 69

Share music.

MUSIC DECEMBER 9TH

QUEENSRYCHE

W/ ARMORED SAINT & MIDNIGHT ETERNAL

DECEMBER 10TH

12TH PLANET:

SMOG 10YR ANNIVERSARY

DECEMBER 16TH

KSHMR

W/ DREZO

DECEMBER 17TH

LANE 8

EXTENDED SET

DECEMBER 30TH DECEMBER 31ST

Gift certificates are perfect for the music lover on your list.

Certificates can be used on classes, concerts, and in our Music Store. We’ve been singing and strumming with Chicago since 1957. Come join the band in 2017, our 60th anniversary!

Browse the class catalog and find your perfect class online.

MALA RODRIGUEZ: NEW YEARS PARTY

DECEMBER 31ST JANUARY 7TH

REAL FRIENDS & KNUCKLE PUCK HOLIDAY SHOW

JANUARY 13TH JANUARY 20TH

DATSIK NIGHT ONE

W/ DOCTOR P, CRIZZLY & VIRTUAL RIOT

New group classes start January 9!

oldtownschool.org 70 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 8, 2016

WWW.CONCORDMUSICHALL.COM 2047 N. MILWAUKEE | 773.570.4000

continued from 68

SATURDAY10 The Bug Part of the Infestational. In School, American Hate, Uranium Club, Big Bleach, the Bug, Bugg, Crude Humor, Negative Scanner, Baghead, Lemonade, Pryuss, Tigress, Chew, Porno Glows, and Black Hole Youth perform.

3 PM, Chitown Futbol, 2255 S. Throop, $15-$25 sliding scale. b In the September issue of Maximum Rocknroll distro coordinator Eli Wald recalls the first time he caught Chicago hardcore misfits the Bug, calling it “one of the best hardcore shows I’ve seen in years.”

It’s no stretch to say that the rest of the MRR folks agree. The cover of that month’s issue features a live photo of the Bug and front man Ralph Rivera— who’s also head honcho of Not Normal Tapes and an MRR contributor—and gives props to the group’s recent Room 44 Sessions cassette (out on Not Normal), which transposes their turbulent, nervy live energy. Frazzled guitars screech like a rat caught in a glue trap, bass and drums pointedly deliver each rapid-fire note and beat in a fog of feedback, and Rivera bellows and bleats like there’s a hairball caught in the back of his throat that he’s desperately trying to get out. The Bug know how to articulate fury through music, even if you have trouble hearing Rivera’s words—though that’s less of a challenge on the distended Krautrock freakout “I Don’t Like Any of You.” Fortunately the band not only included handwritten lyrics for these tracks, but also their respective inspirations; the cascading assault of “Late Lunch Sogged With Grease,” for example, is said to be a response to the loss of black lives at the hands of white supremacy. I imagine the Bug and other bands playing the Infestational—aka Not Normal’s inaugural underground punk gathering—will take the opportunity to call out our country’s ills.

—LEOR GALIL

It’s a Wonderful Life See Friday. 3 PM, Symphony Center, 20 S. Michigan, $45-$145. b Red Fang Torche and Whores open. 8 PM, Metro, 3730 N. Clark, $23, $21 in advance. 18+ It’s impossible to talk about the bearded heshers in Red Fang without getting into their unbelievable music videos. The very first of the bunch, “Prehistoric Dog,” from the band’s 2009 self-titled debut, shows the members engaging in an epic battle as LARPers, outfitted with weapons and armor built from empty beer cans and cases. Red Fang went viral with their second video, “Wires,” which features the group squandering a $5,000 video-budget check to transform a beater station wagon into a battering ram that magnificently demolishes everything from a pyramid of old televisions to a wall of milk gallons to their very own musical gear.

The over-the-top, beer-soaked hilarity runs through all of their videos (2013’s “Blood Like Cream” even stars Fred Armisen). But their best work yet is the brand-new “Shadows,” with the band fighting off a Predator-like nemesis in the woods until all that’s left is ridiculous gore and glorious carnage.

l

l

Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/soundboard.

MUSIC

Never miss a show again.

1800 W. DIVISION

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

(773) 486-9862 Come enjoy one of Chicago’s finest beer gardens!

EARLY WARNINGS chicagoreader.com/early

THURSDAY, DEC 8 .............THE FLABBY HOFFMAN SHOW FRIDAY, DEC 9 ...................UNIBROW SATURDAY, DEC 10 ............VAN GO SUNDAY, DEC 11 ...............HEISENBERG UNCERTAINTY PLAYERS WEDNESDAY, DEC 14 ........ELIZABETH HARPER’S LITTLE THING THURSDAY, DEC 15 ...........SHE ALWAYS LIES EARTH PROGRAM STAR DUSK FRIDAY, DEC 16 .................DANNY DRAHER BAND SATURDAY, DEC 17 ............SEX THERAPY SUNDAY, DEC 18 ...............TONY DOSORIO TRIO WEDNESDAY, DEC 21 ........JAMIE WAGNER BAND EVERY MONDAY AT 9PM ANDREW JANAK QUARTET EVERY TUESDAY AT 8PM OPEN MIC HOSTED BY JIMI JON AMERICA

please recycle this paper

On top of being a crew of hilarious dudes, Red Fang absolutely rip: their brand-new Only Ghosts (Relapse) nails a sweet spot between Danzig and Melvins, combining sludgy tones, brutal riffage, and a serious dose of crunchy, gruff catchiness.

—LUCA CIMARUSTI

Thank You Scientist Moon Tooth, Tea Club, and Megosh open. 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 2100 W. Belmont, $15. 17+ New Jersey seven-piece Thank You Scientist likes to cite Frank Zappa and the Mahavishnu Orchestra as influences, but a better parallel might be the

trashy, squiggly pop prog of Yes. On July’s Stranger Heads Prevail (Evil Ink), the group’s second fulllength, Salvatore Marrano’s vocals are unabashedly schmaltzy, lodged somewhere between the bombast of Jon Anderson and the faux funk of contemporary boy bands. The lyrics are chock-full of hearton-sleeve, wiggy profundity. “Mr. Invisible’s . . . been found!” Marrano wails while the backing band belts out lightning-fast chord changes complemented by smooth-jazz sax. The nine-minute “Rube Goldberg Variations” recalls the cabaret psych-strut of 60s Italian softcore soundtracks by folks like Piero Umiliani, with every tempo shift a wink. It’s all so unhip that the slinky undulations end up back at cool, especially when a crazed fuzz-guitar solo turns J

DECEMBER 8, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 71

4544 N LINCOLN AVENUE, CHICAGO IL OLDTOWNSCHOOL.ORG • 773.728.6000

MUSIC Thank You Scientist

JUST ADDED • NEW SHOWS ON SALE FRIDAY! 1/29/2017 2/16/2017 - 2/19/2017 3/15/2017 3/17/2017 3/19/2017 4/1/2017 & 4/2/2017 4/9/2017 & 4/10/2017

o COURTESY THE ARTIST

Justin Roberts The Cambrians present Empress Archer Noam Pikelny Chuck Prophet / The Bottle Rockets Kasey Chambers Loudon Wainwright Surviving Twin Richard Thompson

VISIT OLDTOWNSCHOOL.ORG TO BUY TICKETS! DECEMBER 8 THROUGH DECEMBER 11

Songs of Good Cheer with Mary Schmich and Eric Zorn

A Caroling Party benefiting Chicago Tribune Holiday Giving

MONDAY, DECEMBER 19 8PM

PigPen Theatre Co. Concert Residency • In Szold Hall

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 31 8PM

Over the Rhine SUNDAY, JANUARY 15 7PM

Peter Asher: A Musical Memoir of the '60s and Beyond Featuring the music of Peter and Gordon

SUNDAY, JANUARY 15 5PM Ukrainian Winter Evenings with

Kobzarska Sich Bandura Ensemble In Szold Hall

SATURDAY, JANUARY 21 8PM

Dale Watson and Ray Benson SATURDAY, JANUARY 21 8PM

Alash

In Szold Hall

SATURDAY, JANUARY 28 8PM Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's

John McEuen & Friends present Will the Circle Be Unbroken SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 4 8PM

James Hill & Anne Janelle

In Szold Hall

72 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 8, 2016

continued from 71

the track into a rock rave-up at the end. This is definitely music to giggle at, but the band either is in on the joke or has enough faith in its own considerable musical invention not to worry about it. Either way, if you like your music bloated and fabulous, you won’t want to miss TYS live. —NOAH BERLATSKY Rock, Pop, Etc Ashell, Dibiase, Ashes & Iron, Falcor 8:30 PM, Township Brendan Bayliss & Jake Cinninger, Joel Cummins 8 PM, Park West, sold out, 18+ Claudettes, Imperial Sound 9 PM, Hideout Deadbeats, Why Not, J. Hanrahan Quartet 8 PM, FitzGerald’s Dopapod, Pigeons Playing Ping Pong 9 PM, Bottom Lounge, 18+ Frontier Folk Nebraska, Hungry Mountain 9 PM, Red Line Tap Geezer, Superstar, Wave of Mutilation, Scary Monsters, INXX, Little Queens 8:30 PM, Schubas Jon Dee Graham 8:30 PM, FitzGerald’s Kristin Hersh 7 PM, SPACE b Hungry Man, Sewingneedle, Horrible 9 PM, Quenchers Saloon Joseph 10 PM, SPACE b Kaminada, Bogtrotter, Grimblee, Ponder 9 PM,

Subterranean, 17+ Lawrence Arms, Copyrights, Brokedowns 8 PM, Double Door, 17+ Mama, Glyders, Flesh Panthers 10 PM, Cole’s F Mama Jimi, Model Stranger, Fox & the Hounds, Midwest State of Mind 8 PM, Cobra Lounge Minor Moon, Half Gringa, Son of Abbey 9 PM, Martyrs’ The Oh Hellos 8 PM, Thalia Hall b Tony Orlando 7:30 PM, Arcada Theatre, Saint Charles b Oscar Bait, Shitty Neighbors, Warrior Tribes, Take Weight 7 PM, Subterranean Rebels in Stereo, Erzulie, Royal, Alex Nero & the Final Surprise, Doves of Mercury 8 PM, Elbo Room Road’s End, Disinter, Genotype, Blacklist Regulars 8:30 PM, Wire, Berwyn Mary Schmich & Eric Zorn’s Songs of Good Cheer 3 and 7:30 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music Britney Spears, Shawn Mendes, Fifth Harmony, Chainsmokers, G-Eazy, Onerepublic, DNCE, Alessia Cara 6:30 PM, Allstate Arena b Supersuckers, Jesse Dayton, Gallows Bound, Siderunners 7:30 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Abigail Williams, Wolvhammer, Amiensus, Terranaut, Varaha 8 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint Dance Sydney Blu, Phil Rizzo, RJ Pickens, M Sylvia 10 PM, Primary Nightclub

l

l

Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/soundboard.

MUSIC

3855 N. LINCOLN

martyrslive.com

THU, 12/8

Cazzette 10 PM, the Mid Cool Cats 10 PM, Spy Bar Gabriel & Dresden 10 PM, Sound-Bar Pat Mahoney, Michael Serafini, Leja Hazer 10 PM, Smart Bar Ron Reeser, Zebo 7 PM, Portage Theater 12th Planet, Lumberjvck, Bommer 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Folk & Country Wandering Boys, Big Sadie, Glass Mountain 8:30 PM, Hungry Brain Blues, Gospel, and R&B Chicago R&B Kings 9 PM, B.L.U.E.S. Eddy Clearwater, Bad Boy 9:30 PM, Buddy Guy’s Legends Nellie “Tiger” Travis Blues Band, Corey Dennison Blues Band 9 PM, Kingston Mines JW Williams Blues Band, Shirley Johnson Blues Band 9 PM, Blue Chicago Jazz Bakerzmillion 9:30 PM, Andy’s Jazz Club Shawn Holt & the Teardrops 10 PM, Rosa’s Lounge Keefe Jackson, Jim Baker, and Phil Sudderberg 6 PM, Empty Bottle F Jeremy Pelt Quintet 8 and 10 PM, Jazz Showcase Samana, Ndosi-Reid’s Sonic Restoration, Amina Claudine Meyers & Nicole Mitchell 3 PM, the Promontory b Matt Wilson’s Christmas Tree-O 8 PM, Green Mill International Dos Santos: Anti-Beat Orquesta 10:30 PM, California Clipper Indika 9 PM, also Sun 12/11, 9 PM, Wild Hare Magic Carpet, I Kong Cult, Coultrain 9 PM, Burlington Classical Apollo Chorus of Chicago (Handel). 7 PM, also Sun 12/11, 2 PM, Harris Theater Chicago Symphony Orchestra with Vadim Gluzman Neeme Jarvi, conductor (Glazunov, Prokofiev, Sibelius). 8 PM, Symphony Center Lyric Opera’s Magic Flute 7:30 PM, also Mon 12/12 and Wed 12/14, 7:30 PM, Civic Opera House

SUNDAY11 It’s a Wonderful Life See Friday. 3 PM, Symphony Center, 20 S. Michigan, $45-$145. b Rock, Pop, Etc American Wrestlers, Varsity, Laverne 9 PM, Empty Bottle Casualties, Virus, Last False Hope, Eruptors 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 18+ Cochino y los Pistoleros 4 PM, Township F Dead to Me, Downtown Struts, Arms Aloft, Sincere Engineer Noon, Cobra Lounge, 17+ Derek Fawcett, Brooke Nicole Lauritzen 7 PM, Schubas, 18+ Gary Hoey 7:30 PM, Arcada Theatre, Saint Charles b Los Lobos 8 PM, also through Wed 12/14, 8 PM, City Winery, sold out b Musicality, EI2, Daylight Sinners, Arcade 88, Matthew Cloud 5:30 PM, House of Blues b Spider Saloff & Jeremy Kahn 5 PM, PianoForte Studios b

Mary Schmich & Eric Zorn’s Songs of Good Cheer 4 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music Sekta Core, Nana Pancha, Malafacha 9 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Harry Shearer & Judith Owen’s Christmas Without Tears 7 PM, SPACE b Spirit Animal, Nico Yaryan, Kullers, Even Thieves 8 PM, Beat Kitchen Two Ton Heads, Brandon Von Vacik, Armadillo, Recall, Judah Michael 5:30 PM, Bottom Lounge b Dan Zanes 11 AM, City Winery b Hip-Hop Xavier Wulf 6 PM, Double Door Dance Derrick Carter, Michael Serafini, Garrett David 10 PM, Smart Bar Folk & Country Emmet Otter’s Jug Band Christmas with Golden Horse Ranch Band, Adventure Sandwich 6 PM, Hideout Wild Earp & the Free-For-Alls 9 PM, California Clipper F Jazz Renee Baker’s Katasha, Jobia Armstrong Coco Elysses Collective, Val-Inc 3 PM, the Promontory b Paul Bedal 7 PM, Red Line Tap Figment 9 PM, Whistler F Dave Koz 8 PM, Chicago Theatre Jeremy Pelt Quintet 4, 8 and 10 PM, Jazz Showcase Experimental Electronic Buffet 5 PM, Elastic b International Indika 9 PM, Wild Hare Classical Apollo Chorus of Chicago (Handel). 2 PM, Harris Theater Francesco D’Orazio 8:30 PM, Constellation

MONDAY12

BAWDY STORYTELLING FRI, 12/9

THE KING OF MARS, FALL CLASSIC, LOCAL MOTIVE, HUMAN BLOOM SAT, 12/10 - 3PM & 5PM - ALL AGES

FLATTS & SHARPE ROCK SHOW SAT, 12/10

MINOR MOON, HALF GRINGA, SON OF ABBEY MON, 12/12

THE GABRIEL CONSTRUCT, THE PHANTOM BROADCAST, CONFLUX TUE, 12/13

GRATEFUL STRING BAND WED, 12/14

JUNGLE OF CITIES, OLD SAP, CHYOMIN THU, 12/15 - SILVER WRAPPER PRESENTS...

DIRTWIRE FRI, 12/16

STAMPY, LUNAR TICKS SAT, 12/17

HELLO MR. ARTHUR, ARTHUR LEE LAND FRI, 12/30 & SAT 12/31

HENHOUSE PROWLERS

Rock, Pop, Etc Exit Verse, Campdogzz, People Out There 9 PM, Empty Bottle F Gabriel Construct, Phantom Broadcast, Conflux 8 PM, Martyrs’ Los Lobos 8 PM, City Winery, sold out b Native Strangers, Hacky Turtles, Hero in Eden, Weathermakers, Sails, Oak Park School of Rock 6:30 PM, House of Blues, 17+ Nick Pontarelli 8 PM, Arcada Theatre, Saint Charles b Secret Sisters 8 PM, Schubas Folk & Country Chicago Barn Dance Company Barn dance featuring Steve Rosen with caller Georges Augustin. 7 PM, Irish American Heritage Center b Robbie Fulks & Eric Noden 7 PM, Hideout Blues, Gospel, and R&B Dave Specter 8 PM, SPACE b Jazz Oby Orchestra, Aycee Lovely, DJ Elliven 7 PM, the Promontory Mai Sugimoto Quartet 9:30 PM, Whistler F Jeff Swanson Quartet, Chris Dammann & John Niekrasz, Black Diamond 9 PM, Elastic b Classical Lyric Opera’s Magic Flute 7:30 PM, Civic Opera House

J

DECEMBER 8, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 73

MUSIC Olivia Block o ANDREA BAUER

continued from 72

TUESDAY13 Rock, Pop, Etc Melissa Etheridge 7:30 PM, North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, Skokie Jaymay, Starving in the Bell of the Whale 7:30 PM, SPACE b Los Lobos 8 PM, City Winery, sold out b Mako Sica, Mardou, Courtesy, Taphophile 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle Radkey, Fame Riot, Lil Tits 6 PM, Cobra Lounge b Secret Space, Heart Attack Man, Recreational Drugs 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club b Touched by Ghoul, Hank McCoy, Sunken Ships, Smear Campaign 9 PM, Emporium Arcade Bar F White Mystery, Zoofunkyou, Friday Pilot’s Club, Bone Lang, Rakunk 7:30 PM, House of Blues, 17+ Hip-Hop CB Smooth, Sees Music 8 PM, Subterranean, 17+ F The Dread, Cojack & Company, Blaqrock 8 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Folk & Country Grateful String Band 8 PM, Martyrs’ Blues, Gospel, and R&B R. Kelly 7:30 PM, also Wed 12/14, 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre Jazz Kahil El Zabar, David Murray, Harrison Bankhead 10 PM, the Promontory 18+ Gunwale 9:30 PM, Whistler F Junius Paul Collective, Elijah Jamal 9 PM, Hideout Greg Ward, Dennis Carroll, Greg Artry 9 PM, Hungry Brain F Experimental MrDougDoug, David Hall, Jen Hill, Rafael Diaz, Adam Bach, Julia Pello 7 PM, Elastic b International Kwame 9 PM, Wild Hare

74 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 8, 2016

Classical Civic Orchestra of Chicago Teddy Abrams, conductor (Adams, Copland). 8 PM, Symphony Center

WEDNESDAY14 The Bad Plus 7 and 9:30 PM, SPACE, 1245 Chicago, Evanston, $20-$40. b The Bad Plus emerged at the start of the century by essaying popular music of the rock era, instantly attracting attention for their conceptual bravado.

Pianist Ethan Iverson, bassist Reid Anderson, and drummer Dave King tackled songs by Aphex Twin, Abba, Nirvana, and David Bowie, hammering them into new shapes and making them more interesting with rigorous arrangements. The treatments were never cynical, and even during their most mawkish performances, when Iverson unveiled his inner Liberace, there was a deep sincerity at work. In 2010 the piano trio began writing their own material, and the melodies, lurching grooves, and glittery flourishes felt natural alongside their pop interpretations. But earlier this year they dropped It’s Hard (OKeh), marking a return to their earlier MO: here the Bad Plus luxuriate on the overripe balladry of Prince’s “The Beautiful Ones” and Barry Manilow’s “Mandy,” rip apart art-rock staples like Peter Gabriel’s “Games Without Frontiers” and TV on the Radio’s “Staring at the Sun,” and offer rubato reinventions of jazz gems like Bill McHenry’s “Alfombra Magica” and Ornette Coleman’s “Broken Shadows.”

The gambit may be familiar; still, the tactics, energy, and discoveries continue to feel fresh. When Iverson splits open melodic lines from Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time” it’s both a love letter and a critical inquiry, a duality that explains why yet again the Bad Plus can’t be tied down by conceptual or any other kind of baggage. —PETER MARGASAK

l

l

MUSIC Femdot o CHOLLETTE

Olivia Block Mike Weis and MT Coast open.

9 PM, Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, $10.

An esteemed architect of Chicago’s experimental-music incubator, Olivia Block has often built her innovative work by finding alternate uses for—and backdoor entrances to—instruments, perhaps, for instance, digging into and exploring the guts of a piano in an attempt to assemble new sound. On her latest LP, Dissolution (Glistening Examples), Block twists and knots together chopped shortwave radio frequencies and slivers of found microcassettes, among other fleeting noises, to “dramatize the fragility and failures of communication and language in shaping memory and experience.” The scene is postapocalyptic in sound, the splicing together of lo-fi signals and the layering of fluttering, indiscernible voices working in fractured unison to build the image of a decimated, scorched wartime bunker. Cricketlike chirps and dull, swelling tones are foiled by what I imagine the tearing of time would sound like from one dimension to the next. Split into “Dissolution A” and “Dissolution B,” the LP keeps you squirming and repositioning throughout its 30-plus minutes as Block refuses to allow you to get comfortable or settle into any one long tone or turgid buzz. It’s quite an accomplishment, really.

—KEVIN WARWICK

Femdot Cool Kids headline; Payroll Giovanni and Femdot open. 9 PM, Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport, $10, $3 with RSVP. 18+ In what has become a tradition for shows curated by Chicago hip-hop blog Fake Shore Drive for Red Bull Sound Select, the big-name headlining act is supported by locals on the precipice of landing their own headlining gigs. (Full disclosure: I host a Chicago-centric show for Red Bull Music Academy Radio.)

The fact that the Cool Kids, who recently reunited to work on a full-length called Special Edition Grand Master Deluxe, are tonight’s main event should be more than enough to convince folks to file in early, but opener Femdot provides extra incentive. Across three EPs self-released this year—April’s Fo(u)r., July’s Thr(we)., and November’s To(u).—the 21-yearold MC displays an advanced understanding of his abilities, limitations, and style, his nuanced emotive touch affecting tracks like a fistful of lit firecrackers. His forceful flow and grip of life’s bittersweet twists help him glide through the autobiographical

“Soul,” delivering lines with aplomb while the journey through his past and present marinates—he encourages listeners to wonder about the things left unsaid. —LEOR GALIL Rock, Pop, Etc Against the Current, Cruisr, Beach Weather 6:30 PM, Bottom Lounge b Andrew Bird 8 PM, also through Fri 12/16, 8 PM, Fourth Presbyterian Church, sold out b Cheap Girls, Two Houses, All Eyes West 9 PM, Quenchers Saloon Christmas Bride, Lifesyles, Heavy Dreams 9 PM, Empty Bottle Fareed & His Funk Brothers, Mister F 8 PM, Emporium Arcade Bar Friends of the Bog, Lone Canary, Nick Jester & the Robot Orchestra 8:30 PM, Beat Kitchen Ariana Grande, Ellie Goulding, Backstreet Boys, Tove Lo, Lukas Graham, Daya, Hailee Steinfeld, Niall Horan 7:30 PM, Allstate Arena Jungle of Cities, Old Sap, Chyomin 8 PM, Martyrs’ Like Rats, Knife Hits, XAbruptX, Bruges 9 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Los Lobos 8 PM, City Winery, sold out b On the Rocks, Laura & Wally, Max Nishida, Phillip Beltz, Uma Bloo 8 PM, Subterranean, 17+ R34L & Lane 9 PM, Whistler F Teenage Rage, Gosh! 9 PM, Hungry Brain F Folk & Country Dead Horses, Crane Wives 8 PM, Schubas Lorrie Morgan 7:30 PM, Arcada Theatre, Saint Charles b Sunny Sweeney, Brennen Leigh, Courtney Patton, Jamie Lin Wilson 8:30 PM, Joe’s Bar Blues, Gospel, and R&B Syd Jay, Mon’Aerie 8 PM, the Promontory b R. Kelly 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre Maxwell, Mary J. Blige 7 PM, United Center Jazz Faraway Plants 10 PM, California Clipper Rob Parton Big Band 7:30 PM, FitzGerald’s Experimental Carol Genetti, Aaron Zarzutzki, Albert Wildeman, and Peter Maunu 9 PM, Beat Kitchen F Classical Luca Buratto Piano. 12:15 PM, Preston Bradley Hall, Chicago Cultural Center F b Chicago Symphony Orchestra Brass Schuller, Schuman, Bernstein. 8 PM, Symphony Center Lyric Opera’s Magic Flute 7:30 PM, Civic Opera House v

#DD% M WO3M-LL5 1033 K;0PRMW

.$* R?">8: F N><*$*E?: F 9\"Y? .<6:8 F .$* 5<V O>>!

1<>Y8"*< 1>\! M*C<E:!E -"Y?*? 7"8V F U6Y&<V N>6Y8E"Y /6Y?EV M"&$8 QETT (8G KE6\ 9*?E\ ] 8$* CEY? 5>6C\* 1*E86<*^ U>\"?EV $><<>< A\E::"A:

.$* 1\ECCV U>S[EY /$>2 X*E<\VJ K<EYE ] KRY8: X\E8*J QEY QE[*: F P*Y .6A!*< B@G@# H L\? OETE<6:Z UE<= B@G+D H 1EA8><V .$*E8*< I 7E"Y N68"YV B@G+B H M,3 2"8$ 8$* K>\!E$>\"A: BG% H W<>2\*< F 7>V>8* 0">8 F .$*[ 7>6\** 9>V: BG# H /**8 F U"A!><V W<"?\>A! F 0"A$ .EY 96S BGB) H 5E[>:*\\E: F L4*<\>A!*? F .$* /8EVH;\"4*:

---G035ORM3.;KG7LN ##+G@#)G')%+ DECEMBER 8, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 75

This is how you say itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s going to be okay.

Every 8 minutes the American Red Cross responds to a disaster and makes this promise. This holiday season, you can help us keep it.

Donate today at redcross.org

76 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 8, 2016

l

l

FOOD & DRINK

INTRO: JAPANESE TRATTORIA | $$$$

2300 N. Lincoln Park West 773-868-0002 introchicago.com

NEW REVIEW

Worlds collide with Intro’s Japanese-Italian trattoria menu

Chef Hisanobu Osaka’s residency explores the affinities of two great world cuisines.

By MIKE SULA

Lamb shank and polenta with citrusy sauce spiked with sansho pepper o DANIELLE A. SCRUGGS

T

he Japanese fascination with Italian food goes back decades, but it wasn’t until the 90s that itameshi, as it was known, came into its own and informal, inexpensive Italian food prepared with quintessentially Japanese ingredients supplanted high-end French as the exotic foreign obsession della giornata. It’s difficult to imagine two world cuisines more suited to one another, if only for their mutual fidelity to pasta.

As compelling as it was, this marriage didn’t make much of a go of it here in Chicago.

Years back there were rumors of a Japanese chef who’d opened a trattoria in an Arlington Heights strip mall, serving pasta with fish eggs and butter, among other experiments, but by the time I’d tracked it down it was gone. Save a few representations here and there—say, at the late Japonais by Morimoto (gyoza in puttanesca, uni carbonara) and at the still extant Momotaro, where Mark Hellyar’s buttery mentaiko spaghetti is still a thrilling bowl of noodles—niente, nani mo.

So when Lettuce Enter ta in You a nnounced that the sixth incarnation of its ever-changing Intro would be playing host to a Japanese’s chef’s passion for Italian food, I decided yet again to break my self-imposed moratorium on new Italian restaurants in 2016 and check it out.

Chef Hisanobu Osaka launched the aforementioned Japonais and a number of Masaharu Morimoto’s restaurants before signing on with LEYE and contributing to Naoki and Wow Bao. But Osaka is a native of Kagawa, Japan, and though he worked in fine dining in his home country during the heyday of itameshi, he was fascinated by the variety of pastas in the more casual style, and it was with this in mind that he designed the pastas for his Japanese Trattoria menu.

Running concurrently with Stephen Gillanders’s dim sum menu, Osaka’s selection of dishes is rather focused: mainly pastas and secondi, a few contorni and insalata, and a handful of appetizers and antipasti. The latter are appealing enough, consisting of wellknown bites like crispy arancini composed of sushi rice studded with bits of Japanese pickle, tangy aioli spiked with fermented beans on the side. In fact, the Japanese J

DECEMBER 8, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 77

S P O N S O R E D

N E I G H B O R H O O D

C O N T E N T

Chicago has always been a city of distinct neighborhoods with their own sense of identity and tradition — and each with stand-out bars and restaurants that are worthy of a haul on the El or bucking up for parking. Explore some local faves here, then head out for a taste of the real thing!

EATALY, LA PIAZZA // RIVER NORTH Tues: 5-9 pm, $15 housemade beer + Margherita pizza alla pala

LINCOLN HALL // LINCOLN PARK $8 Modelo Especial Tallboy + shot of tequila

L H - S T. C O M

E ATA LY . C O M / C H I C A G O

L H - S T. C O M

ALIVEONE // LINCOLN PARK Wednesday: 1/2 price aliveOne signature cocktails

PHYLLIS’ MUSICAL INN // WICKER PARK Everyday: $3.75 Moosehead pints and $2.50 Hamms cans

FITZGERALDS // BERWYN Everyday: $6 Firestone Walker Opal pints

ALIVEONE .COM

7 7 3 . 4 8 6 .9 8 62

FITZGER ALDSNIGHTCLUB .COM

MOTOR ROW BREWING // NEAR SOUTHSIDE Thu, Fri, Tue, Wed: Happy Hour noon-6pm, $2 off all beers

REGGIES // SOUTH LOOP $5 Absolut & Bacardi Cocktails Every Day special

MONTI’S // LINCOLN SQUARE Monday: $1 off Beers, Friday: $5 Martinis

MOTORROWB REWI NG .COM

REGGIESLIVE.COM

I LOV E M O NTI S .CO M

SCHUBAS // LAKEVIEW $7 Modelo Especial + Don Julio shot

R I V E RB ENROWR Y TN H

FAVE > CHAR-GRILLED SURF & TURF

OLIVER’S // 6 9 0 8 W I N D S O R // C H E F - O L I V E R S .C O M Oliver’s features contemporary American with seasonal international dishes—that includes prime cuts, fresh seafood and farm to table specialties in a relaxed casual environment.

Appetizers include oysters, shrimp, sliders and delicious small plates. Chef Oliver’s famous scallops merited a special TV appearance on ABC’s 190 North and several mentions in Chicago publications. The exceptional fare is complimented by a wide variety of signature martinis, extensive selection of craft beers and a unique wine list.

“Outstanding! Wonderful appetizers & martinis!”

78 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 8, 2016

— PAMELA B. / YELP

l

JOBS

SALES & MARKETING

FOOD & DRINK R

THE TASTING ROOM AT MOODY TONGUE

o JORDAN BALDERAS

2136 S. Peoria, 312-600-5111, moodytongue.com, Sun noon-11 PM, Mon 5-11 PM, Thu 5-11 PM, Fri 5 PM-midnight, Sat noon-midnight

BARS

Moody Tongue’s tasting room is all class

By JULIA THIEL

M

oody Tongue Brewing’s new tasting room in Pilsen isn’t for those who prefer to watch TV or snack on fried foods while drinking a pint. In fact, it’s not even for those who want to drink from a pint glass. Or from a tasting flight of small glasses. The beer is served in hand-blown Austrian goblets with stems so delicate they look liable to shatter if you sneeze too hard, and there are no flights.

There are oysters, however, and gargantuan slices of 12-layer German chocolate cake. As far as food goes, that’s it.

The limited food selection may seem like an odd choice, especially given the culinary inspirations behind the beer that head brewer Jared Rouben has been making at Moody Tongue since he launched the brewery nearly three years ago. Among the former chef’s flagship beers are a nectarine IPA and a caramelized chocolate churro porter, and over the years he’s brewed with many other edibles. If Rouben is making food-inspired beer, why not have more beer-inspired food to go with it? In a conversation a few months ago, he said having one savory option and one sweet one is “a great way to show focused beer pairings.” Oysters and chocolate cake also happen to be the foods he most wants to eat when drinking beer.

The tasting room, located in the same former glass factory that houses the brewery, has brick walls painted white and a high black ceiling. Midcentury modern furniture, a white

80 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 8, 2016

marble bar, and a fireplace flanked with glassdoored cases that house old books on brewing create an atmosphere that’s simultaneously cozy and stark. Everything feels intentional, from the hanging ferns to the vintage copy of One Hundred Years of Brewing placed on a side table.

The same attention to detail is apparent in the beer—not to mention each element of the excellent chocolate cake. On top of a crust made of pretzels, chocolate cereal, graham crackers, and butter are layers of chocolate cake alternating with espresso cheesecake, coconut-pecan caramel, and chocolate buttercream. Made by pastry chef Shannon Morrison, it’s served in $15 wedges that weigh nearly two pounds. The bartender recommended the smoked Applewood Gold lager and the Steeped Emperor’s Lemon Saison, two beers that he said would cut through the richness of the chocolate. I preferred the light-bodied, smoky, mildly funky lager to the herbal, citrusy saison. I’m glad I didn’t try the cake with the bourbon barrel-aged barleywine, a lovely beer that tastes like dates and brown sugar with a dash of bourbon and is much too sweet to pair with dessert.

Moody Tongue is clearly fulfilling a vision of Rouben’s: carefully crafted beer served in carefully crafted glasses in a thoughtfully decorated room along with thoughtfully selected food items. The atmosphere isn’t stuffy, but it is exacting. The cake, for example, could easily be sold in more reasonable portions— but that wouldn’t make for the head-turning, Instagrammable dessert that the brewer envisioned. I respect Rouben for not compromising. The execution is flawless. But really, would serving a few pretzels kill him? v

TELE-FUNDRAISING: FOR HOLIDAY CAMPAIGN. American Veterans helping Veterans. Felons need not apply

per Illinois Attorney General regulations. Start ASAP, Call 312-256-5035

HOME REMODELING COMPA-

NY seeks enthusiastic telemarketers. $10/ hour plus 1% commission. Must have good phone skills. Bonuses for top producers. Call Jim after 2:30pm, 773-227-2255.

General MULTIPLE OPEN POSITIONS

at multiple Education/Experience levels at Network Objects: Master’s + 1 yr exp. / Bachelor’s + 5 yrs. exp.: SAP ABAP Analyst (NSAA16): SAP ABAP, SAP R/3, SD, MM, HR, PP, PM, QM, FI/CO, SCM, Vistex, SAP Scripts, Smart forms. SAP BW/BO Analyst (NOSBW16): experience in SAP. SAP SD Pricing Consultant (NSDP16): SAP SD, Pricing, Rebates, Order management, ABAP, Vistex, MM, FICO, Supply Chain, data mapping. SAP SD Solutions Architect (NSARC16): SAP SD, ABAP, MM, FICO, PP, Supply Chain, Vistex.

Bachelor’s +2 yrs exp./ combination of education, training and experience eqv. to Bachelor’s + 2 yrs exp.: SAP BI/BO Analyst (NBBA16): SAP BI /BO, BADI, Vistex, Web Intelligence, Crystal Reports, R/3, HANA. Mail resume with job ID to HR: 2300 Barrington Rd, Suite 400, Hoffman Estates, IL 60169. Travel to unanticipated worksites throughout U.S. Foreign equivalency accepted.

COMPUTER SYSTEMS ANALYSTS ZENSAR TECHNOLOGIES, INC. has openings in Oak Brook, IL. All positions may be assigned to various, unanticipated sites throughout the US. Job Code US-OBIL116 Computer Systems Analyst (Solution Architect): systems, studies & impact analysis.

Job Code US-OBIL117 Computer Systems Analyst (Req.s/NPIs): set up processes, resolve issues +code.

Mail resume to: Prasun Maharatna, 2107 North First Street, Suite 100, San Jose, CA 95131.

Include job code & full job title/s of interest + recruitment source in cover letter. EOE

DEPAUL UNIVERSITY seeks Sr. Web Applications Developers for Chicago, IL location to develop Enterprise Web Applications, throughout the entire life cycle of the development process using sw best practices. Master’s in Comp.

Sci./Comp. Eng./Comp. Interaction /related field + 2yrs exp. or Bachelor’s in Comp. Sci./Comp. Eng./ Comp. Interaction/related field + 5yrs exp. req’d. Must have exp. in higher education environment w/ Windows Client/Server systems, A SP.NET (MVC, Web API), Azure, SQL, TFS, JavaScript/ JQuery/AngularJS/Knockout, CSS /Sass/Less, Xamarin iOS/Android, SQL Server/RDMS, Entity Framework, Object Oriented & Service Oriented architecture (SOAP, RESTful), Unit Testing, Automated Build Tools, Design Patterns, Agile /Scrum, UX design principles. Send resume to: Amaris Casiano, REF: YW, 243 S Wabash, Chicago, IL 60604 TRANSUNION, LLC SEEKS Sr.

Leads for Chicago, IL location to work w/application development teams. Master’s in Comp. Sci./Comp.

Info. Systems/Comp. Applications + 2yrs exp. or Bachelor’s in Comp. Sci./ Comp. Info. Systems/Comp. Applications + 5yrs exp. req’d. Must have front end web development & exp. w /Java, J2EE, Tomcat, JBoss, MVC, JQuery, NodeJS, Angular, Typescript, CSS, Adaptive Design, flux/ redux/ngrx, Apache Camel, Websphere. Send resume to: C. Studniarz, REF: AKP, 555 W Adams, Chicago, IL 60661

COMPUTER/IT: Kraft Heinz Foods Company seeks Manager, IT Development to work in Chicago, IL. Dsgn, dvlp & implmnt the Data Lake platfrm; estblsh, direct & execute the data & analytics vision for the enterprise. Degree & commensurate expernc reqr’d. For details & to apply see req. #7752BR online at: http:// www.kraftheinzcompany.com/ careers.html.

Assoc Creative Dir (Copy): Sr Copywriter position resp for developing bold, strategic & awardwinning creative advertising from concept to execution. Chicago, IL location. Req’s BA in Advertising or Mass Comm & 2 yrs exp as Copywriter at an ad agency.

Send resume to: Ten35 LLC, 401 N. Michigan Ave., Ste 500, Chicago, IL, 60611. Attn: C. Saxena.

Vice President, Integration and Transit Operations (position in Warrenville, IL 60555): Direct the management of all aspects of finances, operations, and integration processes (new contracts and acquisitions) of North American transit business. Direct financial management, the management of financial reporting in compliance with U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (US GAAP), U.K. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (UK GAAP), and International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), and the implementation of financial controls for U.K.-owned multisite company in the transportation industry, using planning, forecasting, and reporting systems, Oracle/JDE/ERP systems, and Hyperion/Business Intelligence systems to inform executive, financial decision-making at U.S. offices and U.K. headquarters.

Must have a Bachelor’s degree in Accounting, Finance, or a related field (or foreign degree equivalent) and 8 years of progressive experience in financial management, the management of financial reporting in compliance with US GAAP, UK GAAP, and IFRS, and the implementation of financial controls for multisite companies, including 6 months of concurrent experience: in the transportation industry; and in using planning forecasting, and reporting systems, Oracle/JDE/ERP systems, and Hyperion/Business Intelligence systems to inform executive, financial decisionmaking. This position requires domestic and international travel up to 33% of working time.

Please submit in duplicate your resume and cover letter referencing position #0503 to: Durham School Services, LP, Kristin Fjelde, Recruiting Supervisor, 4300 Weaver Parkway, Warrenville, IL 60555. Durham School Services, LP is an Equal Opportunity Employer.

SR. SOFTWARE DEVELOPER

– Comcast Cable Comm, LLC, Chicago, IL design, build & support .Net, web-based SW solutions for buy-side & sell-side media clients. Reqs.Bach in CS, Engin or rltd & 5 yrs. exp. utilize .Net technologies to develop web-based SW solutions. Apply to: anne_duong@cable.comcast.com.

Refer to Job ID# 0338

THE LATEST ON YOUR FAVORITE

RESTAURANTS AND BARS

FOOD & DRINK

WEEKLY E-BLAST GET UP TO DATE. SIGN UP NOW. CHICAGOREADER.COM

ß @juliathiel

l

l

REAL ESTATE RENTALS

STUDIO $500-$599 Chicago, Beverly/Cal Park/Blue Island Studio $575 & up, 1BR $665 & up, 2BR $885 & up. Heat, Appls, Balcony, Carpet, Laundry, Prkg.

708-388-0170

STUDIO $600-$699 ROGERS PARK! 7455 N .

Greenview. Studios starting at $675 $695 including heat. It’s a newly remodeled vintage elevator building with on-site laundry, wood floors, new kitchens and baths, some units have balconies, etc. No security deposit! For a showing please contact Samir 773-627-4894 Hunter Properties 773-477-7070 www. hunterprop.com EDGEWATER!

1061 W. Rosemont. Studios starting at $695 to $725, All Utilities included! Elevator building! Close to CTA red line train, restaurants, shopping, blocks to the lakefront, beaches and bike trails, laundry onsite, remodeled, etc. For a showing please contact Jay 773835-1864 Hunter Properties, Inc. 773-477-7070 www.hunterprop.com CHICAGO, HYDE PARK Arms

Hotel, 5316 S. Harper, maid, phone, cable ready, fridge, private facilities, laundry avail. Start at $160/wk Call 773-493-3500

MARQUETTE PARK: 6315-19 S California, Studios, 1beds, 2beds from $600-$800, Free heat, no deposit. 773.916.0039 7500 SOUTH SHORE Dr. Brand New Rehabbed Studio & 1BR Apts from $650.

Call 773-374-7777 for details.

STUDIO OTHER CROSSROADS HOTEL SRO SINGLE RMS Private bath, PHONE,

CABLE & MAIDS. 1 Block to Orange Line 5300 S. Pulaski 773-581-1188

LARGE SUNNY ROOM w/fridge & microwave. Near Oak Park, Green Line & Buses. 24 hr Desk, Parking Lot $101/week & Up. (773)378-8888

CHICAGO HEIGHTS - Newly Remod , FREE HEAT, gas & parking, Section 8 OK! Studio, 1, 2 & 3 BR’s. $550-$800/mo.

(708)300-5020.

CHICAGO - HYDE PARK 5401 S. Ellis.

1BR. $535-$600/mo.

FALL SPECIAL $ 500 Toward

Call 773-955-5106

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 FALL SPECIAL: STUDIOS starting at $499 incls utilities. 1BR $550, 2BR $599, 3BR $699. With approved credit. No Security Deposit for Sec 8 Tenants. South Shore & Southside. Call 312-4463333 QUALITY

APARTMENTS,

Great Prices! Studios-4BR, from $450. Newly rehabbed. Appliances included. Low Move-in Fees. Hardwood floors. Pangea - Chicago’s South, Southwest & West Neighborhoods. 312-985-0556

7022 S. SHORE DRIVE Impecca-

bly Clean Highrise STUDIOS, 1 & 2 BEDROOMS Facing Lake & Park.

Laundry & Security on Premises.

Parking & Apts. Are Subject to Availability. TOWNHOUSE APARTMENTS 773-288-1030

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)

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

773-637-5957 MARQUETTE PARK: 7142 S Richmond, beaut rehab 3BR/2BA house, granite ctrs, SS appls, fin bsmt, 2 car gar. $1600/mo. 708288-4510

Newly remod 1BR & Studios starting at $500. No sec dep, move in fee or app fee. Free heat /hot water. 1155 W. 83rd St., 773-619-0204

Never miss a show again.

Rent Beautiful Studios 1, 2, 3 & 4 BR Sect. 8 Welc. Westside Loc, Must qualify. 773-287-4500 www.wjmngmt.com

CHICAGO - South Shore Large 1BR, $660/mo.

Free heat.

Near Transportation.

Section 8 Welcome. Call 708932-4582 2 BEDROOM / 4 ROOM, New

rehab, jumbo, clean, Heat separate, $ 630/mo, 773-467-8200, Ed. 630926-8392. 649 W 80TH.

Newly updated, clean furnished rooms, located near buses & Metra, elevator, utilities included, $91/wk. $ 395/mo. 815-722-1212

CALUMET CITY - Comfortable

1 bedroom, heat, A/C, appliances & carpet included, $670/month + security, 708-957-2043

9101 S. LOOMIS 1BR, $650.

Heated. Steadman Rlty.

773-284-5822 After 5pm 773-835-9870

NICE ROOM w/stove, fridge & bath Near Aldi, Walgreens, Beach, Red Line & Buses. Elevator & Laundry. $130/wk & up. 773-275-4442

BIG ROOM with stove, fridge, bath & nice wood floors. Near Red Line & Buses. Elevator & Laundry, Shopping. $121/wk + up. 773-561-4970

AUSTIN- 1BR garden apt, Utilities not included $650/ mo plus 1 month security deposit, Section 8 Welcome 773-317-1837 4BR, 2BA REHABBED brick home, 107th and Vernon, hrdwd flrs, granite ctrs, SS appls, full bsmt, $1400 avail. now. 312-683-5284.

SECTION 8 WELCOME. No Security Dep., 7335 S Morgan, 5BR house, appliances incl., $1300/mo.

Call 708-288-4510

HUMBOLDT PARK. ONE

bedroom apartment for rent. Newly remodeled. Next door to food store. $800 per month plus security deposit. Near shopping area. Monica, 773-592-2989.

AUBURN GRESHAM: 79TH &

Paulina, 1-2 Bedroom, $745-$795, Free heat. Call 773.916.0039

1 BR $800-$899 LAKESIDE TOWER, 910 W Lawrence. 1 bedrooms starting at $875-$925 include heat and gas, laundry in building. Great view! Close to CTA Red Line, bus, stores, restaurants, lake, etc. To schedule a showing please contact Celio 773-3961575, Hunter Properties 773-4777070, www.hunterprop.com

MONTROSE/ CLARENDON VINTAGE one bedroom. Sunny/

bright, across from park, heat/ gas included. Miniblinds/ ceiling fans.

Free laundry, private porch, block Montrose Harbor. $895. 773-9733463.

6824

N

WAYNE.

One bedroom apartment near Red Line. Hardwood floors, Pets OK. $850/ month. Heat included. Laundry in building. Available 1/1.

773-761-4318, www. lakefrontmgt.com

1 BR $900-$1099

82ND & LOOMIS, 1BR, 4 ROOMS,

newly decorated, carpeted, heat incl., $675/mo + 1 mo sec. Quiet/Smoke Free Bldng. 773-846-1140

EARLY WARNINGS Find a concert, buy a ticket, and sign up to get advance notice of Chicago’s essential music shows at chicagoreader.com/early.

76th & Phillips 1BR $650-$700; 2BR $750-$800. Remodeled, Appliances available. FREE Heat. 312286-5678

1 BR $700-$799

near Warren Park and Metra, 6802 N Wolcott. Hardwood floors. Heat included. Laundry in building. Cats OK. $900/ month. Available 1/1. 773-7614318, www.lakefrontmgt.com

1 BR OTHER APTS. FOR RENT PARK MGMT & INV. Ltd. IT’S THAT TIME AGAIN! OUR UNITS INCLUDE HEAT, HW & CG Plenty of parking 1Bdr From $750.00 2Bdr From $925.00 3 Bdr/2 Full Bath From $1200 **1-(773)-476-6000***

APTS. FOR RENT PARK MGMT & INV. Ltd. TIME TO TURN THE FURNANCE ON!!!

Most units Include..

HEAT & HOT WTR Studios From $545.00 1Bdr From $575.00 2Bdr From $745.00 3 Bdr/2 Full Bath From $1200 **1-(773)-476-6000**

CHICAGO, CHATHAM NO SECURITY DEPOSIT Spacious updated 1BR from $600 with great closet space.

Incl: stove/fridge, hdwd flrs, blinds, heat & more!!!

LIMITED INVENTORY ** Call (773) 271-7100 **

ROUND LAKE BEACH, IL

2402 N. NEW ENGLAND - 1bd.

apt. $795.00/month heated and free cooking gas. Modern kitchen, new appliances, new carpet, laundry facilities near transportation.

Available immediately. For infor. call Long-Kogen, Inc. (773) 7646500.

FREE HEAT No Sec Dep or Move-in fee!

Sec 8 ok. 1, 2 & 3 BR. Elev bldg, laundry, pkg. 6531 S. Lowe.

Call Gina 773-874-0100 FREE HEAT, 73rd & Harvard Ave. near the Dan Ryan. Lrg 1BR w/ appliances & small 2BR available. Quiet bldng.

773-895-7247.

RIVERDALE, IL 1 Bedroom

Condo, newly decorated, off st. parking, gated community. $750 + sec. Call Mr. Jackson 708-846-9734

SUBURBS, RENT TO OW N! Buy with No closing costs and get help with your credit. Call 708868-2422 or visit www.nhba.com CHICAGO, RENT TO OWN! Buy with no closing costs and get help with your credit. Call 708868-2422 or visit www.nhba.com CHICAGO - BEVERLY, large 2 room Studio, 1 & 2BR Apts. Carpet, A/C, laundry, near transportation, $650-$975/mo. Call 773-233-4939 CHICAGO SOUTH SIDE Beautiful Studios, 1,2,3 & 4 BR’s, Sec 8 ok. $500 gift certificate for Sec 8 tenants. 773-287-9999/312-446-3333

ONE BEDROOM APARTMENT

û NO SEC DEP û

6829 S. Perry. 1BR. $520/mo.

1431 W. 78th St. 2BR. $605/mo.

HEAT INCL 773-955-5106

ONE OF THE BEST M & N MGMT, 1BR, 7727 Colfax ** 2 Lrg BR, 6754 Crandon ** 2 & 3BR, 2BA, 6216 Eberhart ** Completely rehabbed.

You deserve the best ** 773-9478572 or 312-613-4427

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 ∫

ACACIA SRO HOTEL Men Preferred! Rooms for Rent. Weekly & Monthly Rates. 312-421-4597

77TH/LOWE. 2BR. 69th/Dante, 3BR. 71st/Bennett. 2 & 3BR. 77th/ Essex. 3BR. New renov.

Sec 8 ok. 708-503-1366

MOVE IN SPECIAL B4 the N of this MO. & MOVE IN 4 $99.00 (773) 874-3400

2 BR UNDER $900 2 BEDROOM APARTMENT in Calumet City, nice neighborhood, quiet building, newly remodeled, heat, gas & water included. Security deposit required. $850/mo.

708-288-5358 98TH/THROOP. 5rms, 1BR, vinyl tiles, c-fans, appls, nr trans & shops, heat incl. $760/mo + $380 move-in. Brown Realty 773-239-9566

CHICAGO NEAR 80TH & Green,

spacious 6 rooms, 3 BR with heat included. Near transp. $975/mo.

1 month rent + 1 month security. 773874-4755

LOGAN

SQUARE 2 bedroom

apartment, 2-flat building, modern kitchen & bath, balcony, washer & dryer. $750/mo. Near Blue Line.

773-235-1066

AUSTIN AREA, Best deal, Senior discount available, 2BR. $650$695. Credit check required.

6 N. Lockwoood Call 708-2048600 ALSIP: LARGE 2BR, 1.5BA, $875/mo. Balcony, appliances, laundry & storage.

Call 708-268-3762 CHICAGO, NEWLY DECORATED 2BR Apartment, hardwood floors, blinds, $650/mo.

Call 773-617-2909 COZY 2 BEDROOM apartment.

Available now. Seniors welcomed. $800/mo. + sec.

Call: 773.213.1705.

CHICAGO 7600 S Essex 2BR $599, 3BR $699, 4BR $799 w/apprvd credit, no sec dep. Sect 8 Ok! 773287-9999 /312-446-3333

RIVERDALE, IL 14141 S. School St. Newly Renovated 2 BR, 1 Bath avail. No Pets.

Rent $800/mo. 312-217-6556

2 BR $900-$1099

CHICAGO, PRINCETON PARK HOMES. Spacious 2-3 BR Townhomes, Inclu: Prvt entry, full bsmt, lndry hook-ups. Ample prkg. Close to trans & schls. Starts at $844/ mo. w w w . p p k h o m e s . com;773-264-3005 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. 7721 S Peoria, 3BR apt, appls incl. $1050/mo.

708-288-4510

NORTHWEST CHICAGO AVE

and Cicero. 3BR updated unit, tenant pays utils, no pets. $925/mo + sec.

708-249-6668

CONGRESS AND CENTRAL

Area. Large 3BR, hdwd flrs, tenant pays utils, no pets. $1150/mo + sec 708-249-6668

OLD IRVING PARK! 4146 N.

Avers, 2 bedrooms at $1095 including heat and cooking gas. Just completed remodeling, new kitchen, new bath, dishwasher, hardwood floors, walking distance to grocery store, restaurants and public transportation, laundry in building. NO SECURITY DEPOSIT! For a showing please contact Saida 773-407-6452, Hunter Properties 773-477-7070

CHICAGO: 406 E. 109th St. 2BR, parking & W/D available.

Tenant pays all utilities, $800/mo + 1/2 mo sec dep. Call 630-2483051

2419 W. MARQUETTE Rd - 2BR, Appls, c-fans, intercom, tenant pays utils, lndry room avail, sec 8 OK. $90 0/mo. 773-316-5871

DOLTON, 1107 E 151st St, new appl, stove, & fridge, free heat, 2 BR, on-site laundry, Sec 8 ok. $950/mo. New reno 773-723-2063

2 BR $1100-$1299 ROGERS PARK, 7400N & 1900W. Newly Decor BR2, free gas & heat.

no pets, no smoking or drugs. $1100 + dep. Sec 8 welc. 847-4772790

73RD & DORCHESTER, 2BR,

refrig, $1150/mo, gas incl; 119th & Calumet, 3BR, 2BA, $1250/mo. No Sec Dep. Sec 8 ok. 773-684-1166

3525 N WHIPPLE, 2BR, beautiful apt, heat incl, across from Addison Mall, off st parking, near transp. $1175 + sec. Ruth 773-909-6951

2 BR $1500 AND OVER LARGE TWO BEDROOM, two bathroom apartment, 3820 N Fremont. Near Wrigley Field. Hardwood floors. Cats OK. Laundry in building.

Available 1/1. $1595/ month. New Year special: Move in January 1st, get February rent Free. Parking available. $150/ month for single parking space. $250/ month for tandem parking space. 773-761-4318, www. lakefrontmgt.com

NEAR BEVERLY Huge 2BR apt, with bonus room on 1st floor. Sect 8 Welc 312.809.6068

3 BR OR MORE UNDER $1200 80TH/PHILLIPS, BEAUTIFUL, LRG newly renovated 3BR, 1.

5BA, hdwd flrs & appls incl. Quiet apt. $950/mo & up. Avail Now! 312-818-0236 SEC 8 WELCOME

CALUMET CITY, 1469 Forest Ave 3BR, 1.5BA, hdwd flrs, finished partial bsmt, 1.5 car garage, $950/mo. Sec 8 ok 630-621-7142

3 BR OR MORE $1200-$1499 ROBBINS, 14044 Wayman Lane, newly rehabbed, 3BR, 2BA, hdwd flrs, appliances, beautiful neighborhood, $135 0/mo. 773-590-0101

5545 S. LaSalle. & 6227 S. Justine. Both 3br, 1ba, crpt & appls. $1125. $100 Cash Move-In Bonus. No Dep. 312-683-5174

1237 W. 72ND Pl. 4BR, 1BA, full

AVAILABLE NOW! 90th & Jus-

COUNTRY CLUB HILLS vic of 183RD/Cicero.

4BR, 1.5BA $1400. Ranch Style, 2 car gar.

708-369-5187

BROADVIEW - 3BR, large eat in kitchen, includes appliances, laundry, parking & water.

1st month & sec dep. $975/ mo. 708-252-9622

E. 92D ST. Brick, split level 5BR, 1.5BA in a quiet area, 2 car gar, all appls incl, sec 8 welc. $1475. 773720-9787 or 773-483-2594

tine, 2nd flr, 3bedroom, hardwood floors, $1000/mo heat not included plus security Sec 8 Ok. 773-4767335.

SOUTHSIDE, 11042 S. NORMAL, Newly remod, 3BR, 1BA, hdwd flrs, finished bsmt, $115 0/mo. Section 8 welcome.

773-255-8530 CHICAGO, 7053 S. Winchester, 3BR, 2 full bath, 2 story home, backyard, unfinished basement, avail 12/1. $ 950/mo + 1 mo sec.

basement, ADT security system.

Tenant pays Utils. Pets OK. $1200/mo. 847-514-8015

SECT 8 OK, 2 story, 4br/2ba w/ bsmt. New decor, crpt & hdwds, ceiling fans, stove/fridge, $1465.

11243 S. Eggleston, 773-443-5397

3 BR OR MORE $1500-$1799

71ST/ABERDEEN. Newly Rehabbed 4BR, 2BA.

3 BEDROOM TOWNHOUSE , 1.5 baths, hardwood floors, carpet in bedrooms, off street parking, South Shore Near beach, Metra, bus lines & Country Club. $1500/ mo. 773-344-2679

SOUTHSIDE 68th & Emerald 3BR, 1BA. $800/mo 847-977-3552

MORGAN PARK, $1600/mo.

114th & Ashland. 5BR, 2BA, hdwd flrs, stove & frig incl. Freshly remod. Close to public transit.

School Dist 299. Sect 8 ok. 773766-2640

CHICAGO, 1138 N. WALLER, 3BR, 2nd floor, newly decorated, hdwd floors throughout. $950/mo.

Section 8 welcome. 630-915-2755

Unique design 5BR House, 2BA tenant pays utils, no pets. $1600/mo + sec. 708-249-6668

773-230-9250

$1150/mo. Sec 8 Welcome.

Call Keith 708-921-7810

ADULT SERVICES

LARAMIE AND HARRISON.

ADULT SERVICES

FOR RENT: 333 S. Desplaines St.,

#301, Chicago 60661. 2BD/2BA NE corner unit, 12’ beamed ceilings, 1660 sf. Rent @ $2800/month, incl. park, TV, internet, & ex. room. Call Tom at 312-498-1244.

2 BR OTHER BEAUTIFUL NEW APT!

7203 S. Evans. 3 BDRM 6155 S. King. 2BDRM 8129 S. Ingleside 2BDRM 6150 S. Vernon. 4BDRM 7651 S. Phillips Ave 1, 2 & 4BDRM Stainless Steel!! Appliances!! Hdwd flrs!! Marble bath!! Laundry on site!!

FREE 42IN TV Sec 8 OK. 773- 404- 8926

46TH & CALUMET. Quiet, 23BR, 1st flr, heat incl, newly remodeled kit & bath, hdwd floors, near trans. $1000$1100. 773-667-9611

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

224-223-7787

DECEMBER 8, 2016 | CHICAGO READER 81

3 BR OR MORE OTHER

DOLTON - Rent to Own, 15719 S. Minerva.

Exceptional multi-level single family home. Rehabbed 4BR, 2 full BA, laundry, sun room, full basement, 2 car garage, big yard, fireplace & walk in closets. 2296 Sq Ft. New Pisgah Properties, 708-733-0365

COUNTRY CLUB HILLS, 3 B R TH, 1.5BA, att gar & 3BR TH, 1.

5BA w/ deck. $1150 + sec.

Chicago Hts, 3BR, 1BA. 708670-7179/ 708-372-2861

NEAR 83RD & Yates. 5BR, 2BA, hdwd flrs, fin basement, stove & fridge furn. Heat incl. $1600 + 1 mo sec. Sect 8 ok. 773-978-6134

RIVERDALE, 3BR, $1300/MO. Also, South Chicago, 4BR, 2BA, $1400/mo.

Section 8 accepted, 1 mo rent + 1 mo sec reqd. Call 312-388-6610

Section 8 Ok, w/app credit $500 gift certificate 3, 4 & 5 BR houses avail.

312-446-3333 or 708-752-3812

6725 ST LAWRENCE , 4BR, 2BA, newly renovated/rehabbed, 2 story,large fenced in yard, $995/ month, Section 8 Welcome 312576-6443

RENT WITH OPTION TO BUY

CHICAGO, 59 S. HONORE, 5BR home, 3BA, full finished basement, $1550/mo. Section 8 Welcome. Call 773-919-7730

912 E 75TH ST, 4BR, 3BA, off st pkg, newly remodeled, c/a, w/d, stove & fridge Sec 8 ok $1400/mo 773-2517501

12946 S Carpenter, 3BR, 1.5 BA, fireplace and basement, 1 car garage, Section 8 Welcome

CHICAGO HOUSES FOR rent.

GENERAL Rogers Park – 1700 W Juneway 773.308.5167. 3-4 bedrooms from $1175 Free heat. No deposit

FOR SALE Crete-982 Patricia Ln,2BR, 1.5BA impeccable 1500 sq ft, 2fl TH remodeled, large bkyd, ss appls. hdwd flrs, new kit 630-6741940 MONEY MAKER!!! 6 Unit Mod

7543 S. PHILLIPS, Luxury Apts, 3BR, 2 full BA, ground unit. Amenities incl: walk in closet, storage, appl & granite counter tops.

Handicap access. Sect 8 ok.

New Pisgah Properties, 708-7330365

W. 98th St. 98th & Carpenter. across from school, hdwd flrs, lrg front rm & DR. 773-556-7820

AS IS PULLMAN PROPERTY 106TH & Langley, 2 Bedroom, $30,000 as is. 219-791-0897

ADULT SERVICES

ADULT SERVICES

ADULT SERVICES

773-995-9370 OR 773-718-1142 CHICAGO 3 BR apt for rent. 1036

NEAR ARMITAGE/CENTRAL 3BR, 2BA, fin bsmt, hdwd flrs, 2 car parking, convenient location. $239,000. 847-401-4574

apt bldg, all 1BRs, new rear porch, bus at door, serious buyers! $205K. 555 W. 111th St. Trina 630-841-3219

MARKETPLACE MARKETPLACE

GOODS

GOODS

MASSAGE TABLES, NEW and used. Large selection of professional high quality massage equipment at a very low price. Visit us at www. bestmassage.com or call us, 773764-6542.

non-residential SELF-STORAGE

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.

HEALTH & WELLNESS

FOR RENT READY FOR DOCTORS

FULL BODY MASSAGE. hotel, house calls welcome $90

OFFICE, X-RAY & CT SCAN2802 West Devon Avenue, Chicago, IL 60659 Call Alvi 516-967-5768

roommates CHICAGO 67TH AND Emerald -

furn. rooms, 45 + pref, share kitchen and bath, util. included, cable ready.

From $350. 773-358-2570

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

1966

CHEVROLET

COR-

VETTE C2 StingRay, 4 speed coupe, 327/300HP, silver pearl/black interior, $18000, byrdirene16@gmail.com / 773-492-4531

FOR A HEALTHY mind and body.

European trained and certified therapists specializing in deep tissue, Swedish, and relaxation massage. Incalls. 773-552-7525. Lic. #227008861.

UKRAINIAN

ADULT SERVICES LIKE NEW

WALTER E. SMITHE BEIGE LEATHER SOFA 77x34 x32, $1200/obo.

847-807-1038

MASSAGE.

CALLS in/ out. Chicago and suburbs. Hotels. 1250 S Michigan Avenue. Appointments. 773-616-6969.

NOTICES HAVE YOU THOUGHT ABOUT BECOMING A SURROGATE MOTHER? Give the Gift of Life!

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

Infertile couples are in need of healthy moms in Illinois to carry babies for them. If you are a nonsmoking high school graduate, 22-36 years old and are average height and weight. this may be a great work from home opportunity for you!

Compensation and expenses legally paid. Please call Shirley Zager at 847782-0224 for details!

ADULT SERVICES

ADULT SERVICES

BUSINESS OPS FOR SALE. NICE neighborhood bar for sale in central Wisconsin. Located in Adams County, WI. Adams County is know for it’s rural charm and year round tourist activities. The bar is located on a county highway within minutes of Castle Rock Lake and the Northern Bay Golf resort and Marina.

Snowmobile and year round ATV access. This bar has been in continuous operation since the end of prohibition. The current owner has been here for 14 plus years. Building is 1600 square feet includes dining area, pool table,bar, video poker machines, full service kitchen and back storage room with ice maker.. Large walk in cooler and smaller tap beer cooler. Separate 8x12 storage shed. 4 lots about 1.2 acres with two horseshoe pits and sno wmobile/ATV route.. New furnace installed in October 2016.

Commercial 3 tank septic system installed in 2010. Roof in 2013.

Owner says ’This is a great business with a steady local crowd of mostly retired folks. WE also do well with all the weekenders who have cabins within a few miles of town and the folks who come to visit from Northern Bay Resort. Snowmobilers in winter, ATV riders, fisherman and boaters on the lake spring summer and fall.. This is a family place and would be great for someone looking to get into the business of fun. My son is off to college now and it is time for me to do something different.

Asking $224,900.

For more info or interest contact: barback63@gmail.com

ADULT SERVICES

legal notices STATE OF ILLINOIS County of Cook In The Circuit Court For Cook County, Illinois In The Matter of the Petition of Jeann Lee Gillespie Case# 16M2004399 For Change of Name.

Notice of Publication Public Notice is hereby given that on February 2, 2017, at 9:30 AM being one of the return days in the Circuit Court of the County of Cook, I will file my petition in said court praying for the change of my name from Jeann Lee Gillespie to that of Jeanne Lee, pursuant to the statute in such case made and provided. Dated at Skokie, Illinois, November 28, 2016. Signature of Petitioner: Jeann Lee Gillespie, December 1, 8, 15, 2016.

NOTICE IS HEREBY given, pur-

suant 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: D16148871 on November 29, 2016, under the Assumed Business Name of R.E. Construction with the business located at 1025 W Van Buren, Chicago, IL 60607. The true and real full name(s) and residence address of the owner(s)/ partner(s) is: Anthony Colston II, 4621 N Hermitage, Chicago, IL 60640, USA.

NOTICE IS HEREBY given, pur-

suant 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: D16148804 on November 22, 2016, under the Assumed Business Name of Travel Gyrl Shoppe with the business located at 956 N Trumbull Ave, Chicago, IL 60651. The true and real full name(s) and residence address of the owner(s)/ partner(s) is: Danette Carter, 956 N Trumbull Ave, Chicago, IL 60651, USA

ADULT SERVICES

THE LATEST ON WHO’S PLAYING AND WHERE THEY’RE PLAYING

EARLY WARNINGS

WEEKLY E-BLAST GET UP TO DATE. SIGN UP NOW. CHICAGOREADER.COM

82 CHICAGO READER | DECEMBER 8, 2016

l

l

SLUG SIGNORINO

STRAIGHT DOPE

By Cecil Adams Q : What’s the deal with the new crop of bathroom odor-reducing sprays that have come out over the past ten years or so? How do they neutralize the nastiest bathroom stench and replace it with a delightful scent almost immediately? —KARL SCHOETTLER

A : Forget a better mousetrap. You really

want the world to beat a path to your door?

Find a way to make farts smell like lilacs and strawberries. The air-freshener people have been doing their best for decades now, of course: teaching us to feel shame about smells intrinsic to ordinary human existence and peddling a succession of new and improved products designed to obscure them. And the products often are new; we can agree on that. But—your own experience notwithstanding, Karl—it’s a lot trickier to demonstrate that they’re improved.

For some background, let’s recall the words of an internationally recognized expert: “There are three basic ways of getting rid of undesirable odors: masking them with stronger scents, such as the ubiquitous lemon and pine fragrances; chemically dissolving or absorbing them, as with activated charcoal or silica gel; and numbing out your nose, so you can’t smell a damn thing.” This expert, of course, was me, speaking deep from within the last century—in 1980, to be exact, not long after air fresheners had moved on from using formaldehyde as a nasal anesthetic.

Needless to say, manufacturers have rolled out countless new smell-fighting products since then. Some of the most successful (and perhaps the ones you’re thinking of) have been marketed as “odor eliminators”—notably Procter & Gamble’s Febreze line, which reached $1 billion in sales in 2011. Here the active ingredient is a chemical of a type called cyclodextrins; their molecules are roughly funnel-shaped, and have a particular ability to bind with what are known as hydrophobic molecules, which resist contact with water.

The more problematic odor molecules, tending to be hydrophobic, get trapped inside the funnels and are thus rendered unsmellable.

Meanwhile, the spray’s own scent fills the air.

Or that’s the idea. In one Febreze Air Effects ad, blindfolded volunteers were unknowingly placed in close quarters with barnyard animals and raw fish but professed to smell only a pleasant floral aroma; when Consumer Reports tried to replicate this, though, their subjects had no problem pick-

Meet sexy friends who really get your vibe...

Try FREE: 312-924-2066 More Local Numbers: 1-800-811-1633

ing out the fouler odors, and remarked on the chemical smell of the spray as well.

Many air fresheners, including the all-business Ozium (beloved of surreptitious stoners) as well as friendlier supermarket brands, bill themselves as antibacterial or antimicrobial.

Effectiveness aside, this premise makes some sense on paper: the dreaded fecal smell, for instance, is bacterial in origin, a molecular stew of things like methyl mercaptan, hydrogen sulfide, and dimethyl sulfide, collectively known as volatile sulfur compounds. (These same VSCs, curiously and grossly enough, also cause halitosis.)

When we last discussed this topic, environmental concerns had just put the kibosh on the ozone-puncturing CFC-powered aerosols the industry long favored. Reformulated sprays are still going strong, but alternate delivery systems have proliferated wildly. The best-known may be the plug-in, which dissolves a fragrant goo via electrical heat and disperses the vapor. Of course, this is just a fancied-up take on the old-fashioned diffuser, where a candle heats a basin full of scented wax or oil.

As you wage total war on bathroom odors, though, be aware that some air-freshener contents aren’t things you want in the house.

After a 2007 report by the Natural Resources Defense Council revealed that a variety of air fresheners contained chemicals called phthalates, which may interfere with the body’s hormone production, some manufacturers changed their formulas.

But if your nose is so dainty it simply must not smell a fart, consider a time-honored home remedy: lighting a match. This actually works—though not, as many believe, because the flame initiates a chemical reaction that neutralizes the smell. Instead, sulfur in the match head becomes sulfur dioxide, the piercing smell of which leaves your olfactory receptors too confused to register the stench of methyl mercaptan. v

vibeline.com 18+

THE LATEST ON WHAT’S HAPPENING AROUND TOWN READER RECOMMENDS

WEEKLY E-BLAST GET UP TO DATE. SIGN UP NOW. CHICAGOREADER.COM

Send questions to Cecil via straightdope.com or write him c/o Chicago Reader, 350 N. Orleans, Chicago 60654.

DECEMBER 8, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 83

F3GC .0 K31 ",*58B03KJG-GCJ /3 53C8/M ,>O 3K B3.1 2.16H80M /3 2E8CCM5 281MC/H335 D3C58B 5M6MD7M1 ,* %AQ:= 84 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 8, 2016

(>*( C 79;?)L?I ##(@QQ>@P*Q> (&($ C E!<+;N< 84' ##(@%*%@#,%,

l

l

SAVAGE LOVE

By Dan Savage

How to recover from an abusive relationship

Tips for self-renewal, sexual and otherwise. Plus: binding arbitration on spit Q : I’m a 37-year-old gay

man who just got out of an abusive relationship. We were together five years, moved to Portland together, got married three years ago, yada, yada, yada. He suffered a traumatic injury earlier this year, which led to PTSD, which led to a nervous breakdown, which led to our savings being depleted, which led him to leave me in October. He moved back to the other side of the country, and I’m broke and on my own in a strange city.

I saw your dirty film festival when it played here, and it made me realize something: at my age, I should still be enjoying myself and evolving sexually. I was unhappy in my marriage for the last two years, but sexually I was unhappy for a long time.

Recently, I had a decent one-night stand. It was a drunken, stoned hot mess, but it got the job done—and there was no guilt on my part, which to me signifies that it really is over with my ex. But I can’t help feeling like I’m starting over. Not just dating, but starting over with my sex life and my writing.

My ex had me switch from LGBT media—which I am very good at—to copywriting, which sucks but is “steadier.” The point is: I want so much sexually, because I’ve been starved physically and psychologically, but I don’t know where to begin. I feel like my marriage eviscerated me sexually. Not just the sex part of it, but the parts of my homosexuality that felt important to my personality, not just my turn-ons. Help.

—GRIEVING AND YEARNING MAN ASKING NICELY

A : You’re not too old to enjoy yourself and evolve sexually, GAYMAN—you’re never too old to enjoy yourself or evolve, sexually or otherwise.

But it takes time to bounce back after a committed LTR ends traumatically. So don’t rush yourself. But as soon as you can—sooner than perhaps it feels right— you’ll need to get out there.

You’ll need to actively and intentionally reconnect to your homosexuality and the ways in which it shaped and continues to inform your personality, your perspective, and your joy.

And now some random tips . . .

I’m not being looks-ist or body -fascist here—this isn’t about having Instagrammable abs or the best torso on Grindr—but join a gym, GAYMAN. Or take up a sport that kicks your ass, cardiowise. Forcing your body to outrun your brain is a good way to get back in touch with yourself physically, emotionally, and sexually.

And exercising is good for us. It’s a natural antidepressant. It gets blood pumping into our extremities. (Your dick is an extremity.) And it gets us out of our heads. It also creates a social space, if you do it regularly, where you can make friends and connections without booze or drugs or the scourge of dance music. If the gym isn’t for you, ride a bike. If biking isn’t for you, run. If running isn’t for you, walk. Just get your ass moving.

Go volunteer somewhere, anywhere. Like someone or other once said, it’s hard to feel sorry for yourself when you’re making yourself useful. Go volunteer at the ACLU or Planned Parenthood, do some copywriting for an LGBT civil rights organization, find out what orgs are working with immigrants in your community and ask them what kind of help they need.

Please don’t succumb to meth or any of the other

stupid drugs. Pot and alcohol—in moderation—aren’t stupid drugs.

Masturbate. A lot. And don’t use porn every single time—try using your imagination, flip through the ol’ solodex. Be open to new experiences. Ask yourself where you’ve always wanted to go.

Pick a big gay event you’ve always wanted to attend—gay days at Disneyland, International Mr. Leather in Chicago, the World Series of Beer Pong in Las Vegas—and start setting money aside so you’ll have that trip to look forward to.

Good luck, GAYMAN.

Q : I’m a Canadian gay man, married eight years to a man with a thing for men spitting in his face. It’s a degradation thing (of course), and I would do it for him but it can’t be me. It can’t be someone he loves, someone who loves him, it has to be someone he doesn’t know, someone who regards him with contempt.

He finds guys to do this for him on the hookup apps, and I don’t have a problem with it. I do have a problem leaning in for a kiss when his face reeks of some other man’s spit. He likes the “lingering scent”—I do not.

He says I’m kink-shaming him when I recoil and ask him to go wash his face. He’s agreed to abide by your ruling, Dan. Should he wash his damn face? —SMELLING PATOOEY IRKS THIS SPOUSE

REAL PEOPLE REAL DESIRE REAL FUN.

60 MINUTES FREE TRIAL

Try FREE: 773-867-1235 More Local Numbers: 1-800-926-6000

THE HOTTEST GAY CHATLINE

1-312-924-2082 More Local Numbers: 800-777-8000

Ahora español Livelinks.com 18+

12 O’CLOCK TRACK SERIES

A SIDE OF JAM WITH YOUR

LUNCH EVERY WEEKDAY

THEBLEADER.COM

A : You’ve accommodated your husband’s kink. He needs to return the favor and accommodate your nose. He should wash his damn face— and get his damn flu shot. v Send letters to mail@ savagelove.net. Download the Savage Lovecast every Tuesday at thestranger.com. ß @fakedansavage

www.guyspyvoice.com

Ahora en Español/18+

* limit one per person

* Compensation for toy donations is left to the discretion of management.

DECEMBER 8, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 85

b Never miss a show again.

Sign up for the newsletter at chicagoreader. com/early

Growlers o COURTESY BIG HASSLE MEDIA

NEW AFI, Chain Gang of 1974 1/31, 7 PM, Riviera Theatre, on sale Fri 12/9, 10 AM b Jon B. 2/3, 7 and 10 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 12/8, noon b Bash & Pop 1/14, 8 PM, Cobra Lounge, 17+ Bon Jovi 3/26, 7:30 PM, United Center, on sale Sat 12/10, 10 AM Borgeous, Breathe Carolina 1/27, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Gary Burton & Makoto Ozone 3/14, 7 and 9:30 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Sat 12/10, 11 AM b Busy & the Brass 2/14, 8:30 PM, Schubas, on sale Fri 12/9, noon, 18+ Kasey Chambers 3/19, 7 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, on sale Fri 12/9, 8 AM b Jacob Collier 2/14, 8:30 PM, Lincoln Hall, on sale Fri 12/9, noon Commander Cody & His Lost Planet Airmen 3/2, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Sat 12/10, 11 AM b Common Kings 2/22, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Albert Cummings 3/12, 7 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Sat 12/10, 11 AM b Dashboard Confessional 1/28, 7:15 PM, House of Blues, on sale Fri 12/9, 10 AM b Dead & Co. 6/30-7/1, 7 PM, Wrigley Field, on sale Fri 12/9, 10 AM Death by Unga Bunga 3/1, 9 PM, Empty Bottle, on sale Fri 12/9, 10 AM Neil Diamond 5/28, 8 PM, United Center, on sale Fri 12/9, 10 AM

The Dig 4/1, 10 PM, Schubas, on sale Fri 12/9, noon D.R.A.M., River Tiber 1/27, 9 PM, Metro, on sale Fri 12/9, 10 AM, 18+ Electric Guest 3/1, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 12/9, 10 AM, 17+ Emin 5/30, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 12/8, noon b Falling in Reverse, Motionless in White, Issues 2/2, 5 PM, Riviera Theatre b Growlers 3/10, 8 PM, Metro, on sale Fri 12/9, 10 AM, 18+ Hiromi 3/22-23, 7 and 9:30 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Sat 12/10, 11 AM b Sierra Hull 3/5, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 12/8, noon b Hurray for the Riff Raff 4/28, 8 PM, Thalia Hall b Jack Ingram 2/26, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 12/8, noon b Eileen Ivers 3/16, 7:30 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Sat 12/10, 11 AM b Jojo 3/12, 6 PM, Concord Music Hall, on sale Fri 12/9, 10 AM b Booker T. Jones 3/4, 7 and 9:30 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Sat 12/10, 11 AM b Joy Formidable 2/27, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, on sale Fri 12/9, 11 AM, 18+ Stacey Kent 3/18, 7 and 9:30 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Sat 12/10, 11 AM b Kreator, Obituary, Midnight 4/7, 7:30 PM, House of Blues, on sale Fri 12/9, 10 AM, 17+ Lady Lamb, Liam Kazar 1/25, 9 PM, Hideout Dan Layus 2/3, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, on sale Fri 12/9, noon, 18+ Leon 2/9, 9 PM, Schubas, on sale Fri 12/9, 10 AM, 18+ Sondre Lerche 4/22, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, on sale Fri 12/9, 10 AM

86 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 8, 2016

The Life and Times 2/10, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Mayday Parade 4/22, 7 PM, House of Blues, on sale Fri 12/9, 10 AM b Martina McBride, Lauren Alaina 2/3, 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre, on sale Fri 12/9, 11 AM Delbert McClinton 3/10, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Sat 12/10, 11 AM b Modern English 4/6, 9 PM, Empty Bottle, on sale Fri 12/9, 10 AM Mogwai 1/24, 9:30 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 12/9, 10 AM, 17+ Nails, Toxic Holocaust 3/28, 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, on sale Fri 12/9, 10 AM, 17+ Willie Nile 3/17, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Sat 12/10, 11 AM b Old Wounds 1/5, 6 PM, Cobra Lounge b Opeth, Gojira 5/9, 7:30 PM, the Vic, on sale Fri 12/9, 10 AM, 18+ Orwells 3/16, 7:30 PM, Metro, on sale Fri 12/9, 10 AM b Parachute 4/14, 7:30 PM, Lincoln Hall, on sale Fri 12/9, 10 AM b Sam Patch 3/18, 9 PM, Empty Bottle, on sale Fri 12/9, 10 AM Noam Pikelny 3/15, 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, on sale Fri 12/9, 8 AM b Chuck Prophet, Bottle Rockets 3/17, 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, on sale Fri 12/9, 8 AM b Reaction New Year’s Eve with Flume, Zeds Dead, Anderson .Paak, Gucci Mane, and more 12/30-31, Donald E. Stephens Convention Center, Rosemont Josh Ritter 1/22-23, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 12/8, noon b

River Whyless 2/17, 9 PM, Empty Bottle, on sale Fri 12/9, 10 AM Andy Shauf 5/13, 8:30 PM, Lincoln Hall, on sale Fri 12/9, noon Six Organs of Admittance 4/9, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Souther Soul Assembly 3/24, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 12/9, 10 AM, 17+ Southside Johnny & the Asbury Jukes 3/24-25, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Sat 12/10, 11 AM b Al Stewart 3/23, 7 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 12/8, noon b Geoff Tate 2/12, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 12/8, noon b Testament, Sepultura, Prong 5/2, 6 PM, Concord Music Hall, on sale Fri 12/9, 10 AM, 17+ Richard Thompson 4/9-10, 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, on sale Fri 12/9, 8 AM b Thundercat 2/25, 6:30 PM, Concord Music Hall, on sale Fri 12/9, 10 AM b Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue 2/3, 8 PM, Park West, on sale Fri 12/9, 10 AM, 18+ Vallis Alps 3/1, 7:30 PM, Schubas, on sale Fri 12/9, 11 AM, 18+ Frank Vignola & Vinny Raniolo 3/9, 7:30 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Sat 12/10, 11 AM b Martha Wainwright 4/15, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 12/9, 10 AM b Loudon Wainwright III 4/1, 8 PM and 4/2, 7 PM, Szold Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, on sale Fri 12/9, 8 AM b We the Kings 3/9, 7 PM, Bottom Lounge b WGCI Big Jam with Chris Brown, Trey Songz, Young Thug, Lil Yachty, Desiigner, Lil Bibby, and more 12/30, 7:30 PM, United Center b Why? 3/17, 9 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Zach Williams 1/26, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Sat 12/10, 11 AM b Xiu Xiu 3/31, 9 PM, Empty Bottle

UPDATED King 810 12/18, 7 PM, Thalia Hall, canceled

ALL AGES

WOLF BY KEITH HERZIK

EARLY WARNINGS

CHICAGO SHOWS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT IN THE WEEKS TO COME

F

New Kids on the Block, Boyz II Men, Paula Abdul 6/15-16, 7:30 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont, second show added, on sale Fri 12/9, 10 AM Sticky Fingers 3/4, 8 PM, Double Door, canceled Twin Peaks, Together Pangea 12/16, 8:30 PM and 12/18, 7 PM, Thalia Hall, 12/16 sold out, 12/18 added, sold out b

UPCOMING Peter Asher 1/15, 7 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b Cam’ron 12/22, 7 PM, Portage Theater, 17+ Coldplay 8/17, 7 PM, Soldier Field Dawes 3/1, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ Felly 1/7, 6 PM, Portage Theater b Lee Fields & the Expressions 2/28, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Flaming Lips 4/17, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ Laura Jane Grace 2/5, 8 PM, City Winery b Helmet, Local H 12/16, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ Into It. Over It. 1/13, 7 PM, Metro b Juicy J, Belly, Project Pat 3/17, 8 PM, House of Blues, 18+ Ladyhawke 3/8, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Lemon Twigs 1/26, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Magnetic Fields 4/19-20, 8 PM, Thalia Hall b Mayhem, Inquisition, Black Anvil 1/23, 8 PM, Metro, 18+ Moon Duo 4/21, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Ne-Hi 2/24, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Priests 2/9, 7 PM, Beat Kitchen Red Hot Chili Peppers 6/30-7/1, 7 PM, United Center Safetysuit 2/7, 7 PM, Lincoln Hall b Sleaford Mods 4/3, 8 PM, Double Door, 18+ James Taylor & His All-Star Band, Bonnie Raitt 7/17, 7 PM, Wrigley Field b Title Fight 1/14, 7 PM, Metro, part of Tomorrow Never Knows b Tortoise, Monobody 1/11, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, Part of Tomorrow Never Knows, 18+ TV Girl 1/28, 9 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Us the Duo 2/8, 7 PM, Bottom Lounge b Wand, Acid Dad 1/12, 9 PM, Schubas, Part of Tomorrow Never Knows, 18+ Roger Waters 7/22, 8 PM, United Center Wedding Present, Colleen Green 4/21, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall Weekend Nachos 1/13-14, 7 PM, Subterranean b The Weeknd 5/23, 7:30 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont v

GOSSIP WOLF A furry ear to the ground of the local music scene GOSSIP WOLF HAS loved local fivepiece I Kong Kult for years—their funky fusion of new wave and prog sounds like a collaboration by the Waitresses, drummer Tony Allen, and Soft Machine! They’ve been quiet for a while, but drummer Areif Sless-Kitain (a onetime Reader staffer) says that I Kong Kult—whose lineup also includes his Eternals bandmate Wayne Montana—are ending a three-year hiatus by celebrating their debut album, Warnings, at the Burlington on Saturday, December 10. The album was recorded at Wilco’s loft in 2013, and Sless-Kitain says that though “life stuff” has delayed it, “The recent election seems like the perfect time to drop a call to action for anyone standing up for basic human rights, like the right to shake your ass.” Hear, hear!

The Reader’s Kevin Warwick has described the music of local dark-rock trio Mako Sica as “sounding like it should be drifting up from the bowels of a dim, murky cavern,” but the band know city streets too. Frustrated and sad about the recent traffic deaths of local bicyclists, Mako Sica have organized a benefit for Chicago nonprofit the Active Transportation Alliance at the Empty Bottle on Tuesday, December 13. The bill also includes Taphophile, aka Moniker Records co-owner Jordan Reyes.

The monthly Dark Matter Series returns to Elastic this weekend for two events! On Saturday, December 10, interdisciplinary arts organization the Arts Palette and Jerome Derradji’s label Still Music present Artform, a panel on contemporary nightlife history. Panelists include producer Ron Trent, visual artist Tiphanie Spencer, and Robert Williams, who owned house-music clubs the Warehouse and the Muzic Box; Trent and Derradji spin. On Sunday, December 11, local label ETC Records hosts beat-making cypher the Electronic Buffet, with instrumental hip-hop producers including Riki Starr, Cos, and ETC proprietor Radius.

—J.R. NELSON AND LEOR GALIL Got a tip? Tweet @Gossip_Wolf or e-mail gossipwolf@chicagoreader.com.

l

l

R. KELLY

HOLIDAY JAM TUESDAY, DECEMBER 13 WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 14

TEDESCHI TRUCKS BAND

JANUARY 19 - w/ NORTH MISSISSIPPI ALLSTARS JANUARY 20 - AN EVENING WITH JANUARY 21 - AN EVENING WITH

ARETHA FRANKLIN

THE truTV IMPRACTICAL JOKERS “SANTIAGO SENT US” TOUR

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 17

STARRING THE TENDERLOINS SUNDAY, DECEMBER 18 - 5PM & 8PM

JOHN CLEESE LIVE

PLUS A SCREENING OF HOLY GRAIL SUNDAY, JANUARY 22

JIM JEFFERIES

UNUSUAL PUNISHMENT TOUR FRIDAY, JANUARY 27 - 8PM & 10:30PM

GET ACCESS TO

CHASE PREFERRED

SEATING

AVAILABLE TO CHASE CREDIT AND DEBIT CARDMEMBERS.

For more info, visit Ticketmaster.com or

chase.com/chicagotheatre

M A RQ U EE PA R T N ER O F T H E C H I CAGO T H E AT R E ®

The Chicago Theatre provides disabled accommodations and sells tickets to disabled individuals through our Disabled Services department, which may be reached at 888-609-7599 any weekday from 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.

Debit cards are provided by JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A. Member FDIC Credit cards are issued by Chase Bank USA, N.A. © 2016 JPMorgan Chase & Co.

DECEMBER 8, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 87

CHICAGO,

SINCE 1988. ©2016 Goose Island Beer Co., Chicago, IL | Enjoy responsibly.

GOOSE ISLAND BEER CO.

l