Print Issue of December 14, 2017 (Volume 47, Number 11) by Chicago Reader

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Radio gaga An ear to the ground at “the Sundance of radio” in the golden age of podcasting By MAYA DUKMASOVA 14

Plus:

SUICIDE ALONG THE EL Heartbreak, trauma, and the CTA’s new prevention eﬀort BY JOHN GREENFIELD 10

2 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 14, 2017

THIS WEEK

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

FEATURES

IN THIS ISSUE

MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE

4 Agenda The exhilarating Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the drag-infused Rudolph the Red-Hosed Reindeer, homegrown stand-up from Matt Braunger, and more of the week’s best

CITY LIFE TRANSPORTATION

FOOD & DRINK

Blood on the tracks

While Metra’s suicide rate is three to ﬁve times higher than that of the CTA’s train system, such deaths along the el cause heartbreak, trauma, and lost productivity. This month the agency is launching a new prevention eﬀort. BY JOHN GREENFIELD 10

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7 Shop Window Adornment + Theory is a jewelry store “for those who don’t feel comfortable in jewelry stores.” 8 Joravsky | Politics Mayor Rahm brings in a new CPS CEO just in time to close more schools. 9 Transportation Transportation experts and advocates weigh in on the latest plans for the O’Hare Express.

ARTS & CULTURE

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35 Restaurant review: Mirasol Lula chef Jason Hammel’s menu at the MCA is its own form of contemporary art. 37 Bar review: Maplewood Taproom Chicago’s only brewery and distillery enters the bar business.

CLASSIFIEDS

38 Jobs 38 Apartments & Spaces 39 Marketplace

MEDIA

Radio gaga

ON THE COVER: ILLUSTRATION BY HOKYOUNG KIM. FOR MORE OF HER WORK, GO TO HOKYOUNGKIM.COM.

29 In Rotation Current musical obsessions include radio station 104.3 Jams, Liam Gallagher’s press cycle, and more 31 Shows of note Dehd, Timbuck2 Forever, Bebel Gilberto, Matt Wilson’s Christmas Tree-O, and more of the week’s best

An ear to the ground at “the Sundance of radio,” the Third Coast International Audio Festival, in the golden age of podcasting BY MAYA DUKMASOVA 14

23 Opera Turandot isn’t just problematic—it’s complicated. 24 Theater Chicago Shakespeare’s Red Velvet is a singular antiachievement. 26 Small Screen Netﬂix’s Easy is an easy show to hate-watch. 27 Movies The Shape of Water is a kids’ ﬁlm for adults.

40 Straight Dope Are we heading back to 25-year lifespans because germs are invincible? 41 Savage Love Dating advice sources for people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and more 42 Early Warnings Christopher Cross, Taylor Swift, Yanni, and more upcoming shows you should know about 42 Gossip Wolf The Chicago hiphop community mourns musician, designer, and budding entrepreneur Quincy “Q” Easton Kelly, and other music news.

DECEMBER 14, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 3

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READER RECOMMENDED

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b ALL AGES

F SAMAROV Through 12/31: Wed 8 PM, Thu 3 and 8 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 3 and 8 PM, Sun 3 PM (except 12/24, 1 PM), Mercury Theater, 3745 N. Southport, 773-325-1700, mercurytheaterchicago.com, $30-$45, $30-$35 seniors, $30 students.

Altar Boyz ò CODY JOLLY

THEATER More at chicagoreader.com/theater Altar Boyz This toothless send-up of boy bands, Christian rock, and Catholicism (music and lyrics by Gary Adler and Michael Patrick Walker, book by Kevin Del Aguila, based on an idea by Marc J. Kessler and Ken Davenport) is too gentle to be called satire, too tongue-incheek to be taken seriously, too risque to be religious. The tunes, however, are easy on the ear, and the lyrics witty—or at least witty enough to keep an audience’s attention. That’s especially so when the show is performed, as it here, by five energetic triple threats who know how to keep the show moving (thanks surely to Sawyer Smith’s choreography) and give the show’s paper-thin characters the illusion of a depth. Courtney Crouse directs. —JACK HELBIG Through 1/14: Thu 7:30 PM, Fri-Sat 8 PM, Sun 7 PM (no show 12/24), No Exit Cafe, 6970 N. Glenwood, 773-743-3355, theo-u. com, $34-$39. Beautiful You gotta love Carole R King, especially as she’s presented in this jukebox bio-musical chronicling her rise from teenage pop prodigy—writing hits for everybody from Bobby Vee to the Shirelles—to the solo rock auteur of the Tapestry album. A good Jewish girl with conventional domestic dreams, she even makes an endearing doormat as she attempts to save her marriage to songwriting partner Gerry Goffin (great lyricist, rotten husband). When an Equity touring production like this one hit Chicago last year, I called it sweet, fun, and comfortable, and so it remains. The first act has an exuberance that’s necessarily missing from the second, as we move from King’s amazingly productive youth to her sadder-but-wiser maturity. As directed by Marc Bruni, though, the whole functions with all the efficiency of the Brill Building hit-making factory where King started. One oddity: Sarah Bockel’s otherwise excellent lead performance seems to take her closer to Barbra Streisand than King in the end. —TONY ADLER Through 1/28: Wed 2 and 7:30 PM, Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 2 and 8 PM, Sun 2 PM, Tue 7:30 PM, Cadillac

4 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 14, 2017

Palace Theatre, 151 W. Randolph, 312902-1400, $30-$115. The Character Assassination of Donald Trump The show’s savage title, with its perhaps unintentional echoing of Peter Weiss’s masterpiece The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, promises more than director David McGrath and his fellow writers (Eric Coleman, Jamie Quinones, Dave Kwitkowski) can deliver. What we get is 90 minutes of lame material, not even as good as the stuff you see on TV, performed without energy or urgency or wit. The show does contain some sparks of life. Jenny Miller delivers a dead-on impersonation of Senator Elizabeth Warren, and Meir Steinberg kills as the World’s Angriest Magician. Most of the time, though, the proceedings creep along at a petty pace from joke to joke to the last syllable of recorded time. —JACK HELBIG Through 12/29: Fri 8 PM, Collaboraction, 1579 N. Milwaukee, 312-226-9633, brownpapertickets.com/event/3179313, $12. The Christmas Schooner Mercury Theater Chicago presents this musical valentine (book by John Reeger, music and lyrics by Julie Shannon) to a German-American triumph in commerce. When Captain Stossel receives a letter from a relation in Chicago pining for the Christmas trees of their idyllic youth back in Bremen, he hits upon the idea of chopping down the overabundant forest nearby, filling his schooner, and sailing through harsh November waters down from his home in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to spread holiday joy and make a buck in the bargain. Met with overwhelming demand, the Christmas Schooner becomes a beloved yearly tradition hardly slowed even by its originator’s death by shipwreck a mere five years into the enterprise. One’s enjoyment of these proceedings will depend largely on one’s attitude toward Christmas in America and the commerce it exults. Humming carols while frolicking through the mall? This show will fill your heart with holiday cheer; the rest of us will just have to shiver out in the cold. L. Walter Stearns directed. —DMITRY

Gingerbread Grindhouse Dolls come to life and ruin Christmas in this squalid twofer from horror mongers Ghostlight Ensemble and friends. First we get a set of short, mostly improvised pieces, “live trailers” from a variety of local companies that excerpt imaginary holiday slashers to come; my favorite, and the least intentionally bad, was by the Stuntmen. After intermission, with E. T. A. Hoﬀman’s classic Nutcracker tale somewhere in the background, the main event follows Marie (Tatum Hunter) as she defends her family from the evil spirits of her new “Guatemalan worry dolls,” gifts from kooky god-uncle Herr Drosselmeier (Sean Harklerode). Playwright Maria Burnham’s script has its moments, but as the after-hours show wears on past midnight, its scary parts not scary enough and its funny parts not funny at all, the action drags, the magic subsides, and the groans (of boredom, not terror) multiply. Chad Wise directs. —MAX MALLER Through 12/16; Fri-Sat 10:30 PM, Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln, 773-404-7336, ghostlightensemble.com, $15. Little Red Cyrano Shy audience members should brace themselves before seeing Red Theater’s “apocalyptic clown comedy” mashup of “Little Red Riding Hood” and Cyrano de Bergerac, as the audience is expected to participate throughout. In part, it’s a clever device by artistic director Aaron Sawyer to get viewers comfortable with communicating using their hands and to break down barriers between deaf and hearing performers and viewers. There are times when the combination of direct translations, video subtitles, and poetic movement pieces creates poignant moments, as when a series of playful back-andforths with the audience results in everyone in the room signaling “alone.” But it’s hard to make heads or tails of the thing as a whole—the two stories just don’t click. —DAN JAKES Through 1/7: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 4 and 8 PM (4 PM only 1/7), Strawdog Theatre, 1802 W.

Berenice, 773-347-1350, strawdog.org, $20 suggested donation. Rudolph the Red-Hosed ReinR deer Hell in a Handbag’s drag-infused holiday extravaganza wouldn’t

be celebrating its 20th anniversary if it didn’t change with the times, and after a year of President Trump, writer David Cerda has plenty of fresh material to lampoon. In this year’s Rudolph, Santa (Michael Jack Hampton) is elected president of the North Pole, giving him a new wife, Iwanka (Cerda), and press secretary, Connie Ann Blitzen (Terry McCarthy). Trump gags dominate the first half, but this change also intensifies the theme of intolerance at the core of the production. Rudolph (Graham Heacock) and Herbie (Kristopher Bottrall) are queer heroes on a journey to self-acceptance, and their obstacles have only gotten bigger this year. Heacock and Bottrall give delightfully cartoonish performances, and while the show feels long at two hours, it provides a steady supply of catty Christmas cheer. —OLIVER SAVA Through 12/30: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM; also Sun 12/17, 6 PM, Mary’s Attic Theatre, 5400 N. Clark, 773-784-6969, hamburgermaryschicago. com, $25-$50. Steampunk Christmas Carol E.D.G.E. Theatre (whose name is an acronym for “Esteem Development Through Greater Expectations”) puts a steampunk spin on Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, having the familiar tale acted out and narrated by 19th-century robots. Scrooge’s dutiful clerk Bob Cratchit is now “Barb Ratchet”; Tiny Tim is now “Tinker Tim,” in need of a new mechanical leg to replace his rusty old one; and Scrooge’s eccentric mentor, Mr. Fezziwig, is now a female Dr. Frankenstein-like alchemist, Mad Madam Fizzlewig, who creates a female automaton, Claire, as a possible mate for Scrooge. The idea of infusing Dickens’s ghost story with Industrial Revolution-age science-fiction elements is intriguing, but director-playwright Jared McDaris doesn’t investigate the premise’s possibilities in this amateurish low-budget effort. —ALBERT WILLIAMS Through 12/16: Fri 8 PM, Sat 2 PM, Raven Theatre, 6157 N. Clark, 773-338-2177, raventheatre. com, $18.

Rudolph the Red-Hosed Reindeer ò RICK AGUILAR

Best bets, recommendations, and notable arts and culture events for the week of December 14

’Twas the Fight Before Christmas Robert Frosty’s “fight sketch revue” begins with a reading of “’Twas The Night Before Christmas” interrupted by moments where actors beat each other up, and while it’s not especially creative, it highlights how stage combat can invigorate standard holiday material. A showdown between the Grinch and a John McClane-inspired Frosty the Snowman blends exciting choreography with goofy, dark humor. Representatives of different holidays gang up on Santa Claus because Christmas is encroaching on their turf, leading to a free-for-all that cleverly incorporates Thor and his magical hammer. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of material here that doesn’t involve stage combat, including multiple musical numbers that all fall flat. There’s an especially painful number involving “Tiger Hitler” that literally stops the show, and adding a bit about its offensive nature just draws attention to why this sketch should’ve been cut in the first place. —OLIVER SAVA Through 12/21: Thu 8 PM, Public House Theatre, 3914 N. Clark, 800-650-6449, pubhousetheatre. com, $10.

DANCE Myriad Dancers improvise movement based on the theme “diversity,” then write and read poetry inspired by the improvisation. Fri 12/15-Sat 12/16, 7:30 PM, Vagabond School of the Arts, 4001 N. Ravenswood, #504, 312-300-6805, $10 suggested donation. Stuck Foot, Open Hand, Running Mouth Students of a three-month workshop present their experimental dance pieces, each accompanied by live music. Thu 12/14-Fri 12/15, 7:30 PM, Hamlin Park Fieldhouse Theater, 3035 N. Hoyne, 312-742-7785, chicagoparkdistrict.org, $10 suggested donation.

COMEDY Bad Hombres The jokes really R land in this personal, political, and cathartic late-night double bill of

sketch and improv groups Spic & Tan and Mario in iO’s Chris Farley Cabaret. Rich Alfonso and Miguel Lepe perform a series of two-man sketches that play oﬀ experiences and personalities from their own lives, including a fumbling but sweet encounter between a young man and the Spanish-speaking father of a girl he’s dating, and a professional wedding photographer’s party duties getting usurped by a drunk guy with an iPhone. In the Mario set, Damian Anaya, Cesar Jaime, and Jose Molina skewer the current cultural climate. My favorite touch: an obnoxious ICE agent’s walk-on for a Q&A to blaring rap rock, the soundtrack of insuﬀerable tools everywhere. —DAN JAKES Through 12/29: Fri 10:30 PM, iO Theater, the Mission Theater, 1501 N. Kingsbury, ioimprov.com/chicago, $14. Matt Braunger Braunger, who R trained in Chicago and remains a local favorite, brings his Braunger Than

Yesterday tour to town. Sat 12/16, 10 PM, Lincoln Hall, 773-525-2501, lh-st.com, $20.

Mavis Staples ò CHRIS STRONG together a musical one-person show on the spot. Sat 12/16, 9 PM, Den Theatre, 1329-1333 N. Milwaukee, 773-609-2336, thedentheatre.com, $15 in advance, $20 at the door.

LIT & LECTURES Mavis Staples Chicago Tribune R music critic Greg Kot speaks with the dynamic, talented Mavis Staples

about local music, civil rights, and the city in general. Thu 12/14, 6 PM, Harold Washington Library Center, auditorium, 400 S. State, 312-747-4050, chipublib.org.

VISUAL ART Ephemeral Whiplash To demonstrate our collective wastefulness, Corey Hagberg collects discarded objects such as french fry container from McDonalds and covers them with street-art-style paintings. Through 1/6/18. Wed noon-6 PM, Sat 11 AM-5 PM. Elephant Room, Inc., 704 S. Wabash, 708-369-4742, elephantroomgallery.com.

Matt Braunger

MOVIES More at chicagoreader.com/movies

DANKS The members of Dope Ass New Kids write new sketches each week, crafting a dynamic show from a format that’s typically tightly scripted. 12/141/25: Thu 8 PM, Annoyance Theatre, 851 W. Belmont, 773-697-9693, theannoyance. com, $12.

NOW PLAYING Call Me by Your Name A R modern-day Visconti, Italian director Luca Guadagnino (I Am Love)

grants us entry into a world not only of

Félicité The fourth feature from Franco-Senegalese ﬁlmmaker Alain Gomis takes place in Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and centers on a bar singer (Véro Tshanda Beya Mputu, luminous in her ﬁlm debut) whose 14-year-old son is seriously injured in a motorbike accident. To pay for his surgery, she hits up family, friends, acquaintances, and, in desperation, a local mob boss. These tense and often painful encounters are played without sentiment, though in the second hour their urgency gives way to detached, dreamlike sequences showing the city’s street life and to a matter-of-fact romance between the woman and her repairman. Cowritten by Gomis, Delphine Zingg, and Olivier Loustau, the meandering narrative has a lyrical quality consistent with the many musical numbers, most of which are performed by Mputu µ and the Kinshasa-based group

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Las Locas Comedy The bill at this monthly comedy series includes exclusively Latina comics and guests they have invited. Sat 12/16, 8 PM, Karen Marie Salon, 1859 N. Milwaukee, 773-2274003, karenmariesalon.com. Roxy Bellows Plays the Den! Actress Pat Musker transforms into Roxy Bellows, a Liza Minnelli type who whips

wealth but of culture, which can be just as liberating. This richly textured gay romance, adapted by James Ivory (of Merchant-Ivory fame) from a novel by André Aciman, unfolds over the summer of 1983 in the north of Italy, where a prominent historian (Michael Stuhlbarg) welcomes his tall, lanky research assistant (Armie Hammer) for an extended visit at his 17th-century villa. Sparks ﬂy between the vibrant young man and the scholar’s razor-sharp teenage son (Timothée Chalamet) while the two of them pretend to chase girls, the ups and downs of their secret love unfolding against an eﬀortlessly authentic milieu in which the proper piano interpretation of a Bach cantata ranks in importance alongside the joy of dancing to the Psychedelic Furs. In English and subtitled French, Italian, and German. —J.R. JONES R, 132 min. ArcLight, Century 12 and CineArts 6, Landmark’s Century Centre, River East 21, Webster Place.

RSM

They It’s a big deal that Trap Door Theatre has revived this black-comic satire by Polish polymath Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz. Avant-garde in 1920 and uncompromising now, it touches on authoritarianism and art, misogyny and media as it tells the tale of Callisto Balandash, a clueless aesthete who finds himself targeted by a shadowy government agency that seems bent on purging degenerate art but turns out to be animated by more personal motives. The connections Witkiewicz draws among diverse subjects—not to mention his ability to deflate them all—is at once grim, silly, and prophetic. Trouble is, the cast under adapter-director Beata Pilch push their performances so far into heavy-handed freneticism that the production becomes difficult to watch at just 80 minutes. Carl Wisniewski’s Callisto is the worst example. On the other hand, Mary-Kate Arnold manages to give some fire to Callisto’s long-suffering lover, Spika. —TONY ADLER Through 1/13: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Trap Door Theatre, 1655 W. Cortland, 773-384-0494, trapdoortheatre.com, $10-$25.

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

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Call Me by Your Name

DECEMBER 14, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 5

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

AGENDA Star Wars: The Last Jedi

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

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

ONLY ONE PERFORMANCE LEFT! Sunday, December 17 at 3:00pm

The Royal George Theatre, 1641 North Halsted Street, Chicago Opening with a new adaptation of Victoria Bond’s one-act children’s opera, The Miracle of Light!

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

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

DONATE SHOP SUPPORT big-medicine.org

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6 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 14, 2017

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

B Kasai Allstars. In French and

Lingala with subtitles. —LEAH PICKETT 129 min. Fri 12/15-Thu 12/21. Facets Cinematheque.

Just Getting Started The kindest thing one can say about this flaccid comedy, the latest in a string about rambunctious geezers, is that a bucket list doesn’t figure into it. Morgan Freeman plays a former mob lawyer installed by the Witness Protection Program as a resident manager at a luxury Palm Springs retirement complex; Tommy Lee Jones costars as his hypercompetitive golf adversary, an ex-military man turned wealthy entrepreneur, and Rene Russo is the woman they both desire. Writer-director Ron Shelton (Bull Durham, White Men Can’t Jump) wastes the actors’ talents, his screenplay full of cardboard characters but devoid of laughs, and for all the talk about sex, none is shown onscreen. The producers must think this drivel is what their senior target audience wants, but only someone who’s lost an appetite for real life could find any entertainment in it. —ANDREA GRONVALL PG-13, 90 min. For listings visit chicagoreader.com/ movies. Star Wars: The Last Jedi R The eighth installment in the nine-film Star Wars cycle

proves its worth with exhilarating action, well-developed characters, and moments of humor and emotion that director Rian Johnson balances better than any of his predecessors. Nodding to The Empire Strikes Back (1980) but also supplying its own surprising twists, The Last Jedi runs on three tracks that eventually intersect: Rey (Daisy Ridley), a rebel defying the sinister First Order, tries to persuade Master Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) to join her; a crew of her fellow resistance ﬁghters scramble as their spacecraft is pursued by the villains; and the morally conﬂicted Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) struggles with his powerful connection to both Rey and Luke. Choosing hope over despair has

always been the series’ theme, but this film conveys it best of all. With Oscar Isaac, John Boyega, Laura Dern, and Carrie Fisher in a beautiful final performance. —LEAH PICKETT PG-13, 152 min. Arclight, Block 37, Century 12 and CineArts 6, Chatham 14, Cicero Showplace 14, City North 14, Crown Village 18, Davis, Ford City, Lake, River East 21, Showplace 14 Galewood Crossings, Showplace ICON, 600 N. Michigan, Webster Place. Tormenting the Hen In this weird thriller, a New York playwright (Dameka Hayes) invites her fiancee, a Brazilian environmental engineer (Carolina Monnerat), to join her at an upstate artists’ retreat, where unsettling conversations with outsiders expose the cracks in the women’s relationship and their individual selves. All these interactions are colored by sexism or homophobia, particularly when straight people consider the lesbian couple: a chatty volunteer picking them up at the local train station pries into their personal lives, the two male actors in the writer’s play dismiss her ideas, and the caretaker of the women’s cottage follows the engineer around while her partner is at work. Writer-director-cinematographer-editor Theodore Collatos amplifies dread in interesting ways, tinting the screen red when the couple fight and inserting jerky dream sequences of a confused, bleeding hen. —LEAH PICKETT 77 min. Fri 12/15-Thu 12/21. Facets Cinematheque. REVIVALS Batman Returns More of the same, but nowhere near as good (funny, disturbing, obsessive) as the uneven original, revealing arrested development on every level. As villain, Danny DeVito’s Penguin is a pale substitute for Jack Nicholson’s Joker, coming across more as a sketch for a character than a fully realized portrait; ditto for Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman, who promises a lot more than she delivers. Both characters are Jekyll-and-Hyde schizos like Batman/Bruce Wayne

(Michael Keaton again), but it appears the filmmakers were so busy plotting the obligatory special effects that they never got around to developing these three leads past the drawing-board stage. The pictorial effects all seem to come straight out of badly reproduced stills from other movies (Batman, Metropolis, Citizen Kane, Blade Runner), and there’s practically no suspense. Tim Burton directs with a strong sense of “once more around the block” from a script by Daniel Waters and Sam Hamm that plays suspiciously like a first draft, and Danny Elfman did the music again. Consider, though: this 1992 release could have been much worse than it is and still have made piles of money, so why make it even halfway decent? With Christopher Walken, Michael Gough, Pat Hingle, and Michael Murphy. —JONATHAN ROSENBAUM Screens as part of a double feature with Henry Selick’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (see separate listing). Tue 12/19, 5 and 9:30 PM, and Wed 12/20, 2:15 and 7 PM. Music Box. The Nightmare Before R Christmas Tim Burton, working as a producer at Disney,

employed stop-motion animation to ﬂesh out a story he’d ﬁrst dreamed up while working at the same studio a dozen years before—a tale about the havoc that ensues when Jack Skellington, the pipe-cleaner hero of Halloween Town, decides to take over the duties of Santa Claus at Christmastime. As adapted by Michael McDowell and scripted by Caroline Thompson, this 1993 release is at worst a macabre Muppet movie, at best an inspired jaunt. The set designs are ingenious and the songs (music and lyrics by Danny Elfman) are fairly good. Directed by Henry Selick, with the voices of Chris Sarandon, Catherine O’Hara, Elfman, and Paul Reubens. —JONATHAN ROSENBAUM PG, 75 min. Screens as part of a double feature with Burton’s Batman Returns (see separate listing). Tue 12/19, 3 and 7:30 PM, and Wed 12/20, 5 and 9:30 PM. Music Box. v

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A Lawsuit And Settlements May Affect You.

ò ISA GIALLORENZO

Adornment + Theory is a jewelry store “for those who don’t feel comfortable in jewelry stores.” ADORNMENT + THEORY, the roughly month-old boutique next to the Logan Theatre, showcases what proprietor Viviana Langhoff likes to call “wearable art.” “I want to change the game as to what people expect from jewelry and their jewelry-store experience,” the longtime Logan Square resident and Puerto Rico native says. “Creating a space for those who don’t feel comfortable in jewelry stores, while still highlighting the best in design.” Langhoff tends to champion emerging artists whose work is both wearable and well crafted, such as Laura Wood, a North Carolina designer who makes colorful statement-making jewelry evoking abstract scribbles. Locals such as Beth Clark, Lydia Crespo, Audrey Keiffer, and Susan Wheeler are also represented on the store’s shelves. Langhoff gravitates toward light, contemporary-looking pieces made with materials such as silver, laser-cut leather, powder-coated steel, and cement with a surprisingly airy texture. Affordability is also a priority for Langhoff; Adornment + Theory’s selection is priced between $30-$400 (excluding fine jewelry, which usually starts at $600). “It’s a range where someone can start building their personal collection of one-of-a-kind pieces,” she says. For those inclined to spend a little more, there’s a “jewelry bar” where customers can enjoy a beverage while Langhoff helps them design a unique piece. The shop also carries accessories such as handbags and hand-dyed raw silk scarves, as well as options for men: watches, hats, bags, leather wallets, and titanium combs. Oh, and locally sourced beard oil. This is Logan Square we’re talking about. —ISA GIALLORENZO Adornment + Theory 2644 N. Milwaukee, 773-6977090, facebook.comadornmentandtheory

SURE THINGS Ñ

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

THURSDAY 14

FRIDAY 15

SATURDAY 16

* Ol iv i a Block Reader contributor Bill Meyer writes of the sound artist: “Block turns time back upon itself by using a microcassette player to record herself playing, then accompanying the tape as it plays back from inside the piano.” 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, constellation-chicago.com, $10.

¹ B ridgeport Art Center Holiday Night Ma rket Spend the evening in the Bridgeport community shopping for wares and perusing four galleries. All goods and art are made by residents of the neighborhood. 7-10 PM, Bridgeport Art Center, 1200 W. 35th, bridgeportart.com. F

♂ Dad ’s Basement Ho liday B&B This mini Father’s Day includes Bite Cafe bites, the opportunity to donate to the Greater Chicago Food Depository, and dad-rock tunes spun by Ryan Duggan and the Reader’s own Luca Cimarusti. Noon, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, emptybottle. com. F

SUNDAY 17

MONDAY 18

TUESDAY 19

WEDNESDAY 20

J Here, Ch icago Five professional storytellers and ﬁve attendees (in open-mike slots) share the stage while audience members ﬁll their bellies with food brought for a potluck. This edition notably features curmudgeon extraordinaire Ian Belknap. 7:30 PM, Stage 773, 1225 W. Belmont, herechicago.org, $11, free with a dish for the potluck.

( Red Lo bster Comedy Creator Chris Condren, a Chicago staple known for songs that go nowhere, and his 34 producers serve hot dogs and welcome experimental stand-ups. Side note: The troupe sent a cease-and-desist letter to Red Lobster for infringing on their “brand.” 9:30 PM, L&L Tavern, 3207 N. Clark, yelp.com/biz/l-andl-tavern-chicago. F

Christmas : By Melania Actress and writer Erin Diamond plays a caricaturized version of Melania Trump, who hosts a Christmas special—the kind emceed by Bob Hope or the Osmonds during the 1970s and ’80s. 8 PM, Uptown Underground, 4707 N. Broadway, uptownunderground.net, $15.

M Trivia Mafia This new weekly quiz night comes with cheap drinks, popcorn, pizza, and is hosted by WBEZ’s Amy Wielunski. Also you can catch some cool bands and comedy acts after the trivia. 7 PM, North Bar, 1637 W. North, liveatnorthbar. com. F

What is the lawsuit about? There is a lawsuit involving cathode ray tubes (“CRTs”). A CRT is a display technology used in televisions in computers before LCD, Plasma and LED display technologies became popular. The lawsuit was brought by the Illinois Attorney General (“Plaintiff”). The lawsuit claims that Defendants conspired to fix, raise, maintain or stabilize prices of CRTs, which resulted in overcharges to consumers who bought products containing the CRTs. The Plaintiff is asking for money damages. The Defendants deny Plaintiff’s allegations or that consumers suffered any overcharge. The Court has not decided who is right. Settlements have been reached with four Defendants (Hitachi Ltd., LG Electronics, Inc., Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V., Samsung Display Device Co., and certain affiliates). Two Defendants (Toshiba Corp. and Panasonic Corp., and certain affiliates) have not agreed to settle so the lawsuit continues against them. Any future settlements will be posted at www. illinoiscrtsettlement.com. Who is included in the lawsuit? The lawsuit involves CRTs purchased indirectly from the Defendants. “Indirectly” means that you purchased products containing the CRT from someone other than the company that manufactured the component CRT. The case is proceeding to recover money damages that the State alleges were incurred by any Illinois resident (person or business) that purchased a CRT television or monitor between March 1, 1995 and November 25, 2007, while residing in Illinois and for their own use in Illinois and not for resale. If you are a governmental entity, you may not participate in this settlement. The State has not brought this lawsuit on behalf of any political subdivision. Therefore, you may not file a claim and recover damages if you are an Illinois county, municipality, township or other political subdivision. Plaintiff has also settled potential claims on behalf of the State of Illinois and its agencies. However, this notice does not relate to those settlements and Illinois state agencies are not eligible to participate in this claims process. What do the settlements provide? There are four settlements, totaling approximately $36 million. More details are in Settlement Agreements and other documents available at www.illinoiscrtsettlement.com. The cost to administer the Settlements and the Illinois Attorney General’s fees and costs will come out of the Settlement Fund. Plaintiff will request attorney’s fees and costs amounting to 10% of the Settlement Fund. The maximum amount you could potentially recover is $20 for a CRT television and $60 for a CRT monitor. If there is not enough money recovered to pay the maximum amount, your recovery will depend on the number of claims per device submitted by July 12, 2018 and the total recovery. We expect that such a pro rata distribution will allow for at least $20 per claim and will increase if there are additional settlements or the State prevails at trial against the remaining Defendants. How can I get a payment? You must submit a Claim Form to get a payment. You can submit a Claim Form online or by mail. The deadline to submit a Claim Form is July 12, 2018. Any claims filed after July 12, 2018 will be considered for payment only if settlement funds remain after all valid claims filed by that date have been paid in full. Claim forms are available at the website or by calling 1-866-652-8226. No money will be distributed yet. Plaintiff will pursue the lawsuits against the Non-Settling Defendants. All funds received in this case will be distributed together at the conclusion of the lawsuit or as ordered by the Court. Claims filed by someone else on behalf of or as assignee of the person or entity who actually purchased the CRT television or monitor will not be accepted or paid. For individuals, the name of the person verifying the claim must match that of the person making the claim. For businesses, the individual verifying the claim must be a duly authorized officer of the business. Verification provided by anyone else will be invalid. What are my rights? If you do nothing, your rights will be affected. If you do not want to be legally bound by the lawsuit, you must exclude yourself from the lawsuit. If you exclude yourself, you will not get any benefit as a result of the settlements, trial, or judgment in this case. If you do not exclude yourself you will not be able to sue the Defendants for any claim relating to the lawsuit. The deadline to exclude yourself is March 12, 2018. Any request for exclusion or objection must be mailed to: Illinois CRT Indirect Exclusions, PO Box 404041, Louisville, KY 40233-4041. For More Information: 1-866-652-8226 or www.illinoiscrtsettlement.com

DECEMBER 14, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 7

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

CITY LIFE

POLITICS

Closing time

Mayor Rahm brings in a new Chicago Public Schools CEO just in time to shutter more schools. By BEN JORAVSKY

bout 24 hours after David Axelrod, spin master supreme, publicly predicted in the Sun-Times that his old pal Mayor Rahm Emanuel was too loyal to ever—and I mean, ever—sack his other good buddy, Chicago Public Schools CEO Forrest Claypool, down came the boom. The removal came December 8 in a command City Hall performance during which Emanuel thanked Claypool, who was resigning, for “his exemplary service” and promised that Claypool “will always be my friend.” And then Emanuel went on to anoint Janice Jackson to be Claypool’s successor—as a major innovator in public education. Man, there’s so much spin going on, I’m starting to get vertigo! Axelrod’s friendship with Rahm and Claypool dates back to the early 1980s, when they were relative youngsters working as aides on Paul Simon’s ﬁrst senatorial campaign. Axelrod’s public relations genius—and let’s face it, the guy is really good at this stuff—is taking a sad song and making it better. As with the case of Claypool, who got caught lying to the Chicago Public Schools inspector general and falsifying records. This is no ﬁreable offense, Axelrod told the Sun-Times, adding that Rahm

8 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 14, 2017

Mayor Emanuel replaced embattled CPS CEO Forrest Claypool with Janice Jackson, who was CPS’s chief education oﬃcer and will now be the face of Emanuel’s school closing policies. ò RICH HEIN

feels a “sense of loyalty” to Claypool—“not just out of friendship but performance.” Well, I don’t know about Rahm and loyalty. In 2015, Rahm fired Garry McCarthy, his old police superintendent, because someone had to take the fall for keeping the Laquan McDonald shooting video under wraps. And earlier this year he dumped another friend, Department of Water Management commissioner Barrett Murphy, after it became clear that Murphy looked the other way while departmental underlings exchanged racist and homophobic e-mails. For the last several years, Rahm’s been throwing Mayor Daley under the bus every time he brags about how he’s doing away with “the ﬁscal smoke and mirrors” of the Daley years, as he put it in this year’s budget address. True, Rahm never mentions Daley by name—but I don’t think that’s out of loyalty so much as fear. Of course, there was no need for Rahm to fear Claypool, who’s been a loyal factotum for years. One of my favorite revelations from the trial of former governor Rod Blagojevich was the taped 2008 conversation in which Emanuel, who was leaving Congress to work as President Obama’s chief of staff, asked Blago to ﬁll the vacancy with Claypool. Rahm wanted

to return to his old seat after a year or two, at which point Claypool would apparently step down. “Forrest Claypool, bizarrely, would like to be considered,” Emanuel told Blago in a conversation that federal investigators were secretly taping. Rahm concluded the conversation by assuring Blago he would “not forget this” favor. (Blago didn’t actually have the authority to ﬁll a congressional vacancy, so the deal never happened.) Now Emanuel wouldn’t be caught dead mentioning the ex-governor’s name. Guess we can add Blago’s name to Rahm’s disloyalty list. While we’re on the subject of disloyalty, consider how Claypool treated former Cook County Board president John Stroger about ten years ago. Pundits back then were crediting Mayor Daley for winning over black voters who’d once been hostile to him. Part of Daley’s success on that front is that, thanks to Stroger, he managed to keep south- and west-side Democrats content by doling out patronage jobs through the county. In 2006, Claypool, then a Cook County commissioner, launched a “reform” challenge against Stroger, promising to clean up the county’s waste and patronage. Claypool lost that election but he did a great job of making

the Stroger name a pejorative among white north-side voters, even as these same voters kept backing Daley. Apparently, patronage is bad when a black guy’s in charge, but savvy politics for a Daley. Anything to keep black politicians in their place. Well, the Rahm-Daley forces don’t have to worry about black political power that much anymore: the city’s black population is down nearly 240,000 since 2000. In the last week Claypool and the school board have announced the closing of four high schools in low-income, south-side Englewood. Those closings are generating strong criticism from state senator Jacqueline Collins as well as state rep Sonya Harper and other southside officials, who see them as part of a larger effort to gentrify black residents out of the neighborhood. The mayor didn’t mention the closings at Claypool’s send-off. But the reality is that it’s hard enough having a white guy at the helm of the system when you’re shuttering schools in black neighborhoods. It’s even harder when the white guy’s credibility is under siege after he was caught lying to the inspector general. So in order for Rahm to close those schools, Claypool (friend to the mayor or not) had to go. And now the lovely task of being the public face on the mayor’s school closing policies falls to Janice Jackson, just as it fell to former CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett (who’s now serving out a prison sentence for the kickback scheme she helped engineer). When Byrd-Bennett announced the closing of 50 schools back in 2013, Mayor Rahm was on a ski vacation in Utah, as though he had nothing to do with what was going down. It will also be Jackson and the school board’s role to enthusiastically shake their pom-poms as the mayor gears up to divert millions in property tax dollars from CPS to the Cortland/Chicago River Tax Increment Financing District on the near north side. Rahm’s creating that TIF just in time to help lure Amazon’s second headquarters to town with the promise of untold billions of dollars in incentives. The TIF, not to mention the Amazon deal, will undoubtedly result in a rise in property taxes, accelerating the exodus of more poor and working-class black people from Chicago, leading to more school closings. I’m sure Rahm and his aides will say it’s all being done for the benefit of the kids. Hell, they know that line so well they can probably recite it without any spin from Axelrod. v

v @joravben

Elon Musk says he can dig a tunnel to O’Hare and transport air travelers via “electric pods.”

CITY LIFE

ò JONATHAN ROTH

TRANSPORTATION

Boon or boondoggle?

Transportation experts and advocates weigh in on the latest plans for the O’Hare Express. By JOHN GREENFIELD

n November 29, Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced the latest step in his grand scheme to create luxury high-speed express service between downtown and O’Hare. His office had issued what’s known as a request for qualifications (RFQ) for concessionaires to plan, finance, construct, and run the route. Emanuel addressed reporters from within the empty shell of the partially completed, roughly $250 million “superstation” his predecessor Richard M. Daley built underneath Block 37, a symbol of that mayor’s failure to achieve the same dream. Emanuel said the multibillion-dollar initiative is crucial for Chicago’s future, and argued that fortune favors the bold. “More than a century ago, Daniel Burnham encouraged Chicago to ‘make no little plans,’” the mayor said in a statement, adding that the express “will build on Chicago’s legacy of innovation and pay dividends for generations to come.” But after reviewing the details from the RFQ, local transit experts aren’t so sure. They wonder whether building the route could be practical and profitable for a private company without requiring a subsidy from taxpayers. Tech guru Elon Musk’s recent announcement that he will compete for the opportunity to dig a tunnel for whisking passengers to O’Hare in “electric pods” isn’t raising their confidence in the project’s viability. And transportation advocates question whether the express, geared toward well-heeled travelers and business people on expense accounts, represents an equitable use of city resources. The new document states that the goal of the project is to cut the time of the Loop-

airport trip from the current 40 to 45 minutes via the CTA Blue Line to 20 minutes or less, with service every 15 minutes during most of the day (the el generally runs every four to ten minutes). The express fare is supposed to be cheaper than a cab ride, which the city estimates at around $60, or a ride-share trip, estimated at roughly $40. Chicago aviation chief Ginger Evans has previously projected that an express ticket would cost between $25 and $35 compared to the current fare of $2.25 to O’Hare and $5 from it. The request for qualifications stipulates that the project must be ﬁnanced entirely by the concessionaire, but Evans has previously acknowledged that public funds will likely be used for building the stations themselves. RFQ responses are due on January 24, after which the city will select a handful of candidates to move forward with a request for process, the next step in a Hunger Games-like competition to come up with the winning bid. Created by the engineering firm WSP Parsons Brinckerhoff as part of a $2 million planning contract, the RFQ identifies three potential routes and four potential downtown terminals for the service, although the city remains open to other ideas. The first route, the CN-CSX Corridor, would run southeast from O’Hare on Canadian National Railway tracks to west-suburban Forest Park, where it would use the Eisenhower Expressway Corridor and CSX tracks to head east to a downtown station at Congress and Canal. The second option, the NCS Alignment, would use Metra’s North Central Service line with either a downtown terminal at Union

Station or a new facility southwest of Kinzie and Canal. The third route, the CTA Blue Line/Kennedy Expressway/UP-NW Corridor, would parallel the el line in the Kennedy median as it leaves the airport, bypass to the Union PacificNorthwest Metra tracks north of Belmont (where the Blue Line goes underground and then becomes an elevated route), and meet back up with the el corridor downtown, ending at the Block 37 superstation. Rick Harnish, director of the Midwest High Speed Rail association, has eagerly endorsed the O’Hare Express in the past. He contends his group’s CrossRail proposal, which would connect the North Central Service route to Metra’s Electric District line on the southeast side via a freight route along 16th Street, would add value to the project. Harnish says both the CN-CSX and NCS options seem viable, but the Blue Line scenario isn’t realistic because it would require building above or tunneling below the el tracks. That’s where Elon Musk comes in. Musk claims his cheekily named Boring Company has proprietary technology that can dig a tunnel 14 times faster than conventional methods, at perhaps a tenth of the cost. In June then-deputy Chicago mayor Steve Koch met with Musk in LA and returned impressed. After the RFQ was released, Musk tweeted that “The Boring Company will compete to fund, build & operate a high-speed Loop connecting Chicago O’Hare Airport to downtown.” (He subsequently clariﬁed that, unlike his much-hyped Hyperloop scheme to shoot vehicles at more than 600 mph between cities, the roughly 20-mile passageway from Block

37 to O’Hare wouldn’t require the use of vacuum-sealed tunnels.) Harnish is highly skeptical of Musk’s claims. He notes, for example, that while the inventor plans to save time and money by digging a much narrower tunnel than a typical subway, the Boring Company hasn’t addressed the issue of how to evacuate passengers in an emergency. “I always reserve the right to be proven wrong,” Harnish says. “But certainly [Musk’s proposal] is a very high-risk endeavor for something that’s such a high priority for the mayor.” Center for Neighborhood Technology director Scott Bernstein says he’s also “a bit dubious” of Musk’s claim of revolutionary digging technology. Moreover, he’s doubtful that enough travelers would be willing to shell out big bucks for the premium airport service, which could include nicely upholstered chairs, work tables, and beverage service: “How much luxury do you need in 20 minutes?” But even if the express were to get sufficient use, Bernstein wonders if it would cannibalize Blue Line revenue. “Would they be raiding ridership from one part of the system to support another part?” The Active Transportation Alliance is concerned about the city’s focus on high-end airport service. “Time and attention are being commanded by this project, and these resources could be directed to more efficient and equitable transit solutions,” wrote ATA director of government relations Kyle Whitehead in a blog post last month. He argues that Chicago should concentrate on improving transit access from Chicago neighborhoods to jobs and other key destinations. Oboi Reed, a leader of the mobility justice groups Slow Roll Chicago and Equiticity, agrees that the express plan, as outlined in the RFQ, wouldn’t be a wise use of public resources. However, he said he would support a Blue Line-based route that includes improvements to the line’s Forest Park branch, which serves lower-income black neighborhoods like Garﬁeld Park, North Lawndale, and Austin. As for Musk’s potential involvement, Reed says he’s willing to keep an open mind, adding that it’s crucial for residents to have a say in how this tech is delivered to their communities. “Tell Elon to call me, let’s talk.” v

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

DECEMBER 14, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 9

BOBBY SIMS

BLOOD ON THE

TRACKS O

n December 1, 2015, school superintendent Diane Cepela called her son Matt at Central DuPage Hospital in west-suburban Winﬁeld, where the 24-year-old was undergoing treatment for crippling clinical depression. She’d found a long-term residential home near Los Angeles that she thought he’d like, one offering nontraditional therapy options like acupuncture and surﬁng. When Matt didn’t return her messages, Diane felt a pang of motherly instinct: something was wrong. Diane characterizes Matt, who lived with his family in Shorewood, just west of Joliet, as a highly intelligent young man with a “gen-

tle heart” who was passionate about computer programming, music, the Blackhawks, and politics (particularly Bernie Sanders). A rangy guy with hazel eyes and scruffy, sandy-blond hair, he resembled Shaggy from Scooby-Doo, Diane says. He’d participated in cross-country, lacrosse, and wrestling, not because he was especially skilled at sports but because he enjoyed the camaraderie. He also loved to ﬁercely debate theology. “If missionaries came knocking, Matt would argue religion with them until I made him stop,” Diane says. “His rationale was that they came to his house and if they wanted him to convert, they needed to convince him.

CITY LIFE Many poor, God-loving people were turned away thoroughly beaten.” Matt was also an “animal whisperer,” Diane says, whose best friend was his 100-pound Labrador retriever Lilly. Once when he was visiting his sister Jill, a screenwriter, and her boyfriend Michael in LA, Matt fell behind during a walk. When they turned around, he was petting a wild squirrel. “That was pure Matt,” Diane says. “He loved animals and they loved him.” But severe depression had tormented him since high school, Diane says, when he told a counselor that he felt like “an island and the waters around him were confusion.” His condition was resistant to medication, with some drugs resulting in severe, strokelike side effects that left him temporarily unable to speak. In 2015 he spent six months in San Diego with his brother Jake, a programmer. During this time he worked at construction sites and a 7-Eleven, and he stopped taking his

How you can help LANNY WILSON OF the DuPage County Railroad Safety Council says research shows that suicide attempts are usually unplanned, impulsive acts, and if you can stop someone from following through they probably won’t try it again. “Survivors have said that as soon as they jumped they thought, Oh my God, why did I do this?” He says that Elton John’s song “Someone Saved My Life Tonight,” which tells the true story of how a friend stopped the singer from killing himself in 1968, oﬀers hope to those who are considering ending their lives. “Look at the incredible gifts he’s given the world since then.” If you believe a person may be contemplating suicide, don’t leave them alone. Call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255) or text “HOME” to 741741 to communicate with a trained volunteer at the Crisis Text Line. For more information, visit the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention at AFSP.org.

called Diane to tell her that they didn’t believe he was an imminent threat to himself. But around 3:30 or 4 PM that day, Matt was somehow able to access the keys to his pickup truck, which was sitting in the hospital parking lot. He walked out of the facility, apparently unnoticed by hospital staff, Diane says, drove some 22 miles east to the Austin Avenue Blue Line station in Oak Park, parked nearby, and walked onto the platform. At around 6 PM he jumped onto the tracks and was fatally struck by an oncoming train, according to the Cook County Medical Examiner’s office, which ruled the death a suicide. “He had been in so much emotional pain,” Diane says. “A lot of people blame themselves [when a loved one commits suicide]. It’s a deep, dark rabbit hole. You think, what if I had done this or that. But I know that we tried everything we could to help Matt.” A story like Matt Cepela’s reminds us that CTA rail suicide cases are more than just “medical emergencies” or “police and fire investigations,” as they’re described by the agency on intercom announcements and social media posts about the ensuing train J

In December 2015, Matt Cepela, who’d been tormented by severe depression, jumped onto the tracks at the Austin Avenue Blue Line station and was fatally struck by a train. ò COURTESY DIANE CEPELA

antidepressants altogether. “He wanted to live like a young man again and drink and see girls,” Diane says. “When he came back, he was pretty messed up. You could tell he was really struggling.” In early November of that year Matt had a violent episode in which he punched walls and a television set in the family home, breaking his hand, and said he wanted to kill himself. After that he was hospitalized, ﬁrst at Presence Saint Joseph Medical Center in Joliet and later at Central DuPage Hospital, to prevent him from harming himself further. The day before Matt died, he and Diane drove from Central DuPage to his psychiatrist’s office at Northwestern Memorial Hospital’s Streeterville campus. They took the Eisenhower Expressway, which runs parallel to the Forest Park Branch of the Chicago Transit Authority’s Blue Line, the tracks of which are located in the highway’s median. Diane says she believes that during the trip Matt noticed the train stations. On December 1, the day when Matt didn’t reply to her messages, Diane called his therapist at Central DuPage, worried that her son was suicidal. After the therapist evaluated Matt later that afternoon, a hospital staffer

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steps from the Dempster El station DECEMBER 14, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 11

CITY LIFE continued from 11

delays. They’re devastating tragedies for family and friends that also traumatize the transit agency’s personnel and passengers who witness them. Moreover, these incidents can cause massive logistical problems, shutting down entire branches of the el system for hours and causing thousands of people to be late for work, resulting in lost wages and productivity. An extreme example of disruption occurred on August 15 of this year, when Niles resident Dragan “Danny” Andelkovic, 41, dove in front of a train at the CTA’s Fullerton station around 6:30 AM in an apparent suicide, according to the Chicago Police Department. The Fullerton station is a transfer stop for the Red, Brown, and Purple Lines, so service was disrupted on all three routes for about three hours while ﬁrst responders recovered the victim’s body and investigated the scene. The transit agency scrambled to dispatch shuttle buses for the enormous crowds of waiting riders that formed outside the Fullerton and Belmont stations. Ride-hailing services jacked up the price of a downtown trip to $70 or more. (Uber and Lyft later refunded the surge charges.) DePaul University transportation expert Joe Schwieterman provided an estimate on the cost of this kind of delay for CTA customers, using U.S. Department of Transportation estimates on the value of time for

urban transit users to determine an average rate of $21.86 per lost hour. Schwieterman calculates that a one-hour hold-up during the morning rush hour that affects 36 trains with an average of 520 passengers per train (based on eight-car trains with an average of 65 people per car, well below the maximum standing capacity), for a total of 18,720 commuters, results in $409,000 in lost time. This number illustrates that, in addition to the incalculable human toll, train suicides are a major economic issue. Our region’s extensive Metra commuter rail system has seen a rise in suicides in recent years. In 2012 there were 16 deaths, but the numbers continued to increase each year through 2016, when there were 26 suicides or suspected suicides, according to spokesman Michael Gillis. This year started with a series of such deaths, although the pace later slowed down, with 18 confirmed or suspected suicides as of December 4. (While a November Chicago magazine report on Metra suicides stated that there had been 23 confirmed or suspected cases in 2017 to date, Gillis says that several of the suspected cases have since been determined to be accidents.) In response to the rising numbers, Metra hosted a suicide awareness and prevention forum in September titled “Breaking the Silence” that included partner railroads, safety experts, and mental health professionals. In the wake of the conference, the railroad is trying some new intervention strategies. Rail suicides are less prevalent on the CTA than Metra. That’s partly due to the degree of accessibility: the vast majority of CTA tracks aren’t located at street level, which means that one has to jump or fall, rather than just step, into the path of a train. However, the presence of the 600-volt third rail increases the chance that an attempt will be fatal. According to CTA officials, there have been an average of five confirmed suicides annually in the el system over the past six years, with five such cases in 2017 as of December 1. Unlike Metra, the CTA hasn’t seen a steady rise in suicides since 2012, when there were also five deaths on the el system, but there was a spike last year, to eight suicides. Here are the four other 2017 cases besides Andelkovic’s August 15 death that CTA investigations have conclusively determined

The CTA’s new suicide prevention eﬀort includes signs that the agency will begin installing at train stops by the end of December. ò CTA

12 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 14, 2017

CTA rail suicide cases are more than just “medical emergencies” or “police and fire investigations,” as they’re described by the agency on intercom announcements and social media posts about the ensuing train delays. They’re devastating tragedies. to be suicides, according to spokesman Steve Mayberry. On March 8 at 11:53 AM, 28-yearold Karol P. Koperny jumped in front of a train at the Addison Blue Line station. On April 4 at about 2 PM, a woman committed suicide at the Grand Red Line stop. On August 13 at around 5 AM, 23-year-old Brandon Vasquez killed himself at the Orange Line’s Ashland station. And on August 22 at about 1:35 PM, Christopher R. Esberger, 46, was found on the tracks of the Addison Brown Line station after he came in contact with the third rail. Additionally, on September 18 a man dove off the platform of the Fullerton station in an apparent suicide attempt, about a month after Andelkovic reportedly killed himself at the same station. The man fell onto the tracks but wasn’t struck by a train and was hospitalized in serious but stable condition, police said. There are several strategies transit systems can use to help prevent rail suicides, according to Polly Hanson, director of security for the American Public Transportation Association trade organization. Employees should be trained to identify behaviors that may foreshadow suicide attempts, such as pacing up and down a platform, lingering while multiple trains come and go, or leaving belongings behind when walking to another part of the station. Awareness campaigns can encourage fellow commuters to recognize warning signs and intervene as well. “Your customers are some of the best folks to help you with prevention,” she says. Hanson adds that signs should be installed with suicide-prevention help-line numbers, especially at stops that have seen multiple deaths in the past. Metra is currently moving forward with these strategies, and will begin hanging posters with words of encouragement and a hotline number in stations and on platforms

starting in early 2018, according to Gillis. Platform screen doors are a physical deterrent to suicides and accidental falls, as well as to cases in which people are intentionally pushed onto the tracks. (In one such case, on August 1, Chad Estep, a 34-year-old Northwestern neuroscience PhD grad from Wicker Park, allegedly shoved a stranger, 46-year-old Ben Benedict, off the Washington Blue Line platform. Benedict, who later testified that the attack was unprovoked, narrowly escaped being struck by a train.) These doors, usually made of glass, are installed along the platform edge and are aligned with the train’s doors, only opening when the train arrives, which makes it virtually impossible for customers to wind up on the tracks. They also discourage people from throwing garbage onto the third rail, a cause of system-disrupting ﬁres. While platform screen doors are common in Asia and Europe, they’re practically nonexistent among major North American transit networks, although some airport monorails, such as O’Hare’s, employ them. Cost is one reason why the safety tactic hasn’t been used so far on underfunded U.S. rapid transit systems, although Philadelphia’s SEPTA rail network is currently looking into the approach. Former Metropolitan Planning Council staffer Yonah Freemark notes in his blog the Transport Politic that the price tag for platform screen doors can range from $2 to $10 million per platform. Lanny Wilson formed the DuPage County Railroad Safety Council to prevent all types of railroad fatalities in 1994, shortly after his 14-year-old daughter Lauren was fatally struck by a Metra train in Hinsdale while she was a passenger in a car. Wilson says that recent technological developments offer additional hope for preventing rail suicides.

CITY LIFE In the U.K., where commuter rail deaths are more common than in the U.S., train riders are encouraged to download an app that allows them to click a button if they or another passenger are contemplating suicide. The app uses GPS to notify first responders of the location of the crisis. In the future, Wilson says, we may see transit agencies using smart video camera systems that can detect warning behavior, such as platform pacing, and notify employees. The CTA is already starting to train employees in some of these strategies, according to spokesman Brian Steele. By the end of December the agency will begin installing awareness signs with the number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. Installation will start with the five stations, all on the Red Line, that have each seen two confirmed suicide cases in the last six years: 63rd, Lake, Grand, Clark/Division, and Morse. Forty train stops near hospitals will also be prioritized, likely due to the nearby presence of people being treated for mental disorders. The goal is to eventually post signs at all 145 el stops. The CTA is also training employees to recognize people contemplating harm to themselves, Steele says. The 32,000 security cameras installed throughout the system are helpful for spotting telltale behavior, although not all of them are monitored 24 hours a day. The agency isn’t currently considering platform screen doors. Steele cites the logistical, physical, and budgetary challenges of retrofitting the devices onto subway platforms that are more than 50 years old and el stations that are, in some cases, more than a century old. Another issue is “berthing,” lining up trains with specific spots on the platforms, which is currently done manually by CTA drivers, using targets marked on the platform, he says. Systems with platform screen doors, such as O’Hare’s, generally feature automated berthing. One anti-suicide strategy that Steele says is definitely off the table is sending a bill for damages to the families of people who are killed by trains due to suicide or negligence, something rail companies have done in Japan and Belgium. The rationale for this policy is that it makes people consider the financial consequences to their loved ones before jumping in front of a train. Still, Steele says, “The grief that the families and friends of suicide victims have to endure is not something we want to compound.”

Steele emphasizes that, with an average of five cases per year, suicide is a less pronounced issue on the CTA than on Metra. “We provide 2,200 train trips per day, or 800,000 per year, so our numbers are extremely low.” But he promises that the agency will continue to pursue new strategies to prevent future heartbreak. “Even one suicide is one too many.” Indeed, when Matt Cepela threw himself in front of that Blue Line train, he left a void that his loved ones will feel for the rest of their lives. “He was my son and we miss him like

continued walking.” Later, Diane and Matt’s father, John, were walking near the tracks while a train passed by. “We weren’t really paying attention until the train blasted its horn right next to us,” she says. “We jumped, startled, we laughed, and then we cried, agreeing that it was Matt trying to get our attention. We could hear him thinking ‘Oh, OK, too much, right?’ and imagined him shrugging his shoulders and chuckling a bit.” v

no other,” Diane says. Over the last two years she’s begun to make peace with her loss. “I believe that even after Matt died, his spirit continues.” Soon after his passing the family traveled to southern California to meet up with Diane’s sister Ann in San Juan Capistrano, known as a haven for migrating cliff swallows. “While we were there,” Diane recalls, “Ann and I were walking to a coffee shop when the pedestrian gate came down in front of some railroad tracks—but there was no train. After a while it ﬁnally went up and we

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14 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 14, 2017

Radio gaga An ear to the ground at “the Sundance of radio” in the golden age of podcasting By MAYA DUKMASOVA ILLUSTRATIONS BY HOKYOUNG KIM

I’d been hearing about the Third Coast International Audio Festival for as long as I’d been a journalist in Chicago.

Reporters’ circles in this city have been shrinking, so if you’re from the newspaper world you’re bound to cross paths with radio people. They rhapsodize about Third Coast as a magical place for audio producers, or as a kind of forum for inspiration and networking, one that transcends your average professional conference. I’d heard it described as a prom, a group hug, a family reunion, a radio lovefest, the “bar mitzvah of radio,” and the “ﬁrst night of summer camp.” Multiple people told me, emphatically, that they owe their entire careers to Third Coast. I’d been eager to ﬁnd out what all the fuss is about, with an acute suspicion that it’s all bullshit. I imagined an event with power imbalances, snobbery, the popular kids and the ones no one wants to sit with. I thought the reason I only ever heard good things about Third Coast was because I was talking to privileged insiders. I couldn’t resist an opportunity to finally get a glimpse of this inner sanctum. It’s rare for Chicago to be at the center of any industry nowadays. The steel mills and meatpacking plants have closed up shop, but WBEZ, our NPR affiliate, remains an integral part of the local media ecosystem and a titan on the national airwaves. WBEZ has produced some of the most widely syndicated and successful public radio programs of the last 25 years— This American Life, Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me!, Sound Opinions—and Third Coast likewise has its roots at the station. Back in 2000, then 43-year-old WBEZ producer Johanna Zorn lamented the absence of American conferences or festivals dedicated to radio documentary and audio storytelling. The thought was that “we should be getting attention for the extraordinary work that [was] happening in audio documentary,” Zorn told me. The 90s were a J

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fruitful time for the genre: Joe Richman had been hailed as “a kind of Studs Terkel of the airwaves” for his Radio Diaries, radio documentarian Jay Allison had become the first and only independent producer in history to win an Edward R. Murrow Award, and the Kitchen Sisters—Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva—had been earning acclaim for their oral-history-based broadcasts. And of course, there was This American Life, which then reached about a million listeners per episode and had already won the first of its eight Peabody Awards (honoring television, radio, and online media). In the U.S., audio documentary mostly focused on intimate, personal stories edited into relatable, moving narratives that tried to tell audiences something salient about their times. But Zorn and her first collaborator on Third Coast, then 28-year-old Julie Shapiro, also wanted to draw attention to the more avant-garde radio storytelling they saw thriving in Europe and Australia. They wanted to carve out a space where the artistry of radio could be celebrated in the same way films were—a “Sundance for radio.” The very first conference, which happened just six weeks after September 11, 2001, demonstrated that Third Coast would eventually become a “scene.” The festival gave radio producers, especially freelancers, a chance to emerge from their solitary, underappreciated, and poorly remunerated work life. They could find a community. The Kitchen Sisters’ Sonic Memorial Project, dreamed up on the stairs of a Streeterville Holiday Inn, was an auspicious milestone. It was a yearlong effort to collect an audio archive of stories about the World Trade Center, which culminated in the most widely aired 9/11 anniversary broadcast on public radio to date. Since then, producers from the Third Coast scene have spawned hit shows such as Radiolab, Invisibilia, Serial, S-Town, Planet Money, and 99% Invisible. These programs are now part of a veritable “audio storytelling” boom—ushered in by the popularity of podcasting—which we in print media are jealously observing from our shrinking sidelines. According to an Edison Research consumer survey conducted in January and February 2017, 40 percent of Americans, or about 112 million people, say they’ve listened to a podcast; 24 percent, or 67 million people, said they’d listened to a podcast in the last month. These statistics have spurred the creation of a plethora of podcast production companies and have enticed streaming-audio players such as Spotify to produce and distribute new programs. Ad revenue for podcasts is projected to exceed $220 million this year.

16 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 14, 2017

And so on the afternoon of November 9, I entered the gleaming white tower of the Hyatt Regency McCormick Place along with 800-odd other (mostly white) people wearing boxy sweaters, floppy beanies, and gauzy scarves, and, of course, carrying tote bags, to soak in two and a half days of lectures, panels, parties, and performances, to rub shoulders with radio royalty, to gather gossip, and to come away with some idea about what’s made this scene a singular breeding ground for today’s roaring audio storytelling industry.

ithin minutes of arriving I spotted Zorn, described by many as a “fairy godmother.” She appeared totally at ease, despite some unexpected annoyances. A few speakers had canceled. “Some people don’t understand how big a deal it is when people cancel last-minute like that,” she said unaffectedly, and glided away to make the necessary program changes. A thick black Sharpie line appeared through one of the afternoon’s scheduled sessions— reps from the Knight Foundation and Edison Research were supposed to speak on “public media and podcasting listening habits.” “Nooo!” wailed a short African-American woman in jeans and a gray cowl-necked sweatshirt. “How’d that happen?!” She’d been looking forward to that session more than any other that day, she announced. I used our shared disappointment as an opportunity to introduce myself. Lynnae Brown, 50, is the director of a mental health advocacy and job-training center in Harlem and is working on her own podcast. A fast walker and an even faster talker, Brown spent many years working in corporate training, specifically teaching postproduction professionals how to transition from ﬁlm to digital. But seven years ago she decided to switch careers and go into social services. Her podcast project, which she’s calling Late in the Game, is intended to combat stigma around mental illness and dispel myths about the people who experience it. This was her second Third Coast, and she said she was doing a better job keeping her cool about seeing her favorite radio personalities in real life. “Last year I was like, ‘Oh my God, there’s Sam

Sanders! There’s Audie Cornish! ” she said, bursting into giggles. Since the Knight Foundation session was canceled, I opted for the “Radio Atlas” presentation. The brainchild of British radio producer Eleanor McDowall, Radio Atlas is a Web and mobile platform that provides English subtitles for foreign-language audio pieces from around the world; the subtitles soothingly appear against a blank background in the same rhythm as the spoken language. If I was going to get a glimpse of what goes on in audio storytelling outside of America, this was probably my best chance. (Third Coast is dominated by Americans; just 94 of 805 attendees this year were from outside the U.S.) McDowall is a tiny, elfish woman with a short-cropped pixie haircut who could be anywhere between 17 and 35 years old. At one point someone described her to me, not without a hint of resentment, as “the fucking darling of European radio people.” At the screening she treated us to a mix of voice mails French mothers left for their kids, an experimental Czech piece that captured people’s descriptions of meeting strangers in darkness, and a Norwegian narrative of a retired postal worker and amateur physicist who thought he’d invented an “everlasting” battery powered by cosmic energy. The pieces were complex, and at times confusing—artier than straightforward American radio. During the Q&A, McDowall shared tips for finding non-English radio and podcasts. “English-language podcasting is flowing across borders, but it’s not a two-way conversation,” she said. “I find that disturbing. I think we’re gonna become poorer for it. . . . We’re not hearing the majority of radio in the world, or the majority of podcasts.” Afterward I made a brief stop at a way-too-crowded workshop on podcast creation led by Public Radio Exchange (PRX) executives Kerri Hoffman and John Barth— short, middle-aged characters whose jovial manner and approachability belie their power and inﬂuence as the heads of America’s largest distribution platform for public radio programs. Their core message was that one should think about one’s audience and its needs when developing an idea for a show. A slide on the projector read: “The place that we start is EMPATHY.” The rhetoric of empathy turned out to be integral to Third Coast: throughout the conference it was brought up repeatedly. That radio is a particularly intimate medium is an article of faith, and thus, the logic goes, it’s uniquely capable of making us empathize with others. I can’t contest radio’s intimacy, as I frequently ﬁnd myself weeping while listening

to episodes of This American Life. But whether I’m empathizing with the people I’m hearing, or with the community and experiences they represent, is harder to determine. I suspect that rather than empathizing I’m more often just relating things to my own experiences, moved by a stranger’s voice sharing feelings I’m all too familiar with. “We’re looking for empathy for your prospective audience,” Hoffman emphasized as she explained how PRX approaches figuring out which shows are worth producing. It was a nod to the suggestion that audience, not content, is king, an argument increasingly advanced by those interested in the growth of podcasting as a business. Detractors believe that if the work is good, it’ll ﬁnd its audience no matter what.

ack in the hallways of the Hyatt, more and more people were milling around, catching up with old friends at coffee stations, and proudly sharing quirky business cards with new acquaintances. Soon we were all summoned to the “Audible Ballroom,” the largest of the conference venues, for a meet-and-greet in randomly assigned groups. I wound up in a conversation between Hans Buetow (a bald, bespectacled senior producer with American Public Media) and Sarah Richards, a diminutive, middle-aged white woman. She said she’d worked for years in university communications but was once a print journalist. She was considering returning to media and it seemed like radio might be interesting, but she really wasn’t sure whether there was money to be made in it. She was worried she’d find herself in the same hustle mode she’d been in years ago as a young freelance writer. “It’s a medium that resonates deeply with most people who try it,” Buetow told her. “But does it pay?” she wanted to know. “It’s a producer’s market,” he told her confidently. Buetow pulled out his phone. He showed us a page on the crowdfunding platform Patreon, for a show called Last Podcast on the Left. The woman and I had never heard of it, and he said he hadn’t either. “But look, they make $25,000 per month,” he said. “If you figure out your niche and touch people deeply you can make $25,000 per month.” Third Coasters soon swarmed Reggie’s Rock Club for the opening-night reception, filling every cranny of the cavernous South Loop venue. Weaving my way through the crowd, I bumped into a tall Illinois assemblyman. Word quickly spread among the Chicago journalists that he was there on a date with a podcast

celebrity. I quickly lost sight of them amid the throng of people, who were mingling, guzzling their free drinks, and eviscerating a spread of chicken wings, mac and cheese, and vegan sliders. Up in the front bar I had my own brief moment of feeling like a celebrity when a Nordic-looking woman mistook me for a WNYC program executive. Her illusion dispelled, she was nevertheless up for a chat and said she’d been coming to Third Coast since the very ﬁrst conference. A producer at KUOW in Seattle, she recalled a minor breakout session on podcasting at one of the early gatherings, then expressed amazement at how much this world had grown since then. “Suddenly it was like, Who the fuck are all these people?! They’re so young and stylish!” The general opinion of Third Coasters seemed to be that the industry boom wasn’t abating anytime soon, despite the overhyping of certain shows (e.g. Dirty John, a pulpy true-crime podcast many at the conference considered lowbrow and unoriginal). Some predicted a decline in the artistry of audio storytelling as it became more and more commercialized, but most were excited by the evident growth in audience numbers. However, some anticipated a drop in ad revenues and investments in podcasting ventures due to an analytics feature currently rolling out in Apple’s podcast app. Right now the barometer of success for a podcast is the rather crude tallying of downloads, supplemented by listener surveys. Apple’s analytics feature will provide information about whether or not people are actually listening to downloaded episodes, what they skip, and how long they’re listening. Before I knew it, I was discussing all this with Roman Mars, the creator of 99% Invisible, a crowdfunded design podcast that averages a million downloads per episode. It was somewhat surreal to hear Mars pipe his velvety voice directly into my ear, unmediated by headphones. Standing inches away from me on the bustling lower level of Reggie’s, Mars delivered his take on the podcasting business. When he began producing Third Coast’s Re:sound radio show back in 2005, people interested in audio storytelling “just hung out in Chicago to maybe get a radio job.” What success stories like 99% Invisible—on which advertisers are now paying rates on par with in-stream commercials on Hulu—prove is that “if we reached the public directly, they valued the material that public radio directors did not,” Mars said. Before becoming a podcast entrepreneur he worked at public radio stations, where he’d been frustrated that producers seemed to matter least and get paid least. “I wanted to change that,” he said. These days, if you’ve got talent and the right idea for

a show, “there’s enough money for everyone to have a job. If you have talent, you’ll make it.” I asked what he thought about recent corporate encroachment into podcasting, and whether he fears there could be a bubble. “[The companies] are gonna exist outside the real economy of what [audio storytelling] is,” he said. “If you don’t offer the real-world value of a thing, then you get a bubble. The correction only scares you when [the value of what you’re making doesn’t] reﬂect reality.”

[After the election] people kept asking:

fter about four hours of sleep I was back at the Hyatt the next morning at 7 AM for breakfast. I found a seat next to two young women and a man in his 50s who seemed like he’d be up for talking that early. The man turned out to be Trey Kay from West Virginia, who produces a podcast on class and cultural differences called Us & Them. He wore a purple gingham button-down under a gray fleece vest, Keen hiking boots, and khakis; he didn’t exude the hip aura of so many other Third Coasters. But he’s got a Peabody Award, which he owed to a creative collaboration that began the last time he came to the conference, in 2004. Back then, he said, people were more competitive—it seemed like attendees were really “clawing” at the few jobs in this sphere, and he felt like he “needed to measure up.” He admitted he was still feeling a little insecure, but being older, wiser, and surer in his footing put him more at ease. Before long we were joined by two more guys—a producer from a San Diego public radio station and a Canadian podcaster and college instructor. The instructor, Duncan McHugh, a man wearing a full beard, oxford shirt, and cozy beige cardigan, clarified that he’s not Duncan McCue, the famous Canadian radio personality. The first big event of the day was a keynote address by Radiolab creator and industry giant Jad Abumrad, a slim man with huge, puppy-dog eyes and dark, curly hair. The talk was a summary of important lessons from his career punctuated by amusing sound effects, reflecting the sonic style of his radio program. “How do you learn to recognize these little moments before pfffft! they’re gone?” he asked,

‘Does what I do matter? ‘Cuz it doesn’t seem to matter in the culture at all.’”

- Radiolab creator Jad Abumrad

rhetorically. Abumrad reminded everyone of the somber mood of last year’s Third Coast, which happened just three days after the election. “People kept asking ‘Does what I do matter? ’Cuz it doesn’t seem to matter in the culture at all.’” Over the last year, Octavia Butler helped him find the answer. He brought up “Speech Sounds,” the late sci-fi writer’s short story about a violent world in which people either can’t speak or can’t read. Abumrad told us that through that narrative, Butler was “writing herself to hope” in the future and humanity after witnessing a fight on a bus. His answer to the questions shell-shocked Third Coasters kept asking themselves last year was to keep doing whatever work mattered to them. After Abumrad’s talk, there was excited chatter about the arrival of Michael Barbaro, of the New York Times’s 11-month-old podcast The Daily. Barbaro is this scene’s hottest and most recent celebrity. I bumped into a young man from New York City named Ben Ellman, a freelance audio producer and writer who bears a slight resemblance to a brunet Alfred E. Neuman. He was chosen to be one of 25 volunteers to work two-hour shifts in exchange for free admission to the conference. “I helped Michael Barbaro check in!” Ellman informed me. “That was pretty nice.” I asked if he got to exchange any pleasantries. He said he spotted Barbaro a few feet away and dutifully prepared his assigned badge and tote bag filled with swag. The process went quickly and smoothly. Ira Glass’s name tag was also in the stack, but alas Ellman didn’t see him on his shift. I also ran into Lynnae Brown again, this time engrossed in enthusiastic conversation with Third Coast cofounder Julie Shapiro and producer Nigel Poor (a woman wearing a fuzzy green sweater and shit-kicking combat boots), whose Ear Hustle podcast, created with inmates at San Quentin State Prison, is a major inspiration for Brown’s fledgling work. We chose the same breakout session a few minutes later, a panel convened to take stock of the first year under Trump. In the audio storytelling world, as in most of the liberal media, Trump’s election was largely viewed as a crisis. Many journalists felt like they were somehow complicit because they hadn’t been telling the right stories or reaching the right audiences. In the last year Third Coasters compelled to respond did so, loosely, along two paths: Doing stories that attempt to humanize Trump supporters, and doing stories that attempt to hold Trump supporters accountable. In both cases, the established traditions of the audio storytelling medium—focusing on the individual as a vehicle to explain history and systems—has mostly persisted. J

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(One notable exception is John Biewen’s “Seeing White,” a series on his podcast Scene on Radio. Across 14 episodes, “Seeing White” explores the origins of the concept of race and its deployment in American history. Rather than focus on race as something nonwhite people are afflicted with, Biewen examines how whiteness has been constructed over time and used for social control. He also sets the record straight about white people being the primary beneficiaries of government handouts. Rather than merely telling moving personal stories, Biewen convenes experts to discuss the complicated subject matter in an accessible manner.) Al Letson of Reveal (an investigative podcast that, full disclosure, I contributed background reporting to this past June) said that after the election he felt hopeless. It was like all the work his team had done to expose corrupt capitalists, dysfunctional institutions, and hate groups was a waste of time. But over the last year his show doubled down on its coverage and paid particularly close attention to white nationalists. Letson takes every opportunity to challenge them in tense, squirm-inducing interviews. In August, Letson (who’s black) made headlines when he saved a white nationalist from a vicious beating by antifa protesters at a rally in Berkeley. Shortly after this incident, Letson had the guy on Reveal to grill him on the violent and damaging consequences of his views. In Letson’s opinion, the job of journalists right now is to ﬁgure out how to address their audiences without compromising their values; he didn’t think the solution was more stories humanizing white Trump voters. “I feel like I grew up on a life of understanding” people like that, he said. “I feel like I am now always angry, and the way I channel that anger is through the work.” Eve Epstein of Marketplace, who for years worked at the Charleston Gazette-Mail in West Virginia before moving to Oregon, said that she wasn’t surprised by the election results at all. Nor was she new to the feeling that none of her work mattered. “I’ve always felt like we failed,” she said. Nevertheless, she too thought the only option was to just keep reporting. She suggested that the way to transcend the disagreements dividing the country was to bring people with opposing political views into conversations that would reveal the absurd paradoxes of what they claim to stand for. She said this dawned on her shortly after the election, when she watched, baffled, as a right-wing white guy she knew expressed his excitement about Trump to a black liberal man with whom he’d had a professional rapport going back many years.

18 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 14, 2017

“In this world, it’s the best work that rises to the top.”

“At the very foundation this country is white supremacy,” Letson responded, as a wave of blond heads in the audience bobbed in agreement. He didn’t have much patience for trying to find common ground with the sort of people who would, throughout his career, ignore him when he asked questions or turn to talk to a white colleague next to him instead. “They do not understand how they don’t see me and my experience at all,” he said. “And I am so done justifying my humanity or anyone else’s.” Letson’s message resonated with the “woke” white conference attendees. (Though Zorn and her team are aggressively trying to diversify Third Coast through scholarships and work exchanges, 75 percent of this year’s crowd was still white.) It challenged the audience to get better at telling stories about people with abhorrent views who influence our politics by forcing them out into the open. But it didn’t necessarily challenge the impression that storytelling is the antidote to the social and political realities that appall us. The radio people were able to take comfort in the thought that if they just asked their subjects the right questions, did the story in the right way, it might inform, persuade, and perhaps even change something out there in the world. And even if they fail, Letson left them something to contemplate: “We all maintain illusions in our lives to keep us going,” he said. “Walk to the future, fuck everything else.”

- Public Radio Exchange CEO Kerri Hoffman

inutes after leaving the panel I was at lunch (a do-it-yourself pasta and salad bar), once again discussing this economic moment in the industry. Dan Misener, a blond Canadian producer in a blue zip-up hoodie and clear plastic-framed glasses, told me and Shane McKeon, a blond Northwestern undergrad also wearing a blue zip-up hoodie and clear plastic-framed glasses, that “to tell the story [of the industry] only through the Third Coast and American public radio lens is to not tell the whole story.” He was confident of the robustness of the business and told us of a world beyond the iTunes charts, filled with very niche yet well-monetized podcasts. In addition to pro-

ducing his own show, Misener works a day job as the head of audience development for Paciﬁc Content, which makes branded podcasts bankrolled by companies such as Dell and Slack. A consequence of big corporations getting into this game (besides all the jobs) is that their podcasts will help “grow the [audience] pie,” he said, and “create more fans of this medium.” He assured us that we shouldn’t be worried about an oversaturation of podcasts any more than we’d be about an oversaturation of music. From there, I headed to the “Bitchin’ Pitchin’ Panel,” a Third Coast tradition. Producers apply to deliver story ideas to speciﬁc shows and have their concepts approved or rejected in real time. However, true to the spirit of the conference, the attitudes of the judges were more Randy Jackson and Paula Abdul than Simon Cowell. They represented a podcast (Kevin Sullivan from Reveal), a podcast production company (Jenna Weiss-Berman from Pineapple Street Media), and a public radio station (Alicia Montgomery from D.C.’s WAMU). The five freelance producers who took turns pitching were visibly nervous, their tension amplified by distracting mike feedback. Some talked too much, getting lost in the weeds of their ideas; some crumpled in the face of unexpected questions; some had dull tape to share, or no tape at all. Just two ideas were green-lit right away, both of them pitches for Lena Dunham’s Women of the Hour, which Weiss-Berman produces. The proposals were for short segments about ordinary people. One was an elderly black woman who had a successful career in the public transportation sector and wished she could thank her mother for the good example she set for her in life. The other was a young black woman and childhood friend of the producer, a hard-core Christian who’s attracted to women and fears she turned the producer into a lesbian when they were teens. The key factor to the success of these pitches, it seemed, was the gripping pieces of tape the producers shared—moments of recorded interviews during which the subjects projected raw emotion. That these pitches were approved made sense, since “good tape” is by all accounts the ore of the radio business. It’s hard to sell a story without good tape, but what makes for good tape is circumscribed by numerous, commonly held American ideas about what constitutes compelling speech. What happens when the people on your tape aren’t very good talkers? Luckily, there was a breakout session dedicated to that problem: How to embrace working with tape from subjects who speak with accents or in confusing idioms, or who, e.g., don’t come from cultures where peo- J

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ple make sense of the world by talking about their feelings. Unfortunately, the session was boring. A half hour in I felt drowsy and distracted. Looking around, I caught people tapping on their phones; elsewhere, an older man with thin, curly hair, pulled back in a tiny ponytail, was asleep in his seat. I escaped into the cool air of the deserted hallway and struck up a conversation with two burly, middle-aged guys—one white and one black—wearing black T-shirts and sitting behind a small table. They were from the AV unions and frequently worked conferences at the Hyatt. I asked what they thought of the Third Coast crowd. “This conference is mostly empowered women,” the black guy said, “like 94 percent.” The Third Coast people are nice, they said, unlike some of the doctors and pharmaceutical-industry types who come through here. How did they know the women were empowered, I wondered; the white guy quickly took over the conversation. He said that he can tell because he’s got a daughter. I also learned that he’s a northwest-sider who loves Superdawg, and that his partner at the table was from the south side. They’re frequently mistaken for cops or security guards. Asked if they listen to any podcasts, the white guy erupted into a story before his colleague could get a word in. “I like listening to ones about my culture,” he said. “There’s some pretty neat ones out there about Irish music and Irish dance. The strength and the money that’s involved in that right now is mind-boggling.” (I asked if he meant in podcasting, but he meant Irish dancing.) I turned to the other guy: Did he listen to podcasts? He thought for a few moments. “Is Howard Stern a podcast?” he asked. “I listen to Howard Stern sometimes.” “I think,” the Irishman opined, “he was the ﬁrst one to do a podcast.”

ater that evening, I wound up at a happy hour hosted by Transom, a nonproﬁt organization founded by Jay Allison that produces shows, curates a vast array of free online resources like technical how-tos on audio-recording hardware and software, and runs an exclusive boot camp for those just entering the radio-production ﬁeld. The event was held at Chicago Athletic Association’s Game Room, amid a typical Friday-night crowd of drunk, white-collar workers. I was hoping to meet some young strivers just breaking into the audio storytelling business, which I did, but I also unexpectedly met Planet Money host Robert

20 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 14, 2017

805 2017 TOTAL ATTENDEES

INTERNATIONAL ATTENDEES (representing 18 countries)

385 SHE/HER/HERS

ATTENDEES CHOSE TO INCLUDE PREFERRED PRONOUNS ON THEIR NAMETAGS.

HE/HIM/HIS

THEY/THEM/THEIRS

257 116 12

690

ATTENDEES CHOSE TO RESPOND TO A QUESTION ABOUT RACE.

25%

OF ATTENDEES CHOSE A CATEGORY OTHER THAN WHITE.

$495

CONFERENCE REGISTRATION FEE

Source: Third Coast International Audio Festival

Smith. A compact white man with a bouncy, energetic walk and salt-and-pepper hair and beard, he gracefully accepted the compliments of nearby admiring fans and showed interest in talking to everyone about their projects. He admitted to feeling like a fanboy himself at Third Coast, where he sees so many people whose work he considers better than his own. Minutes later, I escorted the avuncular Smith across the street for a live taping of Code Switch—part of Third Coast’s new listener-oriented program called the Fest, which brought live shows of six popular podcasts to Chicago in early November. I thought I’d be remiss not to ask one of America’s pop-economics gurus whether there’s a podcasting bubble looming. Was being at Third Coast now like being at a real estate developers’ conference in 2005? “I probably was at a real estate developers’ conference in 2005!” Smith exclaimed. But the thing about bubbles is that almost no one ever sees them coming. He predicted that the worst that could happen with podcasting, though, is that in the future “it just won’t be as easy to make stupid money.” After watching the Code Switch taping, which sold out the 1,525-seat Harris Theater, I caught wind of a party being thrown by Pineapple Street Media back at the Hyatt. This seemed like the best opportunity to witness whatever drunken debauchery goes on behind the scenes. But things turned out to be quite friendly and tame. On the 33rd ﬂoor of the hotel, with sweeping views of the glowing city grid, Pineapple Street cofounders Weiss-Berman and Max Linsky welcomed the audio-storytelling elite to imbibe craft beers, Four Roses Bourbon, and Tito’s vodka (straight or mixed with Canada Dry). Linsky was wearing a black, conical patch on his left eye to hide a gruesome recent corneal scratch. Before long, the living room and bedroom of the suite were packed. A low-stakes dice game led by Missing Richard Simmons creator Dan Taberski took shape around a table, and someone had a couple of pizzas delivered. Though this party—and, frankly, the whole conference—was dominated by New Yorkers (nearly three times as many people came from New York City than from Chicago, the next-most-common provenance), it felt nothing like a typical New York party, where people’s eyes glaze over as soon as they discover you’re not that important. Ryan Kailath, a Marketplace reporter based in New York, was all too happy to explain the signiﬁcance of Third Coast. “It’s literally my favorite part of every year,” he said, “more than seeing my family.” He’d gotten into radio only recently, after years as a software designer. In 2014, at his first

Third Coast, he landed on the pitch panel with an idea for an All Things Considered segment on Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone.” It got green-lit and catapulted him into several freelance gigs, then a full-time job within two years. “I would take a bullet for Third Coast,” he said. At Third Coast, you don’t feel a sense of stifling hierarchy, as you might at other conferences. The old guard of audio storytelling comes from public radio, and they’re people who’ve spent much of their careers making work that has nothing to do with getting rich. On the other hand, the podcasting vanguard originate from DIY spaces and freelance hustles and have only recently landed in a position to cash in. Perhaps this is why the audio-storytelling industry is living the dream with the same down-to-earth disbelief that would befall librarians or storefront theater operators if they suddenly found themselves in a pool of $220 million. Here, unlike the movie or publishing businesses, the distance between those aspiring to make something and those deciding what gets made isn’t so vast and riddled with bureaucracies and middlemen. For now, the audio-storytelling community can still maintain the appearance of a meritocracy. Standing at the front of the room near the half-eaten pizzas, Kerri Hoffman, the PRX executive, surveyed the suite and said confidently, “In this world, it’s the best work that rises to the top.” An executive at WBEZ would later liken Third Coast to what Sundance was 30 years ago, before it was “overrun by Hollywood production houses looking to ink deals.” Foremost among those who commercialized Sundance was, of course, Harvey Weinstein, whose shadow has crept into the radio world too. NPR newsroom executive Michael Oreskes lost his job in the wake of sexual misconduct allegations just a week before the conference; allegations against Garrison Keillor, John Hockenberry, Leonard Lopate, Jonathan Schwartz, and Tom Ashbrook surfaced in the month after. Despite the efforts of Zorn and her team (all but one of them are women) to diversify Third Coast, the wider audio storytelling world, like the rest of the media, is still dominated by white men. Last year, the Radio Television Digital News Association reported that more than twice as many men than women work in radio news. Meanwhile, a 2016 analysis of iTunes’s podcasting charts found that nearly 80 percent of podcasts were hosted by men—a phenomenon that’s even given rise to a podcast called Sooo Many White Guys. Many Third Coasters see podcasting as a democratizing force—anyone can teach themselves how to do it and put their work out there. Maybe this will prevent the calcifi-

cation of power structures that allow sexual violence to thrive. But just in case it doesn’t, Weiss-Berman and some other women from this scene have begun an “anti-sexual assault/harassment task force.” Nevertheless, some attendees feel that all the money’s changing how people behave around each other. Andrea Silenzi, host and producer of the popular dating-and-relationships podcast Why Oh Why, was nostalgic for the days when people were just making their podcasts on their own, when they were excited to trade tips and ideas and talked about their work freely. Now, she says, even friends are “tight-lipped” with each other, especially those producing for big companies. “People will say, ‘I’m working on a project, but I can’t tell you what it is.’”

he last morning of the conference I caught up with Brown, who’d been having a blast. She was particularly psyched to have met John Biewen, who she said gave her lots of helpful tips. Our conversation was interrupted by Barbaro, who delivered an announcement from the stage about the rest of the day’s events in his signature “Here’s what else you need to know today” tone from The Daily. The early birds at breakfast hooted with delight. “One of the things I love about this conference,” Brown said after he ﬁnished, “is it’s very thoughtful.” I attended a talk by Christopher Swetala, who’s in charge of This American Life’s fact-checking. It was packed. Swetala, a soft-spoken man with kind eyes and a warm smile, shared the details of his process, which he learned from years of fact-checking magazine stories. He showed us slides of marked-up TAL scripts, eviscerated by red and blue pencil markings and some fun notes Glass and the other producers have left him and each other. He said that in radio fact-checking wasn’t as common as at magazines, and that TAL got particularly serious about it after the “Mike Daisey incident.” In 2012 TAL aired an excerpt of Daisey’s monologue about a trip to China, wherein he claimed to have witnessed the horrendous working conditions of people making Apple products; it turned out that while the condi-

tions he described truly existed, what he said about his own trip was largely distorted or fabricated. Daisey’s story is TAL’s only retraction since 1995, but it began a larger conversation about how the narrative framework of the show makes it inherently susceptible to tall tales. When Swetala concluded his remarks, more people than I saw at any other panel rushed the mikes for a chance to ask questions. They wanted to know everything from how to vet experts to how to fact-check impressionistic details that are subject to disagreement. One anxiety that animated many people in the room: What if sources get cold feet about being in the story when you call to fact-check? Ultimately, Swetala said, if the facts check out, he’s usually comfortable green-lighting the pieces. The flood of questions underscored the apparent dearth of fact-checking in audio storytelling. They also spoke to the risk of creating neat, palatable narratives to explain life’s complexities. As Joan Didion pointed out in her 1979 essay collection The White Album, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live. . . . We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of ﬁve. . . . We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” Whether these ideas are expressed in printed word or recorded sound, fact-checking can be a threat to a carefully constructed narrative.

hat afternoon, I joined the stream of conference-goers piling into the ballroom for Ira Glass’s address, entitled “Seven Things I’ve Learned,” with AV components Glass was very particular about. (At one point, when the tech guy lowered the lights before cuing up an audio clip, Glass interrupted himself to say, “Don’t bring down the lights when the tape plays, just bring down the lights when there’s video.”) Most of Glass’s presentation repackaged anecdotes he’s been telling for years. The lessons—on how to prepare for interviews, how to talk to kids, how it’s important to have fun and not be afraid of failure—were ones he’s imparted through myriad books, essays, interviews, and media appearances. Glass’s affinity and respect for this particular venue manifested less in the talk’s originality than in his willingness to deliver it for just $350. (Three years ago the

“If you figure out your niche and touch people deeply you can make $25,000 per month.”

- American Public Media producer Hans Buetow

New York Times reported that he now makes the bulk of his money in ﬁve-ﬁgure speaking fees.) He was on home turf, enjoying the moment of arrival at the head of the procession. The godfather of audio storytelling was playful and confident, and at times emotional, bringing up his divorce and that he hadn’t seen his dog in a year because of it, and that now the dog didn’t recognize him, which prompted a chorus of 800 awww!s. If there’s anyone who’s a true believer in the emotional power of audio storytelling it’s Glass. In this talk and elsewhere, he’s referred to radio as a “machine for empathy.” His theory is that when, unmediated by visual distractions, we hear the voice of people sharing their thoughts and feelings, we’re more able to connect with them as human beings, to see ourselves in their shoes. But so what? Glass didn’t offer an answer about what that’s supposed to lead to, what the value or impact of that connection might be. Ultimately, he’s a pragmatist. In a recent interview with Zorn’s husband, Tribune columnist Eric Zorn, Glass said he had no problem with people listening to TAL on double speed—an infuriating trend for those who see the stories they produce as art. The work, he said, is “Disposable. Meant to be heard, remembered a while, then forgotten.” It’s hard to square that utilitarianism with the soul-searching insecurity brought on by the election. That could be because the election, for this milieu, was a stark reminder of the disposable nature of their work. As many at Third Coast told me, this past year they pondered whether what they’re doing has value; if it matters, then it seems like this political moment shouldn’t have happened, or at least they should’ve seen it coming. They wondered if they should give up storytelling, go do something else with their lives. But the response they came up with was that no, storytelling was still the answer, they just needed to keep going. And Glass was careful not to deflate the egos of those gathered around him, telling them instead what they wanted, or perhaps needed, to hear: that they did indeed matter, that they could safely take comfort in their success. “We’re in a part of the media that’s growing and thriving,” Glass said as he was wrapping up his talk. “One out of four Americans has listened to a podcast in the last month. It’s the wild west.” He also offered an uncharacteristic glimmer of hope that this work could change something in the world. “Hard-core Trump supporters listen to our show,” he said. “In this room we have the ability to make the future.” He delivered these parting words sincerely, which isn’t surprising, given that Glass J

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has long had opportunities to take solace in his professional triumphs when life might have left him feeling insecure. Before he came to Chicago in 1989, Glass was in a relationship with a woman in New York, a public interest attorney he felt was much smarter than he. “For her it was very important that things be very serious and deal with serious issues,” Glass told Stop Smiling magazine in 2005. “I always felt like the things that were interesting to me were fluff compared to the big things that were on her mind.” They temporarily separated when she had to travel for work, and the break allowed him to suddenly feel secure in his own head, with his own interests, he said. Later, he came to Chicago for another woman—cartoonist Lynda Barry—and perfected his craft of collecting ordinary people’s little stories and packaging them with big, satisfying narrative bows. In 1998 Barry described Glass to the Reader as a “person who changed my belief in human nature.” Going out with him was the worst thing she ever did, she said. “When we broke up he gave me a watch and said I was boring and shallow, and I wasn’t enough in the moment for him, and it was over. I had to go around for a year saying, ‘Am I boring and shallow and not enough in the moment?’ ” She added (and also cartooned about) how he used to call her his “‘little ghetto girl.’ We were reading the New York Times one morning a couple of weeks in, and he looked at me and said, ‘You don’t know what the IMF is, do you?’ ” (Glass never disputed her account of the relationship.) Glass ultimately came to think of his work as something that made life easier, even if it made personal relationships more difficult. Working obsessively on TAL “simplifies your life,” he told the Tribune, in an interview that preceded the Reader article. “It makes your life about something instead of about nothing.” The Reader revealed not just that this insight may have been achieved at Barry’s expense, but at the expense of a professional collaborator. Before TAL became WBEZ’s first national hit, Glass spent the first half of the 1990s working with local producer Gary Covino on a weekly radio program called The Wild Room. Covino felt strongly that the show was the incubator that produced TAL. He told the Reader a story of being left behind, of watching Glass take their idea and maneuver himself into the perfect position to seize on WBEZ executives’ eagerness to produce a nationally syndicated show and $275,000 of MacArthur Foundation money. It was an archetypal story of capitalism, public radio’s version of The Social Network.

22 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 14, 2017

In the weeks following the conference, I came up with a narrative to process Glass’s talk: in a way, his story of insecurity, conﬂict, and resolution through a blinkered devotion to work is an allegory for what’s going on with the Third Coasters. Focusing on the process is a way to suspend the cognitive dissonance between the commercial success of audio storytelling and the election-prompted shell shock of realizing that their audio storytelling might be deeply out of touch with American life. Glass’s success could be attributed to the power of his work, but a less idealistic way of framing TAL is as a product hawked by an expert salesman. Back in TAL’s early days, Glass found himself in opportune proximity to the right WBEZ suits and all that MacArthur money and capitalized on a moment in time: the relatively carefree 90s, when the bourgie public radio audience could shamelessly enjoy his kind of program. Now the DIY radio makers and podcast producers who grew up listening to him have found themselves in proximity to iPhones and venture capital in a moment when we’re desperate—to feel like we can navigate the riptide of terrible events around us, but also to be told that we’re gonna be all right. Whether audio storytelling makes us better people or changes the world or is truly worth doing won’t really matter as long it remains a way to pay the bills.

“We all maintain illusions in our lives to keep us going. Walk to the future, fuck everything else.”

he conference concluded with the much-anticipated awards show, preceded by a “red carpet,” which consisted of little more than Third Coasters goofing off on thin sheets of red polyester felt that quickly tore and knotted at their feet. For the first time in this entire three-day affair I found Zorn flitting around with a worried look on her face. It was 8:17 PM and the award ceremony still hadn’t started. It turned out that they’d have to pay double time to the AV unions if the show ran past 10 PM. But the awards host—British broadcaster Helen Zaltzman, channeling The Magic School Bus’s Miss Frizzle in a black dress printed with white-and-gold lightning bolts— was graceful under pressure. She smoothly and humorously presented winners with customized radios—Third Coast’s version of the

- Reveal host Al Letson

Oscar statuette—and the ceremony unfolded at a timely clip, punctuated by TAL producer Sean Cole’s hearty whoops and cheers of appreciation. Afterward, the Third Coasters trekked over to South Loop brewery Baderbräu for a final celebration. I ran once more into Trey Kay, the West Virginian, who seemed elated. He said that any anxiety he might have felt early the previous morning had completely disappeared. He’d reconnected with people he’d known for years who’d never heard of Us & Them, met people he didn’t know who praised the show, and he felt just fine about it all. He also mentioned that he appreciated Glass bringing up the pain of his divorce so publicly—Kay himself recently got divorced and was comforted to know that he wasn’t alone in his troubles. Later in the evening, I caught him busting a few swing moves with Zorn on the periphery of a dance floor to the pulsations of Estelle’s “American Boy.” Producers young and old swayed and jumped with uninhibited joy that night, all relaxed around each other. In the bathroom, a woman said with public-radio sobriety: “I’ve never done cocaine before. Now is not when I’m trying to start.” All the hand-wringing and soul-searching could stop temporarily as they soaked in their final moments of communion. Tomorrow, it would be back to the real world and the often lonely work of interviewing, and editing, and mixing, and sitting in dark little soundproof booths for hours on end, and wondering if any of it made a difference and how to make it matter if it didn’t. Around 1 AM the lights of the microbrewery came on and the reveling conference-goers began to disperse to the waning sounds of Bruce Hornsby and the Range’s “The Way It Is.” On my way out, I stumbled into one last conversation. A small cluster of people was gathered around a woman on the verge of tears. They listened intently, exchanging shocked looks as she spoke in anxious, uncertain circles about how a powerful and influential industry player had apparently been sexually and psychologically manipulating a friend of hers for years. The conversation was a jarring reminder that for all the ways Third Coast turned out to be true to its reputation—as a warm, accepting, and inspirational place—it’s an extension of, not an escape from, the world we all have to live in. There was a nauseous silence in the group. People made some tentative guesses about the alleged perpetrator’s identity. The woman squeezed her eyes and gave a decisive shake of her head. “No,” she said. “But he’s here.” v

v @mdoukmas

ARTS & CULTURE Turandot’s riddles and the piteous Liu is dead by her own hand, having sacriﬁced herself to protect Calaf, whom she secretly loves. Moved by Liu’s example, Turandot gives in to Calaf, dropping her resistance to love, marriage, and domestication. Ask opera lovers why Turandot is still produced today and they’ll likely cite the power and beauty of the music. “Puccini is a master composer, a master orchestrator, a master writer for voices, both solo and choral voices,” says Anthony Freud, Lyric’s general director, president, and CEO. “Turandot was his last opera, and I think he poured into it both a lifetime of experience Puccini’s opera returns to the Lyric, and so does its troubling Orientalism. ò TODD ROSENBERG

Turandot isn’t just problematic—it’s complicated

By ROBIN AMER

NOW PLAYING

“A WILDLY ENGAGINGHIP-HOPP TTAKE ON DICKENS’ CLASSIC” “75 MINUTES OF HIGHLY ENERGETIC HOLIDAY MAGIC” “SAVVY AVVY & WITTY ITTY” –CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

OPERA

iacomo Puccini’s Turandot, now being produced by Lyric Opera through January 27, is one of the most popular operas in the classical repertoire. Lyric has staged it five times in its 60-plus-year history, roughly once a decade; both the San Francisco Opera and the Met are also putting on runs this season; and “Nessun Dorma,” Calaf’s sung promise to win over the princess, is arguably the most famous tenor aria in opera (and the stuff of many a Pavarotti compilation). But for all Turandot’s popularity, and for all Puccini’s efforts to weave Chinese melodies into his score, the opera has always been a problematic exemplification of Western projections about the Far East. Puccini never visited China (nor did Franco Alfano, who completed Turandot in 1926, two years after Puccini’s death) and suffered from what today might crassly be called “yellow fever,” an obsession with Asian women he twice made the tragic heroines of his work. To ask what it

and a determination to break new ground. But ultimately, why is it popular? Because it has fabulous tunes.” Freud and others tend to dismiss the opera’s Orientalism—the nameless “Mandarin,” the stereotypical dragon queen, the trio of buffoonish jester-ministers named Ping, Pang, and Pong—by describing the work as a fairy tale or fable. “It doesn’t represent China any more than Brighton Pavilion does,” says Rob Kearley, director of Lyric’s current production. “It doesn’t represent China any more than Beauty and the Beast represents medieval France.” But others have branded Turandot out- J

–CHICAGO THEATRE REVIEW

–CHICAGO GO TRIBUNE TRIBUN BUNE

means for Lyric to stage Turandot yet again is to ask what it means to present an Orientalist fantasy for public consumption in 2017. Turandot opens in mythical ancient China, replete with sumptuous royals, bedraggled peasants, and a slew of fantastical beasts— phoenixes, unicorns, and giant tortoises carved into the walls of the palace loggia. A masked character known only as the Mandarin issues a fearsome proclamation in a deep baritone: the vicious but beautiful princess Turandot must marry any man who successfully answers three riddles, which she herself will pose. But even one mistake will doom the suitor to death. That doesn’t deter Calaf, a Tartar prince in exile, who falls in love with Turandot after glimpsing her in a window. Despite admonishments from his father, the exiled Tartar king, and a slave girl named Liu, he strikes a massive gong, signaling his intention to vie for Turandot’s hand. From there the plot twists and turns, but by the end of act three, Calaf has bested

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

312.595.5600 • WWW.CHICAGOSHAKES.COM

A Chicago Shakespeare production presented by CST and Richard Jordan Productions

DECEMBER 14, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 23

ARTS & CULTURE continued from 23

right racist, staged as it often is and historically has been by mostly white performers whose pancake makeup and choppy, exaggerated movements are basically “yellowface,” or ethnocentric representations of Asians in media and entertainment. “It is cold comfort to say it’s not really real, because it’s being treated as if it’s real,” says Naomi Andre, a University of Michigan scholar who studies race and gender in opera. “We get to have all of our negative associations of the West coming in and domesticating the East, of women learning the right way to be domesticated. That’s how that opera seems to live today.” “Opera companies are always asking [me to direct Turandot], and I’ve always turned them down,” Chinese-American opera director Chen Shi-Zheng told the Daily Review, an Australian newspaper, last year, after ﬁnally acquiescing to staging a massive production in Sydney Harbor. “I’ve always thought they’re very offensive stereotypes of Asian women and very stereotyped stories, in spite of some very beautiful music.” Performances of Turandot were banned in China until the late 1990s. Opera companies’ tendency to stage the same repertory pieces over and over again gives directors and performers an opportunity to reinterpret and recontextualize, directly addressing the misogyny, Orientalism, or reductive elements present in the source material. “I think the way a contemporary opera company has to present [Turandot] is with sensitivity to those issues, bearing in mind the difference in our perspective from the perspectives of the audiences of the day in which it was written,” Freud says. “And frankly, to have dialogue and discourse about those issues.” But the extent to which opera companies actually do this or do it well is mixed, even in Lyric’s case. For this winter’s run, Lyric has purchased (for an undisclosed sum) a 1982 coproduction of Turandot originally created by Bliss Herbert and Allen Charles Klein for four opera companies in Texas, Florida, and California. In other words, Lyric is reusing most of the set design, costumes, and props from a production first staged when conversations about cultural appropriation were far less prominent. Kearley says he and his collaborators worked to tone down some of the more obvi-

24 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 14, 2017

Amber Wagner in Lyric’s Turandot ò TODD ROSENBERG

ously offensive or problematic elements from the original production. “We’ve gone back and looked at the costumes and gone back and looked at the use of masks, certainly the way the physical language as well, the way these characters are presented, and we’ve tried very hard to avoid anything that doesn’t come across as genuine or real,” he says. “This wasn’t a conversation we were having ten years ago,” Kearley continues. “And I think it’s great we are having it.” But is it enough? The centerpiece of Lyric’s production is still a 30-foot carved mustachioed dragon grasping the glowing orb of the moon in its claws. The emperor still sports a comically long white beard; Ping, Pang, and Pong still prance around the stage in brocade robes and ﬁx their elaborate makeup in lacquered dressing chests. Even toning down the staging or hiring an all-Asian cast wouldn’t solve the real problem with Turandot: its Orientalism is inextricable from the opera. It raises the question of whether it’s possible to responsibly engage in what one might call transracial fantasy ﬁction, or whether works like Turandot should just be put to bed. “I think that can be an important learning place for people of one culture to think about another culture,” Andre says, as long as it’s done with sensitivity and respect. That approach, she says, has given us other beloved if problematic works, like Gershwin’s 1935 opera Porgy & Bess, in which the characters belt out American standards like “Summer-

time” but also speak in an uncomfortable approximation of black dialect based on minstrel stereotypes. “I think it was an important and a good thing to have a sympathetic side of black culture portrayed,” Andre says of Porgy & Bess. However, “Gershwin was able to do something that no black composer or impresario were doing,” because black composers of the era faced incredible discrimination. “Scott Joplin found black composers who wrote operas and couldn’t get them produced.” If Lyric wanted to take a dramatically different tack, it could reprise what I’ve come to think of as the anti-Turandot—Zheng’s Monkey: Journey to the West, ﬁrst performed at the Manchester International Festival in 2007 and staged at the Met in 2013. Written by Zheng with music by Damon Albarn of Blur and Gorillaz, Monkey is based on an actual 16th-century Chinese fable; is sung entirely in Mandarin, by Chinese performers; and is produced without sacrificing any of the colorful spectacle or pageantry opera audiences love. Lyric does get credit for its own ongoing efforts to support new works by a more diverse crew. To date, Freud has boldly commissioned a pair of mariachi operas (the ﬁrst of which was created when he was still running the Houston Grand Opera) and has launched a partnership with the Chicago Urban League that has enlisted black high school students to write a new opera based on the stories of their lives. Although she doesn’t advocate censorship, “if we have some voices of the culture representing itself in the dialogue,” Andre suggests, “maybe we won’t need Turandot any more.” It’s probably unrealistic to think that Turandot could ever be phased out—it’s too popular with hard-core opera fans and too lucrative for the companies that stage it. But hopefully opera houses can tackle it in a way that actually confronts the Turandot’s Orientalism head-on rather than preserving it while simultaneously dismissing it as incidental or trivial to its popularity, as I’d argue Lyric has done this time around. Staging works by a more diverse set of creators could help Turandot be one voice among a choir, instead of a lone soloist. v TURANDOT Through 1/27: Thu 12/14 and Sun 12/17, 2 PM, Lyric Opera House, 20 N. Wacker, 312-8275600, lyricopera.org, $36-278.

v @rsamer

READER RECOMMENDED

b ALL AGES

THEATER

The black Othello By JUSTIN HAYFORD

ow that Chicago’s been granted, in quick succession, two full-scale, well-acted productions of Lolita Chakrabarti’s biodrama Red Velvet (Raven Theatre’s 2016 version closed a year and three days before Chicago Shakespeare Theater opened its current staging), it’s clear how singular an anti-achievement Chakrabarti’s play is. She manages to take the fascinating, complicated life of Ira Aldridge, perhaps the 19th century’s only African-American international theatrical star, and drain from it most everything that makes it fascinating and complicated. In its place she fabricates a tale that loses coherence under even moderate scrutiny. Chakrabarti gets enough of the basics right to set things in motion, ably abetted by sure-footed director Gary Griffin. In the spring of 1833, Edmund Kean, one of London’s most popular actors, collapsed in the middle of his star turn as Othello at the renowned Covent Garden Theatre. The following night Aldridge went on in his stead, igniting a political and theatrical firestorm. Some newspapers were savage. The Figaro in London pledged to offer Aldridge “such a chastisement as must drive him from the stage he has dishonoured, and force him to find in the capacity of footman or street-sweeper, that level for which his colour appears to have rendered him peculiarly qualified.” After two performances the production closed, at which point the Figaro crowed it had “hunted the Nigger from the boards.” For Chakrabarti, such vitriol exemplifies workaday 19th-century racism, akin to the chilliness—and overt hostility—Aldridge receives from fellow castmates when he shows up for rehearsal and they’re aghast to discover he’s black (a difficult plot point to swallow considering Aldridge had made his London debut eight years earlier and maintained a steady stage career as “the African Roscius”). But much larger and more specific forces fueled the outrage. The abolitionist movement in England was putting tremendous pressure

on Parliament to end the slave trade in all British colonies, and a vote was scheduled that very spring. Through pure happenstance, Aldridge became an overnight propaganda icon for both abolitionist and anti-abolitionist forces. The best Chakrabarti can do to inﬂect this sweeping political narrative is to let the audience hear an angry crowd outside early in the play, never to be heard from again. Chakrabarti also imagines that London’s reception of a black Othello at Covent Garden was universally negative (it wasn’t). Unaccountably, her Aldridge seems entirely unprepared for such a response—despite having left his native New York precisely because he believed racist animus made a successful theatrical career there impossible. Just as curiously, his castmates seem mortiﬁed reading the negative reviews, even those who opposed his appearing on stage because of his race. It’s as though Chakrabarti jettisons historical credulity in order to drive home the point that racism is ugly. In another perplexing turn, Chakrabarti suggests Aldridge’s failure at Covent Garden not only severely hobbled his career (in truth, he was across the Thames a few days later in Othello at the Surrey Theatre) but ultimately drove him to madness. She opens her play with an aged, demented Aldridge, badgered by a young female journalist (whose sole purpose in the play is to point out that women also faced enormous career hurdles in the 19th century). One question haunts the ensuing two and a half hours: What caused a capable, tal-

ented, strong-willed man to lose his reason? Since Chakrabarti shows us almost nothing of Aldridge’s post-Coventry Garden life, she offers only one unsatisfying answer. (In case you’re wondering, Aldridge didn’t go mad. At the time of his death, he’d spent three decades touring Europe as an actor and lecturer, and he’d just ﬁnished negotiating a 100-performance tour of America that would have remunerated him handsomely. He’d made a London return in 1855 to great acclaim.) It seems Chakrabarti wants to reduce Aldridge to an uncompromising, trailblazing social justice crusader whose political idealism leaves him unable to abide a less-thanideal reality. This makes things relatively easy for an audience, but it leaves actor Dion Johnstone ﬁshing for depth where little exists. More importantly, the revision erases perhaps the most fascinating thing about Aldridge: his pandering to racist audiences. While on tour, he routinely followed Othello with a performance of The Padlock, an 18th-century comedy about a drunken, stingy, bumbling West Indian servant named Mungo. Was Aldridge subverting racist stereotypes by lampooning them, or playing the mercenary to a racist marketplace? As with so many of the most interesting aspects of Aldridge’s life, Chakrabarti doesn’t appear to care. v RED VELVET Through 1/21: Wed 1 and 7:30 PM, Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3 and 8 PM, Sun 2 PM (no show 12/24), Tue 7:30 PM; also Sun 12/31, 8 PM, and 1/7, 6:30 PM, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, 800 E. Grand, 312-595-5600, chicagoshakes.com, $58-$68.

Dion Johnstone (front) with Greg Matthew Anderson, Jürgen Hooper, Bri Sudia, and Tiﬀany Renee Johnson ò LIZ LAUREN

Marc Maron and Kate Berlant in Easy ò NETFLIX

SMALL SCREEN

Easy to hate-watch By MEAGHAN GARVEY

TV show that begs to be hate-watched isn’t, by definition, a “bad” show. The most glaring example is Girls, a “good” show that’s nearly impossible to view through any lens other than unﬁltered contempt—its quartet of fairly loathsome Brooklyn gentrifiers, moving messily through their 20s, are subtly exaggerated caricatures that are meant to simultaneously represent and critique their demographic. But Girls is addictive because of the surfacelevel familiarity of the setting and styling, enough so I’ll clench my jaw while watching a very specific subset of upwardly mobile urban “creatives” behave noxiously. Besides, good TV doesn’t require characters you can personally vouch for; more often, the truth is closer to the opposite. Since it’s written into the millennial birthright that, in exchange for affordable health care, each major American city is entitled to its own comedy-drama series locals can mock knowingly while secretly hoping they’ll one day make a cameo, Joe Swanberg’s Easy seems like a blessing. Now in its second season, the Netﬂix show posits itself as the antidote for anyone tired of

seeing Chicago represented on television as “New York, but not” or in overwrought Dick Wolf melodramas. Easy presents a series of loosely connected vignettes about everyday Chicagoans, revolving mostly around sex and love and loneliness. (It’s been noted that the vast majority of these “everyday Chicagoans” are planted firmly on the north side, but I’d argue that’s better than the inevitably offensive alternative.) It’s a bit obvious to say Easy’s best character is the city itself, albeit in limited scope. But there’s something appealing about spotting recognizable bars and beers and landmarks presented with casual reverence, even if that appeal is just, “Hey, I’ve been there!” So I instinctively started cackling when episode three (“Side Hustle”) opens inside Cafe Mustache, a perfect monument to Logan Square hipsterdom, or whatever we’re calling “hipsterdom” these days. “Nailed it!” I thought, reminiscing over when I’d freelance from Mustache during the year I couldn’t afford Comcast. The dialogue snapped me out of my reverie. Annabelle (Jane Adams), a middle-aged theater actress we met in season one, is sputtering with delight as Sally—a sex blogger played by Slutever’s Karley Sciortino—details the feminist backlash against a recent post in which she confessed her gang-bang fantasy. “That’s thought-police shit, right?” Annabelle yelps. “Yeah, I definitely feel like I’m increasingly libertarian,” Sally replies, and the two laugh, bonding over their shared un-PC smugness. The episode goes on to juxtapose Sally, who builds her brand on her blog but pays her rent via sex work, with Od (Odinaka Ezeokoli, playing a lightly fictionalized J

DECEMBER 14, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 25

ARTS & CULTURE continued from 25

Photo by Chris Lee

20th Annual Concert in Chicago

Strauss Symphony of America featuring

Nir Kabaretti, conductor (Vienna)

Hege Gustava Tjønn, soprano (Vienna) Martin Piskorski, tenor (Vienna) Dancers from Europaballett St.Pölten (Austria) & International Champion Ballroom Dancers

European Singers, Ballroom Dancers & Ballet Enjoy Waltzes, Polkas & Operetta Excerpts

Saturday, Dec. 30, 2017 at 2:30 pm ORCHESTRA HALL SYMPHONY CENTER

312.294.3000 • cso.org salutetovienna.com/chicago Produced by Attila Glatz Concert Productions. Artists subject to change without notice.

26 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 14, 2017

version of himself), a Nigerian immigrant and aspiring stand-up comic who drives an Uber and guides for Big Bus Tours to make ends meet. Presumably, these characters represent two sides of a similar coin: both use autobiography as creative source material, and both must indulge their tedious customers’ egos in order to pay the bills. Still, I was along for the ride, glib libertarianism aside, until the final scene, where Annabelle debuts her hot mess of a stand-up routine, stammering “Hate speech is free speech, you fuckers!” to a politely uneasy audience. We’re supposed to cringe at her performance, but we’re also meant to recall Annabelle’s backstory from season one: she’s lonely, unfulfilled, and unloved. And so we’re meant to understand—perhaps even sympathize with—the conditions under which this harsh new worldview was born. In short, the Chicago of Easy is by and large a judgment-free zone, populated by flawed but well-intentioned people in cozy threads they picked up at Village Discount Outlet. Hence, in season two, there are stories of Beverly yuppies in training conspiring to narc on a neighborhood package thief; stories about the bumbling soft opening of an open marriage; more stories about craft breweries and artisanal dog-biscuit start-ups. (We all know SAIC can be a cornucopia of fart-huffing post-postmodernism, but we collectively abandoned performance art about iPhone selfies in 2015.) The characters are clearly Chicagoans, though not particularly interesting ones. And while it often feels like Swanberg goes out of his way to focus on the most tedious subjects imaginable, you can’t say he doesn’t have a distinct style. Chicago is an apt canvas for the muffled, slow-paced, hyperreal mode of filmmaking Swanberg’s been pushing since the mid2000s. If the city is Easy’s best attribute, the most frustrating aspect of the show isn’t a specific individual but how Swanberg frames them all—with a kind of gentle midwestern tone, scored by reassuring soul songs and lit serenely in orange-streetlight glow. There’s something unshakably patronizing in this presentation of not-terribly-dire interpersonal conflicts, an unchallenging perspective that nudges us to root for almost everyone. This storytelling mode drives Easy’s narrow narratives, rather than any claim toward a broad representation of the “Chicago everyman.” The characters are tenderly idealized, even in their fuck-ups, to the point of complacency—nice people with relatable growing

pains and artsy hobbies who talk, in a chill way, about absolutely nothing. In its efforts to avoid melodrama, Easy creates a new kind of cliche, an inverted “Da Bears!” impression that instead bashfully stammers, “Yeah, uh, haha, I do community theater” over a tallboy of Hamm’s. Season two’s most fully realized episode, “Conjugality,” reprises Marc Maron’s role from season one as Jacob, a successful but smarmy graphic novelist who treats the women in his life like garbage, then plumbs their failed relationships for source material (because there’s such a void of novels about wack men’s gross sex lives). “Conjugality” succeeds not because Jacob’s ex-wife exacts some small yet satisfying revenge by sabotaging his upcoming release, but because his character veers the farthest from Swanberg’s model Chicagoan. Demographically speaking, Jacob doesn’t exactly break the mold, but at least he’s not another well-intentioned dork who has OK sex and medium-size dreams. He just plainly sucks; his story is unresolvable, not because life’s complicated but because he’s an irredeemable schemer whose art is dumb. Easy presents itself as a show about sex, but in truth it’s a show about self-image—even the episodes featuring couples are really about individuals. And believe it or not, the midwest has raging narcissists too! Even at its best, Easy’s full-on individualization of perspective—the storytelling mode that sees each person’s life as a screenplay, no matter how banal—comes at the expense of any real consideration of Chicago’s broader structural realities. And it’s this stubbornly small-stakes focus that ultimately makes Easy feel somewhat false, even though it takes place in the “real world.” Each story ends with an overwhelming “welp!” or a minor conﬂict tenderly half-resolved. The characters are tethered to one another but unaffected by the city’s sociopolitical framework beyond who drinks at which bars. And to suggest that this is the Chicago way of seeing—or even just a Chicago way of seeing—feels condescending to Chicagoans I know, who are urgent, thoughtful, accountable, and critical. (And funny! Why is nobody on this show funny?) The Chicagoans I know would never suffer bullshit out of midwestern nicety. The Chicagoans I know would’ve booed Annabelle offstage the moment she got out of pocket. Don’t let ’em sell us short. v EASY is streaming on Netflix

v @meaghan_garvey

Get showtimes at chicagoreader.com/movies.

ARTS & CULTURE Sally Hawkins in The Shape of Water

MOVIES

Trapped in the kiddie pool By BEN SACHS

he Shape of Water, the latest fantasy from director Guillermo del Toro (Hellboy, Pan’s Labyrinth), is essentially a children’s movie for adults, inspiring a sense of wonder but also of passivity. It looks marvelous—one can easily get caught up in the lavish production design and inventive special effects, and the graceful camera movements carry one through the meticulously designed environments. The storytelling is fantastic and straightforward, like that of a fairy tale. Yet The Shape of Water is also a patronizing film; del Toro and his cowriter, Vanessa Taylor, tell viewers what to think and feel at every turn, then congratulate them for responding appropriately. Set in the early 1960s, the ﬁlm depicts the social mores of that era in simple, black-and-white terms to make contemporary audiences feel good about their modern, liberal values. Its primary aim is to reassure.

Del Toro sets the tone with the opening sequence, which shows the heroine, Elisa (Sally Hawkins), asleep in a room ﬁlled with water. A narrator—later revealed to be her neighbor, Giles (Richard Jenkins)—describes Elisa as a princess, framing the story as a modern-day fairy tale. The room is ﬁlled with vivid period details—worn modernist furniture, tall windows that open onto a bustling cityscape— and the camera moves fluidly about them. Even after del Toro reveals this sequence to be a dream, the camera continues to track balletically through Elisa’s apartment, and Alexandre Desplat’s fanciful score maintains an ambience of wonderment. This is a child’s view of adulthood, complete with storybook imagery and language. The next scenes show Elisa embarking on her nightly routine, as structured as a child’s activities. She wakes in the middle of the evening, takes a bath, prepares hard-boiled

eggs, then visits Giles in the apartment next door before leaving for her job at an aeronautical research institute, where she works the night shift as a cleaning woman. She uses an egg timer to monitor the duration of each task, and they proceed like clockwork. Elisa seems a bit like an overgrown child: because she can’t speak, she communicates with sign language and uses broad gestures and facial expressions. She’s also friendly and trusting, displaying goodwill toward not only Giles but also the immigrant who owns her apartment building and her coworkers at the institute. Del Toro presents Elisa in such idealized terms that one can’t help but sympathize with her, and Hawkins’s winning performance sweetens the deal. Elisa’s warm nature is thrown into relief by the gloominess of her workplace. The institute, deﬁned by concrete ﬂoors and giant, ugly machines, is a cross between an ogre’s dungeon and a mad scientist’s lab, and sure enough, both a monster and a madman soon enter the story. The madman is Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon), the new overseer J

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ARTS & CULTURE continued from 27 of the institute, whom del Toro and Taylor depict as a bully from the start. Strickland displays his bigotry when he introduces himself to Elisa and a black coworker, Zelda (Octavia Spencer); since Elisa can’t speak, he presumes that she can’t understand what he’s talking about. He’s humorless, stern, and intimidating—a personiﬁcation of repressive values.

Del Toro’s simplistic reduction of cold warera society divides people into openminded dreamers and narrow-minded villains.

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The monster is a humanoid aquatic creature that a group of U.S. scientists have recovered from the Amazon. Looking like a more complex version of the Creature From the Black Lagoon, the Amphibian Man (as he’s billed in the credits) is as tall as a person and covered with scales. Strickland and his cohorts keep it chained inside a water tank at the institute and plan to launch it into outer space as part of a secret mission. Cleaning the lab where the creature is being held, Elisa takes pity on it and feeds it one of her hard-boiled eggs. Over the next several nights, she communicates with the creature, teaching it sign language, and before long she decides to free it. The hair-raising rescue mission is one of the most impressive sequences in The Shape of Water, as Elisa, Giles, and Zelda race to smuggle the creature out of the institute before Strickland and his men can spot them.

ssss EXCELLENT

28 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 14, 2017

sss GOOD

Afterward, Elisa hides the Amphibian Man in her bathtub, waiting for the next high tide to release it into the ocean. Strickland, pressured to recover the creature by his superior (an army general who’s even meaner than he is), investigates the disappearance, eventually landing on Elisa’s trail. The remainder of the film alternates between her friendship with the creature (which blossoms, improbably, into romance) and Strickand’s dogged efforts to find it. Strickland becomes increasingly monstrous as the movie proceeds, spewing bigoted language toward anyone who isn’t a white man (he’s particularly cruel toward Zelda, making ugly generalizations about her race when he interrogates her about the creature’s disappearance) and behaving sadistically toward anyone who stands in his way. He even starts to look like a monster: when the creature was being transported to the lab, it used its claws to slash off two of Strickland’s fingers, and over the course of the film, his reattached fingers turn gangrenous and drip with pus. By making Strickland physically hideous, del Toro emphasizes his malign nature, but it’s an unnecessary detail, since the character was already awful. Del Toro also overplays his hand in characterizing the heroes. Midway into the film, he reveals that Giles is gay when the character makes a pass at a friendly restaurant owner; the latter promptly kicks Giles out of the restaurant, along with a black couple who want to eat there. Though superfluous to the story, the scene reflects the movie’s mission, to inspire sympathy with outsiders and anger toward anyone who would prevent them from experiencing love. This simplistic reduction of cold war-era society divides people into open-minded dreamers and narrow-minded villains. The movie’s worldview is as easy to like as the protagonist and her friends, but del Toro lays it on so thick that there’s no room for counterargument or even independent thought. Ultimately his perspective is every bit as confining as the giant tank housing the creature at the lab, and this makes The Shape of Water, for all its good intentions and visual imagination, a limited experience. v THE SHAPE OF WATER ss Directed by Guillermo del Toro. R, 123 min. For showtimes visit chicagoreader.com/movies.

v @1bsachs

ss AVERAGE

s POOR

•

WORTHLESS

MUSIC IN ROTATION

4544 N LINCOLN AVENUE, CHICAGO IL OLDTOWNSCHOOL.ORG • 773.728.6000

A Reader staﬀer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn.

The Eurythmics in 2014 ò KEVIN WINTER

The cover of Bob Weir’s 1972 solo debut, Ace

JUST ADDED • ON SALE THIS FRIDAY! 1/27

2/10 2/11 2/18 2/18 2/24 3/4 3/7 3/10

Uncovered: Sisters are Doin' It For Themselves • A tribute to pioneering female artists from Aretha Franklin to Wanda Jackson! Sexteto Milonguero Jay Farrar Big Bad Voodoo Daddy Sonia De Los Santos (kids) Bela Fleck & Abigail Washburn Ricky Skaggs & Kentucky Thunder Lunasa California Guitar Trio

FOR TICKETS, VISIT OLDTOWNSCHOOL.ORG FRIDAY, DECEMBER 15 8PM

Hayes Carll FRIDAY, DECEMBER 15 8PM

Kate Renegade formerly Nest / Many Places In Szold Hall

Gyda Valtysdottir ò COURTESY THE ARTIST

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 16 8PM

LUCA CIMARUSTI

MIKE GEBEL Head booker and venue manager for the Empty Bottle

events director for Audiotree

Bob Weir, Ace My current favorite LP from the expansive Grateful Dead family tree is the 1972 solo debut by Dead rhythm guitarist Bob Weir. Released the same year as the solo debuts of Jerry Garcia and Mickey Hart, Ace is straightforward rock ’n’ roll, with Bobby backed by the greatest band on earth: the Grateful Dead. (This is basically a Dead album under another name.) No fluff, no filler, no meandering jams . . . just unstoppable tunes.

Gyda Valtysdottir, Epicycle Cellist Gyda Valtysdottir is best known from mercurial Icelandic group Múm, but last year the composer and improviser released a collection of reinterpreted classical compositions that I’ve been loving this fall. The nine pieces, which date back to 100 A.D. (the ancient “Seikilos Epitaph”), are delicate, spacious, and hauntingly beautiful. Originally released only on CD and only in Iceland, Epicycle was “reissued” in October on Figureight, a new label that’s oﬀ to a helluva start in its ﬁrst year.

Anniversary tours I love taking road trips down memory lane, especially if it involves Tegan & Sara and Frightened Rabbit. These bands are celebrating the tenth birthdays of their classic records The Con and The Midnight Organ Fight, respectively. Listening to my favorite acts play full-album gigs really takes me back. I hope I can hear more of these anniversary tours in 2018, because thinking about the “now” is overrated.

Reader music listings coordinator

Song Exploder This podcast invites artists to break down every last detail about how they write and record their music, starting with the story and inspiration and leading into the studio process. Presented as an interview intercut with demo recordings and isolated master tracks, Song Exploder is so honest and fascinating that it can keep me totally engaged even when I’m absolutely not a fan of the musician whose work is getting dissected (the Lumineers, what?). The best episodes so far have been the ones with Converge, St. Vincent, Metallica, and Iggy Pop. 104.3 Jams Imagine my surprise when I went shuffling through the radio dial and arrived at what I thought was soft-rock station K-Hits, only to hear Mark Morrison’s “Return of the Mack.” About a month ago, K-Hits turned into 104.3 Jams, a station completely devoted to all the 90s hip-hop and R&B that soundtracked my middle-school dances—songs from a simpler time, when for some baﬄing reason Ja Rule’s out-of-key yelling seemed like a necessary addition to nearly every song on the radio.

Firm Believers, Hard Country We’ve got the Hoyle Brothers happy hour every Friday at the Bottle, so I get my share of “hard country,” but boy howdy was I was delighted to stumble upon Chicago’s Firm Believers early this year. These local punks play cosmic country with a rock ’n’ roll heart, and my favorites are “Last Will & Testament,” the self-effacing “Born to Loose,” and a pair of howlers, “Circles” and “I Get By.” Classic cuts, start to finish—Hard Country is damn fine songwriting and sounds like the ghost of Gram Parsons. Liam Gallagher’s press cycle I don’t care how good his new album is, it’s been a joy to have Liam in the press behind As You Were. He seemingly never turns down an interview or opportunity to share his crass, unfiltered, and often foul-mouthed observations. My personal favorites are Liam’s Weekly Music Corner on Vice News, where I found our tastes surprisingly similar, and the “best and worst haircuts” piece for NME, which is peak L.G. Here’s hoping for a podcast or a spoken-word tour.

NIKKI HARTEL Sponsorship and

Broken Social Scene, Hug of Thunder and reunion tour This amazing group of humans and musicians, who take care of one another and their fans, got the band back together. Broken Social Scene’s album and reunion tour featured familiar faces, including Feist and Amy Millan, and other Canadian heroes such as Andy Kim and opening band the Belle Game—both very welcome additions. Hug of Thunder gives me the same glorious feeling I get as an adult when I can still sock-slide on hardwood ﬂoors like an agile teen. The Eurythmics’ 2018 vinyl reissue campaign If you know me well (which you probably don’t), you know I’m a huge Annie Lennox fan, which means I love the Eurythmics. Dave Stewart and Annie Lennox are an untouchable dynamic duo (if you say otherwise, we are ﬁghting). Their music and videos are beyond inspirational—they’re transformational. If you don’t own their records yet, not all is lost, because you can preorder vinyl reissues now! Also noteworthy is an 11-minute retrospective “Eurythmix” by DJ Earworm, compiled from 23 videos spanning 1983 to 2005.

Mark Olson

(of the Jayhawks)

In Szold Hall

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 17 5 & 7PM

Irish Christmas in America SUNDAY, DECEMBER 31 8PM

New Year's Eve with Over the Rhine SUNDAY, JANUARY 14 10:30AM

Justin Roberts and the Not Ready for Naptime Players • Kids Concert

SUNDAY, JANUARY 14 7PM

Kaumakaiwa Kanaka'ole with Shawn Pimental In Szold Hall

ACROSS THE STREET IN SZOLD HALL 4545 N LINCOLN AVENUE, CHICAGO IL

1/12 1/19 1/26

Global Dance Party: Dos Santos Anti-Beat Orchestra Global Dance Party: Big Mean Sound Machine Global Dance Party: Ethnic Dance Chicago Celebrates the EU featuring Mazurka Wojciechowska and Paul Collins

WORLD MUSIC WEDNESDAY SERIES FREE WEEKLY CONCERTS, LINCOLN SQUARE

1/10 1/17

Rómulo Castro García Marimba Oxib K'ajau

OLDTOWNSCHOOL.ORG DECEMBER 14, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 29

30 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 14, 2017

Recommended and notable shows and critics’ insights for the week of December 14

MUSIC

b ALL AGES F

PICK OF THE WEEK

Dreamy postpunk trio Dehd celebrates the release of two records in one

ò ASH WINDBIGLER

DEHD, DEEPER, GLYDERS

Fri 12/15, 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $8. 21+

THURSDAY14 Olivia Block Carol Genetti opens. 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $10. 18+ On most of Olivia Block’s records, what she does to sounds matters much more than how they were originally made; using field recordings, instrumental passages, or electronics, she cuts, distorts, and layers the material until even the quietest passages feel packed with multiple meanings. But in concert, things can happen for a long time without intervention; the sustained organ notes and prerecorded electronics of 132 Ranks, which she performed last April at University of Chicago’s Rockefeller Chapel, turned the building’s interior into one giant instrument for an hour. Block brings together her studio and performance practices on her latest recording, an untitled piece for piano and organ that has just been released by the British label Another Timbre. Its three movements include long passages of Block’s unedited piano playing, some of which is purely acoustic and some of which is ampliﬁed so that notes sound like sonar pings. Emphatic ﬁgures and single resonating notes call attention to the space around the instrument, while sequences in which the strings have been damped by various preparations make you aware of how much metal is strung inside of the thing. The record isn’t entirely recorded live; Block turns time back upon itself by using a microcassette player to record herself playing, then accompanying the tape as it plays back from inside the piano. It also employs overdubbed piano clusters and subliminal organ drones. In anoth-

er temporal reversal, Block doesn’t ﬁnish scoring her pieces until after she has recorded them. She and Haptic’s Adam Sonderberg, who coproduced the album and will play organ and second piano tonight, will use the completed score as their guide as they perform the entire piece in real time. —BILL MEYER

Us & Us Only Prawn headlines; Slingshot Dakota People Like You, and Us & Us Only open. 8:30 PM, Beat Kitchen, 2100 W. Belmont, $12. 17+ On July’s Full Flower (Topshelf), Baltimore’s Us & Us Only play indie rock reminiscent of the brackish waters that split the eastern part of the state of Maryland, the Chesapeake Bay. The genre is open to mixing many different things; Us & Us Only’s version is multilayered, charmingly timid and tender to the touch. The group allows their music to breathe and give it room to stealthily borrow ideas from other genres, such as the pondering melodies of slowcore, the minimal plaintiveness of folk, and the bare verses and walloping choruses of emo. Full Flower occasionally veers from one genre to the next, be it the reedy acoustic folk of “Shame” or the intimate emo of “Kno,” which is anchored by thick guitars reminiscent of early Pedro the Lion tracks. But no matter what inﬂuences Full Flower may recall, Us & Us Only manage to leave a footprint in the increasingly muddy landscape of indie rock. The euphoria encoded into the chorus for “Lawn” is another addition to the genre’s long list of great moments, and the result so catchy it’s liable to root itself in your memories and burst forth when you least expect it. —LEOR GALIL

ONE OF THE BEST local releases of 2016 was the debut self-titled tape from Dehd on the proliﬁc Maximum Pelt Records. The trio of guitarist-vocalist Jason Balla (of Ne-Hi and Earring), bassist-vocalist Emily Kempf (of Heavy Dreams and Veil), and stand-up, cymbal-less drummer Eric McGrady explored dreamy, hazy postpunk with beautiful vocal interplay; simple, plunky guitar; and a dark, behind-the-beat throb. Earlier this year Dehd released a follow-up tape, Fire of Love, on Inﬁnity Cat Recordings, which opened up their sonic palette with noisy guitar, upbeat tempos, complex arrangements, and a bit of sunny bounce. The tapes play back-to-back like they’re two sides of an excellent coin, and now they’ll be two sides to the same record: Maximum Pelt has teamed up with Wicker Park record store and label Shuga to press them on one convenient vinyl package, with Dehd on side A and Fire of Love on side B. This show is the LP’s release party. —LUCA CIMARUSTI

FRIDAY15 Matt Wilson’s Christmas Tree-O See also Saturday. 9 PM, Green Mill, 4802 N. Broadway, $15. 21+ Few jazz musicians combine love of tradition with mordant wit like drummer and bandleader Matt Wilson. That combination is perfectly suited to his Christmas Tree-O project, which sanguinely essays holiday themes—both classic and schmaltzy—with gusto and ardor. But as the group established on its entertaining eponymous 2010 album, it isn’t above tweaking the material too. It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to even consider playing “The Chipmunk Song”—whose very title sends shivers of pitch-shifted whining down my spine—but by treating it with a lurching rhythmic attack and an even more wild, rheumy bass clarinet voice (courtesy of the versatile Jeﬀ Lederer), the trio imparts an acidic bite that showcases the tune on a strictly musical level. A sly take on “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch” plays up the song’s inherent theatricality without becoming a parody. Most of the material is interpreted with a more generous touch; there’s a snappy, almost sock-hop feel to “Winter Wonderland,” while the group echoes the approach of Chicago reedist Mars Williams by braiding Albert Ayler’s lovely “Angels” with “Angels We Have Heard on High.” A hurtling explosion of the Vince Guaraldi ballad “Christmas Time Is Here” retains the melody’s tender beauty, while Lederer’s hearty tenor rips it into shreds. Wilson understands that much of this material can drive people crazy, and it’s to his credit that the trio routinely meets listeners halfway, turn-

Olivia Block ò ANDREA BAUER

ing in performances that use inescapable themes as a launchpad for what a good jazz band does best— improvise. And as with all Wilson projects, it’s also fun as hell. Bassist Martin Wind rounds out the group. —PETER MARGASAK J

DECEMBER 14, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 31

MUSIC Marty Stuart & His Fabulous Superlatives

continued from 31

SATURDAY16

ò ALYSSE GAFKJEN

Marty Stuart & His Fabulous Superlatives 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, 4544 N. Lincoln, sold out. b Few active country artists possess the deep knowledge and love of the tradition’s history and lore of singer-songwriter Marty Stuart, who’s evolved into a gray eminence with a mixture of elegance and unquenchable curiosity. His latest album, Way Out West (Superlatone), draws upon this background to send a trippy love letter to the southwest, cowboy culture, and the drifter lifestyle. The record was coproduced by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell at his studio in Los Angeles. Campbell keeps the sound of Stuart’s crack backing band crisp and full, especially the delicious leads and textures of guitarist Kenny Vaughan. The album intersperses a number of evocative instrumentals; the opening mood piece, “Desert Prayer— Part 1,” collides Native American chants and spacey sitar figures in a brief, cosmic meditation, and several twang-heavy excursions flit between the influence of Link Wray, Dick Dale, Jimmy Bryant, and Italian composer Ennio Morricone (specifically his spaghetti western themes). The group also tackle the Benny Goodman classic “Air Mail Special,” made famous

in the country world by Jim & Jessie, with a generous dollop of Tex-Mex guitar ﬂourishes. Their cover of Johnny Cash’s harrowing “Lost in the Desert” is a blunt reflection of nature’s brutality, while the title track delivers a cosmic travelogue whose mile markers are the multicolored pills the singer recalls taking along the way. “Time Won’t Wait” delivers old-fashioned carpe diem pronouncements over a soaring Byrdsian attack, while the string-swaddled ballad “Please Don’t Say Goodbye” conveys the lush, sorrowful mood of Glenn Campbell’s “Wichita Lineman.” —PETER MARGASAK

Matt Wilson’s Christmas Tree-O See Friday. 8 PM, Green Mill, 4802 N. Broadway, $15. 21+

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32 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 14, 2017

John McCowen Ben Lamar Gay opens; Crushed Love DJs between sets. Damon Locks also screens his animation for Emmett Kelly & Rob Mazurek’s Alien Flower Sutra. 5:30 PM, Logan Hardware, 2532 W. Fullerton. F b Although clarinetist John McCowen is a founding member of the Chicago art-rock band Wei Zhongle, I only encountered his playing long after he moved to California for graduate studies at Mills College. Earlier this year his contributions to a tape by the Vibrating Skull Trio knocked me out; his overblown lines push things into the red and pulse with intense energy. I’m even more impressed after hearing the stunning new Solo Contra (International Anthem), a deep dive into the microscopic qualities of the contrabass clarinet. McCowen’s playing on the recording is purely acoustic, but he employed 13 microphones on his instrument to pick up every minuscule sound, key clack, and breath (an approach reminiscent of what reedist Colin Stetson does in a more pop-oriented direction). Over three extended pieces, his striated long tones glisten with sour harmonics, cavernous overtones, and breath surges that make the music expand and contract in visceral waves. On “Chopper HD” the upperregister squawks weave in and out of a low-pitched drone like live wire spasming on the ground, while “Berths 1-3” is a gritty exercise in dynamics with wild swings in density and harmonic eﬀects that make it sound like he’s sitting behind a bank of electronics instead of an unwieldy reed instrument. The results are unabashedly exploratory, and McCowen engages in his investigation of sound with a natural sense of flow that keeps pulling me back in. He’ll play music from the album as part of an International Anthem in-store, which also features a set by Ben Lamar Gay with video artist Kim Alpert and a screening of an animation created by Damon Locks for Alien Flower Sutra, the project of Rob Mazurek and Emmett Kelly. —PETER MARGASAK

Dave Rempis The Few headline. 2 PM, May Chapel, Rosehill Cemetery, 5800 N. Ravenswood. F b

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Chicago reedist Dave Rempis is well established as one of the city’s finest improvisers, a player who can adjust and adapt to fluid, unexpected musical situations with stunning alacrity, sensitivity, and ingenuity. But his ability to live in the moment doesn’t mean he’s not a thinker and a

Daymaker Camp Howard, Evening Glow, and Bike Cops open. 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $7. 21+ “Condos are killing my country / My city gets nothing / Burning like a rash from my undies / My city gets nothing,” Erin Delaney warbles before unleash-

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In 2000 the Brazilian pop singer Bebel Gilberto— daughter of the brilliant bossa nova pioneer João Gilberto—achieved a breakthrough with her album Tanta Tempo (Six Degrees), a masterful blend of sensual bossa nova grooves with gentle club flourishes that, like Starbucks, quickly became a model of middle-class sophistication. Though the music remains lovely if a bit toothless, in the years since its release she has struggled to parlay this approach into something fresh. She’s worked with a shifting array of producers and has toggled between Brazilian forms and American pop styles, but while most of her subsequent releases have been well made, they haven’t exactly lit the world on fire. Her new EP, Live at the Belly Up (Belly Up Live), a live recording made in the titular San Diego club with only her longtime acoustic guitarist Masa Shimizu, offers a new mode: unplugged. Gilberto’s attractively scuﬀed voice dispatch- J Daymaker ò ALEXUS MCLANE

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ing her full-throttle yowl on “Condos,” the antigentriﬁcation single Chicago’s Daymaker released in June. The band comes staggering in, sloshing loose feedback wails around the song’s can’t-getit-out-of-your-head indie-pop hook. Daymaker’s a bit of a mess and a bit of a known quantity—snotty punk rawk bands litter the midwest as liberally as abandoned industrial plants—but Delaney’s pissedoff charisma oozes from the recording, and the band embraces its underdog status with winningly mean-spirited resolve. A live recording at the Empty Bottle sponsored by DIY collective Young Camelot is raucous and crowd-pleasing. “I get bioluminescent when you come around / I change colors like a deep . . . sea . . . squid!” Delaney howls during “Glowworm.” It may be a love song, but when she’s in front of an enthusiastic crowd, it also comes across as a goofy, semicrazed declaration of loyalty to the audience; Delaney’s determined to belong to the milieu she ﬁnds herself in. It’s hard to imagine Daymaker blowing up nationally, partially because they’re so deliberately unpolished, but mostly because they seem refreshingly committed to being where they are. —NOAH BERLATSKY

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planner. Rempis has developed a strong practice as a musician through years of toil and focus, and he looks at the big picture with wide-eyed vision. In his liner-note essay for his recent album Lattice (Aerophonic) he admits that he took his time to enter the fray as a solo saxophone improviser, remarking on the lineage of artists that have excelled in the format. He finally took the plunge this past spring, embarking on an extensive U.S. tour that allowed him to both share and sharpen his solo performance skills. He also engaged in the kind of community building that’s made him such an important figure on Chicago’s scene as a key figure behind Elastic Arts; most of his 31 solo sets among 27 cities he visited were complemented with collaborative performances with local musicians. The sometimes fiery, sometimes pensive performances on Lattice reveal the value and rigor of his approach. The percussive pops, rude snorts, key clacking, and tightly coiled upper-register sallies of “If You Get Lost in Santa Paula” and the high-octane blasts, split tones, and screams of “Loose Snus” both convey the kind of muscular, paint-peeling aggression Rempis is known for. He’s one of the loudest saxophonists I’ve ever heard, but it’s the more gentle, more lyric side of the collection that has kept me most riveted. The album opener, a surprising rendition of Billy Strayhorn’s ballad “A Flower Is a Lovesome Thing,” is suffused with tender patience and a foggy tonal aura, its melody emerging from sibilant clouds of sound. “Linger Longer” expresses its lyric soul both directly and through elaborate circular breathing, which creates mosaic-like constructions of glimmering tones. Rempis also performs as part of a quartet with Jim Baker, Kent Kessler, and Avreeayl Ra at Elastic on Thu 12/14. —PETER MARGASAK

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es the material with intimacy, but she doesn’t really bring anything new to chestnuts like Caetano Veloso’s tropicalia standard “Baby” or the Emílio Santiago gem “Bananeira.” It’s an utter mystery why anyone thought it was a good idea to include a woefully inept audience sing-along on her version of the Marcos Valle crossover smash “So Nice,” on which she herself ﬂubs some of the lines. And on a cover of Radiohead’s “Creep,” it’s embarrassing to hear her try to convey the wounded anger of Thom Yorke as she insists “You’re so fucking special.” For these shows she performs with a trio—here’s hoping the drummer brings some vitality missing from her recent eﬀort. —PETER MARGASAK

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34 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 14, 2017

Timbuck2 Forever 9 PM, House of Blues, 329 N. Dearborn, $30-$35. 21+ In December 2015 world-class DJ and WGCI on-air personality Timothy Jones, better known as DJ Timbuck2, died from stage-four renal cancer at the age of 34, leaving the Chicago hip-hop community bereft. Jones had been involved in the scene since before he could legally enter most clubs; in the early 90s, he apprenticed with Common’s righthand DJ, Twilite Tone, who was friends with his older sister. Jones went on to spin at popular clubs such as Dragon Room and Slick’s Lounge in the early 2000s, joined WGCI and the elite DJ crew Heavy Hitters in the mid-aughts, and went on to tour as a DJ for Kanye West and Lupe Fiasco. As his fame grew he constantly gave back to the community that had given him so much, using his GCI program GoILL Radio to spread the gospel of new artists whose music had never been played on commercial radio; that list includes Cool Kids, King Louie, Rockie Fresh, Jeremih, Vic Mensa, and Chance the Rapper. Roughly a week and a half after Jones died, his family and friends banded together for a tribute at Metro called Timbuck2 Forever, a bigger version of his weekly DJ night, Timbuck2uesdays, which has continued at Beauty Bar in his honor. The location has changed for the third annual Timbuck2 Forever, but everything else is more or less the same. The event is a fund-raiser for the Timothy Francis Jones Foundation, which was launched to educate men of

color about health care and how to seek help with cancer treatment. In just a couple years, the foundation has built partnerships with the UIC Cancer Research Center and Rush Cancer Research Center. As with each previous year, the lineup won’t be revealed until roughly 24 hours before the doors open, but the ﬁrst two years featured unannounced appearances by De La Soul, Vic Mensa, Joey Purp, Twista, Juice, and so many other names the list could ﬁll up another show preview. Many of these folks are ordinarily headliners, but refrain from promoting the event as a show of their own, because they’re in the house for the same reason everyone else is—to honor Timbuck2. —LEOR GALIL

WEDNESDAY20 Bebel Gilberto See also Tuesday. 8 PM, City Winery, 1200 W. Randolph, $45-$44. b Belmont & Clark Ovef Ow headlines; Belmont & Clark, Tomorrow the Moon, and Aphorism open. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, $5. 21+ The Minimal Beat began life as a music blog in 2011, and like many music blogs that came before it, it has branched out into other ventures, including a weekly radio show on Loyola’s WLUW. In 2014 it launched a label, TMB Limited, which boasts a small but varied catalog of releases, including slick contemporary yacht rock (Adam Ashbach’s “Street Lights” single), jangly garage-pop (Lucille Furs, who previously released a TMB Limited single as Shah Jahan), juiced-up electro-pop (Kaneholler), and far-out experimental recordings (Willis Earl Beal’s recent work under his own name and the pseudonym Nobody). Minimal electro duo Belmont & Clark further expand TMB Limited’s reach. Their new cassingle, “Headwave” b/w “Reverse Entropy,” takes blocky, brittle Krautrock synths and grafts them onto video-game percussion to create oddly playful neofuturistic melodies. As much as these songs are indebted to pop’s synth past, Belmont & Clark’s effervescent, lo-fi kick place them squarely in our present. —LEOR GALIL v

FOOD & DRINK

MIRASOL | $$$ R 205 E. Pearson 312-799-3599 marisolchicago.com

Flax-seed crackers, brussels sprouts and whiteﬁsh with candied poppy seeds and orange vinaigrette, sunﬂower hummus; honey-garlic sourdough toast with burrata, candied squash, semidried persimmons, and charred ginger ò JAMIE RAMSAY

I RESTAURANT REVIEW

With Mirasol, Jason Hammel paints a new canvas

The Lula chef’s menu at the MCA is its own form of contemporary art. By MIKESULA

’ve been obliged to review an excess of high-profile hotel restaurants in 2017, and it’s been making me grouchy all year. Even the good ones follow a formula that implies they aren’t for Chicagoans. By their nature hotel restaurants encourage visitors to stay in their bubble and avoid exploring the thousands of other cheffy cheeseburgers the city has to offer—they’re about keeping in, not attracting. I wasn’t too worried about that happening with Marisol, the new restaurant on the ground ﬂoor of the Museum of Contemporary Art. Yes, the MCA is a tourist attraction, and one would expect the visiting eyeballers to require their familiar comforts after a long hour confronting the blood splatters and panicked text of, say, Raymond Pettibon’s No Title (To Dust Cover . . . Shut) or the grinning one-eyed monster in Paul Sarkisian’s Night With Raping Wave. But you don’t go to the MCA expecting not to be challenged, and that should extend to Marisol. Sure, the lunch menu does feature a burger. But it’s a veggie burger. There’s no chef in Chicago more deserving of this lofty culinary platform than Lula Cafe’s Jason Hammel, Logan Square OG and early champion of the four seasons and the local farms that live by them. Marisol refers to the Parisian-born Venezuelan pop artist of the same name, known for her boxy figurative

sculptures, hanging out with Warhol, and donating the museum’s first piece of artwork. I’m not sure exactly how the design honors her work, but the environs—vaulted ceilings and bright white walls featuring British artist Chris Ofili’s plantlike line drawings and prominent mural of a cave-dwelling green sorceress—are engaging enough without being a distraction from Hammel and chef de cuisine Sarah Rinkavage’s menu, which is pretty riveting in its own right. A quartet of snacks including marcona almonds, olives, and oysters references a Spanish style of nibbling, particularly a plate of octopus done in the style of the Spanish oil-and-vinegar-marinated anchovies known as boquerones, only slightly upstaged by the garlicky saffron-stained potato chips they arrive with. Sunflower hummus with flaxseed crackers sounds like a depressant at a vegan commune, but the creamy swirl of nut butter is suffused with tangy artichoke and almost cheesy thanks to nutritional yeast. The pile of nutty brittle it comes with should be sold by the bag in the gift shop. Burrata, the second-most obligatory menu item of the last decade, is here one of the period’s most original, garnished with candied squash, semidried persimmons, and charred ginger and served with honey-garlic sourdough toast. Brussels sprouts, another old warhorse, are revived plated three ways, whole raw and fried J

DECEMBER 14, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 35

Search the Reader’s online database of thousands of Chicago-area restaurants—and add your own review—at chicagoreader.com/food.

FOOD & DRINK Stuﬀed prawns roasted in walnut oil, with lardo, crab, and bitter greens; mafalde with goat-milk butter, sweet red peppers, black trumpet mushrooms, ricotta, and kale ò JAMIE RAMSAY

continued from 35 leaves alongside shavings piled to conceal smoky deposits of whitefish, its salinity countered by candied poppy seeds and orange vinaigrette. Whole roasted chicken, another standard, rests on an assemblage of rich pan juices, fresh herbs, masa dumplings (tamales

36 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 14, 2017

by any other name), and roasted squash, along with an herb-and-apple-bedecked tartine with chicken-liver mousse curlicued across the surface. Sweet, just barely cooked shrimp kissed with lardo and drizzled with brown butter and walnut-apple saba seems to channel a weirdly compelling union between sea life and apple

pie. A wobbly tower of Boston bibb lettuce and Granny Smith apples is pleasantly dilled with green goddess dressing inspired by a “natural food salad dressing” Marisol herself contributed to the 1977 Museum of Modern Art Artists’ Cookbook. It’s a work of minimalism that stands out in this crowd. Pastas are a forceful presence on the tight menu, including ropy rye-flour bucatini coiling among fat fresh clams and chunks of pancetta. Mafalde (short ruffled ropes) glistening with goat-milk butter tangle with sweet red peppers, meaty black trumpet mushrooms, fatty dabs of ricotta, and kale (you won’t notice it). And yet this particular menu strays off course here and there. Purple beets are a positive bummer, leaden slabs squirted with oily olive puree and huckleberry conserves without any dairy or acid to cut through the dense, beety fog. These are the taproots that encourage the unjust discrimination against all beets that infects most small children. On one occasion a whole roasted sea bream hit the tables with soft skin, maybe dampened by its overstory of an otherwise colorful and enjoyable salad of radishes and cranberry beans. The most challenging dish on the menu is a piece of swordfish steamed without the flavoring kiss of fire, perched on a mound of riced cauliflower and smothered in uni-tinged hollandaise with a topknot of sliced MightyVine cherry tomatoes. Apart from those, it’s a study in white I could probably better appreciate in one of the galleries upstairs.

Pastry chef Alison Cates ends things nicely with a deconstructed tres leches cake and coconut sorbet scattered with a textured chicory crumble that supports the liquid pleasures inherent in this dessert without making it collapse into a swamp of mush. The date cake is a chewy disk of fruit surrounded by chocolate gravel and dried apricot and topped by a ball of frozen keﬁr. And Cates’s individual ice creams conceal wonderful textural surprises, like candied fennel at the base of a scoop of apple cider sorbet or crushed macadamia nuts with coffee-coconut sorbet. Just a few cocktails—like the judiciously sweetened Sidney J, with sherry and tequila, or the Found in Photo, with Old Tom gin and the wine-and-unfermented-grape-juice liqueur Byrrh Grand—play support to some 50 whites, oranges, and reds by the bottle, most in the $50 to $80 range, and almost 20 by the glass, among them options like an orange Sikile Terre Siciliane Grecanico Dorato with apricot notes or a relative heavyweight like a Ligurian Rossese di Dolceacqua. The very best thing about Marisol is that Hammel and company aren’t presenting boring food. They’re challenging themselves, like artists are known to do. You slash the canvases sometimes when you do that. Fortunately, a restaurant isn’t a motionless painting. It’s an ongoing performance, and this is only the beginning of Marisol’s already promising run. v

v @MikeSula

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BAR REVIEW

Chicago’s only brewery-distillery opens a bar