Chicago Reader: print issue of December 17, 2015 (Volume 45, Number 12) by Chicago Reader

C H I C A G O ’ S F R E E W E E K LY | K I C K I N G A S S S I N C E 1 9 7 1 | D E C E M B E R 1 7, 2 0 1 5

BLACK, AUTISTIC, AND KILLED BY POLICE

Stephon Watts was diagnosed with Asperger’s at age nine— and shot dead by Calumet City cops at age 15. Now his family is working to keep other kids with autism out of the line of ﬁre. By ADRIENNE HURST 12

Music Oral history: 20 years of Hamid Drake and Michael Zerang’s wintersolstice concerts 27 Food & Drink Bar Marta shows the growing inﬂuence of Empire Sodikoﬀ. 39

2 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 17, 2015

THIS WEEK

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EDITOR JAKE MALOOLEY CREATIVE DIRECTOR PAUL JOHN HIGGINS DEPUTY EDITOR, NEWS ROBIN AMER CULTURE EDITOR TAL ROSENBERG FILM EDITOR J.R. JONES MUSIC EDITOR PHILIP MONTORO ASSOCIATE EDITORS KATE SCHMIDT, KEVIN WARWICK, BRIANNA WELLEN SENIOR WRITERS STEVE BOGIRA, MICHAEL MINER, MIKE SULA SENIOR THEATER CRITIC TONY ADLER STAFF WRITERS LEOR GALIL, DEANNA ISAACS, BEN JORAVSKY, AIMEE LEVITT, PETER MARGASAK, JULIA THIEL PHOTO EDITOR ANDREA BAUER GRAPHIC DESIGNER SUE KWONG MUSIC LISTINGS COORDINATOR LUCA CIMARUSTI SOCIAL MEDIA COORDINATOR RYAN SMITH CONTRIBUTING WRITERS NOAH BERLATSKY, JENA CUTIE, MATT DE LA PEÑA, ANNE FORD, ISA GIALLORENZO, JOHN GREENFIELD, JUSTIN HAYFORD, JACK HELBIG, DAN JAKES, BILL MEYER, SARAH NARDI, J.R. NELSON, MARISSA OBERLANDER, BEN SACHS, ZAC THOMPSON, DAVID WHITEIS, ALBERT WILLIAMS INTERNS MANUEL RAMOS, KACIE TRIMBLE

IN THIS ISSUE 5 Agenda Holiday theater, stand-up Neil Hamburger, the ﬁlm Christmas, Again, and more recommendations 8 City Life Street View: SAIC student Reygan Putman selfidentiﬁes as a “freak.” Chicagoans: A former Iraqi refugee on the struggles of adapting to the U.S. City Agenda: one sure thing to do every day of the week

10 Joravsky | Politics Rahm’s made matters worse for himself by bringing on a possible teachers’ strike. 11 Transportation Will a new plan ﬁnally bring a sidewalk to 130th Street?

MUSIC

ARTS & CULTURE

20 Film production Illinois taxpayers will be picking up part of the tab for Chi-Raq. 21 Dance Molly Shanahan’s latest work, Tiny Liquid Bones, grew from a state of forgetfulness. 21 Theater Chicago Shakes’s The Heir Apparent is a forced farce. Also: Steppenwolf’s Domesticated is a battle tooth and claw. 21 Comedy Max Lipchitz is using his one-night-only show at iO to help you find love. 23 Movies Paolo Sorrentino’s Youth is a great movie about movie people. Also: The Big Short identifies those responsible for the 2008 financial crisis—and you’re one of them.

27 Bringing back the sun for 25 years An oral history of the wintersolstice concerts that drummers Hamid Drake and Michael Zerang have been convening since 1990. 32 Shows of note Dogs on Acid, Shemekia Copeland, Infernal War, Mars Williams, Bell Witch, and more 35 The Secret History of Chicago Music Folksinger Bob Gibson was among the brightest stars at the Gate of Horn.

FOOD & DRINK

42 Apartments & Spaces 44 Marketplace 44 Straight Dope Why do I get the sudden urge to jump from high balconies or cliﬀs? 45 Savage Love How to safely realize a “rape fantasy” 46 Early Warnings Adele, Fetty Wap, AC/DC, Babymetal, and more concerts on the horizon 46 Gossip Wolf Waﬄe Gang celebrates hip-hop Christmas at Jerry’s, and more music news.

38 Review: Bar Marta The Humboldt Park restaurant shows the growing inﬂuence of Empire Sodikoﬀ. 40 Cocktail Challenge: Lamb jus Meat juice and Dr. Pepper make for a smoky Argentine-inspired scotch whiskey cocktail. 41 Bars Hopleaf, Dryhop, and more spots for craft beer

CLASSIFIEDS 41 Jobs

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FEATURE

Black, autistic, and killed by police

Stephon Watts was diagnosed with Asperger’s at age nine—and shot dead by Calumet City cops at age 15. Now his family is working to keep other kids with autism out of the line of ﬁre. BY ADRIENNE HURST 12

I DON’T KNOW HOW to put this politely—so I’ll just come out and say it. Fuck Star Wars. I have a fantasy where I leap into the cockpit of an X-Wing, fly across America, and fire proton torpedoes at everything Star Wars-related. All of it. The movies. The books. The podcasts. Jar Jar Binks plush dolls. Hayden Christensen’s boring face on cereal boxes. Plastic lightsabers wielded by 40-year-old men. I’d fire one final shot into whatever base is holding the blueprints for the Lucas Museum in Chicago—blowing up the paperwork into a thousand little pieces while Han Solo shouts: “Great shot, kid! That was one in a million!”

Before deciding to see The Force Awakens, read the rest of Ryan Smith’s forceful op-ed at chicagoreader.com.

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F singer Jase makes one final, preposterous stab at success: he’s asked pop star Simone Butterfly, sister to one of his bandmates, to stop by the wedding in hopes she’ll join the band. Leo coyly sets the play in the band’s nondescript dressing room, a cruddy limbo where long-repressed dreams and longer-repressed resentments hold dominion. Director Brad Akin finds ample humor and pathos as the band bumbles toward rejuvenation, but when the play devolves into an unaccountable hostage situation, internal logic evaporates—along with most of the comedy. —JUSTIN HAYFORD Through 1/10: Thu-Sat 8 PM (no shows 12/2412/25), Sun 3 PM, Rivendell Theatre, 5775 N. Ridge, 773-334-7728, akvavittheatre. org, $20, $15 students and seniors.

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The Naughty List: A Holiday Sketch Revue " SAM BENGSTON

THEATER

More at chicagoreader.com/ theater Baritones Unbound Noted singers Nathan Gunn, Mark Delavan, and Marc Kudisch star in this informal celebration of the baritone in classical and popular music, with selections from opera (Mozart, Verdi, Wagner), American musical theater, the Great American Songbook (Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas”), and more. Gunn’s creamy, well-placed voice, connection to the lyrics, and casually charismatic stage presence set him apart from his colleagues at the opening matinee I attended. Kudisch’s upper-register nasality and Delavan’s sometimes foggy tone produced an uneven blend and some out-of-tune harmonies in the group numbers, and Delavan’s rendition of the great “Lonely Room” aria from Oklahoma! substituted a showoffy alternate ending for the original, reminding me of Wagner’s famous phrase “effects without causes.” (But the audience ate it up.) —ALBERT WILLIAMS 12/16-1/3: Wed-Thu 7:30 PM (no show 12/24), Fri 8 PM (no show 12/25), Sat 3 and 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, Royal George Theatre Center, 1641 N. Halsted, 312-988-9000, theroyalgeorgetheatre.com, $60. El Stories: Holiday Train Waltzing Mechanics debuted its first installment of this documentary series chronicling strangers’ real-life oddities and inspirations on the CTA five years ago. Now, 23 editions in, it’s become a staple of the late-night theater scene and an enduring outlet for a revolving door of fresh-faced storytellers. This year’s holiday edition once again highlights, in a batch of sugary monologues, the unique joy otherwise ornery Chicagoan subway riders experience upon seeing lit-up, bedazzled trains. The quirk-to-sentiment ratio seems a little off and perfunctory this year, however, leaving most bits more simply sweet than profound. —DAN JAKES 12/18-1/9: Fri-Sat 11 PM (no shows Fri 12/25 and 1/1), Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln, 773-404-7336, waltzingmechanics.org, $10-$20.

4 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 17, 2015

Holiday Stories Three Cat Productions brings us nine merry and merrily awkward Christmas sketches, interspersed with caroling and dance interludes in the jolly holiday tradition. These are new works, dwelling on such winsome themes as a Jewish tween girl’s yuletide fantasies of holly and trim and a suicide hotline worker’s attempts to deal with a pill-popping husband who wants to off himself before New Year’s. But the audience has to suffer through a lot of goo to see the last and best sketch, which hilariously turns the entire cast into giggling third-graders in a pageant about Woden and the pagan origins of Christmas. —MAX MALLER Through 1/3: Thu-Fri 7:30 PM (no shows 12/24-12/25 and 1/1), Berger Park, 6205 N. Sheridan, 773-761-0376, threecatproductions.com, $25. The Naughty List: A Holiday R Sketch Revue A sullen teen suffers through her parents’ efforts

to create original hip-hop Christmas carols. Apocalypse survivors helplessly attempt to celebrate Hanukkah in an underground bunker, although none is Jewish. Huggable Riot’s hour of sketch comedy isn’t especially naughty once the opening song, “Chicago Winters Fuck Us in the Butt,” concludes. Rather, the six-person ensemble, under Mark Fleming’s fleet, nuanced direction, aim for something much more sophisticated and difficult: namely, rendering extreme holiday anxieties at once absurd and familiar. It’s sharp, imaginative stuff, and often disarmingly touching—the bunker dwellers, for example, want a Hanukkah celebration to ensure the tradition doesn’t disappear from the earth. —JUSTIN HAYFORD Through 12/30: Wed 8 PM (no show 12/23), Annoyance Theatre, 851 W. Belmont, 773-697-9693, theannoyance.com, $10. The Orchestra Finnish playwright Okko Leo’s 2013 comedy typifies Akvavit Theatre’s offerings over the past five years: droll, unmoored, unendingly peculiar. Five-piece rockers the Everlast had one hit 20 years ago. Now they play one wedding a month. Self-absorbed lead

Phiggy Pudding This improvised R hour of holiday storybook fun relies on the little ones in attendance

to decide pivotal plot points. The cast begins by presenting holiday storybooks as potential jumping-off points for the set to follow; then audience members vote on their favorite story. The Snow Rocket (previously published as Romeo and Lou Blast Off) kicked things off on the day I attended, and cast member Jake Farrington read the story’s introduction before passing things off to the cast for improvisation. Austin Campion and Brett Mannes delivered all-ages-appropriate comedy as the titular pair, weaving a wild tale of a kidnapped Santa, warring gnomes and fairies, and immobilizing snow pants. Young audience members were eager to be put to imaginary work onstage shoveling snow and baking cookies, eventually helping defeat evil Robot Santa (played with great physical comedy by Bill Letz). —MARISSA OBERLANDER Sat 12/19 and 1/2, 11 AM, pH Comedy Theater, 1515 W. Berwyn, whatisph.com, $12, $8 students. Process This CIC Theater troupe shows a good ear for irreverence, and the setup—a new holiday show from rehearsal to closing night—offers a lot of potential for industry in-jokes and seasonal satire. It’s a shame, then, that during the

opening weekend, the format proved more a burden than a launching pad. On the night I attended the innocuous audience suggestion of “Santa Leaves Town” as the title for a new Christmas play somehow ended with the big guy loudly masturbating over two mortiﬁed elves. In the parameters of absurd comedy, that would all be well and ﬁne—if the rest weren’t so full of gags and metagags with ever-diminishing returns. —DAN JAKES Sat 12/19 and 1/2, 8 PM, CIC Theater, 1422 W. Irving Park, 773-865-7731, cictheater.com, $10. Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Christmas Goose Only a little more than an hour long, this little drama is tailor-made for holiday audiences who want mild diversion uncomplicated by strong religious sentiment. Adapted by Michael Menendian and John Weagly from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1892 story “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle” and set in Victorian London at Christmas, it’s standard Holmes fare, if a bit thin; summarizing the tale would spoil it. Menendian, who also directs, is particularly adept at creating stage pictures that look like engravings from the Strand Magazine. And the production is packed with strong performances—Graham Emmons is particularly winning as Holmes—and padded out with lots of Christmas carols. But in the end, one leaves this show hungry for some real drama. —JACK HELBIG Through 1/4: ThuFri 7:30 PM (no shows 12/24-12/25), Sat 5 and 7:30 PM, Sun 3 and 5:30 PM (except 1/3, 3 PM only); also Tue 12/29-Wed 12/30, 7:30 PM; Thu 12/31, 5 PM, Raven Theatre, 6157 N. Clark, 773-338-2177, raventheatre. com, $20, $15 students and seniors. Tinsel! The Musical Tinsel R (Amanda Anne Dayton), the forgotten daughter of reindeer Cupid, is awkward, nearsighted, and a big fan of country music; Frosty (David Gordon-Johnson) puts up with her clumsy waitressing at his North Pole diner. Things seem to change when she is discovered by Dastardly Snide (Shym Jamin) and his sidekick, Sneakly

Tinsel! The Musical " COURTESY LI’L BUDS THEATRE COMPANY

Best bets, recommendations and notable arts and culture events for the week of December 17

some good riffs on cocaine and FBI Special Agent Johnson. But the cast’s timing is off, which keeps a stapled-on Laquan McDonald reference from landing. And the humor’s confused: Alan Metoskie’s barefoot “Bruce McClane” goes from pissed-off straight man to silly jokester in a New York minute. Thankfully, at only an hour and BYOB, it’s an outing that won’t make you feel you’ve been taken hostage at Nakatomi Plaza. —ANDREW LAPIN Though 1/9: Fri 8 PM (no show 12/25), Sat 7 and 8:30 PM, MCL Chicago, 3110 N. Sheffield, mclchicago.com, $20.

Neil Hamburger in The Incredibly Strange Holiday Spectacular . . . for the Needy! " LARRY BUSACCA/GETTY

(Bethany Arrington), who encourage her to enter a “Next Big Thing” competition. This is Tinsel’s Susan Boyle moment, and she stuns the skeptical crowd and judges alike with her elegant singing voice. It’s a fun, festive and original story for the littlest audience members, who will thrill to be up close and personal with the cast. —SUZANNE SCANLON Through 12/27: Sat 11 AM and 1:30 PM, Sun 11 AM; also Mon 12/21, 7:30 PM, No Exit Cafe, 6970 N. Glenwood, 773-743-3355, lilbudstheatre.org, $15, $10 students and seniors. Twist Your Dickens There are the reverent Christmas shows and the subversive ones. Goodman Theatre has had reverent covered since 1977, with its heirloom version of A Christmas Carol. Last year it expanded into subversion, presenting the Second City’s Twist Your Dickens—a profane, Bizarro World rendering of the Scrooge story, written by Colbert Report veterans Peter Gwinn and Bobby Mort. The first iteration had its nasty pleasures, including a holiday party hosted by Tiny Tim for his wee pals with rickets, dropsy, and advanced malnutrition. The second? Same pleasures, not quite so fresh. Inasmuch as almost nothing has changed, the show doesn’t reward annual viewings. Even the spectacle of Francis Guinan’s Scrooge attempting hip-hop moves bears only so much repetition. If you saw it last time, you’ve seen it. —TONY ADLER Through 12/27: Wed-Thu 7:30 PM (no show 12/24), Fri 8 PM (no show 12/25), Sat 4 and 8 PM, Sun 3 and 7 PM, Tue 7:30 PM; also Mon 12/21, 7:30 PM, Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn, 312443-3800, goodmantheatre.org, $10-$61. Yippee Ki Yay Merry Christmas: A Die Hard Christmas Musical Let’s be frank: Die Hard, the 1988 actioner that launched Bruce Willis’s film career and inspired a thousand knockoffs, is already a hilarious movie. Did it really need the musical spoof treatment (or, for Bob’s Burgers fans, another one)? Ready or not, Michael Shepherd Jordan’s popgun-popping laffer is making a return MCL engagement this holiday season after last year’s wildly successful run. The production has an impeccable Alan Rickman impersonator in Mark Rudy and

DANCE Molly Shanahan/Mad Shak: Tiny Liquid Bones: See preview, page 20. 12/17-12/20: Thu-Fri 7 PM, Sat 10 PM, Sun 7 PM, Hamlin Park Fieldhouse Theater, 3035 N. Hoyne (Thu-Fri), Links Hall at Constellation, 3111 N. Western (Sat-Sun), linkshall.ticketﬂy.com, $15-$45.

COMEDY

The Combo Sam Gordon hosts R this variety show featuring standup from Liz Ziner, Bill Bullock, and Lucas

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

A Very Merry Mother-F@#*ing Christmas Eek! Theatre Company’s holiday show features oﬀ-color sketches, song, and stand-up. Sat 12/19, 7:30 PM, Gorilla Tango Theatre, 1919 N. Milwaukee, 773-598-4549, gorillatango. com, $15.

VISUAL ARTS Firecat Projects “This Is Home,” paintings by local architect and watercolorist Jane Sloss. Opening reception Fri 12/18, 7-10 PM. 12/18-1/23, 2124 N. Damen, ﬁrecatprojects.org. Pilsen Outpost CMYCake, a pop-up showcase of comics, zines, and crafts by the likes of Kevin Budnik, Zelda Galewsky, and Javier Suárez, with pastries from Rendezvous: A Community Confectionary. Sat 12/19, 3-10 PM, 1958 W. 21st, pilsenoutpost.com.

12/17, 7PM, Beauty Bar, 1444 W. Chicago, 312-226-8828, curbsidesplendor.com.

MOVIES

More at chicagoreader.com/ movies The Assassin In the ninth cenR tury, near the end of the Tang Dynasty, the governor of a state pulling

away from the empire (Chang Chen) is stalked by a beautiful assassin (Shu Qi) who’s been trained since childhood by the cunning princess of a rival family (Sheu Fang-yi). The story promises action, but this brooding martial-arts adventure from Hou Hsiao-hsien is largely a pictorial experience: in the glistening black-and-white preface, the killer slashes an opponent’s throat and Hou cuts abruptly to a spray of wildﬂowers. Extreme wide shots place the characters against stunning mountain terrains and inside wild forests, recalling the crystalline detail of classical Chinese paintings; interior scenes unfold in a golden glow, gauzy curtains drifting back and forth over the action, while crickets chirp and tribal drums sound

O’Neil, with music by Luke Null and improv from Stars and Gripes. Tue 12/22, 10:30 PM, iO Theater, 1501 N. Kingsbury, ioimprov.com/chicago, $5.

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Dave Maher Coma Show ComeR dian Dave Maher’s one-man show about his time spent in a coma. Through

12/18: Fri 8 PM, Annoyance Theatre, 851 W. Belmont, 773-697-9693, theannoyance. com, $8. The Incredibly Strange Holiday R Spectacular . . . for the Needy! A holiday variety show featuring comedy

from Neil Hamburger, a found-footage presentation from Everything Is Terrible!, and pinup star Masuimi Max. Toy donations can be dropped oﬀ at Taco in a Bag (4603 N. Lincoln) through 12/19. Sun 12/20, 7:30 PM, Emporium Arcade Bar, 1366 N. Milwaukee, 773-697-7922, emporiumchicago.com, $20, free with unused, unwrapped toy. Supply and Demand Stand-up R showcase featuring local comedians Dave Helem, Jeﬀ Arcuri, and Drew

Frees. Wed 12/23, 8 PM, Laugh Factory, 3175 N. Broadway, 773-327-3175, laughfactory.com, $20 plus two-drink minimum. Talk Show (W)Interrupted Host Tyler Ross manages an assortment of characters as he tries to put on a functional talk show. Thu 12/17, 8 PM, Public House Theatre, 3914 N. Clark, 773230-4770, pubhousetheatre.com/show/ talk-show-winterrupted, $5.

12 Comics of Christmas Junior Stopka hosts this holiday-themed stand-up showcase. Mon 12/21, 8 PM, North Bar, 1637 W. North, 773-123-5678, liveatnorthbar.com. F

Christmas, Again

LIT Gint Aras Chicago writer Aras celebrates the release of his new book, The Fugue, which is about 15 years in the making; he’ll talk about the process of writing it. Expect also a musical interlude featuring violinist Maria Storm, performing the Fugue from Bach’s Violin Sonata no. 1 in G Minor. Thu 12/17, 6:30 PM, City Lit Books, 2523 N. Kedzie, 773235-2523, citylitbooks.com. The Second Annual Curbside Yuletide Book Party Curbside Splendor’s annual soiree features readings by Tony Fitzpatrick, Suzanne Scanlon, Jessica Hopper, Vu Tran, and more, plus pizza and Malort, a DJ set by Reader contributor Steve Krakow, a raﬄe, and a book table courtesy of the Book Cellar. Thu

periodically, the hushed tone making the eruptions of swordplay seem even more clangorous. The dazzling 35-millimeter photography is by Mark Lee Ping Bing. In Mandarin with subtitles. —J.R. JONES 105 min. Fri 12/18, 6 PM; Sat 12/19, 3 and 7:45 PM; Sun 12/20, 4:45 PM; Mon 12/21, 7:45 PM; Tue 12/22, 6 PM; and Wed 12/23, 7:45 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center Christmas, Again This aﬀecting R realist drama (2014) is all the more cheering for being rooted in the cold ground of seasonal ennui. Kentucker Audley gives a lived-in performance as a depressed, transient Christmas tree vendor who self-medicates in his trailer; working yet another night shift in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, he rescues and befriends a young woman passed out on a bench (Hannah Gross). Crafted with aﬀection and attentive to workaday !

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AGENDA

The Assassin

B rhythms, this first feature from writer-director Charles Poekel demonstrates an authentic feel for the neighborhood, where he himself once sold trees. Its moments of warmth, stolen from the cold by two outsiders, are strangely hopeful and affirming, offering the surprise of beauty in a bleak world. —SCOTT PFEIFFER 79 min. Fri 12/18, 2 and 6:15 PM; Sat 12/19, 5 PM; Sun 12/20, 3 PM; Mon 12/21, 6 PM; Tue 12/22, 8 PM; and Wed 12/23, 6 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center

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6 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 17, 2015

Concussion An experienced investigative journalist, writer-director Peter Landesman (Parkland, Kill the Messenger) brings a responsible, fact-oriented approach to his politically fraught stories, which comes in handy with this exposé of brain trauma in pro football. Based on a GQ article by Jeanne Marie Laskas, the film tells the story of Dr. Bennet Omalu, a forensic pathologist in Pittsburgh who took on the National Football League with his 2005 paper asserting that legendary Pittsburgh Steelers center Mike Webster had suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (brain degeneration caused by repeated blows to the head). Will Smith gives an ingratiating performance as the comically egotistical but passionately idealistic doctor, and there’s strong work from Alec Baldwin as a former NFL physician counseling Omalu and the ever-reliable David Morse as Webster. Less impressive is Albert Brooks, whose dramatic performance as Omalu’s supportive boss collapses under the weight of too many bad one-liners. —J.R. JONES PG-13, 121 min. For venues see chicagoreader.com/movies. Difret Coming home from school one day, a 14-year-old Ethiopian girl (Tizita Hagere) is surrounded by men on horseback, taken captive, and raped; the next day her attacker tells her, “Don’t worry, you will soon be my wife.” The tradition of marriage by abduction is still practiced in parts of Africa and central Asia, and this effective 2014 issue

drama—based on the 1996 case of Aberash Bekele, who killed her attacker and was prosecuted for murder—shows how the barbaric practice was still deeply knit into the society. Angelina Jolie served as executive producer, so naturally there are big doses of heroism and uplift, as real-life women’s rights attorney Meaza Ashenafi (Meron Getnet) defends the girl in the regressive tribal court and ultimately takes her case to the ministry of justice. This plays like Law and Order, but there are also striking glimpses of a backward society in rapid transition. Zeresenay Mehari directed his own script. In Amharic with subtitles. —J.R. JONES 101 min. Sat 12/19, 3 PM, and Tue 12/22, 6 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center Dreams Rewired Narrated by Tilda Swinton, this poetic essay film uses animation and clips from silent movies and early talkies to ponder the cultural effects of electronic communications. Writer-directors Manu Luksch, Martin Reinhart, and Thomas Tode explicitly link the new modes of thinking caused by radio, film, recording, and telecommunications to our current metamorphoses in the dawn of the online age. The filmmakers focus on the power of technology to erase distances— among the phenomena considered are the worldwide potency of Sergei Eisenstein’s Potemkin as revolutionary propaganda, the pioneering TV broadcast of the 1936 Olympic games from inside Nazi Germany, and the amateur radio enthusiasts who inadvertently blocked distress calls from the Titanic. “To be is to be connected,” Swinton concludes near the end, summing up a film whose images of the past predict not only our present but our future. —J.R. JONES 88 min. Facets Cinematheque Flowers “Dead people are dead, end of story,” the widow of a construction worker tells his grieving mother. “Yes, especially when we forget about them,” the mother retorts. Her notion of life sustained

in the hearts of others is essential to this Spanish melodrama, in which the two women—along with a coworker of the dead man who develops a years-long fixation with him—negotiate their personal loss. Directors Jon Garaño and Jose Mari Goenaga elicit solid performances from their cast but tend to overstate nearly every narrative beat; the film ably examines the processes of grief but withholds any meaningful emotional rewards in favor of too-neat coincidences. With Itziar Ituño, Nagore Aranburu, and Itziar Aizpuru. In Basque with subtitles. —DOMINICK SUZANNE-MAYER 100 min. Fri 12/18, 4:15 and 7:15 PM; Sat 12/19-Sun 12/20, 2, 4:15, and 7:15 PM; Mon 12/21, 4:30 PM; Tue 12/22, 4:15 and 7:15; Wed 12/23, 2, 4:15, and 7:15 PM; and Thu 12/24, 2 and 4:15 PM. Music Box In the Heart of the Sea Ron Howard’s alternately awesome and wooden whaling epic tells the true story of the Essex, whose destruction by a giant, vengeful sperm whale in 1820 became the source material for Moby-Dick. The CGI folks have outdone themselves on the whale, which stretches nearly 100 feet in length and has crummy skin peeling away and exposing the great white blubber beneath; the scenes of it leaping into the air and thundering down on the ship give an overwhelming sense of its deadly tonnage. After the Essex is destroyed, the crew members endure three months of privation in lifeboats on the high seas; Howard shot this part in sequence and put his actors on a strict, wasting diet, which gives them something to boast about now and probably made them easier to handle on location. With Chris Hemsworth, Benjamin Walker, Cillian Murphy, Brendan Gleeson, and Ben Whishaw. —J.R. JONES PG-13, 122 min. For venues see chicagoreader. com/movies. Star Wars: The Force Awakens The franchise that wrecked American cinema is back, with fanboy auteur J.J. Abrams (Star Trek, Mission: Impossible III) taking the reins from series creator George Lucas. I’ll spare you the scrolling yellow text, but suffice it to say that this brings back the coed trio of the original trilogy 30 years after their previous exploits (Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill) while prepping a new trio of young bucks to replicate the seniors’ chemistry (Oscar Isaac, Billie Lourd, John Boyega). As with other installments, this is less a movie than an exercise in massaging a juvenile-minded audience that wants the experience to be new and familiar at the same time. With Adam Driver and Domhnall Gleeson. —J.R. JONES PG-13, 136 min. For venues see chicagoreader. com/movies. v

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DECEMBER 17, 2015 - CHICAGO READER 7

CITY LIFE Ù

OUR MOST READ ARTICLES LAST WEEK ON CHICAGOREADER.COM IN ASCENDING ORDER: “Urbanism battles suburbanism in Jefferson Park” —JOHN GREENFIELD

ò ISA GIALLORENZO

“Sorry doesn’t cut it, Rahm—but your resignation might” —DERRICK CLIFTON “Rahm’s nightmare: Dick Simpson is applying for Chicago’s election board” —BEN JORAVSKY

Street View

Freaked out

“I DESCRIBE MYSELF AS A FREAK,” says School of the Art Institute of Chicago painting student Reygan Putman. “I’ve been called that as an insult for years, and I like the idea of taking that back and claiming it for myself.” Known to friends as Casper, Putman has worked at a haunted house seasonally since she was 12. Being in character, often as a clown, helps her deal with her anxiety, she says. Inﬂuenced by 90s Japanese street fashion and, in particular, punk singer Nina Hagen, Putman’s colorful garments come from thrift stores and underground labels such as the heart-and-dollar-sign top from the Berlin-based line Indyanna and shoes from LA’s YRU, the platforms of which the artist glammed up with a custom paint job. “I hate the idea of trends and practical, boring clothes,” Putman says. “I’m just doing what feels right.” —ISA GIALLORENZO See more Chicago street style on Giallorenzo’s blog chicagolooks.blogspot.com.

“You had your chance to recall Mayor Rahm, Chicago” —BEN JORAVSKY

“How a fake Facebook event turned into a real Chicago protest” —LEE V. GAINES

Diameters of circles are proportional to the number of page views received.

Chicagoans

Othman Al Ani, former refugee I CAME FROM BAGHDAD three years ago. I applied at the end of 2008 to come to United States as a refugee, and after that, I had to wait for four years and a half. Sometimes they give me a call, I have a hope they will say, “Your ﬂight will be next week,” and instead they say, “We missed some documents. You should return to our office.” For my security check, I had three interviews. They asked me, “Do you feel you are in dangerous situation in Iraq?” It’s the easiest question ever. The person asking me is working in a building inside a building inside a building inside a very secure building. I’m thinking, “If we are in a good situation in Iraq, why are you sitting in here? You can come do the interview in my home.” I always remember my second day in United States. I love movies a lot, but I hadn’t been in a movie theater before. So I went to movie theater in Evanston. I took the bus. Somebody—I don’t even know his name—he took my hand and said, “Wait here.” He wasn’t waiting for the bus; he just helped me. At the theater, I don’t know where to go, I don’t know how to pay, I don’t even know how to use money. I told the cashier, “This is my second day in United States, and I haven’t

“You are al-Qaeda” is something Al Ani heard a lot when he ﬁrst came to the U.S. from Iraq. ò ANDREA BAUER

been in a movie theater before.” She was very excited to help me. When I told her I’m from Iraq, she wanted to hear about how I came. It was a great experience. After one month I had a job interview. I don’t know what’s job interview because in Iraq it’s totally different. Here I worked helping the chefs in a restaurant. Some of the employees, they were always saying, “You are al-Qaeda” or “Are you related to Osama bin Laden?” It was annoying. I was like, “OK, it’s just the ﬁrst job. This is not who you are.” That was something I had to repeat to myself every day, because in Iraq I’m physics teacher. I started to search for something to give me hope to change my situation. First thing was, I volunteer at Iraqi Mutual Aid Society. After working six months there as a volunteer, I get a job. It was out of 55 candidates. The person who managed the organization, he believed

in my opinions and my skills from the first day. The main thing I am doing here, I am answering questions for people who are new to United States. I answer questions about health insurance, helping them fill out application for benefits, any queries about green card, legal documentation. I guide them to obtain an ID or driver’s license, help them to build their credit history. We have only five employees. We are working so hard, and the number of refugees is increasing day by day. I am seeing every day seven to ten clients. But the spirit of helping people, this is what encourage me. I keep reminding myself, those people need help, and we can’t just say, “I’m tired.” Always we should smile, deal with them with very high quality. I am always telling Americans, “Just close your eyes. Put yourself in the same situation. Be a refugee.” —AS TOLD TO ANNE FORD

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

CITY AGENDA One sure thing to do every day of the week THURSDAY 17

FRIDAY 18

SATURDAY 19

SUNDAY 20

MONDAY 21

TUESDAY 22

WEDNESDAY 23

e Chicago Ma gic Lounge Every Thursday the Chicago Magic Lounge oﬀers audiences a close-up experience of magic (plus drinks!); this evening Edd Fairman headlines. 8 PM, Uptown Underground, 4707 N. Broadway, chicagomagiclounge. com, $10-$40.

ã A Wild Game and Bourbon Af fa ir Chef Aaron McKay prepares wildgame dishes to pair with whiskey; a portion of the evening’s proceeds beneﬁt Esperanza Community Services, which supports people with developmental disabilities. 6-9 PM, Blackstone Hotel, 636 S. Michigan, blackstonerenaissance.com, $65.

^ Pre - Kwanzaa Holiday Ma rket & Celebrati on “Eclectic” holiday gifts for sale, live entertainment, storytelling, and more ahead of Kwanzaa, which starts 12/26. Fri 12/18, 4-9 PM, and Sat 12/19, 10 AM-7 PM, Africa International House, 6200 S. Drexel, aihusa.org.

i Ma de in Chicago Ho liday Ma rket The Reader hosts this market for all your last-minute gift-giving needs! Buy local this season at a showcase of some of the best apparel, housewares, food, and drink that Chicago has to oﬀer. 11 AM-5 PM, Plumbers Hall, 1340 W. Washington, chicagoreader.com/ madeinchicago.

* Do -It-Yo urself Messiah Now’s your chance to sing Handel’s Messiah. A full orchestra and four soloists will lead the audience (seated according to vocal range) during the choral sections of the holiday classic. Through 12/22, 7 PM, Harris Theater, 205 E. Randolph, harristheaterchicago.org, $15.

¿ IFPA Pinball Tournament The International Flipper Pinball Association hosts an open tournament with cash prizes for winners and a bag of tokens for everyone who enters. 7 PM, Emporium Arcade Bar, 1366 N. Milwaukee, emporiumchicago.com, $5 entry fee, free to watch.

Po p Art Design Works by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, and Mel Ramos alongside chairs, sofas, lamps, and architecture by Charles Eames, George Nelson, Achille Castiglioni, and Verner Panton. Through 3/27, Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago, mcachicago.org, $12.

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DECEMBER 17, 2015 - CHICAGO READER 9

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

BOBBY SIMS

CITY LIFE

POLITICS

Strike, too?

By BEN JORAVSKY

ord broke Monday that Chicago teachers had overwhelmingly voted to authorize a strike. I’d like to note that Mayor Emanuel could have avoided all of this by agreeing to a one-year deal that wouldn’t have cost the schools any more new money in teacher salaries. But he walked away from that deal over—of all things—the issue of teacher evaluations. That was back in June—which seems like a billion light-years ago given all the tumult of the past few weeks. So now, as if Mayor Emanuel didn’t have enough to worry about with the fallout over his handling of the Laquan McDonald shooting, he’s made matters worse for himself by bringing on a possible teachers’ strike. Get ready for an eventful 2016, Chicago. OK, a few reminders: In 2012, after an eightday strike, the teachers signed a three-year deal that expired this past June. Mayor Emanuel’s negotiators met throughout the spring with Chicago Teachers Union

10 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 17, 2015

president Karen Lewis, his old adversary, trying to reach an agreement that would enable them to avoid another strike—which neither side seemed to want. Indeed, in those days it looked as though Lewis and Emanuel had patched things up. They let it be known they had exchanged texts and calls and even, for all I know, shared favorite lines from Tarantino ﬁlms. By June, Lewis predicted that they would soon ink a one-year contract in which the teachers would agree to forgo a raise if the mayor modified CPS policies on teacher evaluations. If nothing else, the deal would have bought them time to go, hand in hand, to Springﬁeld to persuade the governor and legislative leaders to send more money to Chicago. If that didn’t work—and it was a long shot— they could try to agree on a new source of revenue. Or to agree on some new source of revenue to pay off the ever-escalating pension obligation CPS has been forgoing for the last few years. Or at the very least to put off any strike for another year. Anyway, the potential deal died on June 24 when the mayor’s team walked out of a negotiating session declaring that they wouldn’t budge on the teacher evaluation policy. With that, Lewis and Emanuel went back to the tough talk—though to his credit the mayor

has refrained from throwing out the F-bomb this time around. “Initially, we thought we might be close to a deal,” Lewis told reporters in June. “But today we have found out that their bargaining rhetoric is as empty as their bank account.” To which the mayor responded: “After years of our academic gains, now is not the time to shortchange our children by eliminating evaluations for tens of thousands of employees or lowering teachers’ performance standards.” People, I’ve got to tell you—of all the stupid, trivial things to go to the mat on, teacher evaluations head the list. First of all, teachers were not demanding that evaluations be eliminated. They just wanted the formula changed so they wouldn’t automatically be fired if they got a bad evaluation. I know, I know, education reformers insist that the secret to transforming public schools—so that Chicago does as well as, say, New Trier—is to fire all the bad teachers. As if income and poverty play no role in how kids perform in school. But really, getting rid of teachers hasn’t been an issue in Chicago since 2010, when Mayor Daley effectively abolished tenure by enacting a system called redefinition. That enables principals to get rid of teachers by redefining their job descriptions. So it’s not hard for principals to dismiss teachers— good or bad—virtually anytime they want.

I’d go so far as to say that the real problem in Chicago is not getting rid of bad teachers so much as convincing the good ones to stay. And I don’t know how we plan to recruit more teachers—or get them to stay—if we’re making their working conditions less tolerable. That brings me to the current state of negotiations. At the moment, Mayor Emanuel wants Lewis and the union to sign on to a contract that would effectively cut pay by more than 10 percent by freezing salaries and hiking health and pension costs. Yeah, that ought to bring the best and the brightest ﬂocking to Chicago’s public schools. In any event, there have been no meaningful negotiations since June. And last week—as the mayor was apologizing for his mishandling of the McDonald video—the teachers began the three days of their strike vote. The results? Well, it depends how you look at it. Of the union members who voted, roughly 96 percent opted to authorize a strike. If you include the employees who didn’t bother to vote, “only” 88 percent voted to authorize a strike. That’s an important distinction, since state law requires a yes vote from 75 percent of all eligible voters to authorize a strike. Imagine if we had that method for electing mayors. We could add the 60 percent of the eligible electorate who didn’t vote to the people who voted for Jesus Garcia and, voila, Mayor Rahm Emanuel would be out of office. And we wouldn’t have to pass a new state law allowing us to recall the mayor, as several legislators have proposed. To make things even more complicated, the strike vote isn’t really a vote to go on strike. It’s a vote to start the clock on going on strike. There’s a bunch of other time-consuming things that have to happen—like a fact-ﬁnding process featuring three mediators—before teachers could take to the streets. The process can take up to four months. So the earliest the teachers can strike is March. Or they could wait till next school year. Or they could just not strike at all. Got it? You know, Mr. Mayor, you’d have done everybody—yourself included—a big fat favor had you just signed onto that one-year deal back in June. v

v @joravben

CITY LIFE The dirt lane between Altgeld Gardens and Rosebud Farm Stand ò JOHN GREENFIELD

TRANSPORTATION

Where the sidewalk ends

By JOHN GREENFIELD

or years, Altgeld Gardens-area resident Deloris Lucas has pushed for a sidewalk on 130th Street, an interstate-like truck route that serves as the northern boundary of this farsouth-side public housing project. “[Altgeld is] a poor area that’s a food desert, where people don’t even realize we lack facilities like sidewalks and bus shelters,” says Lucas, 59. Since 1967, Lucas has lived in Golden Gate, a quaint enclave of single-family homes just west of the housing project. Due to lack of interest from decision makers, her crusade hasn’t gained much traction since she ﬁrst told me about it in July 2014. But a new multimodal transportation plan from the Chicago Department of Transportation may lead to Lucas ﬁnally getting her sidewalk. For context, the Altgeld area is hemmed in by the Little Calumet River to the south and west, a water reclamation plant to the north, and the Bishop Ford to the east. CTA service is

limited, and bike infrastructure is nonexistent. Median household income is less than a third of the city’s median of $47,250. Only about half of households own cars, compared with 72 percent citywide. Access to nearby Rosebud Farm Stand, 525 E. 130th, is a particular sore spot. It’s the area’s sole grocery store, but it’s difficult to access by foot. The only way to walk there from the west is via a narrow trail pedestrians have worn on the south side of the five-lane highway. Walking north to Rosebud from Altgeld means taking a rutted dirt lane. Lucas began her advocacy after she was laid off from her job as a CPS teaching assistant in 2013. She launched the grassroots Safety and Transit Action Council, currently made up of a dozen or so neighbors. The group soon partnered with the Active Transportation Alliance and the Consortium to Lower Obesity in Chicago Children to assess her neighborhood’s walkability. In addition to sidewalks,

the groups determined the community needs more crosswalks, STOP FOR PEDESTRIANS signs, pedestrian islands, speed humps, and streetlights. The Chicago Housing Authority has earmarked money to pave the lane between Altgeld Gardens and Rosebud, and the project is currently out to bid, according to an Active Trans rep. But the sidewalk on 130th has been a tougher nut to crack. It’s a state route, which would normally give the Illinois Department of Transportation control over upgrades. However, agency spokesman Guy Tridgell said 130th is actually maintained by CDOT, which is also responsible for sidewalk construction in the city. But CDOT frequently looks to the city’s aldermen to pay for improvement projects using the $1.32 million in “menu money” allocated annually to each ward. Lucas has pitched the 130th sidewalk to Ninth Ward alderman Anthony Beale more than once, but says most of the ward’s menu money is used for fixing potholes. Indeed, a CDOT report shows last year Beale spent $1,243,957 on street resurfacing, and a mere $54,491 on sidewalks. “The alderman has really dropped the ball on this,” Lucas says. “Ms. Lucas has contacted everybody from President Obama on down,” Beale says, adding that the land west of Rosebud is empty. “I’m not going to waste taxpayer dollars installing a sidewalk next to a vacant lot,” he says. When asked why his agency has never built the 130th Street sidewalk, CDOT spokesman Mike Claffey declined to comment. But here comes the good news: Claffey also indicated that the sidewalk may finally become a reality as a result of CDOT’s upcoming plan for Riverdale, the community area that includes Altgeld Gardens. In October, CDOT received a Local Technical Assistance grant from the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning to conduct the Riverdale study. Claffey says the report may identify funding for the Rosebud sidewalk, plus other infrastructure prescribed by the Altgeld walkability assessment. “There’s a need to improve access to adjacent neighborhoods, recreational opportuni-

ties, transit, and employment centers,” Claffey stated in an October interview with Streetsblog’s Steven Vance. Lucas’s group applied for a separate LTA grant for a 130th Street corridor study, which wasn’t awarded. But the grassroots organization will be one of several community organizations providing key input for CDOT’s plan, Claffey says. Those efforts will complement other improvements the neighborhood has seen of late, including the CHA-funded reconstruction of 133rd, which was so dilapidated the CTA was forced to shorten the #34 Michigan Avenue bus route there. (The route also serves the 95th Street el station, so it’s a lifeline for residents. The planned extension of the Red Line to Altgeld will greatly improve access, but that initiative is moving slowly.)

“THIS IS A POOR AREA THAT’S A FOOD DESERT, WHERE PEOPLE DON’T EVEN REALIZE WE LACK FACILITIES LIKE SIDEWALKS AND BUS SHELTERS.” —Altgeld Gardens-area resident Deloris Lucas

Another positive development is “We Keep You Rollin’,” a bike group Lucas started last February with help from Active Trans. They’ve held repair sessions, distributed helmets, and hosted workshops with CDOT’s Bicycling Ambassadors. Lucas was disappointed her proposal wasn’t picked, but she’s excited to brainstorm with CDOT on ways to lessen Altgeld’s isolation. “It’s a great ﬁt because STAC is still developing, and we don’t have a war chest,” she says. “This puts us in the driver’s seat.” v

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

DECEMBER 17, 2015 - CHICAGO READER 11

Black, autistic, and killed by police

Stephon Watts was diagnosed with Asperger’s at age nine—and shot dead by Calumet City cops at age 15. Now his family is working to keep other kids with autism out of the line of ﬁre.

By ADRIENNE HURST

Danelene Powell and Steven Watts Sr. hold a photo of their son Stephon, right, as a young child. Also pictured is another son, Steven Jr., left.

12 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 17, 2015

ò JEFFREY MARINI

n a sunny Saturday last April, a small crowd gathered in a Calumet City park to mourn the loss of a black child. “I want you to realize we have tragedies every day, black families,” 58-year-old Steven Watts told the crowd. His voice was worn and somber, barely eclipsing the hum of passing cars. “I saw it. I watched it. And for three years now, this is what I see every single day: I see my son dying. I see his eyes closing. And for what?” Watts ﬂexed his thumb and foreﬁnger, thinned by an ongoing battle with stomach cancer, into the shape of a gun. It was a crude representation of the scene he witnessed in the basement of his home on February 1, 2012, when Calumet City police officers William Coffey and Robert Hynek shot and killed his youngest child. Fifteen-year-old Stephon Edward Watts joined a now familiar litany of young black men killed by white police officers. But his case was even more complicated than most. Stephon (pronounced steh-FON) had autism. He was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome—a complex developmental disability characterized by social and communication difficulties, eccentric behavior, and often singular, intense interests—at age nine. People with an autism spectrum disorder are seven times more likely to encounter police than “neurotypical” individuals, or those without developmental disabilities, according to autism experts. Depending on the severity of their disorder, people on the autism spectrum can react inappropriately to police and have trouble following commands. When a lack of understanding drives both sides of the equation, police interactions with developmentally disabled populations can—and often do—result in tragedy. But with better training, the Watts family says, those encounters don’t have to end that way. CALUMET CITY—population 37,042— sits just south of Chicago in Cook County on the border with Indiana. The majority-black town has had more than its fair share of scandals in recent years. In 2005 alone, a deputy police chief was charged with stealing $26,000 in narcotics-bust cash (he later pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor theft charge); a racist effigy hung from a billboard

before the mayoral primary election; and excessive-force charges involving another black 15-year-old were filed against a veteran police officer by his own department. This September, the city settled, for $2.1 million, another excessive-force case relating to the 2012 death of 20-year-old Archie Lee Chambers, who sustained three bullet wounds after police fired at him between 11 and 13 times, according to court documents. Still, to the Watts family, Calumet City was home. Their modest white frame house on Forsythe Avenue was silhouetted in ivy and included a basement where Steven and Stephon slept. It was where Steven and his then wife, Danelene Powell, raised their three youngest children: Renee, now 29; Steven Jr., 20; and Stephon. Their eldest, 33-year-old Fabion, left the nest before the family moved from nearby Dolton in 2002. On Wednesday evenings, Stephon’s aunt and grandmother would take him to Bible study. Typical Sunday services triggered his sensory issues—he would cover his ears and wail to drown out the sound. Two months before his 15th birthday, he begged his mother to get him baptized: “I love him,” Danelene now says, “but the Lord loves him more.” Even though he was a five-foot-seven, 205-pound teenager, Stephon’s family called him “Baby.” He liked to stroke his mother’s arm, press her skin to his cheek, and declare how soft it was. His face lit up whenever his mother promised him a piece of his favorite fruit if he behaved. “A pomegranate was all he needed to be happy,” Danelene, 51, recalled in the living room of her Sauk Village home. When she gave one to him, Stephon would hang his head, bury his hands between his knees, and giggle. “He was 15, but he was just a child, you understand? That’s how autism works.” But Danelene said Stephon often refused to take his Abilify, the medication he was prescribed to treat his symptoms of poor concentration and aggression. When he didn’t take it for extended periods, Stephon was prone to bouts of anger: refusing to listen to others, fighting with family members, and retreating into a mental space that not even his family could penetrate. Like many families with autistic children, the Watts family relied on emergency services for help when Stephon

became agitated or wandered off. Steven said social workers and doctors advised him to contact the police when Stephon needed immediate psychiatric care. But Steven, who grew up in Chicago with an intense distrust of law enforcement, wanted the police to have no part in his son’s treatment. “Steven would tell me, ‘Stop calling the police. They’re going to murder Stephon one day,’ ” Danelene said in an interview. She’s from Jamaica, where she grew up viewing police officers as problem solvers. Her brother was a police officer back home, and Danelene herself once worked as a clerk for the Dolton Police Department. The Wattses called 911 or the city’s nonemergency hotline ten times during the past four years, Danelene estimates, seeking help for Stephon. Danelene and Steven Jr. made nine of those calls. But Steven Sr. would often usher his son into the car and drive away before the police even arrived. “I said, ‘No, Steven, they’re trained professionals,’” Danelene recalls. “‘They know he has a disability, so how could they hurt him?’”

“The police are trying to apply principles for ‘neurotypicals’ that don’t work with an autistic population . . . You’ve got two people who don’t understand each other.” —Clinical psychologist Genevieve Thornton

EVEN WITH THE BEST of intentions, spotting and properly dealing with the signs of mental illness and disability are special challenges for first responders: autistic individuals don’t always react to things like eye contact, commands, sounds, and changes in their environments the way most people do. Visits from law enforcement officers can mean sensory overload for people

with autism. Shiny badges, flashing lights, and loud voices can escalate the situation and lead to inappropriate responses, says autism advocate and police training specialist Dennis Debbaudt. “Their actions, though not mean or malicious, can appear that way to others,” he wrote in his 2002 book Autism, Advocates and Law Enforcement Professionals. “You’ve got two people who don’t understand each other,” explains Genevieve Thornton, a clinical psychologist based in Northbrook. “The police are trying to apply principles for ‘neurotypicals’ that don’t work with an autistic population.” Many police departments have addressed this disconnect by offering training programs designed to help officers understand these kinds of disabilities. For example, the Chicago Police Department offers a 40-hour program based in Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) training, a model used in more than 2,700 communities to teach officers how to de-escalate mental and developmental health crises and ultimately link citizens with social and medical services. But just 20 percent of Chicago’s 12,000-some ofﬁcers have received this voluntary training, according to the 2014 testimony of a senior police official. Compounding matters, a lack of state funding had the program on hold, says Eric Pingolt, director of the West Central Illinois Criminal Justice Council, which conducts police training in the western and central parts of the state. The program was recently reinstated, Pingolt says. With just 82 officers and a $10.6 million budget, Calumet City’s police force is tiny compared to Chicago’s. Still, the department requires its officers to take “roughly two hours” of training annually on autism and Alzheimer’s disease, according to Sergeant Jason Menclewicz, the force’s training director. Indeed, the Calumet City Police Department flagged the Wattses’ address with a “10-96” code to alert responding officers that someone with a mental disability lived there, both Hynek and Coffey stated in 2013 depositions taken as part of a wrongful-death lawsuit Danelene ﬁled against Calumet City and the two officers. And the department’s officers had used crisis-intervention techniques with Stephon on several occasions in the past. In March 2011, for instance, Ste- J

DECEMBER 17, 2015 - CHICAGO READER 13

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continued from 13 phon barricaded himself in a bathroom with a knife after his father told him to turn off his video game. Hynek and Coffey were among five officers who responded after Stephon’s family called police for help. A negotiator was also called to the scene during that incident, police records show. Danelene said the negotiator asked about Stephon’s interests, searching for a topic of conversation that would engage him. The negotiator started chatting with Stephon about his favorite video game, World of Warcraft. Something clicked: Stephon relinquished the knife, unlocked the bathroom door, and was taken to the hospital for treatment. Nine months later, on December 10, 2011—his 15th birthday—Stephon hit his mother under her left eye after refusing to take his medication, according to a police incident report. (Danelene says it was her jaw that took the blow and that Stephon fell to his knees in prayer when he “snapped out of it.”) Shaken by the violent outburst, she called 911 in order to get him back on his medication and into emergency psychiatric treatment. When Calumet City police officers William Slough and Fernando Guerrero arrived, they saw that Stephon had a knife in his hand, according to the police incident report. They asked him to drop it. Instead, he bolted down the street. “Kids like this feel such a lack of control,” Thornton explains. “They don’t understand, explicitly, the stimulus response”—how reactions to stimuli can trigger their behavior. In addition, autistic children tend to be impulsive and have poor executive functioning, which drives problem solving, reasoning, working memory, and task-management skills. “When you’re impulsive and you pick up a knife, what you notice is you get attention,” Thornton says. “You stop whatever’s going on, you get power and you get control. But unfortunately, it’s a maladaptive response”—one that is counterproductive to the individual’s and others’ safety. After initially running from police, Stephon turned and charged at Officer Slough. Stephon was “swinging the knife” when Slough and Guerrero tased him, according to the incident report. The first shock did not penetrate his suede jacket, but the second was effec-

tive in causing Stephon to drop the knife, Slough wrote when documenting the knife as evidence. Stephon was transported to Franciscan Saint Margaret hospital in Hammond, Indiana, for a mental evaluation and then to Streamwood Behavioral hospital in Streamwood for two weeks of psychiatric care. STEPHON WAS HOLDING a knife on the day he died, too. Only this time, his family maintains, it was a butter knife, not the 4.5-inch kitchen knife pictured in a later investigation by state police of the incident. (Danelene, following orders from Stephon’s doctor, says she hid all the sharp knives from her kitchen after the prior incidents.) He was using the knife to unlock the door to a basement bedroom where his father had stashed the computer as punishment after Stephon refused to go to school that day, Steven said. It would have been his third day at Easter Seals Autism Therapeutic School in Tinley Park, where he had recently transferred. Stephon, who wanted to become a computer programmer, was “tussling” with his dad over the computer, yanking it back and forth. This was unusual for the pair, Steven says. He describes him and his son as “best friends” who spent their days watching the History Channel and designing computer games when Steven was on cancer-related leave from his job as a school bus driver.

Frustrated, Steven made his first call to Calumet City’s nonemergency police line. “[Stephon] made me mad,” Steven said in an interview. But as soon as he placed the call he regretted it: “I knew I made a terrible mistake. Knew it, knew it, knew it.” Steven dialed the dispatcher again and told him not to send help, that he had overreacted. But the police were already on their way. When officers Coffey, Hynek, and Jeff McBrayer knocked on the Wattses’ door around 8:30 AM, Steven told them everything was under control. Hynek said he still needed to “check the house to make sure everyone in the house was safe and not injured,” according to his summarized interview in the state investigation. He checked the bathroom, kitchen, and dining room. (Danelene questions the term “everyone” in Hynek’s account, wondering why he didn’t check the first-floor bedroom where she was sleeping.) Feeling uneasy, Steven told the officers his son had left the house—a conceivable fabrication, considering Stephon’s past attempts to run away. But when Stephon called out from the basement, Steven reluctantly agreed to let one officer check on him. Instead, all three followed Steven down the stairs: Hynek first, then Coffey, and then McBrayer. Hynek stopped just before he reached the bottom step, according to the state investigation.

Watts, pictured with Powell at an April rally, mimics what he saw when police drew their guns on Stephon. ò ADRIENNE HURST

All parties agree: it happened in a matter of seconds. With his father a few steps away, Stephon came from around the corner and moved toward the stairs within arm’s reach of the officers, waving the knife in his hand. “He wasn’t running, but he wasn’t walking,” Hynek said in his deposition. No one asked Stephon to drop the knife. Nor did Hynek use any of the de-escalation techniques he learned in training, he testiﬁed. In his own deposition, Coffey did not say whether or not he used those techniques, but indicated he thought about them on his way to the scene. As Stephon came into Hynek’s view, Hynek yelled, “Knife!”—and the officers fired two shots at Stephon. The first bullet, fired by Hynek, hit Stephon under his right armpit; the second came from Coffey and struck Stephon in his back, according to the state investigation. Young Kim, the pathologist who performed the autopsy at the Lake County coroner’s office, informed state investigators that the second shot likely caused Stephon’s death. “Check me for holes,” Hynek yelled at his fellow officers immediately afterward, saying, according to his later deposition, “I know that he hit me with that knife at least once.” Hynek and Coffey both testified that they couldn’t find the cut on Hynek’s forearm—pictured in the state investigation—until they walked into the police station a few minutes later.

AFTER STEPHON’S DEATH, the Illinois State Police Public Integrity Task Force (PITF) conducted an investigation of the shooting. The PITF investigates officer-involved shootings in Cook County—excluding Chicago, which has its own Independent Police Review Authority—and submits its interviews and evidence to Cook County state’s attorney Anita Alvarez’s office for review. On April 12, 2012, assistant state’s attorney LuAnn Snow wrote the following in a letter to the Illinois State Police: “Our review of the investigation revealed no conduct by Officers William Coffee [sic] #211 and Robert Hyrak [sic] #157 during this shooting that would give rise to criminal charges against the officers.” Both Hynek and Coffey had previously been involved in one excessive-force case each, according to the 2013 J

DECEMBER 17, 2015 - CHICAGO READER 15

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continued from 15 depositions each officer made. A man named Zachary Kinney claimed that Coffey used racial slurs and reckless physical force against him; the case was settled and dismissed without prejudice in 2009. Hynek testified he received no discipline for the accusations made against him and another officer in 1997 (court docket information on the case is too dated to be immediately accessed). In addition, Coffey and Hynek testified that they had received autism-related training just once in the six and 17 years, respectively, they’d been on the force before Stephon’s death. Each received 11 weeks of paid administrative leave following the shooting. Coffey’s attorney, John Murphey, acknowledges the tragedy of the case, but says the legality of it is fairly straightforward. “We believe that, based on the undisputed facts, the use of deadly force was reasonable,” he said in an interview. “The people who defend us have the right to defend themselves.” Murphey said Coffey is not allowed to speak with media while the Wattses’ lawsuit is pending. Circuit judge Eileen Brewer granted the defendants’ motion for summary judgment in July, stating that the officers were “in the execution and enforcement of the law at the time of this incident” and that their deadly force was legally justified. The Wattses’ attorney, former Cook County commissioner Anthony Peraica, filed an appeal in November. “Despite Defendants’ arguments to the contrary, the ensuing result—the extinguishment of a young life—was not necessary,” Peraica wrote in the brief. The Calumet City Police Department would not comment on the case, assistant police chief Tom DiFiori said, also citing the pending appeal. ALTHOUGH TRAGIC, Stephon’s death was no anomaly. There are no official statistics on the police-involved deaths of autistic minors—or police shootings in general, although the FBI said last week in the wake of the Laquan McDonald video that it would start tracking all police shootings in the U.S. The numbers that do exist create a stark, if imprecise, picture of what it means to be black and disabled in the U.S.

“Their job is to serve and protect. Why did they serve two bullets in my son, in my baby, and didn’t protect him?” —Danelene Powell The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that 1.2 million children under the age of 21 have been diagnosed with autism. White children are 30 percent more likely to receive an autism diagnosis than black children— experts say the discrepancy may lie in health-care access and parental education. Of those black children who do get diagnosed, roughly 48 percent also have some sort of intellectual disability. In a Washington Post analysis of nearly 400 police-involved deaths, a quarter of which involved someone with a mental illness, black people were killed three times more often than whites or other minorities. Taken together, these statistics suggest that black people with developmental disabilities and mental illnesses are less likely to get diagnosed or get medical treatment than their white peers. And if they do encounter police, which Debbaudt says they are more apt to do, they are more likely to be shot and killed. Despite the state’s ﬁndings, Stephon’s family desperately wishes the officers had taken a different approach. “When you deal with a child with autism, you don’t come at it with guns blazing,” said Wayne Watts, Stephon’s uncle, his voice wavering at a Burger King in Chicago’s Beverly neighborhood. “There is no reason that child should not be sitting here today.” Steven said he’s exhausted himself trying to understand why police didn’t use de-escalation techniques with his son that day. “Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and say that they were in fear of their lives, and they took their weap- J

DECEMBER 17, 2015 - CHICAGO READER 17

continued from 17

ons out and they shot him,” Steven said. “My problem with that is they didn’t try to stop him; they tried to kill him.” “They could have kicked him, kicked the knife out of his hand, anything,” Danelene added. “Butter knife—it was a butter knife,” Steven Jr. interjected. In any case, “their job is to serve and protect,” Danelene said. “Why did they serve two bullets in my son, in my baby, and didn’t protect him?”

AMONG POLICE, a widely accepted benchmark for the distance an individual with a knife can cover in the time it takes an officer to react is 21 feet. So what could the officers who shot Stephon at close range have done differently? Louis Turner, a security-training specialist who teaches crisis-intervention tactics for Illinois security officers and others across the state, says that, for one, officers could have used their Tasers, as they had with Stephon in the past. “The police department dropped the ball,” he says. Turner, whose adult daughter is autistic, also works as a security guard for the Chicago-based disability-rights organization Access Living. Police also need to realize that their presence can escalate an autistic child’s aggression, he said, adding that there was no need for all three officers to check on Stephon. Responding officers should “come to the realization that this call will take longer—there’s no need to rush,” Debbaudt says. He recommends in his book that police responding to crises involving autism adhere to the following acronym:

Fourteen-year-old Stephon, center, revieves a bible two weeks after his baptism. ò COURTESY DANELENE POWELL

A - Approach the person in a quiet, nonthreatening manner. U - Understand that touching a person with autism may cause a “ﬁght or ﬂight” reaction. T - Talk to the person in a calm voice, repeating directions or questions several times if necessary. I - Instruct the person simply and directly. S - Seek to evaluate the situation as it is unfolding. M - Maintain a safe distance and be able to retreat, if necessary, to de-escalate the situation.

18 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 17, 2015

Police officers aren’t the only people who should follow those guidelines, Danelene says. “There could be somebody in a house fire and there’s someone in there with autism. [A firefighter] could say a whole bunch of things to that person, and none of that the person would hear. They need to know how to talk to someone in cases like that, how to coax them out of the fire.” First responders “need to be very patient, be very slow, take a step back and process” when dealing with children who have autism, says Kelly Moore, Stephon’s special education teacher of five years. She described Stephon as intelligent, nonviolent, and self-aware—but easily overwhelmed by his own obsessive thoughts. “Stephon is a very typical example of what first responders would come across,” she says. “This is what they’re going to see. And they’re going to see a lot more of it because [autism diagnosis] numbers are on the rise.” Some experts, however, say the responsibility goes both ways. Autism researcher and law enforcement trainer Emily Iland hosts interactive screenings

of her ﬁlm Be Safe, which teaches young autistic people how to safely interact with police officers. Iland calls education on the autism-community side “the ﬁrst de-escalation technique.” “The police can’t go home dead because somebody has autism,” she said. “We have to teach our young people how to be safe when they interact with the police . . . How much practice did they need to learn to tie their shoes? Tons and tons—and so it’s dangerous and very risky to not be explicitly teaching.” BUT THE WATTSES don’t call what happened to Stephon a shooting. They call it a murder. “Stephon was a special child. They murdered our baby, and I’ll never forget it,” his uncle Wayne says. “No pepper spray, no mace, no negotiating. Nine-millimeters.” On that chilly February morning in 2012, Danelene ran outside, barefoot and in her pajamas. “They killed Stephon,” she wailed at bystanders. “They murdered my baby.” Steven remained quiet, in shock. Stephon, as described by a paramedic interviewed in the state investigation,

“didn’t say anything and never had a pulse.” It’s been three years since Danelene lost her son, but the grief has not subsided—it comes in waves. She feels it during her daily shift at the Hegewisch Ford assembly plant, where she inspects the paint jobs on new vehicles. Every so often, she stands and watches as a black car comes toward her on the assembly line—the same kind of car driven by Calumet City police officers, she says. Today, along with Advance Youth Leadership Power, a subgroup of Access Living, the Wattses are drafting legislation that would require mental illness and developmental disability training for all ﬁrst responders—police officers, firefighters, and emergency medical technicians—nationwide. “They’ll know what to do” with better training, Steven said. “They won’t be pulling out their nine-millimeters.” Through the Stephon Watts Law, which is in the early stages of drafting and research, Danelene hopes to expand upon an Illinois law that is already in place. In 2007, state legislators voted to require autism identification and interaction training for school police officers—a small step toward the reality Danelene would have wanted for Stephon. In the wake of a strikingly similar incident in 2003, police familiar with 15-year-old Paul Childs shot and killed him in his Denver home while he was carrying a knife. The Childs family attempted to pass Paul’s Law—a proposal that would have mandated developmental disability training for all Colorado police officers—but legislators agreed that expanding the city’s CIT training would be enough. “We need the world to see that all ﬁrst responders need training,” Danelene said through tears, a rubber Autism Speaks bracelet dangling from her wrist. “What they need to understand is this person has a disability, and what they do is no fault of their own,” she said. “They never asked to be born that way.” v

This story was produced as part of the Social Justice News Nexus, a journalism fellowship program housed at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. v @adriennehurst

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FILM PRODUCTION

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Spike Lee’s new ﬁlm was funded in part by a state tax credit. ò ROADSIDE ATTRACTIONS AND AMAZON STUDIOS

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ast summer, during the furor over Spike Lee’s title for the movie he was making about gun violence in Chicago, the Illinois Film Production Tax Credit popped briefly into the spotlight. The movie was Chi-Raq; the tax credit is the result of a law that says Illinois taxpayers will kick in at least 30 percent of the money spent locally to make it and other productions. No one had seen the film at that point, and little was known about the script (which turned out, in my opinion, to be an impressive adaptation of the ancient Greek source material, Aristophanes’s bawdy antiwar satire Lysistrata). But a lot of people didn’t like the title—a mashup that compares the loss of American lives in the Iraq War to shooting deaths in Chicago during the same period. It didn’t seem like a good label for a city working to establish itself as a global tourism destination. Even Mayor Rahm Emanuel let Lee know he didn’t like it. But Lee wasn’t giving it up. Which is why the state’s Film Production Tax Credit came to mind—specifically to the mind of Fourth Ward alderman Will Burns. If Lee was hell-bent on sticking that title on his film, Burns figured, there was no way the public should be funding it.

20 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 17, 2015

The Illinois Film Production Tax Credit is, as it happens, a good example of the power of proper naming—a glaze-over moniker that pretty much conceals the fact that this “credit” amounts to a healthy subsidy for the film industry—and a nice little tax break for some completely unrelated businesses. Here’s how it works: The state issues a transferable tax credit of 30 percent of local expenses, including wages paid to Illinois residents, for any qualifying project. The threshold for qualification is a minimum expenditure of $50,000 for commercials and short films, $100,000 for longer films. And there’s a bonus: wages paid to residents living in areas of high unemployment qualify for an additional 15 percent. If a film eventually makes a profit, the credit could be used to reduce its state tax liability. But since bottom-line profits are notoriously scarce in the film business, most moviemakers don’t wait for that. They simply sell this “transferable” credit to a more conventional business, which will buy it at a little discount (say 10 percent), deduct the full amount from its own tax bill, and pocket the difference. How does the filmmaker find such a buyer? The state film office provides a list, dominated by brokers. Unfortunately for Alderman Burns, the City Council has no control over the film subsidy,

and the state legislators who made it a law back in 2008 neglected to add a requirement that any portrayal of Chicago must be positive. Burns did what he could, introducing a resolution asking the state to nix Chi-Raq’s credits. It was debated, but never came to a vote. Still, the tax credit, developed in response to similar programs in some other states and administered by the Illinois Film Office, has spurred production. According to the office’s annual reports, direct spending hit an estimated $294 million in 2014, but is down since, coming in at $170 million in fiscal year 2015, which ended June 30. (The film office changed its methodology that year, reporting actual rather than estimated expenditures, which might account for some of the drop.) In February, Governor Bruce Rauner replaced film office head and seasoned film professional Betsy Steinberg (now at Kartemquin) with Christine Dudley, a former executive director of the Illinois Republican Party and a novice to the film business. And for a while, it looked like the tax credit might fall victim to the state budget crisis: it was put on hold in June, then given a shaky reinstatement in November, when reports circulated that credits would only be honored if a budget was passed. Dudley told me last week that’s not the case: the program is in full force, she said. According to Dudley’s staff, the total value of tax credits issued from July 2008 through December 2014 was just under $204 million. The rationale for this largesse is a combination of job creation and city/state branding. But the job-creation argument has always been wobbly, with the state locked into paying a hefty share of earnings for temporary workers in short-term assignments. It’s generally agreed that if the subsidy goes away, so will the jobs—to wherever production costs are lowest. Which almost brings us to the glamorous part of the rationale. Almost, because a sizable chunk of the film tax credit supports something more mundane: commercial production, as in TV commercials. It accounted for $37 million of the total spent here last year. The rest is Hollywood on the Lake, where we show off our gorgeous skyline and sophisticated urban culture in popular films seen all over the world, with a great big payback in tourism and an influx of new businesses. Enter Chi-Raq, with the blood in the street. Spike Lee reportedly expects to collect $3 million in Illinois tax credits. v

v @deannaisaacs

READER RECOMMENDED

b ALL AGES

Kristina Fluty, Jessica Marasa, Molly Shanahan, and Ben Law ò WILLIAM FREDERKING

DANCE

Before remembrance comes forgetting remembrance YOU COULD SAY THAT Molly Shanahan’s latest work grew from a state of forgetfulness. The expansion of a yearlong investigation, Tiny Liquid Bones is the second iteration of Shanahan’s Virtuosity of Forgetting, a previous performance that steeped its roots in the practice of improvisation. In Tiny Liquid Bones the purpose is to venture between realms—some of it is improvised, some of it structured—and see how the process reveals itself onstage. “I was thinking about memory and what sticks and what we forget, and how they have an impact on who we are,” says Shanahan, artistic director and founder of the local company Molly Shanahan/Mad Shak. “I was ﬁnding that you have to be willing to forget something to ﬁnd it in your memory.” The project was initially sparked by a prompt from Shanahan that asked collaborators to “go back as far as they could and talk about how they understood language in the most primary way.” Shanahan also asked the dancers to send her voice memos recalling some of their formative experiences with language. For company member Ben Law, that meant the challenges of studying in Japan. For Kristina Fluty, who hails from southeastern Kentucky, it was the process of ridding her southern accent during college, a process that proved noticeable to her family members. That vulnerable yet euphoric sense of self-realization, Shanahan says, is partly what Tiny Liquid Bones is all about. “You always have to be right on the edge,” she says of the piece. “You can’t get away from that edge.”—MATT DE LA PEÑA TINY LIQUID BONES 12/17-12/20: Thu-Fri 7 PM, Sat 10 PM, Sun 7 PM, Hamlin Park Fieldhouse Theater, 3035 N. Hoyne (Thu-Fri), Links Hall at Constellation, 3111 N. Western (Sat-Sun), linkshall.ticketfly.com, $15-$45.

ARTS & CULTURE Paxton Whitehead, Nate Burger, Jessie Fisher, and Cliﬀ Saunders ò LIZ LAUREN

Chamber Opera Chicago presents Gian Carlo Menotti’s

The 10th anniversary of this treasured Chicago holiday tradition, perfect for all ages!

December 19 & 20 at 3:00PM Cindy Pritzker Auditorium, Chicago Public Library Harold Washington Library Center, 400 S. State St.

THEATER

A forced farce at Chicago Shakespeare By TONY ADLER

orn into extraordinary wealth during the reign of Louis XIV, French writer JeanFrançois Regnard traveled widely—and for a while, involuntarily, when he was captured by Barbary pirates and sold into slavery. Ransomed, he continued his travels, spending time with the Sami people of Lapland. Then he took a cushy government job that left him free to write Molière-esque plays for Molière’s old theater, the Comédie-Française. Regnard died under ambiguous circumstances (suicide? horse pills?) at age 54, but even that didn’t end his adventures. His disinterred skull was discovered in the 1830s by some kids, who, the story goes, used it as a soccer ball. All of which begs the question: Why did David Ives choose to adapt a Regnard farce when he might’ve written one about Regnard himself? As things stand, The Heir Apparent, Ives’s rhymed yet rangy adaptation of Regnard’s Le Légataire Universel, lacks even a single pirate. Not that that makes it a waste of time. The Heir Apparent is mostly fun and mostly entertainingly performed in the current Chicago Shakespeare Theater production directed by John Rando. But its virtues come across as spotty, forced, and familiar—particularly disappointing given Ives’s history of witty resourcefulness in devising versions of Corneille (The Liar) and Molière (The Misanthrope, presented as The School for Lies). Penniless young aristocrat Eraste covets two things above all else: sweet Isabelle

Sung in English with Orchestra, featuring dancers from Ensemble Español Spanish Dance Theater & a Children’s Chorus. “First rate.... The parting of mother & son at the work’s close was moving indeed.” Richard Covello, NIB Foundation

and Uncle Geronte’s immense fortune. Since getting the latter will assure him the former, he does his best to become the old miser’s heir. But, sick as he is—and, in Paxton Whitehead’s performance, he exhibits supremely disgusting symptoms—Geronte has his own plans for his life and wealth. So Eraste and his cunning servant, Crispin, ﬁnd themselves using all kinds of stratagems to get hold of the money. Regnard was famous for his unprincipled heroes, and, sure enough, Eraste and Crispin’s lack of compunction is the most interesting thing about them. Ives, however, sets their immorality play amid anachronistic references (Godzilla, Tonto and his kemosabe) and intentionally fudged verse that foster a generic hilarity rather than inciting anarchy, as the same devices do in other Ives “transladaptations.” Similarly, Joe Pesci lookalike Cliff Saunders pushes his antics as Crispin—which dominate the play’s long midsection—to a one-note and therefore self-defeating point of hysteria. It’s a great relief when Whitehead is onstage, using his subtler comic skills to bring some modulation to the proceedings. v THE HEIR APPARENT Through 1/17: Wed 1 and 7:30 PM, Thu-Fri 7:30 PM (no shows 12/24, 12/25, and 1/1), Sat 3 and 8 PM, Sun 2 PM, Tue 7:30 PM; also Thu 1/14, 1 PM, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Navy Pier, 800 E. Grand, 312-595-5600, chicagoshakes.com, $48-$88.

Tickets ($10-$25) • chamberoperachicago.org • 312.951.7944

v @taadler DECEMBER 17, 2015 - CHICAGO READER 21

ARTS & CULTURE

THEATER

Nasty, brutish, and long-winded By ZAC THOMPSON

here are scenes in American politics so familiar you could watch them with the sound off and not miss a thing. Near the top of that list has to be the public apology for infidelity. In fact, the disgraced politician’s words of remorse and promises to reform only distract from the spectacle’s most fascinating figure: the mute, shell-shocked wife standing next to the podium where her husband is trying with all his might to look and sound sincerely disgusted with himself. They say politics is theater, but the truth is that it’s bad theater— the scripts are predictable and the actors are never convincing. This empty ritual is repeated near the beginning of Domesticated, Bruce Norris’s fiercely funny though repetitious comedy now onstage at Steppenwolf Theatre Company under the author’s own efficient direction. The apologizer here is women’s health advocate turned renowned public servant Bill Pulver (Tom Irwin), who’s been caught with a young prostitute wearing a schoolgirl uniform similar to the one his two teenage daughters wear every day. Worse, the girl is now in a coma, having sustained a head injury after falling

22 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 17, 2015

during a playful tussle over a spanking paddle. Bill’s apology for the scandal differs from the usual televised mea culpa, however. He can’t quite bring himself to perform the rites of self-ﬂagellation expected of him, choking on the text of his speech and eventually going off script. He regrets being dishonest and causing pain, but when it comes right down to it he isn’t sorry. As Bill sees it, love, marriage, monogamy, and other such absurdities are contrary to the natural instincts of the human animal. Despite all our good intentions and solemn pieties (two of Norris’s favorite satirical targets), we are at bottom creatures driven by self-preservation, a need to dominate, and a need to boink. The biological argument is underscored by the show’s framing device, a school presentation delivered by Bill’s adopted tween daughter, Cassidy (Emily Chang), on the subject of sexual dimorphism in the animal kingdom. Assisted by Jeff Sugg’s video projections, she cuts in every now and then to supply entertaining examples of differences between males and females of the same species, from gnus to something called the bone-eating snot ﬂower. Bill would have us also chalk up his supposed

sins to nature, which has predisposed him to horniness. Further, he believes that women are well on their way to becoming the more dominant half of Homo sapiens (persistent pay gap notwithstanding) and, if they had their way, would probably emulate that snot ﬂower, whose females keep their parasitic males around for no other purpose than procreation. As his attempts to rebuild his life founder and he spirals into irrelevance, Bill rails at one female combatant after another, including his lawyer, a colleague, a bartender, a transgender stranger, and Cassidy’s viperish older sister, Casey (Melanie Neilan). All this mouthing off does Bill no good, which either proves that the women he knows really do have the upper hand or that he’s a self-destructive blowhard. Norris declines to say, though as in his earlier works, which include most notably the Pulitzer-winning Clybourne Park, the playwright clearly relishes hurling brickbats at liberal orthodoxy and shows a grimly humorous pessimism about humankind’s prospects for improvement or even effective communication. Through all of this, Bill’s chief sparring partner is his steely wife, Judy, played by the excellent Mary Beth Fisher. Following the path expected of famous wronged spouses, she writes and promotes a book about her ordeal, tries to keep up the veneer of respectability, and privately cycles through her own stages of grief—as she tells Bill in one of several lacerating speeches, they include the drinking stage, the monologue stage, and the stabbing stage. In truth, she never really leaves the anger stage, but Fisher ﬁnds layers anyway, conveying beneath the harangues and put-downs a wounded sense of betrayal and a struggle with a kind of searing emotional migraine. Irwin’s Bill is angry the whole play too, but he’s best when he’s bottling it up, as in the press-conference apology. When he eventually bursts, what starts out as a bracing purge of political correctness quickly turns into unvaried ranting. But that’s mostly because Norris keeps having him make the same points, at length and with diminishing returns. In this particular Hobbesian state of nature, the diatribes are nasty, brutish, and definitely not short. v DOMESTICATED Through 2/7: Wed-Fri 7:30 PM (no shows 12/24-12/25 and 1/1), Sat-Sun 3 and 7:30 PM, Tue 7:30 PM, Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Downstairs Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted, 312-3351650, steppenwolf.org.

ò THOMAS KELLY

Mary Beth Fisher and Tom Irwin ò MICHAEL BROSILOW

COMEDY

Find love with Max Lipchitz THERE ARE ONLY A FEW short weeks left in the year, and Max Lipchitz wants you to use them to find love. His one-night-only show at iO, Night of Falling in Love: How to Find Love in 2015 and Keep Love in 2016, is an interactive comedic “event” inspired by the search for romance. “It’s a seminar-type of show where I’m teaching the audience tips and tricks and rules of the game—how to do love, which is kind of a silly idea in itself,” says Lipchitz, who wanted to host a Steve Harvey-type show. “Desperation is funny.” It’s one in a series of recent productions intended to revitalize the lineup at iO’s Mission Theater, a stage for alternative comedic voices. “It’s the sort of ‘go for it’ attitude that I’m trying to foster at iO to get performers in positions to stretch themselves and figure out what works and what doesn’t,” says Alex Honnet, iO’s creative director. This is the first solo venture for Lipchitz—who is also on an iO Harold team and performs at the Annoyance’s Holy Fuck Comedy Hour—but he hopes to do more one-off events like this in the future. As for Night of Falling in Love, he’ll bring in funny friends to help lead a series of activities—Holy Fuck comrades Danny Catlow and Nate Varrone among them—in the hopes that people will not only laugh, but maybe, just maybe, find a connection. “I pray that some people will find love at the show and use the tools after to go out into the world and hopefully find a mate,” Lipchitz says with a laugh, “or at least a friend.” —BRIANNA WELLEN MAX LIPCHITZ’S NIGHT OF FALLING IN LOVE, Thu 12/17, 10 PM, iO, the Mission Theater, 1501 N. Kingsbury, ioimprov.com/Chicago, $5.

YOUTH ssss Directed by Paolo Sorrentino. R, 118 min. Landmark’s Century Centre

Caine and Keitel in Youth

MOVIES

They lost it in the movies By J.R. JONES

o film directors really walk around peering at the world through the frame of their joined hands? They do it often enough in the movies— but that’s where it counts, because the rectangle of fingers resides inside the larger frame of the film itself, turning the character into a camera and his experience into a movie within the movie. The final shot of Paolo Sorrentino’s commanding philosophical drama Youth shows an elderly filmmaker making a viewfinder with his hands in just this fashion, and it’s appropriate to a film that, while dwelling primarily on the discontents of old age, also considers the creative problems of movie people and, more specifically, the friction between their work and their own sense of self. These are pretty high-class problems, but then, one can hardly accuse Sorrentino of having the common touch. His international hit Il Divo (2008) dealt with Italy’s political ssss EXCELLENT

sss GOOD

elites (in the administrations of long-serving prime minister Giulio Andreotti), and his Oscar-winning The Great Beauty (2013) dealt with the country’s cultural elites (in the social circle of a happily corrupt celebrity journalist). Youth considers the inner lives of artistic elites: at a posh resort hotel in the Swiss Alps, retired composer and symphony conductor Fred Ballinger (Michael Caine) is courted by an emissary of Queen Elizabeth to perform again; meanwhile, his old pal, a now-lionized filmmaker named Mick Boyle (Harvey Keitel), brainstorms with his crew of young screenwriters to finish the script for a self-described “testament,” to be titled Life’s Last Day. Two movie stars figure in the action as well: Jimmy Tree (Paul Dano), a creatively conflicted actor preparing for an upcoming role, and Brenda Morel (Jane Fonda), a fire-breathing old screen siren and Hollywood survivor who’s agreed to star in Mick’s cinematic swan song. J

ss AVERAGE

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DECEMBER 17, 2015 - CHICAGO READER 23

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Film is a medium that consecrates memory, which makes it an especially apt metaphor in a movie about two old men. As Mick and Fred admit to each other, their memories are starting to fail them—Mick can’t even remember if he slept with the young beauty Fred was in love with 60 years earlier—and Mick quite naturally expresses this anxiety through a viewfinder. On an observation deck at the hotel, he asks one of his charges to look through a telescope at a distant mountain. “This is what you see when you’re young,” he says of the magnified image. “Everything seems really close. That’s the future. And now . . . ” He swings the device around so that she’s looking through the other end, their companions reduced to insects. “That’s what you see when you’re old. Everything seems really far away. That’s the past.” For Mick, death seems really close, but that doesn’t mean he can bring it into focus. Laced throughout the narrative are scenes of him and his four scribes spitballing lines for the deathbed scene that will conclude Life’s Last Day. Sorrentino finds some solid laughs in their fumbling attempts, which often play as a parody of Hollywood writing-by-committee; there’s no way these egghead writers, two generations younger than Mick, could possibly hit on the right line, because what he’s after is nothing less than his own last words. A medium close-up shows their heads clustered together as they lie on a carpet tossing lines around. “I should have devoted myself to you and to our love instead of wasting my life trying to become the king of insurance policies,” one suggests. “Not even morphine can help me now,” says another. When Mick takes a stab at it, he focuses not on the dying man but on the wife at his bedside, who regrets all the years she gave him. Jimmy Tree, the intelligent and discerning young actor who befriends both Fred and Mick at the hotel, suffers from a similar confusion, though instead of translating his life to the screen he’s trying to figure out what his screen work means to his life. Patterned on Robert Downey Jr., Jimmy has become a celebrity playing a robot called Mr. Q in a worldwide blockbuster, and the crush of people who know him only for this frivolous role is beginning to get to him. His roles allow him to connect with strangers, a power he craves as an artist, but the best known of them has become an identity he can’t escape. Brenda Morel, the brittle screen goddess who

roars into the hotel for a meeting with Mick, has about 40 years on Jimmy, and she’s figured out what her screen work means to her life—nothing. Sitting in the hotel lobby with Mick, she announces she’s quitting his film to do a Mexican TV series, pronouncing his last three films to be “shit” and his artistic vision to be hopelessly constricted. “All you know how to see is your own death,” she declares (which seems pretty ironic given Mick’s difficulty in scripting just that). Her heartless exit line—“Life goes on, even without all that cinema bullshit”—seems like a challenge not only to him but to Youth itself. Cinema may be bullshit, but Sorrentino glories in it. Youth is full of vivid images that speak to a preoccupation with spectacle and spectators: The opening shot shows a woman belting out a buoyant dance tune as part of the hotel’s nightly outdoor entertainment, a camera fixed on her as the revolving bandstand turns the background of dancing guests into a rotation of blurry forms. A lurid music video starring the English pop diva Paloma Faith turns out to be the nightmare of Fred’s daughter, Lena (Rachel Weisz), whose husband has run off with Faith (playing herself). And one evening, in the hotel dining room, Lena joins her father and Mick in their long-running surveillance of an old married couple, whose wordless and apparently miserable relationship plays out like a series of silent-movie tableaux. In a shocking moment, some unknown offense prompts the wife to stand up, brutally slap her husband in the face, and stalk off, leaving him the center of attention in the room as he tries to compose himself and finish his soup. All three of Sorrentino’s movie people reach a crisis point. Brenda Morel, ruing her harsh words to Mick, melts down aboard a flight to Cannes, her makeup smeared and the blond wig sliding off her head as the flight attendants pin her to the floor. (Fonda isn’t onscreen for long, but her vinegary performance is destined for a best supporting actress nod). Jimmy Tree, having revealed that his upcoming role was no less than Adolf Hitler, announces his decision to quit the movie and focus his future energies on stories about desire, “because that’s what makes us alive.” What will become of Mick and Life’s Last Day? Who knows, but as he gazes through his framed hands at us, they seem less like a viewfinder than like a portal to that desire. v

v @JR_Jones

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THE BIG SHORT ss Directed by Adam McKay. R, 130 min.

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Carell and Gosling in The Big Short

Christmas Vacation

MOVIES

Betting against the house By LEAH PICKETT

n the mid-2000s, the banks that serve as the pillars of the U.S. financial system defrauded the American people, caused the worst global economic crisis since the Great Depression, and essentially got away with it. Only one executive went to jail for a calculated and widespread corruption that tainted every echelon of the U.S.’s top-tier financial institutions, from JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs to the sincecollapsed Bear Stearns, AIG, and Lehman Brothers. Millions of Americans lost their jobs, homes, pensions, and retirements, and the big banks that survived the crash were compensated by the U.S. government with a multitrillion-dollar taxpayer bailout. What a disgrace. What a story. Adam McKay must have thought so. The Big Short, a ruthless comedy based on Michael Lewis’s nonfiction book The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, is something of a departure for McKay, best known for goofball romps like Anchorman and Step Brothers. In directing The Big Short, he employs a more crafty and sardonic approach: lecturing, testing, inveigling, and even dressing down his viewer to listen up, damn it, because the

U.S. subprime mortgage crisis—as boring as it sounds when shrouded in purposefully abstruse ﬁnancial jargon—is not as inscrutable as the one-percenters would have you think. The system is complex by design, the film maintains, to keep the insiders protected and the outsiders, until their world comes crashing down around them, blissfully oblivious. In fact The Big Short sees as much danger in a passive, too-trusting, and easily distracted culture as in Wall Street’s insatiable greed or the federal government’s lack of oversight. McKay’s gimmicks shouldn’t land as well as they do, but the ﬁlm succeeds because its indignation is righteous and earned. Most of The Big Short’s bitter humor is injected via the fourth-wall-breaking character of Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling), a Brillo-haired Wall Street trader who stares languidly into the camera with a teasing smirk on his lips. “It’s pretty confusing, right?” Vennett asks the audience after a stream of money talk. “Doesn’t it make you feel bored or stupid? Here’s Margot Robbie in a bathtub to explain. . . . ” Cut to the Wolf of Wall Street actress soaking in a bubble bath and sipping a glass of wine as she delivers a primer on J

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ARTS & CULTURE continued from 25 mortgage-backed securities. “When you hear subprime,” Robbie warns. “Think shit.” The celebrity cameos persist—Anthony Bourdain popping up to explain collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) while chopping fish, Selena Gomez demonstrating the domino effect of synthetic CDOs by losing a game of blackjack in a casino—but they all serve a purpose. The economy may not be sexy to the masses, but money itself, debauchery, and beautiful people most certainly are. McKay cowrote The Big Short’s screenplay with Charles Randolph (Love and Other Drugs), and they know how to keep an audience engaged, broadcasting this knowledge often, as both parody and indictment. The film moves at a quick clip, often surprising one with a random jump cut or freeze frame, as if to say, “Pay attention!” Names, quotes, keywords, and definitions materialize onscreen as they’re spoken, adding punch and clarification, and just as quickly disappear. Other characters make asides to the camera to point out what is true about their interactions and what isn’t, keeping the audience on its toes. Flashes of mid-2000s commercials and music videos abound, and popular songs of the time, like Ludacris and Pharrell Williams’s “Money Maker,” are peppered throughout. But for all of the self-aware snark and superciliousness, The Big Short is an underdog story at heart. Three characters in particular contribute some moral sensitivity to the otherwise jaded proceedings: Michael Burry (Christian Bale), a brilliant hedge fund manager who detects the housing credit bubble in 2005 and accurately predicts its burst; Ben R ickert (Brad Pitt), a disillusioned former Wall Street trader turned lone wolf; and Mark Baum (Steve Carell), a principled money manager who convinces his team to begin shorting—betting against—securitized subprime home mortgages after Vennett inadvertently alerts them that the vast majority of these mortgages are fraudulent. Baum, Burry, Rickert, and Vennett may seem well intentioned and outspoken against corruption, but their motives are complicated by their knowing they could make a fortune. In the end they all profit from the crisis, with Baum and Rickert expressing only a modicum of remorse for how they cashed in on other people’s pain. Burry, Rickert, and Baum are outsiders, and though that doesn’t automatically re-

deem them, it does render them more sympathetic. Burry (the only character named after his real-life counterpart) is bothered by the reactions of others to his glass eye and antisocial behavior, but he speaks his mind anyway, insisting that the housing market is propped up by bad loans. Rickert is drawn back into the business by a pair of twentysomething entrepreneurs who spot trouble in the system, but later chastises them for celebrating their own financial windfall. “You know what I hate about banks?” Rickert growls. “They turn people into numbers.” And Baum, wracked with guilt following his brother’s suicide, throws himself into the unpopular job of exposing injustice, ﬁnancial

THE ECONOMY MAY NOT BE SEXY TO THE MASSES, BUT MONEY ITSELF, DEBAUCHERY, AND BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE MOST CERTAINLY ARE.

or otherwise, wherever he can find it. “He was having bad thoughts,” Baum confides in his wife, when the death finally hits him. “And my first thought was to offer him money.” Even Vennett has his conciliatory moments. At one point he reveals how “numbers guys” are able to assert such power over everyone else: through obfuscation and alienation. They want you to think that they’re the only ones smart enough to understand, he says. There have been several decent films about the 2008 financial meltdown, including J.C Chandor’s drama Margin Call (2011) and Charles Ferguson’s Oscar-winning documentary Inside Job (2010). The Big Short is the most incisive. Its method of pedagogy may be too acerbic for some tastes, but maybe that’s what people need in this instance: to be rudely shaken awake. v

v @leahkpickett

Bringing back the sun for 25 years An oral history of the ritual winter-solstice concerts that drummers Hamid Drake and Michael Zerang have been convening since 1990 BY BILL MEYER

umans have been observing the winter solstice across cultures and continents for thousands of years. In 1990 two Chicago percussionists, Hamid Drake and Michael Zerang, marked the northern hemisphere’s shortest day with a concert in a dance studio with a view of the el tracks. The idea was to provide a special occasion for a couple dozen friends who might not celebrate the season in any other way. But that concert has grown over the past 25 years into a beloved series of concerts—an annual gathering that transcends Drake and Zerang’s respective social circles and fan bases. For those who come year after year, it has become an anchor, a beacon, and a seasonal tradition in its own right. Over the decades Zerang, who’s now 57, and Drake, who’s 60, have become internationally respected touring musicians, in demand abroad for much of the year. But every winter since 1990 they’ve returned to Chicago from whatever corner of the globe their itineraries take them in order to convene before sunrise on the morning of the solstice. Their performances usually begin in candlelit semidarkness and end when sunlight streams through the windows. After the drumming stops, the two of them maintain a moment of silence, and then Drake offers a few end-ofthe-year observations. The music changes every time, drawing from their backgrounds in improvised music as well as from their studies of percussive practices from around the world. They both use drum kits, frame drums, and other handheld percussion, but each man has a distinct approach; Drake tends to swing more, while Zerang is more likely to sound like a one-man Middle Eastern street parade. J

Hamid Drake and Michael Zerang in 1995, just a few years into their long-running winter-solstice duo series ò MARC POKEMPNER

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MUSIC continued from 27 The differences continue in the music they play the rest of the year. Both can include saxophonists Peter Brötzmann and Ken Vandermark on their long lists of collaborators, but Drake has spent a lot of time working in jazz and world-music contexts, perhaps most notably with bassists William Parker and Bill Laswell, while Zerang has played trance music with DRMWPN and Daniel Higgs, free improv with trumpeter Mazen Kerbaj and cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm, and bleak rock with Bonnie “Prince” Billy. Zerang has also organized his share of shows: he served on the board of Links Hall (which hosted the solstice concerts through 2012) until it merged with Constellation in 2013, and in the early 2000s he ran a small venue called the Candlestick Maker. Drake and Zerang’s annual solstice celebration has ranged widely in magnitude: it’s been as modest as a single sunrise concert on December 21 and as ambitious as the ten-morning sequence they booked for their tenth anniversary in 2000. Some years they’ve added sunset and evening concerts, and they’ve occasionally welcomed guests, including trombonist Jeb Bishop, clarinetist Douglas Ewart, and late tenor saxophonist Fred Anderson. For their 25th anniversary, they’re taking over Constellation—the site of the concerts since Links Hall moved there in 2013—for three days and three nights. Each morning from December 21 through 23, Drake and Zerang will greet the sun. The first two nights, they’ll each lead a band; the final night, they’ll sit in with Tatsu Aoki’s Tsukasa Taiko drum troupe, then lead an orchestra assembled from the musicians who’ve played the two previous nights. For this oral history of the duo’s solstice concerts, I spoke with DRAKE and ZERANG, of course, as well as with five other people with close connections to the series. Performer and educator ZAHRA GLENDA BAKER has greeted solstice audiences for more than 20 years; bassist and guimbri player JOSHUA ABRAMS has collaborated with both drummers, and he once sat in on a sunrise concert. Cellist, composer, and bandleader TOMEKA REID and drummer MIKE WEIS, who plays in Zelienople and Kwaidan, have both been attending solstice shows since moving to town (in 2000 and 1995, respectively). And RAYMOND SALVATORE HARMON is an artist and record producer based in London who attended sunrise concerts from 1996 till 2002—that is, every year he lived in Chicago.

am making prayers for peace. And as people come in, that energy of peace is resonating in the room.

Drake: She welcomes everyone who comes into the space, and also is there right before we go out into the room. There’s always that moment that the three of us have together that makes it very special. The three of us embrace each other and we have a little bit of extra inspiration and energy.

Baker: Usually there’s some playfulness that takes place, and it’s a really warm exchange of energy, where I’m honored to be making way for them. I think they’ve already prayed before I go get them, but usually there are some hugs.

Zerang and Drake on tour in Europe in the early 2010s ò COURTESY OF MICHAEL ZERANG

Hamid Drake: We wanted to create this environment where people could come, you know—based around drumming, of course. Something that was nondenominational. The solstice is an important time for all people of any religion or race, because it’s about the cycling of the earth itself, and nobody can really claim that. It’s a time of the year when a lot of people are home and visiting, and we wanted to create something that people would enjoy at that particular time, regardless of whatever they might be following. I think it just kind of naturally turned into this continuing event. I don’t think that we planned it at the beginning. Michael Zerang: It became clear that it was going to be an annual thing. It’s the meaning of this time of year, and it’s great to know that you’re going to land and do this thing for three days. Drake: The solstice concerts are very environmental. We have all of our stuﬀ. Candle lights. You remember Links Hall—you had the light coming into the room and letting us know in a certain way that it’s getting time to reel it in. Zahra Glenda Baker: Hamid and I were doing a show together, and he told me about it. Drake: Zahra and I met years ago when we were working for the Chicago Shakespeare Theater.

Baker: It was maybe the third or fourth year, back when they were doing sunrise and sunset concerts. Zerang: We did concerts at sunrise and sunset at Links Hall. The reason that we stopped doing the sunset concerts was because the bar downstairs had their jukebox blaring. There’s nothing that can lose the solstice vibe more than some thumping coming up through the floor. When we do the sunrise shows, there’s no thumping coming up through the ﬂoor, there’s no noise at all, no traﬃc. So let’s just do sunrises. Literally that’s why we did it, and I’m really glad. By the tenth anniversary, they were all sunrise shows. Baker: I went one Friday, and I was so mesmerized that I wanted to come back. Because it was improvised, I wanted to know what the full experience would be. It was very healing, like a revival of the spirit. I was in love with what they were doing. That time or the next year, they asked me to help manage the house. I wanted to keep hearing every performance.

Raymond Salvatore Harmon: The first time I went was in 1996. I’d just moved to Chicago about three months before. I knew almost no one in Chicago, but over the next few years I would come to know a lot of the people in the audiences. I went after that to the winter solstice every year until around 2002. It was a pretty profound spiritual experience, especially that ﬁrst time. The atmosphere was very solemn and quiet, and it was still dark and very cold out. As things began and the room warmed as the sun came up, it was very much a ritual experience. The candles and the low seating helped that.

Mike Weis: You enter a room lit only by candles arranged in a circle around the drums before dawn. As the performance carries on, the room slowly ﬁlls with the light of the rising sun, and the music in the room begins to be accompanied by the sounds of the city waking up outside—the elevated trains increasing in frequency, commuters beginning their day, et cetera.

Zerang: She lights the candles—she’s like our mother.

Joshua Abrams: I think they play together like brothers. It’s very complementary; the solstice events have a heightened stage of ritual to the experience. It’s a feeling of journeying and progressing. As you go through the concert and the dark becomes light, as a listener you go to a diﬀerent place. Really, they have honed the experience to mark a transition.

Baker: Aw, that’s sweet! Even though I’m younger than both of them. Mostly I want to help create a sense of sacred space. We have candles that I place in a circle around the drums. As I light them, I

Weis: I really look forward to these shows. I like the fact that it’s not an easy task to get there—you have to put a little eﬀort into waking up at 5 AM on possibly the coldest mornJ ing of the year!

DECEMBER 17, 2015 - CHICAGO READER 29

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MUSIC Drake: Touring the world— Zerang: Right! I was really happy to hear that from her. She was a young person that came, and just because of the strength and the nature of the event, she saw the whole city as a place to come and work.

Zerang and Drake on tour in Europe in the early 2010s ò COURTESY OF MICHAEL ZERANG

continued from 29 Drake: One of the hardest things is that first night, hauling out most of our stuff. Most of the time when we were at Links Hall, we were able to put it somewhere—in closets or whatnot. On the first morning we had to take all that stuff up. Zerang: Three-thirty in the morning on a freezing Wrigleyville street with my tom-toms! Drake: Constellation is nice because we’re on the ground floor. Zerang: The music in Constellation and the old Links Hall—they’re two unique places, though they’re somewhat similar in size. Constellation has a higher ceiling, but it doesn’t have a train—it has that overpass. The Links Hall space has windows facing east, so that at least you had the potential for direct sunrise light. Whereas this place has the lights facing the west, but it has glass blocks so when it does get light, it’s not eastern light but it’s really quite amazing. What I liked about Links Hall was that we could do the quietest thing and everyone in the room could hear it without amplification or anything—we had 120 people in the room sometimes, and everyone could hear. I think that happens at Constellation too, because we don’t want to have to mike things and we want to have the full spectrum of dynamics. As long as the space can handle it, I’m very happy. Tomeka Reid: The sound of the drums really takes you away; it’s like a meditative expe-

rience with a bunch of people you don't know. I’ve tried to go to the concerts each year and to bring others with me. Something about starting your day with that and ultimately ending your year with the experience is amazing and cleansing in a way. It always feels so powerful, like you’re a part of something greater than yourself. Zerang: What I’m really amazed with is how it’s new people all the time, and younger people. Drake: It’s great. People bring their kids. Zerang: Yeah, well, there’s that. Drake: And their coffee, their mugs, their tea, their pillows, their blankets. Zerang: I don’t exactly know how that happens, apart from people bringing their kids and their kids grow up. I mean, my daughter Veena—if I were to mark this solstice for me, Veena was born in October of 90, and we did our first one in December of 90. Now I have a 25-year-old daughter who is smart and intelligent and not around and totally grown up— that’s how I can gauge the time. Drake: And new people have moved to the city also. Zerang: People like Tomeka Reid. I don’t know if Tomeka had told you, but she was young, she was in Chicago studying, and she saw one of the solstice concerts and said, “I’ve got to move to Chicago!” It’s happened! And now Tomeka is doing all this great stuff—

Reid: I can’t remember what year I first came, but I think it was 2000. It was definitely in the first year or two of me moving here. I attended the concert with Nikki Mitchell and David Boykin. I was like, “Six AM, for real? Ha!” But when I got there, it was so amazing! Sitting there in the old Links Hall, I remember thinking, “How’s this gonna work?” The Red Line is passing by, and you can hear it loud and clear. But the minute they started, somehow the train sounds melted away and you just heard the sound of the drums. When the sun had risen and the concert was over, the train sounds reemerged. It was really momentous. My first years in Chicago were a little rough, and I remember this being one of the things that made me so excited about Chicago and wanting to stay—that and the Harold Washington Library. And my U-Pass! Weis: I like that you had to buy your tickets at the used bookstore across the street. I always used this opportunity to do a little book shopping. I kind of wish that they still sold tickets this way, but even the solstice shows have become digital. Zerang: Bob [Roschke] and Rhonda [Pilon] at Bookworks, they sold our tickets for us as a favor. Those were definitely two people who were really, really helpful, and there was no gain for them except some more people strolling through their bookstore. It’s a pretty noble profession, bookseller, I’d say. Abrams: I’ve gone alone, I’ve brought friends, I’ve brought my wife, I’ve gone on both sides of the day by staying up after a gig or getting up early. Each way has its merits. If you’re staying up, hopefully it means you’re having a good time. At a certain point it makes sense to have it be a continuation of the previous night. There’s something special about listening to music at that hour—it’s so unusual and puts me in a different place for receiving the information of the music. Weis: Hamid concludes each performance with a thoughtful speech. I still remember last year's message about his call for shar-

ing bodhicitta—the Buddhist act of transferring compassion to other sentient beings and removing the self from its bubble.

Drake: What makes me be a blabbermouth? Nothing is planned out—it’s all pretty much spontaneous. Sometimes it might be inspired by conversations that Michael and I have when we’re in the back room or the side room, whatever you want to call it, before we play. The inspiration just comes to say something, and usually it seems like what comes is right for that particular moment.

Zerang: Twenty-five sounds like a lot, but it’s not that much. We both are healthy and able to go do it, and there’s no reason not to until we can’t for whatever reason. I did have this ridiculous fantasy that this year we would do the three morning shows, and then the evenings, and make a special thing out of it. It would be the 25th annual winter solstice celebration—and the first annual winter solstice festival of the arts! I backed off on that one a little bit when I realized how much work that would be, but it’s not a bad idea—

Drake: It’s a beautiful idea. We wanted to do something special for our 25th year, so we decided to present concerts in the evenings where we each on two of the nights present a group. Michael will present a group and I will present a group, ﬁrst night; second night, both of us will present a diﬀerent group; and what we’re trying to do on the third night is to present a large group project with all of the people who are involved in our group presentations and perhaps all of the other people too. Sort of a Solstice Orchestra, that’s what we’re going to try and do. And then in the morning, of course, we’re going to do our duet concerts.

Weis: My wife and I have been attending these shows together ever since we met in ’97. It’s now part of our holiday tradition, in addition to the midnight screenings of It’s a Wonderful Life at the Music Box, glögg toasting at Simon’s Tavern in Andersonville, and playing hooky from work to wander around downtown. Christmas in Chicago can be a beautiful thing. I’ve had to attend a few of the more recent solstice shows by myself because Michelle had to stay home with our son, and while it’s still a fulﬁlling experience, it’s just not the same as sharing it with her. I’m looking forward to the time when my son is old enough to attend these concerts with us as a family. I hope these guys carry on for another 20 years. v

DECEMBER 17, 2015 - CHICAGO READER 31

MUSIC

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! TIM OWEN

DOGS ON ACID, YEAR OF GLAD, COASTER, AND HOT BAGELS 6 PM, Beat Kitchen, 2100 W. Belmont, $10. b

DELAWARE INDIE LABEL JADE TREE helped steer second-wave emo to unprecedented heights in the 90s. After a recent dormant period, the label restored its focus on releasing new music, much of which is being made by the fourth-wave upstarts indebted to Jade Tree’s legacy. Among the great fare the label has introduced this year is the self-titled debut from Dogs on Acid, a Philadelphia outfit featuring members of two of the current scene’s most important bygone bands: Snowing and Algernon Cadwallader. The furious and fun songs bashed out by both bands suggested they had worn out their respective copies of Cap’n Jazz’s Analphabetapolothology, but, unlike their predecessors, Dogs on Acid don’t buckle under the pressure of their own energy. They charge ahead through sky-opening rock tracks built out of easy hooks that land hard. Emo still gets unfairly maligned as an ill-fated expression of adolescence, but it’s now in its third decade and Dogs on Acid are among the great bands that can mine the hard-to-define feelings of a post-quarter-life crisis. On “9 Times” front man Peter Helmis sings about stubbornly holding your ground even though you know you’re on the wrong side of an argument. The obstinate conviction in his voice reminds me of the inner turmoil I’ve experienced in fights. Whatever wisdom I’ve accumulated that might help me best deal with a disagreement squares off with my pig-headed desire to never give up—and Helmis captures all that confusing tension with pop solemnity. —LEOR GALIL

32 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 17, 2015

Seattle funeral-doom duo Bell Witch play metal with a metabolism so slow it feels like the breathing of a great beast that sleeps under a mountain of rock—or the breathing of the mountain itself, an ancient thing whose life moves at a pace we can’t perceive. This year’s Four Phantoms (Profound Lore) adorns its dilated, mournful melodies with patient, bell-like tolling and implacably cycling arpeggiated patterns, draping almost everything in buzzing, gently undulating bass drones that feel as edgeless and eternal as the low flat clouds on the hundredth day without sun. The drums (played by Adrian Guerra, who’s since been replaced by Jesse Shreibman) rarely approximate anything you could call a “beat”—they’re usually just a disconnected series of concussions and clashes. Bassist and singer Dylan Desmond gets help with vocals from his duo partner, and they move among a wide variety of timbres—growls, shrieks, grating rasps, even ripe clusters of monklike harmonies, mostly in long syllables that are hard to resolve into words. Sometimes the music consists of nothing but delicate, almost crystalline guitar, and sometimes it erupts into full-band impacts so dense that they seem to make spacetime shimmer a little. But it always feels governed by a clock ticking so slowly that human lives blink in and out of existence like mayflies. If you’re the sort of person who takes comfort in your utter insignificance in the vastness of the universe, you may also find this bleakly beautiful, barely human music strangely consoling. —PHILIP MONTORO

Samuel Blaser Quartet 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $10. 18+ Swiss trombonist Samuel Blaser is one of the more deliberate and focused musicians in jazz: he not

only sculpts meticulous improvisations that sound composed, but also assembles smart projects in which the concept never overwhelms the emotional substance. His recent quartet album Spring Rain (Whirlwind) is an imaginative salute to the great reedist and improviser Jimmy Giuffre, more specifically the trio music he made in the early 60s on clarinet with pianist Paul Bley and bassist Steve Swallow. That small body of music remains a touchstone for players committed to chamber-like intimacy, free time, and an ensemble aesthetic devoid of strict chord changes. Blaser combines a series of elegant originals with tunes by Giuffre—as well as a couple the trio recorded by Carla Bley, like the beautiful “Jesus Maria”—and for the most part his excellent band (drummer Gerald Cleaver, pianist Russ Lossing, and bassist Drew Gress) bring greater heat and propulsion than their forebears. The parts played by Blaser and Lossing coalesce within fleet polymetric schemes. The former serves brooding melodies with plush-toned voicings that are frequently riddled with multiphonics, while Lossing piles on exhilarating solos that occasionally become discordant when he switches to Fender Rhodes or Wurlitzer. For this show Lossing joins Blaser along with drummer Gerry Hemingway and bassist Toto Gucci. —PETER MARGASAK

Goodbye Tomorrow Kweku Collins, MFN Melo, John Walt, Shaffer, G-Scott, and DJ Chris Ill open. 9 PM, the Promontory, $13, $10 in advance. 18+ Local hip-hop outfit Goodbye Tomorrow are the latest group to be defined by their anonymity. According to a recent DJ Booth profile, they keep their ranks hidden to preserve the integrity of the group (watching Donnie Trumpet and the Social Experiment play second fiddle to founding member Chance the Rapper with this year’s Surf apparently bolstered that goal). If the group’s ornate debut, A Journey Through the Mind of a Non Believer (Rostrum), held its weight, the mysterious membership might feel like less of a gimmick. The boisterous, ostentatious album sounds luxe but sags in parts, and though members approach the mike with an

MUSIC Last month, when Michigan emo linchpins Empire! Empire! (I Was a Lonely Estate) visited Beat Kitchen, they handed off their vocal duties to a foursome of guests. I walked in to find magnetic Island of Misfit Toys singer Anthony Sanders with mike in hand, bobbing and gesticulating with so much force it looked like each song was taking hold of his body. Sanders channels the same earnest intensity on the band’s recent second album, I Made You Something (Broken World Media). The quasi-symphonic squad propel through delicate, hushed melodies and blustery punk crescendos with a theatrical fervor, which makes the overwrought passages go down easier and the ambitious leaps more charming than not. The fits of rapping on “A Healthier Olympics” exude enough heart to make the experiment feel necessary, and the occasional awkward bump in flow fits the band’s scrappiness. Like their contemporaries, Island of Misfit Toys stir huge moments that effectively coax listeners to follow them during their upward trajectory. When Sanders hollers, whispers, and spills his guts on “Burble,” I find myself wanting to reach out and help him sort through his feelings, even if that just means singing along. —LEOR GALIL

Island of Misfit Toys ! JOHNNY FABRIZIO irrepressible hunger, they too frequently come up with familiar boasts about inflated egos. But Goodbye Tomorrow can make chest-puffing work in their favor, as they do on the pristine “Jay Z” and their somber nonalbum collaboration with G Herbo, “NoOne or NoThing.” On the sprawling “Goodbye Tomorrow” one member proclaims, “I just numb the pain under these lights at these shows,” which is confusing since tonight’s show is Goodbye Tomorrow’s debut live performance. Part of the draw will be seeing what they do in the flesh. —LEOR GALIL Rock, Pop, Etc Devon Allman Band, Danielle Nicole 9 PM, Cubby Bear AV Club, Spocket, Astro Samurai 9 PM, Schubas Empire of the Sun 8:30 PM, Riviera Theatre A Life Endangered, Other Masquerades, Pink Eyes 9 PM, Burlington Loving Hour, Nasty Snacks 9 PM, Martyrs’ Michele McGuire, Brian Johannesen 9 PM, Hideout Mr. Gnome, Beat Drun Juel, Blind Moon 8:30 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Planes Mistaken for Stars, As Hell, New Strange, Droughts 9:30 PM, Quenchers Saloon Marc Roberge 8 PM, Thalia Hall, sold out b Hip-Hop Juvenile 10 PM, the Shrine Newsense, Ang13, Sahi Alyssia with Lockeroom Talk, Milly Mango 9 PM, Double Door Rodes 9 PM, Jerry’s Dance Drezo 10 PM, the Mid Nicolas Jaar (DJ set) 10 PM, Smart Bar Hiroko Yamamura, Zebo 10 PM, Primary Nightclub Folk & Country Devil in a Woodpile 6 PM, Hideout Meghan Linsey, Sarah Potenza 7:30 PM, SPACE b Darius Rucker, Jerrod Niemann 8 PM, Joe’s, sold out Jazz Robert Glasper Trio 8 and 10 PM, also Fri 12/18 and Sat 12/19, 8 and 10 PM, Jazz Showcase New Standard Jazz Orchestra with Bob Mintzer 8 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 18+

John Niekrasz and friends 9 PM, Elastic b Classical Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center Bach. 7:30 PM, Harris Theater for Music and Dance Chicago Symphony Orchestra with Alexander Hanna James Conlon, conductor (Mozart, Vanhal, Dvorak). 8 PM, also Fri 12/18, 1:30 and Sat 12/19, 8 PM, Symphony Center

FRIDAY18 Infernal War See also Saturday. Nokturne, House of Atreus, Slutvomit, Somnolence, Fin, and Isotopic Goatlasers open. 4 PM, LiveWire Lounge, 3394 N. Milwaukee, sold out. You’re probably not getting tickets to Cathedral of the Black Goat VII if you don’t already have them, regardless of what or whom you sacriﬁce. The amazing metal fest put on annually by the theistic-satanist group of the same name always sells out fast (in this case it took only a few hours in June). And with good reason: it has a knack for drawing the best and most exciting acts from the gnarliest reaches of underground metal. This year’s biggest score is probably the hostile Poles Infernal War, who are making their first U.S. appearance. The band released two albums in 2005 and 2007 before focusing on other projects, which left listeners wondering if Infernal War were done. Well, war is never over, and Infernal War came back with their third full-length, Axiom (Agonia), this past spring. It shows a broadening of themes but no decline in the band’s howling, pounding aggression— despite some surprisingly adventurous breaks and hooks the filthy blasting roar never quite lets up. —MONICA KENDRICK

Island of Misfit Toys Annabel, Nnamdi’s Sooper-Dooper Secret Side Project, and Laverne open. 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln, $12, $10 in advance. 18+

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Rock, Pop, Etc Bangers 9 PM, Hideout Andrew Belle, Jon Guerra 8 PM, SPACE, sold out b Brave Combo 9 PM, FitzGerald’s Everybody All the Time, Superbig, Toy Robots, Dirty Blue 8 PM, Martyrs’ Jay Farrar, Greg Silsby 7 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b FKJ, My Boy Elroy, Vapor Eyes 9 PM, Double Door Future Laureates, Jarryd Scott Steimer 10:30 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Hood Smoke, Fluﬀers, Heavy Hinges 8 PM, Schubas In La Kesh, Alex Rossi 9 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint Nayo Jones 8 PM, the Promontory Kill Hannah, Shiny Toy Guns 9 PM, also Sat 12/19, 6:30 PM, Metro, 18+ Linden Method, Guardrail, On a High Wire, Rebuild & Rebound 7:30 PM, Cobra Lounge Makaya, Manuals 9 PM, Beat Kitchen Mustard Plug, MU330, Skapone, Invaders, DJ Chuck Wren 8:30 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Craig Owens, Whenskiesaregray, Too Close to Touch, Marina City 6 PM, Bottom Lounge b Pantomime, Bonesetters, Black Tape, Cat Daiquiri 10 PM, Quenchers Saloon Pinko, Rash, Imelda Marcos, Den 10:30 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Saurom, El Clad, High Spirits 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Sister Hazel, JD Eicher & the Goodnights 8 PM, also Sat 12/18, 8 PM, House of Blues, 17+ Skip Church, Wooly Bushmen 10 PM, Cole’s F Smoking Popes, AM Taxi, Showoﬀ 8:30 PM, Cubby Bear Voice of Addiction, Ghost Sector, Death & Memphis, Brouhaha 9 PM, Burlington Ryley Walker, Circuit des Yeux, Moon Bros., Hubble 9 PM, Empty Bottle Weird Bear, Blue Steel, 4 Drink Minimums, Nathan Weber 8 PM, Elbo Room Dance Hernan Cattaneo 10 PM, Spy Bar DJ Funk, Luminox, DJ Nephets, Zebo, Brotinez 9 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ DJ Pierre, Hyperactive, Frankie Vega 10 PM, Primary Nightclub

J DECEMBER 17, 2015 - CHICAGO READER 33

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Buy a gift certiﬁcate for the music lover on your list. This year, do something new. Do something for yourself. Give something worthwhile. Take a class with us and you sign on for so much more. Meet new people from all walks of life. Come alive through music, art and dance. Find your folk at the Old Town School of Folk Music. New classes start January 4, 2016! Gift certiﬁcates and class schedules at oldtownschool.org

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34 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 17, 2015

MUSIC continued from 33

Hip-Hop DJ Yella, DJ Sean Legend, DJ Alicia, DJ Bonsu 9 PM, the Promontory Austin Fillmore, Ross Blaze, Rawk Miller, Kid Ro, Ness Twins, King Pevie 9 PM, Subterranean

EDX, Croatia Squad 10 PM, Sound-Bar Joe Kollege, Sean Mac, DJ Slow Mo, DJ Commando 10 PM, the Promontory Just Blaze, Jahlil Beats, Zebo 10 PM, the Mid Anthony Naples, Huerco S 10 PM, Smart Bar

Dance DJ Stingray 313, Justin Long, Kiddo & Antiphase 10 PM, Smart Bar Joeski, Diz, Augie Delarosa 10 PM, Primary Nightclub Reventon Navideno, Plan B, Silento, De La Ghetto 7 PM, Aragon Ballroom, 17+ Matt Tolfrey, Dino Gardiakos, Garrett Belschner 10 PM, Spy Bar Yellow Claw, Stratus 9 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Yellow Claw, Moksi, Howie Doin 10 PM, the Mid

Blues, Gospel, and R&B Corey Dennison, Paul Filipowicz 9:30 PM, Buddy Guy’s Legends Jazz Die Enttäuschung 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Robert Glasper Trio 8 and 10 PM, also Thu 12/17 and Sat 12/19, 8 and 10 PM, Jazz Showcase Al Jarreau 8 PM, the Venue at Horseshoe Casino Lowdown Brass Band 9:30 PM, also Sat 12/19, 9:30 PM, Andy’s Jazz Club Bob Mintzer Trio 9 PM, also Fri 12/19, 8 PM, Green Mill

Folk & Country Jorma Kaukonen 7 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b

Experimental Galaxxu; Michael Golas, Jordan Martins, and Ryan Packard; Derek Baron 9 PM, Elastic b

Blues, Gospel, and R&B Tab Benoit Early show is sold out. 7 and 10 PM, City Winery b Eddy Clearwater, Betta Blues 9:30 PM, Buddy Guy’s Legends Sugar Blue Band 10 PM, Rosa’s Lounge

Classical Jesus Garcia Piano. 7:30 PM, PianoForte Studios b Von Trapps 7 PM, also Sat 12/19 and Mon 12/21 through Wed 12/23, 3 PM, Symphony Center

Jazz Robert Glasper Trio 8 and 10 PM, also Thu 12/17 and Fri 12/18, 8 and 10 PM, Jazz Showcase Lowdown Brass Band 9:30 PM, also Fri 12/18, 9:30 PM, Andy’s Jazz Club Bob Mintzer Trio 8 PM, also Fri 12/18, 9 PM, Green Mill

SATURDAY19 Infernal War See Friday. Cruciﬁer, Iconoclast Contra, Svolder, Infernal Sacrament, Moharebeh, and Bestial whore open. 4 PM, LiveWire Lounge, 3394 N. Milwaukee, sold out.

International Tatsu Aoki & Tsukasa Taiko 7:30 PM, also Sun 12/20, 3 PM, Museum of Contemporary Art b

Jaye Jayle Dim headline; Jaye Jayle and Stirrup open. 9 PM Burlington, 3425 W. Fullerton, $7 suggested donation. In 2013, Evan Patterson—perhaps best known as the front man of veteran Louisville posthardcore band Young Widows—began traveling to Santa Fe to visit his then girlfriend who was there attending grad school. During his downtime, he strung up an old acoustic guitar she had lying around and started writing some exploratory yarns that were never meant to see the light of day. After hearing snippets of the tracks, however, Patterson’s friends encouraged him upon his return to pursue the subdued side project. Or so the story goes. What resulted was a modest singles series by Jaye Jayle: four records, each with two tracks per, on four diﬀerent labels. Patterson’s dark and heady drawl is unmistakable during a slow roller like “Moonglares,” but it’s on the dustier lilting numbers like “The Road to New Mexico”—with its rudimentary, stripped-downto-nothing rhythm—that Patterson softens his vocals and sounds the most like a wanderer casually hitching his way through the southwest (“I’m on the road to New Mexico / I’m going to bury my face in the desert snow / I’m on the road to New Mexico / I’m going to leave my wife and my kid at home”). For this show Jaye Jayle will perform as a quartet; and the singles series will be available in its four pieces along with a screen-printed limited-edition CD of the series as a whole. Patterson also tells me that his debut full-length album, House Cricks . . . and Other Excuses to Get Out, will arrive early next year via local label Hawthorne Street Records. —KEVIN WARWICK

Classical Apollo Chorus of Chicago Handel. 7 PM, also Sun 12/20, 2 PM, Harris Theater for Music and Dance Deru, Eﬃxx 8:30 PM, Constellation

SUNDAY20 Shemekia Copeland Marty Sammon Band opens. 8 PM, City Winery, 1200 W. Randolph, sold out. b

Rock, Pop, Etc Beast Warrior, Misanthropy, Central Disorder 10 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Casual Ties, Captain Coopersmith, Marmaletta 9 PM, Martyrs’ Drilling for Blasting; Fuck You, Idiot; Closed Mouths; Costanza 7 PM, Subterranean Flat Five 8 PM, SPACE, sold out b Fletcher, Snicholfritz 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Kill Hannah 6:30 PM, also Fri 12/18, 9 PM, Metro, sold out b Noise FM, Blane Fonda, Model Stranger, Workout Music 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Sidewalk Chalk, Cloud9, Brandon James & Aug-

mented Reality 8 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club Sister Hazel, JD Eicher & the Goodnights 8 PM, also Fri 12/18, 8 PM, House of Blues, 17+ Skid Row, Great White 6 PM, Portage Theater b Snow Angels 9 PM, Hideout Straight No Chaser 3 and 8 PM, Civic Opera House b Strange Arrangement, Mungion 9 PM, Schubas, 18+ Walsher Clemons, Joe Hertler & the Rainbow Seekers, From tha 99 7:30 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Warforged, Impale, Tanzen, No Conviction 10 PM, Quenchers Saloon Werewolves at Hour 30, All the Animals, Draft Week 8:30 PM, Cobra Lounge

Shemekia Copeland has developed from a blues shouter teeming with raw power into a stylist of subtlety and nuance. And she’s done it without sacrificing any of her intensity. Her recently released Outskirts of Love (Alligator) features the expected bluesy paeans to erotic infatuation—she covers the straight-ahead 12-bar-blues of Albert King’s “Wrapped Up in Love Again,” for instance— but she also takes on more urgent contemporary themes: from homelessness on “Cardboard Box” to soul-killing loneliness on the title track to date rape and its payback on “Crossbone Beach,” which features a surrealistic guitar break from Robert Randolph that invokes the psychic terror and dissolution being suﬀered by the protagonist. Still Copeland emerges hopeful and unbowed on healing anthems like “Lord, Help the Poor and Needy” from the late Jessie Mae Hemphill and Mo Rodgers’s “The Battle Is Over (But the War Goes On).” She negotiates a complex melodic and emotional terrain: her unfettered roar remains J

DECEMBER 17, 2015 - CHICAGO READER 35

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Elidades Ochoa y Barbarito Torres SUNDAY, JANUARY 31 11AM & 3PM

Justin Roberts & His Not Ready for Naptime Players Kids' Concert FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 5 8PM

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Erwin Helfer 80th Birthday Celebration • with Barrelhouse

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WORLD MUSIC WEDNESDAY SERIES

continued from 35

among the most thrilling in contemporary blues, and her ability to fuse vulnerability with toughness and grit—most evident on the aforementioned “Crossbone”—is both riveting and inspiring. —DAVID WHITEIS

Health & Beauty State Champion headline; Health & Beauty, Sapat, and Scott Tuma open. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $5. As a full-time music journalist, it’s never easy admitting that you missed the boat. But after catching Health & Beauty a few weeks ago, I’ve been kicking myself over the countless missed opportunities I had to see them prior. As a result, I’ve recently disappeared down the rabbit hole of their deep Bandcamp discography—and I’m officially paying attention now. Over the last year, I’d taken notice of the group’s leader, Brian Sulpizio, thanks to his excellent work as the lead guitarist in Ryley Walker’s band, but what he’s doing in Health & Beauty—often with keyboardist Ben Boye and drummer Frank Rosaly, who are also both Walker collaborators—is a different can of worms. They’re an art-rock juggernaut with irresistible hooks and fizzy, over-the-top performances. And the best is yet to come. Their forthcoming album delivers lush, more forceful versions of older songs—including a bunch from the group’s out-of-print 2013 tape, Guns (Teen River)— that remind me of Dirty Projectors with a less hysterical sense of ambition, as well as soft-rock icons Bread (in terms of Sulpizio’s gorgeous vocal melodies and the stunning harmonies he produces with Gillian Lisee and Emme Williams). Sulpizio definitely brings a proggy complexity to his arrangements, but the aesthetic is breezy and soulful—he might drop a scorching guitar solo in the middle of an R&B flavored jam, or uncork some nasty blues rock (“Beyond Beyonce”). —PETER MARGASAK

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OLDTOWNSCHOOL.ORG 36 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 17, 2015

Mars Williams 9 PM, Hungry Brain, 2319 W. Belmont, $10 suggested donation. For many years Witches & Devils, the long-running Albert Ayler tribute band led by saxophonist Mars

Williams, have existed mostly as an excuse to get together and perform an annual holiday concert. This year Williams put the group’s name aside and is simply calling the event the Sixth Annual Albert Ayler Xmas Show—but the content hasn’t changed. For these memorable concerts, Willams merges a variety of Christmas songs with the indelible repertoire of free-jazz titan Ayler, who brought a scalding intensity to tunes rooted in gospel and spirituals. It may sound silly, but the performances are no joke, and they produce a seriously joyful noise. The band tackles warhorses like “O Tannenbaum” and “12 Days of Christmas” in the same smoldering fashion as their take on Ayler: the rhythm section bubbles and generates a kind of levitating intensity during the wonderfully expressive, multilinear theme statements, while the horns state familiar melodies in loose cries and the embellished lines of each player pull apart and coalesce in a naturalistic frenzy. Williams designs clever medleys that appropriate the pulse and feel of particular Ayler tunes as the band rips through a greatest-hits lineup of holiday tracks. This year’s group features cornetist Josh Berman, drummer Steve Hunt, cellist and guitarist Fred Lonberg-Holm, bassists Brian Sandstrom and Kent Kessler, and keyboardist Jim Baker. —PETER MARGASAK Rock, Pop, Etc The Academy Is . . . , Partybaby 7 PM, also Wed 12/23, 7 PM, House of Blues b Counterfeit I, Action Boy, Butchered, Person 8 PM, Quenchers Saloon Flat Five Late show is sold out. 4 and 8 PM, Hideout Forest Fires, Evening Attraction, Karma Wears White Ties, Post Animal, Capital Soiree 6 PM, Subterranean b Fruit & Flowers, Darkwing, Chinatown Secuity, Strawberry Sunburn 9 PM, Burlington Pears, Nervous Passenger, Tens 7 PM, Cobra Lounge Retar Crew, Dirty Dirty Dollars, Chamothy the Great, DJ Supernova 8 PM, Double Door Soft Candy, Joseﬁna 9:30 PM, Whistler F Wizards of Winter 7:30 PM, Thalia Hall Hip-Hop Blkjuptr, Smino, Monte Booker, Ravyn Lenae, Jean Deux, Jay2, Bryant Stewart 6:30 PM, Schubas b

MUSIC Folk & Country Sons of the Never Wrong 7 PM, SPACE b Experimental Carl Testa 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ International Tatsu Aoki & Tsukasa Taiko 3 PM, also Sat 12/19, 7:30 PM, Museum of Contemporary Art b Classical Alyssa Arrigo, Emi Lee Hart, Eric Miranda 3 PM, PianoForte Studios b Chicago Symphony Orchestra with the Chicago Symphony Chorus Bernard Labadie, conductor (Handel). 3 PM, Symphony Center Cheryl Wilson, Jim Gailloreto, and Jeremy Kahn Noon, City Winery, sold out b

MONDAY21 Crown Larks ShowYouSuck, Cell Phones, and Ace Da Vinci open. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western. F To begin to understand the eclectic art-rock explorers in Crown Larks, may I suggest listening to the last 40 seconds of “Blood Mirage,” one of the seven psych-treated, space-cadet tracks from the locals’ 2015 debut full-length, Blood Dancer (Space Lung)? That short stretch is a deconstruction in which skronky sax rapidly tumbles alongside a frenetic nonrhythm on drums and discordant, gashing organ lines. And those several seconds should startle you well enough to brace you for the rest of the album, which is primarily an oﬀ-kilter blend of dreamy, nearly ambient soundscapes (“Fog, Doves”) and colorful, Kraut-influenced journeys of avant-garde experimentation (“Defector”). The prevalence of straightup jamming and improvisation is plenty worth taking note of as well—because neither path feels overwrought during the band’s meandering execution. The droneful and solemn male and female vocals that sweep in and out of the clatter aren’t really much needed to augment the already fantastical world occupied by Crown Larks, but thankfully they don’t distract too much. —KEVIN WARWICK Rock, Pop, Etc Cardboard Cutout, Mike Golden, Bonﬁres, Lights Over Bridgeport 6:30 PM, House of Blues b Daniel Knox 8 PM, Comfort Station b Pat McCurdy 8 PM, Beat Kitchen Michael McDermott 8 PM, also Tue 12/22 and Wed 12/23, 8 PM, City Winery b Meristems, Merit Badge, Horrible/Beaut, Western Canyon 8 PM, Burlington Sam Trump, Zigtebra, Kwest_on 7 PM, the Promontory Wild Earp, Babe-a-Lon 5 8 PM, Martyrs’ Hip-Hop Hurt Everybody 6:30 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, sold out b Dance Light Em Up, Gus Karas, Metro 10 PM, the Mid Folk & Country Robbie Fulks & Kelly Hogan 7 PM, Hideout

Jazz Hamid Drake & Michael Zerang See more on Drake and Zerang on page 27. 6 AM, also Tue 12/22 and Wed 12/23, 6 AM, Constellation b Hamid Drake, Ari Brown, and Harrison Bankhead; Michael Zerang & the Blue Lights 8 PM, Constellation, 18+ Quin Kirchner Group 9:30 PM, also Tue 12/22, 9:30 PM, Whistler F Classical International Music Foundation “Do-It-Yourself Messiah.” 7 PM, also Tue 12/22, 7 PM, Harris Theater for Music and Dance

TUESDAY22 Rock, Pop, Etc Brandon James, Mike Zabrin’s Funktastic 8 PM, Martyrs’ Ravyn Lenae, Manwolves, Toni Romiti, Ace Da Vinci 5:30 PM, House of Blues b Bill MacKay & Ryley Walker 9 PM, Hideout Michael McDermott 8 PM, also Mon 12/21 and Wed 12/23, 8 PM, City Winery b Shaun Peace, Ace B8gie, Joseph Chilliams, Defcee 9 PM, Burlington Hip-Hop Big Dipper, Witch Hazel 9 PM, Empty Bottle Jazz Quin Kirchner Group 9:30 PM, also Mon 12/21, 9:30 PM, Whistler F Michael Zerang, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Jim Baker, and Kent Kessler; Hamid Drake, Joshua Abrams, and Jason Adasiewicz 8 PM, Constellation, 18+

WEDNESDAY23 Rock, Pop, Etc The Academy Is . . . , Partybaby 7 PM, also Sun 12/20, 7 PM, House of Blues b Michael McDermott 8 PM, also Mon 12/21 and Tue 12/22, 8 PM, City Winery b No Men, Jackson Van Horn, Aces 9 PM, Burlington Tiger Summer, Edwin, Will Ejzak & Tom Reynolds, Colin Strand 7 PM, Martyrs’ Turbo Vamps, Lester & the Finks, Hasta Lumbago 9 PM, Quenchers Saloon Hip-Hop Roy Kinsey, DJ Castle 9 PM, Hideout Mack Nito, Al Tamper, the $hoots, Monsoon, Spqher 9 PM, Jerry’s Sir the Baptist, Romiti, Logan, Duke da Beast, DJ Hoop Dreams 6 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club b

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DECEMBER 17, 2015 - CHICAGO READER 37

FOOD & DRINK

Bar Marta shows the growing inﬂuence of Empire Sodikoff

A team of Hogsalt Hospitality veterans stealthily takes Humboldt Park.

By MIKE SULA

ertain restaurants and restaurant groups are known kitchen incubators. Trotter’s. Alinea and company. Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises. They’ve all nurtured legions of cooks and then let them spread out, like seeds cast into the wind, and grow into chefs. I suspect Hogsalt Hospitality is the next breeding ground for talented young chefs. Empire Sodikoff—its leader himself begat by LEYE (and before that the French Laundry, like Grant Achatz)—has begun shedding chefs who move on to do their own remarkable work. Look at Jason Vaughan, said to be the driving force behind the Au Cheval burger, who took over culinary operations for Heisler Hospitality and upended Indian food at Pub Royale. Then there’s Forester Sorensen, the Au Cheval and Green Street Smoked Meats alum behind the expertly constructed sandwiches at Wyler Road. Now quietly comes Bar Marta, an unassuming neighborhood joint in the former Hunters & Tails space, opened by Austin Baker, a former cook at Le Bernardin and a longtime Hogsalt operative who helped open nearly a half dozen of the group’s restaurants, and remains a partner in a few of them.

38 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 17, 2015

R BAR MARTA |$$$

2700 W. Chicago 773-697-4489 barmarta.com

Baker’s brought along with him so many former Hogsalt colleagues you wonder if it constitutes a brain drain back on the mothership. They include Jeff Pikus, a former development chef whose successful avoidance of the spotlight obscured the significant, yearslong influence he’s had on the group’s food. Despite all that talent, Bar Marta opened quietly, with little of the slobbering food-media foreplay that an opening of this import usually entails. Even now it barely calls attention to itself, with a subdued sign, covered windows, and a side entrance on Washtenaw off Chicago. Inside it is squinting dim, a long dining room dominated by a marble bar, white glazed brick barely reflecting enough light to read the menu. It’s almost Gilt-like, definitely Hogsalty in its Victorian gloom. The menu reads that way too: appetizer dominated (they have the good sense not to call them “small plates” or “shareable”), with a few entrees and fewer pastas and sides. Still, the predominance of most of these starters underscores the truth in Bar Marta’s name: this is good drinking food, truly

Clockwise from left: Lamb tartare with raw egg yolk, chopped almonds, caper leaves, and harissa aioli; charred eggplant seasoned with smoky paprika and tarted up with sumac is cooled down with Greek yogurt, tahini, and buttermilk; the French fries have a light crispiness and creamy interior. ! ANDREA BAUER

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communal, with the exception of a handful of salads. It begins with a dish of olives and spicy-sour dill pickles, starkly different from the treacly preserved vegetable candy most restaurants traffic in these days. Lengths of meaty charred eggplant seasoned with smoky paprika and tarted up with sumac are cooled down with Greek yogurt, tahini, and buttermilk, and accompanied by thick pepita-and -sesa me-studde d crackers. Chicken liver paté enriched with sherry is smeared thickly on hunks of grilled bread and speared with shards of crispy lacquered chicken skin. The mineral gaminess and textural oleaginousness of lamb tartare and its accompanying protein-rich raw egg yolk is cut with chopped almonds, caper leaves, and potent harissa aioli. French fries are an extraordinarily refreshing change; pale blond, they’re blanched and double-fried Kennebecs that achieve an almost angelically light crispiness and ethereally creamy interior. That’s in opposition to a side of earthy Chinese broccoli leaves—stems sliced thinly on the bias and seasoned simply with garlic and chile—that are dense and ﬂeshy enough in their own way to satisfy the most bloodthirsty carnivore. Salads too are something more than just a collection of greens to offset the less virtuous things you’re eating. The Caesar, along with its typical umami-boosting accoutrements (Parmesan, anchovy-spiked dressing), is further powered by bonito ﬂakes in the dressing and sprinkled on top, providing an umami explosion in the mouth. Meanwhile an iceberg salad is given full dimension with a creamy

avocado dressing and a liberal sprinkling of nutty farro grains. It’s quite a selection to dither over with a group, but among larger entrees there are a few that shouldn’t go unnoticed. Buoyant yet hearty meatballs with bacon ground into the pork have the structure of sturdy, resilient sponges, able to soak up the powerfully glutamic red sauce. A simple roast chicken sits atop a bed of crispy sourdough bread fried in poultry fat. It’s so chewy and saturated with the bird’s delicious lipids it ought be served on its own. My only real disappointments at Bar Marta were the pasta dishes I tried. Both an uni-king crab ravioli special and ruddy garganelli with pork ragu spiked with chicken liver were doughy and undercooked, so far from any ideal state of al dente they distracted from the appealing saucing. It’s an executional anomaly for a kitchen commanded by Pikus, who’s always done pasta exceptionally in the past. Among four desserts a hazelnut chocolate tart with Nutella ganache provided a dense, rich footnote to a relatively light meal of shared appetizers and drinks from the list of rigorously orthodox classic cocktails, while a lighter and more cheffy banana-rum cake draped in glassy caramel was an appropriate ending to a visit that consisted largely of entrees and bottles of dry cava. All over Bar Marta you can see the building blocks of Hogsalt, but they merely lay a foundation for a group of impressive restaurant professionals clearly going their own way. v

" @MikeSula

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WICKER PARK

SOUTH LOOP

REGGIE’S

PHYLLIS’ MUSICAL INN

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1800 W. Division 773-486- 9862

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$6 Jameson shots, $3 PBR bottles, $4 Lagunitas drafts, $4 Absolut cocktails, “Hoppy Hour” 5pm8pm = 1/2 price IPAs + pale ales