Print Issue of March 23, 2017 (Volume 46, Number 24)

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 | M A R C H 2 3 , 2 0 1 7

The future is female.

So how do we get there?

Four badass women discuss how intersectionality will save the feminist movement.

By AIMEE LEVITT 12

Chicago’s school board needs watchdogs, not Rahm’s lapdogs. 9 Danny Boyle gives Trainspotting a shot in the arm with T2. 26 A Bite of Szechuan is the latest addition to West Rogers Park’s unsung dining scene. 39

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EDITOR JAKE MALOOLEY CREATIVE DIRECTOR PAUL JOHN HIGGINS DEPUTY EDITOR, NEWS ROBIN AMER CULTURE EDITOR TAL ROSENBERG DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY DANIELLE A. SCRUGGS FILM EDITOR J.R. JONES MUSIC EDITOR PHILIP MONTORO ASSOCIATE EDITORS KATE SCHMIDT, KEVIN WARWICK, BRIANNA WELLEN SENIOR WRITERS MICHAEL MINER, MIKE SULA SENIOR THEATER CRITIC TONY ADLER STAFF WRITERS MAYA DUKMASOVA, LEOR GALIL, DEANNA ISAACS, BEN JORAVSKY, AIMEE LEVITT, PETER MARGASAK, JULIA THIEL SOCIAL MEDIA EDITOR RYAN SMITH GRAPHIC DESIGNER SUE KWONG MUSIC LISTINGS COORDINATOR LUCA CIMARUSTI EDITORIAL ASSISTANT CASSIDY RYAN CONTRIBUTING WRITERS NOAH BERLATSKY, MATT DE LA PEÑA, ANNE FORD, ISA GIALLORENZO, JOHN GREENFIELD, JUSTIN HAYFORD, JACK HELBIG, DAN JAKES, BILL MEYER, J.R. NELSON, MARISSA OBERLANDER, LEAH PICKETT, DMITRY SAMAROV, DAVID WHITEIS, ALBERT WILLIAMS INTERNS AUSTIN BROWN, ISABEL OCHOA GOLD, RACHEL HINTON, JIAYUE YU ----------------------------------------------------------------

FEATURES

IN THIS ISSUE 4 Agenda Truth and Reconciliation at Victory Gardens, Katie Rich and Holly Laurent at the Chicago Improv Festival, the film Raw, and more recommended things to do

CITY LIFE

FEMINISM

The future is female.

So how do we get there?

Four badass women discuss how intersectionality will save the feminist movement.

BY AIMEE LEVITT 12

VICE PRESIDENT OF BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT NICKI STANULA VICE PRESIDENT OF NEW MEDIA GUADALUPE CARRANZA SENIOR ACCOUNT MANAGER EVANGELINE MILLER ACCOUNT EXECUTIVES FABIO CAVALIERI, ARIANA DIAZ, BRIDGET KANE MARKETING AND EVENTS MANAGER BRYAN BURDA DIRECTOR OF DIGITAL JOHN DUNLEVY ADVERTISING COORDINATOR HERMINIA BATTAGLIA CLASSIFIEDS REPRESENTATIVE KRIS DODD

8 Space A wondrous world of nature hides in plain sight at the Chicago Academy of Sciences collections facility.

9 Joravsky | Politics Chicago’s school board needs watchdogs, not Rahm’s lapdogs.

10 Transportation Chicago should decriminalize nonpayment on transit.

11 The Trump Era Chicago-area resident Diana Cruz on living as Muslim, Latina, and under attack in Trump’s America

ARTS & CULTURE

21 Theater Theater artists and audiences alike trudge through tech in 10 Out of 12.

22 Theater Court Theatre’s The Hard Question pits morality against materialism in both senses.

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24 Visual Art At the Art Institute, Hélio Oiticica is too organized.

25 Comedy How Scott Adsit went from patio serenades to 30 Rock

26 Movies Danny Boyle delivers a sequel to Trainspotting, the movie that made heroin fun.

MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE 32 Shows of note Jay Som, Lyric Opera presents Charlie Parker’s Yardbird, An Evening With Closed Sessions, and more recommendations

FOOD & DRINK

39 Restaurant review: A Bite of Szechuan Dingguo Cheng adds uncompromising Chinese to West Rogers Park’s unsung dining scene.

41 Key Ingredient: Umeboshi Bang Bang Pie & Biscuits chef Emily Stewart makes a pie fit for a samurai warrior.

CLASSIFIEDS

42 Jobs 42 Apartments & Spaces 43 Marketplace

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MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE

On Fillmore parlay a Brazilian epiphany into another rebirth

With the new Happiness of Living, bassist Darin Gray and drummer Glenn Kotche have made the loosest, most accessible record of their 18-year collaboration.

BY PETER MARGASAK 29

23 Dance Tesseract explores queer identity through the lens of science fiction.

44 Straight Dope When and why did humans start wiping their butts?

45 Savage Love Dan addresses threesomes, butt plugs, Justin Trudeau, and more 46 Early Warnings Juliana Hatfield, Smino, the Sword, and other shows in the weeks to come 46 Gossip Wolf Ty Segall hangs his first art show, “Assterpiece Theatre,” in Chicago, and more music news.

MARCH 23, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 3

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b ALL AGES

F of the mouth. And when Loesser’s show transitions from dialogue to song, watch out! His full-throttle operatic score, sung by a strong-lunged, open-throated cast, blasts like heavy metal turned to 11. —JACK HELBIG Through 5/7: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 7 PM, No Exit Cafe, 6970 N. Glenwood, 773-743-3355, theo-u.com, $34, $29 students and seniors.

Phantom Pain William Faulkner’s R line “The past is never dead. It’s not even past” could be the tagline

Falling o EMILY SCHWARTZ

THEATER

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Electra Garrigó When Virgilio Piñera’s brazen, bewildering adaptation of Sophocles’s tragedy premiered in Havana in 1948, the literary establishment responded with contempt and disgust—and Cuban modernism was born. Restaged in 1958, its focus on princess Electra’s struggles against her unreasonable tyrant father, Agamemnon, bolstered pro-Castro sentiments (ironically, Castro would later jail Piñera for being queer).

While Piñera fell into obscurity by the end of his life, director Kathi Kaity resurrects this seminal work in a Right Brain Project production that may provoke its own share of contempt. Kaity wisely does nothing to smooth over the script’s disjointed expressionism, putting a premium on physical and vocal stridency (Piñera aimed to provoke bourgeois audiences). But the show’s boldness often compromises fundamental comprehensibility, obscuring key relationships among characters. Still, it’s refreshing to see an almost entirely Latinx cast tackle this demanding work.

—JUSTIN HAYFORD Through 4/22: ThuSat 8 PM, Right Brain Project, 4001 N. Ravenswood, 773-750-2033, therbp.org, $22, $15 students.

Falling Saint Louis playwright R Deanna Jent’s 2012 off-Broadway hit is a compelling study of a family on

the brink of falling apart. The mother, Tami (the superb Amy Johnson), is determined to raise her severely autistic son Josh (Justin Tsatsa) rather than place him in a group home even though the burly 18-year-old’s behavior is becoming increasingly violent and unmanageable. The turbulent situation is threatening to destroy Tami’s marriage to her resolutely patient husband, Bill (Nick Freed), and to force the couple’s 16-year-old daughter Lisa (Tristin Hall) to leave home and move in with Bill’s zealously Christian mother (Heidi Katz). Sensitively directed by James Yost, this Interrobang Theatre Project Chicago premiere is an emotional roller coaster, played with impressive emo-

tional authenticity. —ALBERT WILLIAMS Through 4/16: Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 2 and 7:30 PM, Sun 2 PM, Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N. Southport, 773-935-6860, interrobangtheatreproject.com, $24, $17 students and seniors.

The Kid Thing Structurally, Sarah Gubbins’s play is a conventional tale of love and betrayal. That it doesn’t feel conventional is a function of who’s doing the loving and betraying: a pair of lesbian couples living middle-class lives on Chicago’s north side. Margot and Nate are having a baby thanks to sperm-donating pal Jacob; Leigh and Darcy are thinking of borrowing Jacob for same. Their struggles over imminent parenthood get at the psychic and social consequences of sexual difference. Or at least they did when The Kid Thing premiered at Chicago Dramatists in 2011. Jake Fruend’s current staging for Nothing Without a Company is too reductive to get at much of anything.

Certain passages suggest sitcom tropes, certain performances stick tenaciously to a single note. Shalyn Welch is so insistently arch as Darcy, for instance, that she ends up undermining the logic of scenes. —TONY ADLER Through 4/15: Thu-Sun 7:30 PM, Berger Park Cultural Center, 6205 N. Sheridan, nothingwithoutacompany.org, $20.

The Most Happy Fella New R York Times theater critic Brooks Atkinson said of the 1956 production of

this musical by Frank Loesser (based on Sidney Howard’s 1924 play They Knew What They Wanted) that it was “about as close to opera as the rules of Broadway permit.” Indeed, the triangle at the heart of the story—foolish older rancher marries vivacious younger woman who in turn is sexually attracted to a feckless but virile hired hand—is pure opera, and most of Loesser’s tunes approach bel canto. But the show’s pasted-on “happy” ending is less La Scala than Great White Way. That said, Theo Ubique’s staging in an intimate cabaret space brings out the best in Loesser’s finely shaded character development, an effect heightened by director Fred Anzevino’s preference for fine actors, like Molly Hernandez, who communicate volumes with a tiny movement of the hand or a slight twitch

for Barbara Lhota’s wise, witty play about three childhood friends, now in early middle age, suddenly confronted by ghosts of the past, specifically the traumas associated with decaying race relations in Detroit in the 70s. Lhota, a subtle but effective storyteller, pulls the audience in before we can resist, then keeps us absorbed in her narrative. Her characters are free of cliche—no wonder the actors in this world-premiere Organic Theater production, directed by Laura Sturm, seem to be having a blast. Their passion and energy provide the extra fuel that makes this quiet, intensely introspective tale so compelling. —JACK HELBIG Through 4/2: Wed-Fri 8 PM, Sat 3 and 8 PM, Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln, 773-404-7336, organictheater.org, $25.

A Princess of Mars Can’t say I liked anything about A Princess of Mars, Otherworld Theatre’s adaptation of the 1917 novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

I’m not much of a sci-fi/fantasy person, though, so the trouble may be with my receiver and not the play’s transmitter.

Then again, I can’t think of any less obviously theatrical scenario than beaming a hee-haw Confederate Army deserter onto the surface of Mars, where he must aid Dejah Thoris and the Tharks in their war with Zodanga. I wanted to believe in the aliens, I really did, but the oinking, growling, torture-loving Tharks were more dork than orc in their wrinkly warthog masks and pleather tunics. John Carter (Elliott Sowards), the earthling hero from Virginia, has the occasional splurt of countrified poignancy to his credit, but for me this play was sheer agony. —MAX MALLER Through 4/1: Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 2:30 and 7:30 PM, Berger Park, 6205 N. Sheridan, 773-761-

0376, otherworldtheatre.org, $20, $10 students.

The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui R Bertolt Brecht set this bludgeoning satire of government corruption in

a comic-book 30s gangland Chicago, but wrote it in 1941 to protest Hitler’s rise in his native Germany. Given the recent fascistic turn on these shores, this material wouldn’t lack resonance even in less capable hands, but Victor Quezada-Perez directs the hell out of it: he’s able to find subtlety and nuance even where Brecht’s words lack either.

And this Trap Door production is visually and aurally stunning, with a large cast—most playing multiple roles, all in pancake makeup and clown noses—that’s uniformly excellent. Each is constantly sniffing loudly through those red snouts as if to drive home the all-encompassing stench of their fictive Chicago. They’re only able to breathe easily through their own nostrils after being gunned down, as if freed from a lifetime of holding their noses to get through the days. —DMITRY SAMAROV Through 4/22: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Trap Door Theatre, 1655 W. Cortland, 773-384-0494, trapdoortheatre.com, $20-$25.

The Scullery Maid Cooks and kings meet face-to-face in this English Gothic fantasy play from Idle Muse, written

by Joseph Zettelmaier. As it opens, maidservants prepare a dessert of marchpane for Edward III (Dave Skvarla).

This may not sound like the stuff of riveting theater—most of the first act is about making a cake that ultimately gets knocked onto the floor—but “kitchen humor” had a rich tradition in medieval drama; the boisterousness of cooks and lowly servants was thought to be an ideal foil for the lofty pinings of nobility. Miriam (a beautiful Lydia Hiller) is a Jewish scullery maid with a secret vendetta against the venturesome king.

The confrontation between the two, who have more in common than either supposes, cuts across class boundaries, but has about all the excitement of watching water boil. —MAX MALLER Through 4/9: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 5 PM, Mon 8 PM; also Sat 4/1, 5 PM, the Edge Theater, 5451 N. Broadway, idlemuse.org, $20, $15 students.

Phantom Pain o JOHN LEE JENNINGS

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Best bets, recommendations, and notable arts and culture events for the week of March 23 For more of the best things to do every day of the week, go to chicagoreader. com/agenda.

Sycamore It’s hard to fathom why Raven Theatre, with a three-decade history of picking strong material, would premiere a work that might earn a B minus in freshman playwriting class. Brooklyn-based scribe Sarah Sander tells the expedient tale of middle-American teen siblings Celia and Henry—one recently suicidal, one recently oversexed, both fixedly territorial—who vie for the romantic attentions of mysterious pot-smoking boy-next-door John. Sander wants to reveal profound sexual and emotional angst just beneath the placid surface of suburban life (everyone’s desperate to “escape”), but her unlikely dialogue, shortcut-heavy plotting, and manufactured resolution make most of the 70 minutes ring false. If director Devon de Mayo can’t even get convincing performances out of respected veterans Robyn Coffin and Tom Hickey as the siblings’ distraught parents, the fault lies with the material. —JUSTIN HAYFORD Through 4/29: Thu-Fri 8 PM, Sat 3:30 and 8 PM, Sun 3:30 PM, Raven Theatre, 6157 N. Clark, 773-338-2177, raventheatre. com, $46, $41 seniors and teachers, $22 students.

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Truth and Reconciliation British playwright Debbie Tucker Green turns catharsis on its head with this collection of brief scenes set in bare rooms across Europe and Africa. The people in those rooms are perpetrators, victims, and relatives of victims of such horrors as the Rwandan and Bosnian genocides, Northern Ireland’s troubles, and South African apartheid, meeting ostensibly to confront the crimes that connect them. The circumstances are odd in that participants encounter one another without mediators; the content is mostly trivial, hung up on questions of who will sit where, if they agree to sit at all; and Green’s pseudo-Mametian use of repetition and interjection gets annoying quickly, creating more chaos than clarity. But that’s the point: Discussion is useless. Only the guilty and the dead know the truth. Under Jonathan L. Green’s direction, this 60-minute Sideshow Theatre production concedes nothing to comfort. —TONY ADLER Through 4/16: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM, Victory Gardens Theater, 2433 N. Lincoln, 773-871-3000, sideshowtheatre. org, $25-$30.

DANCE

Alvin Ailey The legendary R dance company presents three new works: Deep, r-Evolution, Dream,

and Untitled America, the last a piece choreographed by MacArthur fellow Kyle Abraham that examines the impact of incarceration on black families. 3/223/26: Wed-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 2 and 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, Auditorium Theatre, 50 E. Congress, 800-982-2787, auditoriumtheatre.org, $33-$115.

CREATIVE CLAYTHINGS Teaching in Chicago Since 1983

reception and curator tour Sun 3/26, 3-4 PM. 3/26-7/2. Mon-Thu 9 AM-8 PM, FriSat 9 AM-5 PM, Sun noon-5 PM. 5020 S. Cornell, 773-324-5520, hydeparkart.org.

Greg Proops o MIKE WINDLE

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Liaison Chicago Tap Theatre collaborates with France’s Tapage and Spain’s Tap Olé for a performance highlighting international styles of the dance form. Sat 3/25, 7:30 PM, Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N. Southport, 773-9356860, chicagotaptheatre.com, $23-$37.

COMEDY

Chicago Improv Festival It’s R no secret that Chicago is home to some of the world’s most talented

improv actors. The Chicago Improv Festival celebrates them with a weeklong series of events, ranging from musical comedy to long-form and dramatic and experimental performances. 3/27-4/2, various locations, chicagoimprovfestival. org.

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iRiete Guey! Ramiro Lynch hosts this Spanish-language variety show featuring music by Rai and standup from Edgar Mota, Noah Gutierrez, Soli Santos, and Rene Valdiviezo. Sat 3/25, 7 PM, Playground Theater, 3209 N. Halsted, 773-871-3793, the-playground. com, $10.

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The Smartest Man in the World Proopcast Comedian Greg Proops presents a live recording of his podcast. Wed 3/29, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln, 773-525-2501, lh-st.com, $20.

VISUAL ARTS

National Museum of Mexican Art “Memoria Presente: An Artistic Journey,” an exhibition celebrating the museum’s 30th anniversary, featuring work by contemporary Mexican artists working in Chicago. Opening reception Fri 3/24, 6-8 PM. 3/24-4/13. Tue-Sun 10 AM-5 PM. 1852 W. 19th, 312-738-1503, nationalmuseumofmexicanart.org.

LIT & LECTURES

Kathleen Rooney and Victor R Lodato The authors read from their newly released novels, Lillian Box-

fish Takes a Walk (Rooney) and Edgar and Lucy (Lodato). Thu 3/23, 6:30 PM, City Lit Books, 2523 N. Kedzie, 773-2352523, citylitbooks.com.

Michael DeForge and Sadie R Dupuis DeForge reads from his new comic, Sticks Angelica, Folk Hero,

followed by a musical performance from Dupuis of Speedy Ortiz. Sat 3/25, 7 PM, Quimby’s Bookstore, 1854 W. North, 773342-0910, quimbys.com.

Re-run: A History of Policing R in Chicago, 1850-2017 SURJ Chicago presents this discussion looking back at the history of policing in Chicago. Wed 3/29, 7 PM, Chicago Literary Alliance, 641 W. Lake, 312-690-4227, chicagoliteracyalliance.org.

MOVIES

More at chicagoreader.com/movies NEW REVIEWS Dig Two Graves In this supernatural mystery (2014), seasoned character actor Ted Levine (Shutter Island, The Silence of the Lambs) proves he can carry a picture; as a guilt-ridden lawman,

he easily outclasses the supporting cast, whose performances range from serviceable to histrionic. After the sheriff’s teenage granddaughter loses her brother in a swimming accident, she’s approached by three sinister backwoods drifters who promise to restore the brother to life if she will lure another youngster to his death. Swedish cinematographer Eric Maddison renders the southern Illinois locations stark and ominous, and screenwriters Hunter Adams and Jeremy Phillips toss in black magic, vengeful gypsies, and a snake cult. But this still lacks the punch of even a humble campfire tale. Adams directed; with Samantha Isler. —ANDREA GRONVALL 97 min. River East 21

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My Egg Boy This cloying Taiwanese romantic comedy is painful to watch despite the attractive young couple at its center. A marketing executive for a frozen foods company (Ariel Lin), dumped by her fiance, hears her biological clock ticking and freezes her ova for storage until that far-off day when she might settle down; then, after a thoroughly unconvincing meet-cute, she falls for a hotshot farm-to-table chef (Rhydian Vaughan) who doesn’t want kids. Scattered throughout are insufferably long fantasy sequences in a fertility lab where actors costumed as eggs and sperm fret about abandonment.

The narrative is frequently incoherent, but there’s no mistaking the movie’s anti-abortion, pro-conception message, presumably a reaction to Taiwan’s low birth and marriage rates. Tien-Yu Fu directed his own script. In Mandarin with subtitles. —ANDREA GRONVALL 112 min.

River East 21 Raw An innocent young vegetarR ian (Garance Marillier) eats raw meat as part of a college hazing ritual

and develops a taste for it—humans in particular. Written and directed by Julia Ducournau, this gruesome French horror flick (2016) functions more as a mystery than as an action film, with an endless drip drip drip of revelation that gradually exposes a terrifying world behind the everyday. Ducournau uses the heroine’s cannibalism as a metaphor for sexual desire, following her through the predatory campus party scene W

Shane Campbell Gallery “Their Funeral, Our Dance Floor,” new works by local artist David Leggett. 3/25-5/6. Wed-Sat noon-6 PM. 2021 S. Wabash, 312-2262223, shanecampbellgallery.com.

Fulton Market Kitchen “Yo, Complete Me,” Chicago street artists Franco Campanella—or Lefty Out There—and Tubs participate in a live painting collaboration. Fri 3/24, 6 PM-midnight, 311 N. Sangamon, 312-733-6900, fultonmarketkitchen.com/yo-complete-me.

Hyde Park Art Center “The Presidential Library Project: Black Presidential Imaginary,” an exhibition curated by Ross Jordan that looks at portrayals of a black president in visual culture, both historical and contemporary. Opening

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Song to Song Is this the one with Ben Affleck? No, that was To the Wonder (2012). Is this the one with Christian Bale? No, that was Knight of Cups (2015). This is the one with Ryan Gosling, and like Terrence Malick’s two previous dramas it’s a gauzy, improvised affair that looks like a photo essay out of Architectural Digest and regards its gorgeous, murmuring actors as if they were statuary. Faye (Rooney Mara) and BV (Gosling) are lovebird singer-songwriters in Austin, Texas, though Faye strays with the handsome, slippery music mogul Cook (Michael Fassbender). Meanwhile Cook is two-timing Faye with Rhonda (Natalie Portman), a waitress in town, and there are numerous, ethereal soft-core scenes of the various couples inspecting each other. But don’t get too comfortable, because John Lydon, Iggy Pop, and Patti Smith all show up for cameo appearances, looking like a bunch of gargoyles. With Cate Blanchett and Holly Hunter. —J.R. JONES R, 129 min. River East 21, Landmark’s Century Centre Wilson Adapted from the graphic novel by noted misanthrope Daniel Clowes, this bummer comedy stars Woody Harrelson as the title character, a middle-aged layabout in Oakland who meets up again with his ex-wife, played by Laura Dern, and discovers that he has a teenage biological daughter being raised by adoptive parents out in the suburbs. The comic strips that make up the Clowes novel typically culminate in Wilson blurting out some acrid put-down or doom-heavy insight; onscreen, as delivered by the cantankerous star, these gags play like rancid Cheers outtakes. With Ghost World (2001) and Art School Confidential (2006), director Terry Zwigoff managed to replicate Clowes’s weird tone of mingled empathy and revulsion; Craig Johnson, coming to this project from his indie success The Skeleton Twins, can’t find the heart in this fractured, disappointed family.

With Judy Greer, Cheryl Hines, and Margo Martindale. —J.R. JONES R, 94 min. Landmark’s Century Centre

“You

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B as she discovers the gustatory delights of lovemaking and the peril of taking a bite. The movie is a weird stew of ideas—social, sexual, psychological—whose indeterminacy only makes it creepier. In French with subtitles. —J.R. JONES 99 min.

Fri 3/24 and Sat 3/25, 2:15, 4:45, 7:15, 9:30, and 11:30 PM; Sun 3/26, 2:15, 4:45, 7:15, and 9:30 PM; Mon 3/27, 2:15, 4:45, and 9:30 PM; and Tue 3/28-Thu 3/30, 2:15, 4:45, 7:15, and 9:30 PM. Music Box

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REVIVALS Blade Runner: The Final R Cut Not to be confused with the mislabeled “director’s cut,” this seventh edition of Ridley Scott’s SF

Raw

masterpiece (1982) is arguably the first to get it all right, finally telling the whole story comprehensibly.

This visionary look at Los Angeles in 2019—a singular blend of grime and glitter that captures both the horror and the allure of Reagan-era capitalism—was a commercial flop when it first appeared. Loosely adapted from Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, it follows the hero (Harrison Ford) as he tracks down and kills “replicants,” or androids. Much of the film’s erotic charge and moral and ideological ambiguity stem from the fact that these characters are very nearly the only ones we care about. (We never know for sure whether Ford is a replicant himself.)

—JONATHAN ROSENBAUM R, 117 min. Fri 3/24, 2 , 7 , and 9:45 PM; Sat 3/25, 7 and 9:45 PM; Sun 3/26, 2 PM; Mon 3/27, 2 and 7 PM; Tue 3/28 and Wed 3/29, 2 PM; and Thu 3/30, 2 and 9:45 PM. Music Box A Man Escaped Based on a R French lieutenant’s account of his 1942 escape from a gestapo

fortress in Lyon, this stately yet uncommonly gripping 1956 feature is my choice as the greatest achievement of Robert Bresson, one of the cinema’s foremost artists. (It’s rivaled only by his more corrosive and metaphysical 1970 film Au Hasard Balthazar.) The best of all prison-escape movies, it reconstructs the very notion of freedom through offscreen sounds and defines salvation in terms of painstakingly patient and meticulous effort. Bresson himself spent part of the war in an internment camp and subsequently lived through the German occupation of France, experiences that inform his magisterial grasp of what the concentrated use of sound and image can reveal about souls in hiding.

Essential viewing. In French with subtitles. —JONATHAN ROSENBAUM 101 min. 3/29, 7 and 9:30 PM. Univ. of Chicago Doc Films The Practice of Love Sexuality, voyeurism, and paranoia create an enigmatic tangle in this 1985 avant-garde feature by Austrian experimentalist Valie Export (Invisible Adversaries). It’s loosely about a woman whose relations with a lover become strangely fragment-

ed after she witnesses a subway accident, though straightforward narrative, as always, promises to be the least of Export’s resolutely nonliteral concerns. With Adelheid Arndt and old Wim Wenders icon Rudiger Vogler. In German with subtitles. —PAT GRAHAM 86 min.

Sun 3/26, 9 PM. Facets Cinematheque You, the Living “KeaR ton-esque” hardly begins to describe this brutally deadpan

comedy by Swedish director Roy Andersson (Songs From the Second Floor), who seems to have translated the entire range of human misery into a loosely connected series of slapstick gags.

His black humor is impressively layered, each layer darker than the last: when a joker at a family banquet insists on performing that old parlor trick of yanking the tablecloth out from under the dishes, he not only shatters a huge collection of crystal and china but also exposes a vintage dining table inlaid with swastikas. Andersson’s building block is a static long shot so solidly composed it suggests a panel in a comic strip; the central figure is often encased in his own suffering, and sometimes additional laughs come from a background figure surveying his despair in openmouthed bewilderment. I laughed so hard I hurt—or was it the other way around? In Swedish with subtitles. —J.R. JONES 92 min.

Filmmaker Melika Bass lectures at the screening. Tue 3/28, 6 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center

SPECIAL EVENTS Black Films for Trying Times Scholars of African-American media sign their books and present video clips of their favorite moments from film and television history. Fri 3/24, 8 PM. Currency Exchange Cafe Fantastic Fantasy Film Festival This one-day festival celebrates all things fantasy and sci-fi, featuring The Dark Crystal (1982), Flash Gordon (1980), Legend (1985), Masters of the Universe (1987), and Dune (1984). For tickets visit brewview. com. Sun 3/26, noon. Brew & View Theater v

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CITY LIFE

a video tour of the Chicago Academy of Sciences Ç Take collections facility at chicagoreader.com/space.

Space

A wondrous world of nature hiding in plain sight The Chicago Academy of Sciences collections facility in North Center contains nearly 300,000 specimens that document the biodiversity of the midwest, Illinois, and greater North America.

ONCE UPON A TIME, the midwest was home to parrots—specifically, a gregarious green bird with a bright yellow head and reddish orange face called the Carolina parakeet. It flitted around primeval forests, orchards, and fields until the 19th century, and was officially declared extinct in 1939. Amazingly, there’s a drawerful of these colorful birds in an old industrial building on the corner of Irving Park Road and Ravenswood Avenue in North Center.

Other specimens found here: examples of the extinct passenger pigeon, drawers stuffed with snakes, rats, coyotes, and frogs, many varieties of butterflies, and more . . . all squirreled away in an unassuming building that also houses a DJ academy, a theater company, a vegan makeup business, and a burlesque school.

It’s the secret side of the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, an offsite collections facility containing nearly 300,000 natural history specimens that document the biodiversity of the midwest, Illinois, and greater North America.

“Most museums actually have off-site collection storage,” says Dawn Roberts, director of collections for the Chicago Academy of Sciences and the Nature Museum, and one of the facility’s two fulltime staff members. “They’re too large to fit within the constraints of the proper museum.”

In fact, the Chicago Academy of Sciences, founded 160 years ago, moved its collection to this location in the early 1990s, when it started to outgrow its existing museum in the Matthew Laflin Memorial Building in Lincoln Park. While it’s not open to the public, the facility welcomes historians, scientific researchers, and artists to come in and utilize its collection. The specimens are also incorporated into exhibits at the museum as well as educational programs.

“We’re focused on urban nature—we always have been,” says Roberts, moving among narrow rows of steel storage cabinets, pulling out one awe-inspiring drawer of specimens after J

Dawn Roberts, director of collections for the Chicago Academy of Sciences and the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, shows off some of the thousands of specimens—everything from a bison to birds of prey to snakes—stored at the Chicago Academy of Sciences collections facility. o KERRI PANG

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

SURE THINGS THURSDAY 23

FRIDAY 24

SATURDAY 25

SUNDAY 26

MONDAY 27

TUESDAY 28

WEDNESDAY 29

× Lill Moxie release Manny’s Deli hosts a launch party for the Goose Island cream ale Lill Moxie. Proceeds from the event benefit the Illinois Restaurant Association Educational Foundation.

7-10 PM, Manny’s Deli, 1141 S. Jefferson, gooseisland. com, $10.

» Th e Backroom: Scienti fic Art + Ka raoke Greg Mercer, Peggy Macnamara, and Stephanie Brown discuss the intersection of science and art with moderator Aron Packer. Karaoke hosted by Lumpen Radio follows. 5 PM-midnight, Chicago Athletic Association Hotel, 12 S. Michigan, chicagoathletichotel.com. F

& MAC & Cheese Cook-Off The Midwest Access Coalition (MAC) hosts this fund-raiser featuring allyou-can-eat mac and cheese from local eateries like Mac Dynamite, Reggie’s, and Q-tine plus an open bar, a photo booth, and live music.

7-10 PM, Second Unitarian Church, 656 W. Barry, midwestaccesscoalition.org, $40.

Ú Chicago Zine Fest B ingo Fundraiser Bingo night hosted by drag queen bingo caller Velicity Metropolis to benefit the 2017 Chicago Zine Fest. Admission includes one bingo card. 8-11 PM, Hamburger Mary’s, 5400 N. Clark, chicagozinefest. org, $15.

& Comics & Pastries Collide Five local comics artists were paired with local pastry chefs to create a work of art inspired by a dessert.

All sweets are available for tasting, and the pieces will be auctioned off to support Common Threads. 6-9 PM, Martyrs’, 3855 N. Lincoln, martyrslive.com, $10.

Th e Gi rl Talk This month the talk show that features “Chicago women doing cool things” invites Cook County state’s attorney Kim Foxx to discuss topics such as working in the male-dominated justice system. 6:30 PM, Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, hideoutchicago.com, $5.

½ Reverend Jesse Jackson The civil rights leader discusses political and social developments since the presidential election. Noon, UIC Student Center East, 750 S. Halsted, uic.edu/depts/ chcc/SCE.html. F

MARCH 23, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 7

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another. “We look at nature that lives right alongside us.”

With a gloved hand, she gingerly holds squirrels and bats and a “type specimen” of the southern rock vole. This chubby, mouselike rodent is not so stunning as, say, the Carolina parakeet, but it serves a vital function.

“It’s a specimen that was used to describe all members of that species and all physical characteristics of that species,” she explains. “It’s kind of like having the first edition of a signed copy of a book—it’s that important.”

Roberts says that what she finds most unique about the collection is that it’s reflective of a community. The Chicago Academy of Sciences was founded by local naturalists in 1857 to serve as a hub for scientific discussion.

“People such as [naturalist and herpetologist] Robert Kennicott and [ornithologist] Benjamin Gault brought their personal collections to the table to offer as a reference library of the natural world.”

In the 1800s, she says, people made a hobby of understanding nature. “They were putting

together collections of insects, plants, bird eggs. . . . They were getting outside and seeing different things and then having these little cabinets of curiosities, these treasure troves in their homes.”

As a result, the Ravenswood facility has a huge collection of lepidoptera (moths and butterflies), because they’re pretty and thus what people have collected most. One native species of butterfly, the orange-hued regal fritillary, is currently the subject of conservation efforts on the part of Notebaert Nature Museum biologists.

The Chicago Academy of Sciences collection is spread across two floors of the Ravenswood building and is also home to some 100,000 audiovisual materials—glass-plate negatives, lantern slides, and other historic photographs. As for the specimens, they keep coming.

“Natural history collections are best when they’re dynamic,” Roberts says. “That means we’re continually developing them in order to better understand the world we live in.”

—LAURA PEARSON

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

CITY LIFE Mayor Rahm Emanuel at the March 7 ribboncutting ceremony for the River Point office tower, which was subsidized by $29.5 million in TIF money

POLITICS

School electives

There are tens of millions of reasons to approve an elected school board.

By BEN JORAVSKY

A

s Illinois state legislators last week debated the latest incarnation of a bill for an elected school board in Chicago, we got tens of millions of reminders why it should be passed.

There’s the $29.5 million in property tax dollars Mayor Rahm Emanuel diverted from the broke public school system to subsidize the construction of River Point, an upscale office building at 444 W. Lake Street in the West Loop, one of Chicago’s wealthiest neighborhoods.

That TIF deal passed in 2012. But on March 7, Rahm showed up for the tower’s ribboncutting ceremony around the same time his appointees were talking about cutting back the school year by 20 days because Chicago Public Schools doesn’t have enough money to pay its employees.

C’mon, Mr. Mayor. You should be showing remorse for wasting millions—not celebrating it.

Then there’s the $20 million the mayor’s appointed school board awarded in 2013 to a couple of scam artists who were bribing then schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett to use her clout to get them a no-bid principaltraining contract.

Yes, the Supes Academy contracting scandal is in the news again. On Monday, the feds outlined their case for why Gary Solomon, the co-owner of Supes, should get nine years in prison for masterminding the scam.

Finally, there’s this important number to consider: zero—or the number of school board members who voted against the Supes deal or

questioned the River Point handout (or any TIF handout for that matter).

People, I think it’s time we acknowledge that our current system, whereby we give the mayor the power to appoint whomever he wants to oversee CPS, is a failure.

The state legislature came close to passing an elected school board bill last year, but Emanuel got his pal—senate president John Cullerton—to kill it. Apparently the mayor doesn’t like to give up control of anything.

Northwest-side state rep Rob Martwick recently reintroduced the measure. On March 15, a house committee held hearings on his bill, to which the mayor dispatched two emissaries: former school board member Jesse Ruiz and CPS chief education officer Janice Jackson.

Ruiz said an elected school board would present a “grave risk.”

A grave risk of what? Wasting money on TIF deals?

And Jackson blamed the current fiscal mess on the state. “An elected school board would have no more authority than our existing board to raise additional revenues for CPS,” Jackson testified. “And revenue is at the root of our problem.”

OK, one more time. Yes, the state woefully underfunds low-income school districts like Chicago’s. (See Chance the Rapper’s recent attempts to sway the governor on this point.)

But clearly, Emanuel exacerbates a bad situation by recklessly wasting the money he’s got. Mayor Daley did it too—let’s not forget about him.

And that’s where the appointed school

o SUN-TIMES MEDIA

board comes in. Even in the board’s current appointed form, its members have the power to review and oppose TIF districts or use the bully pulpit to speak out against them. But ever since the state gave the mayor the power to appoint board members in 1995, the board members he’s selected have looked the other way while the mayor throws good money out the window. It’s pretty obvious our mayors carefully vet potential appointees to make sure they’re of the rubber-stamp persuasion.

Nothing personal against any particular board member. They’re clearly all smart and successful people, generally from the worlds of law, banking, or business (with a university president occasionally thrown into the mix).

The board members are supposed to be watchdogs—to provide fiduciary oversight of CPS. And yet, year after year, they behave as mayoral lapdogs, looking the other way as our mayors waste money and the system falls hundreds of millions of dollars in debt.

Years ago I asked a Daley aide why board members never protested as more than $200 million in property taxes was annually diverted from the schools to the tax increment financing program. He told me it’s ’cause the mayor appoints “team players.” By that he meant the mayoral team. How about just once having a school board member who’s on the kids’ team—or the taxpayers’?

Whenever I raise this issue, some mayoral insider will tell me: If voters don’t like what the mayor does with the schools, they should vote him out of office.

That’s easier said than done when Rahm, like Daley before him, is bolstered by big campaign contributions from the corporate types he puts on the school board.

In any event, it sounds like something Kellyanne Conway would say to voters complaining about President Trump’s policies. Yes, the people elected Trump. But that doesn’t mean Congress should let him operate without oversight. A president—like a mayor—can do a lot of damage in four years.

Right now, Rahm has no oversight in regard to the schools. He can destroy them if he wants. In fact, sometimes I think that’s his goal.

Last week, the Illinois house schools committee passed the elected school board bill by a margin of 18-1. Of course, the house has

never been the obstacle to the bill.

In 2016, Martwick’s measure passed the full house 108-4, winning overwhelming Republican support—no small feat given the bitter rivalry between Governor Bruce Rauner and house speaker Michael Madigan.

“Republican legislators like their suburban elected school districts,” says Martwick.

“They have no objection to this bill.”

It doesn’t hurt that they probably got the green light from Rauner because the bill messes with Rahm. It’s amazing how Republicans have the courage of their convictions when the big man gives them the OK. Allow me this brief tangent, though, to point out that even if they don’t have a problem with an elected school board, Illinois Republicans do have objections to teachers and their unions. Last year, the governor’s floor leader—Glen Ellyn state rep James Durkin — introduced a bill that would have prohibited teachers, even retired teachers receiving pensions, from running for the hoped-for elected school board. It also banned contributions to school board candidates from teachers or the CTU. In his day job, Durkin’s a senior partner with the downtown law firm Arnstein & Lehr. He’s in the Municipal & Governmental Practice Group, according to the firm’s website, which among other things offers legal representation to cities and/or developers looking to take advantage of TIFs. I say we extend Durkin’s proposed contributions ban to any person, place, or thing that’s feeding from the TIF trough—since that money’s diverted from the schools in the first place.

According to the General Assembly’s website, the last official action on Durkin’s bill was adjournment sine die. That’s Latin for “without assigning a day for a further meeting or hearing.” Or Madiganese for Go fuck yourself, Durkin!

Anyway, it was Democrats—led by senate president Cullerton—not Republicans who prevented the school board bill from passing last year.

So, people, if you want an elected school board, you’ll have to pressure Chicago-based state senators such as Kwame Raoul, Heather Steans, Iris Martinez, and Omar Aquino to go to Cullerton and say, Hey, man, stop being Rahm’s puppet!

We have enough of them on the school board already. v

ß @joravben MARCH 23, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 9

CITY LIFE

TRANSPORTATION

Chicago should decriminalize nonpayment on transit.

By JOHN GREENFIELD

A

round 1997, before the CTA used payment cards, wine company owner Rodney Alex, now 50, got locked up for fare evasion after jumping the turnstile at the Harrison Red Line stop, next to Jones College Prep high school.

“I had a paper transfer in my pocket, but there was a long line of students waiting to enter the station,” he recalls. “I was running late for work at Carmine’s Clam House and I’d been told if I was late one more time I’d be fired, so I said ‘Fuck it’ and jumped the turnstile.”

That’s when two female police officers stepped out from behind a door and handcuffed him.

“I was dressed in a frickin’ waiters’ tux, but they gave me no chance to explain myself,” he says. They took him to the local police station, where he was charged with theft of services, a misdemeanor, and spent six hours in a cell before being released.

When he and the officers showed up for his court date, the judge dismissed the charges.

“He seemed kind of annoyed,” Alex says.

“There’s no way cops should be wasting time taking someone in for stealing $2.25. It’s ridiculous.”

Alex, who’s black, says he believes his arrest was part of a fare evasion sting against the students of the then largely African– American school.

10 CHICAGO READER - MARCH 23, 2017

“I guarantee that if this station was near New Trier there wouldn’t have been two cops making sure no one jumped the turnstile,” he says.

The Chicago Police Department didn’t respond to questions about transit enforcement for this story. But as reported earlier this month by Streetsblog USA, with the renewed focus on the broader disproportionate criminalization of people of color and poor people, west-coast decision makers have been rethinking policies on enforcing transit fare evasion. Chicago criminal justice reform advocates say that’s a conversation we should be having here as well, because being short a couple dollars shouldn’t result in stiff fines or a criminal record, much less deportation.

San Francisco was ahead of the curve on the issue, passing a law in 2008 to decriminalize fare evasion, which means that you can be fined but not charged with a misdemeanor.

In 2015, Washington State’s King County, which includes Seattle, decriminalized fare evasion for minors. In 2016, California decriminalized nonpayment for youth under 18. And in January, after a Portland State University study found African-American TriMet fare evaders were more likely to be penalized than white fare evaders, local prosecutors announced that they’d generally stop pursuing charges.

In contrast, Chicago officials have taken a hard-line approach; a 2012 Chicago Tribune

o SUN-TIMES ARCHIVE

More than just a token punishment

piece noted that police had made 1,548 arrests for fare evasion the previous year.

Then-CTA president Forrest Claypool told the Tribune that cracking down on fare evasion was a strategy to prevent more serious crimes because security camera footage showed that people who picked pockets, snatched purses, and grabbed cell phones almost always entered the el system illegally.

CPD didn’t provide more recent arrest numbers for fare evasion by press time, but CTA spokesman Jeff Tolman indicated that the agency still supports prosecuting nonpayment as a misdemeanor.

“We take fare evasion very seriously at CTA,” he says. “Fare evasion means a fare-paying customer is not only paying for their own ride but for a portion of someone else’s ride.” He declined to estimate how much revenue is lost to fare evasion each year.

One possible downside of the CTA’s fixation with fare evasion is that it seems to have made the agency overly cautious about implementing prepaid boarding along the Loop Link bus rapid transit corridor. Loop Link was supposed to include this time-saving feature when it debuted in December 2015, but 15 months later it still hasn’t been rolled out on a permanent basis. (Tolman says that fare evasion is “one of many factors that we look at . . . in deciding whether and where to implement prepaid boarding.”)

Not having prepaid boarding means more dwell time at Loop Link’s eight platform stations, which slows down the buses. So it appears that the CTA’s obsession with losing revenue has, in effect, increased Loop Link travel times, which in turn may be costing the agency ridership and overall revenue.

Jon Orcutt, policy director for the TransitCenter foundation (a Streetsblog Chicago donor) says agencies should stop worrying about whether every single rider has paid.

Instead, he argues, they should focus on implementing features like prepaid and alldoor bus boarding, because they shorten trip times, which attracts more customers and can have a net positive effect on revenue.

“Transit people here have this religion about avoiding any possible fare evasion,” he told Streetsblog USA. But the most compelling argument for not jailing someone for depriving the CTA of $2.25 is an ethical one. State senator Robert Hertzberg, who sponsored California’s statewide legislation, felt that excessive punishment for nonpayment was unfairly resulting

in criminal records for low-income youth in his district.

“They don’t have the cash to pay for a ride to school or maybe to a job, they get a ticket, the ticket can be hundreds of dollars, and they don’t know how to pay that,” Hertzberg’s spokesman, Andrew Lamar, told Streetsblog USA. “Kids would end up either being convicted of some misdemeanor or spending time in juvenile hall. . . . That punishment is far too harsh for the crime.”

Locally, Cook County Board president Toni Preckwinkle has similarly advocated for policy changes designed to keep low-level, nonviolent offenders out of jail.

“President Preckwinkle has been clear that people charged with petty offenses should not be forced into the criminal justice system,” spokesman Frank Shuftan said via e-mail. “We would support [decriminalizing fare evasion] given that these are petty offenses and that there are better ways to manage this sort of behavior than heavy fines or funneling them through our jail.”

Jason Ware, who runs a restorative justice program at Austin High School and has been active with the local Black Lives Matter movement, echoes these sentiments. He says he’s heard multiple stories of people being threatened with arrest because they needed to go somewhere and didn’t have enough money to board a CTA bus.

“To criminalize something that’s directly related to poverty is ridiculous,” Ware says.

Another reason to decriminalize nonpayment is to reduce the chances that a minor infraction could lead to major legal problems, or even deportation, for undocumented immigrants.

“Many people targeted for fare evasion on metros around the country tend to be . . . people from immigrant communities,” says Naomi Doerner, a New Orleans-based transportation-equity consultant. “They then end up with these minor violations on their records, which make them [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] targets because they’re labeled undocumented ‘criminals.’ ” These are all good reasons for Chicago to reconsider its commitment to prosecuting fare evaders. If that devotion borders on religious (as Jon Orcutt said), let’s hope Chicago will follow the lead of other American cities and question that orthodoxy. v

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

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CITY LIFE THE TRUMP ERA

Ô ELLEN HAO

Muslim, Latina, and attacked from all sides

As TOLD TO ALEX V. HERNANDEZ Diana Cruz, 44, was born and raised in Chicago and converted to Islam 17 years ago.

She’s Mexican on her mother’s side and Puerto Rican on her father’s. Here she describes what it’s been like to witness the impact of antiimmigrant policies under the Donald Trump administration.

I

grew up in my mother’s Mexican culture, but my parents were sure I kept my father’s Puerto Rican roots through things like cooking arroz con gandules.

When I came to Islam, the last thing I wanted to lose was my Latino culture. But Islam is a universal religion. [And] Latin Americans who come and convert to Islam, one of the beautiful things is that we’re not separated by our nationality anymore. We’re all Latino Muslims.

My experience converting to Islam showed me the need for support for Hispanic people who want to convert. Back when I converted, there was no support. An example is the language barrier for Latinos who speak Spanish trying to learn about the religion from people who speak English or [Arabic]. And there was sometimes a cultural barrier for Muslim communities who are majority Arab or Pakistani and don’t have a lot of experience with Latin American cultures.

Because of this I first decided to volunteer for the Muslim Community Center. I have a job in the corporate world, but my work for God is volunteering. The prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, said God will send messengers to spread the word of Islam by the peoples’ own tribe. So I can’t expect a non-Latino to understand my culture.

I feel that the Trump administration is targeting both of my communities. Trump’s deportation orders seem focused on criminalizing Latinos. What Trump is doing is trying to blame a group of people to say, “They’re taking your jobs.” He’s very manipulative.

I worked for a company where people— many of them in their late 40 and 50s—are losing their jobs. And many of these jobs are going overseas. So I understand people buying what Trump was selling, saying Mexicans were taking their jobs. I understand why someone from the manufacturing industry would vote for Trump. From high school you went to a manufacturing company because you had good benefits and good pay. You thought you had a job for life. But that’s not the case anymore. I made time during my lunch hour to help create resumés for my former coworkers. I think Trump took advantage of their frustrations. These are people who aren’t old enough to retire but they can’t find a job because of their age. But it’s not Mexicans taking these jobs away. It’s the CEOs, CFOs, and shareholders who have the power to keep jobs in the U.S. or move them overseas.

As for the Muslim ban, it impacts my family and me. As a practicing Muslim woman, my driver’s license and my state ID have me wearing my headscarf. If I go flying, I’m worried I may be stopped because I look Muslim.

They’re not going to care that I’m Mexican and Puerto Rican, or that I was born in Chicago. If I take off my scarf I may pass, but I wear my scarf everyday. I don’t want to hide my identity as a Muslim.

And I believe that the media has done of great job of polarizing people to think that the word “Muslim” is synonymous with the word “terrorism.” When the Oklahoma bombing happened, white Americans in the U.S. did that. I wasn’t Muslim then, but when that happened, it never crossed my mind that it was a Muslim responsible. My first thought was that a militia did it, because there was so much news coverage of those types of groups back then. Now, after September 11, it seems any horrible act is first blamed on Muslims, even if they had nothing to do with it.

I think people need to stop only watching the news and visit an Islamic center. Call the nearest Islamic center in your area or CAIR [the Council on American-Islamic Relations] or Gain Peace. For the Latino community, contact Islam in Spanish.

I’m a strong woman—most Latinas are— and we’re very passionate when we believe in something. I cannot live in fear. This is what I tell my kids, my son. I tell them and remind other people too that there is only one being we should fear: God, Allah. That’s it.

God is the best of planners. And right now we’re in this moment where Muslims really need to organize and collaborate more than ever. The majority of the people in this country will always do what’s right. And this is what I’m seeing now: This is God telling us to wake up and do something.

This interview was conducted as part of the storytelling project 90 Days, 90 Voices.

MARCH 23, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 11

The future is female.

So how do we get there?

Four badass women discuss how intersectionality will save the feminist movement.

By AIMEE LEVITT Photos and ďŹ lm by SCRAPPERS FILM GROUP

12 CHICAGO READER - MARCH 23, 2017

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ne of the most striking images from the January 21 Women’s March on Washington was a photo of a cluster of white women wearing pink pussy hats and taking selfies, while a black woman, Angela Peoples, stands in front of them sucking on a lollipop and holding a sign that reads WHITE WOMEN VOTED FOR TRUMP. Fifty-three percent of them, in fact, as opposed to the 94 percent of black women who voted for Hillary Clinton.

Since its very beginning, feminism in America has looked a lot like that photo: able-bodied, cisgender white women standing up for their rights while either remaining oblivious to all other women or noting their presence only to make sure they knew their place in the movement—bringing up the rear. (Literally, in the case of the 1913 Women’s March on Washington.) And for almost as long, women of color have argued that such a stance is unacceptable, and that if feminism is going to succeed, it needs to be adaptable to the needs of all women, not just women who are educated, well-off, well-spoken, and (implicitly) straight and white. Instead of feminism, Alice Walker argued, there needs to be womanism, which embraces everyone traditional feminism looked down on or excluded. Other women have found other ways to adapt their personal feminism to their own particular circumstances. Kimberlé Crenshaw, a UCLA law professor, compared this to navigating a crowded intersection where women have to choose between different allegiances to different identities. Do you stand with your gender? With your race? What if those two groups are in conflict? What do you do then?

In the immediate aftermath of the election, women began planning for a march on Washington the day after the inauguration. The original organizers were white women, but very quickly they invited women of color to join them. There were discussions about intersectionality and inclusivity—not just at the march, but in feminism in general. Women of color had been having these conversations for a long time, but would they have become so widespread if Hillary Clinton had been elected president? Well, if Clinton had won, there probably wouldn’t have been a Women’s March. We would have had a woman president. Would it have mattered so much that feminism itself was divided?

Then there’s the question, what does feminism that embraces a wide variety of women’s experiences look like? It starts with asking women themselves, and also putting them together in the same room so they can speak to each other directly, without interference or reinterpretation from a reporter. We invited four Chicago women from different backgrounds to lunch at Two in West Town to discuss their lives as women and as feminists. After two hours, it felt like the conversation was still just beginning, but we all hoped it would continue.

They are:

MIKKI KENDALL,

a writer whose work has appeared in Ebony, Essence, Time, and the Washington Post and on Twitter, where she’s known as @Karnythia.

ALICIA SWIZ,

a writer, performer, and adjunct professor at Harold Washington College. She organizes the spoken-word series Slut Talk and Feminist Happy Hour.

SAMEENA MUSTAFA,

a commercial real estate broker and stand-up comic and actor who is the founder of Simmer Brown, a diverse comedy collective.

CLAUDIA GARCIAROJAS,

codirector of the Chicago Task Force on Violence Against Girls and Young Women and a PhD candidate in African-American studies at Northwestern.

What is intersectional feminism, and how do you do it?

broad base. I think inclusion is one of the most important aspects to the concept of intersectionality.

AIMEE: How do you do that in a practical sense?

MIKKI: So I want to say ’93—and someone’s gonna tell me I’ve got my dates wrong, but whatever—Kimberlé Crenshaw coins the term.1 She’s a black woman, she’s using it to describe challenges black women face in the legal justice system because of their identity, and the ways those identities intersect.

It has since expanded and been adopted, in some cases co-opted by others, to talk about the ways in which feminism has, can serve, or has failed to serve varying communities underneath this broad umbrella. I tend towards an intersectional feminist lens. I’m gonna plug in the idea here that there’s a space for a variety of feminisms underneath the umbrella, and intersectional feminism is really a hopeful meeting ground where the different interests and needs come together, and we can all consider that what is good for my community may not be good for your community, and it’s OK for us to have different thoughts.

SAMEENA: That is the $64,000 question, because I feel like I struggle with it too.

I don’t want to be the one that’s always showing up and saying, “Remember me?” and “Think about me.” But I realize that I have to do that. And that’s partly why, when I perform, I talk about those issues.

AIMEE: That goes along with the hashtag you started, Mikki.

MIKKI: Right, so I started this hashtag #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen, and I won’t make you go through all the backstory, but one of the things about the hashtag was that there are other feminists who will show up and make you feel good about what I just told you about yourself, but often people are not listening to the quiet, calm voice until the really loud, angry voice speaks up.

And I am.

ALICIA: In the nuances of different life experiences and race, class, privilege, comedy versus print writing even, there’s a lot of spaces where the influence of one can dominate the influence of another, and you have to negotiate that differently depending on the identity you inhabit.

And we have to continue to explore these every time we have a conversation about something that’s intersectional, which is basically like everything in life.

SAMEENA: I think there’s also an understanding now—what does a feminist look like, and sound like, and what does a feminist do? As someone who was raised Muslim and does not cover my hair, it’s one of those things that’s like, are you really a Muslim? Or, are you really practicing? Is there something about the Islam that you adhere to that’s different? I’ve never shied away from the feminist label, but I’ve seen how I show up and there isn’t really a place for me, and I think it’s almost like, “OK, we failed somehow to bring in a variety of voices, so let’s make sure that we’re not doing that.” And we’re creating a more

ALICIA: Happily!

2. In 1983 in her book In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. The full definition concludes, “Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.”

3. Writer Cate Young has provided a succinct explanation of white feminism—with a diagram!—on her blog BattyMamzelle (tinyurl. com/m5bbhrz).

4. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981), edited by Gloria Anzaldúa, was the first book to specifically describe the pressures of balancing the dual,

MIKKI: I’m not even sure if it’s a happily thing. Some people are passive-aggressive, I’m aggressive-aggressive. But also in terms of inclusion, sometimes the best thing you can do to be inclusive is know that you don’t have to have the mike, you don’t have to be the person speaking. To turn and hand it to someone, because you have access to this large platform, and then you say, well, you want to talk about that thing? I’ll sometimes get requests to come and speak about issues impacting immigrant women or Muslim women or indigenous women, and it’s like, “Well, I’m a black girl from the south side of Chicago. I’m not an expert on that, but I know some people who are.” Sometimes, unfortunately, being the person who speaks up, you become the face.

I have what I call “hood feminism,” which is the feminism that develops outside of academia, that kind for black women in particular, it can include some womanism, and some of what we think of as traditional feminism, and some things that are really impacted by the fact J

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of sexual violence as they primarily impact women of color but also just women in general. So that’s where I want to focus my energies, doing organizing in Chicago, where I was born. And I also agree that, yes, white people need to be organizing more than ever and talking to other white people more than ever, and that might mean that at certain times we’re gonna be in similar spaces talking to each other, but I also think that it doesn’t necessarily mean that we have to talk to each other. Like, I’m OK if there are white folks organizing or spaces that I’ve never been to, or, you know, I’m OK if I’m not consistently talking to white folks that are organizing.

MIKKI: And I think it’s an emotional labor question. Full disclosure: I am not an organizer. Other people have that kind of emotional range and patience. I am a person who thinks it’s lovely that you can talk to 37 people and try to get them all wrangled like a herd of cats, I just don’t have that lifestyle. I just want to yell.

Claudia Garcia-Rojas and Sameena Mustafa o SCRAPPERS FILM GROUP

continued from 13

that the world engages with you in a way that it may not engage with someone who is white, or light, or white-passing. And then, when you are from the inner city of Chicago, for instance, the narratives that’ll spring up. I would go into places where people don’t expect someone like me to be there—because I sound like this, they don’t realize where I came from—so that I can speak up for the people that they’re not used to having to listen to.

That’s how the hashtag happens. I’m mad, and I’m really good, apparently, at making people hear me when I’m angry.

SAMEENA: I was so angry, especially after the election, I was just livid. And then I realized, I need some allies. And even, dare I say it, white men who are allies. I said it!

MIKKI: I don’t want allies. I want accomplices.

SAMEENA: I see what you’re saying. Like, be active. Don’t be an observer.

MIKKI: Yes.

SAMEENA: I’ve said that to multiple peo-

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ple. Please do not be a bystander. We do not need bystanders, because that’s how we got here.

MIKKI: I think white men can absolutely be accomplices. I think white men absolutely should be stepping up right now— and this is like, not to lay it on you, white women, but in terms of speaking to each other about what’s happening in their situations, and what your friend who voted for Cheeto McTinyPaws had to say.

SAMEENA: After the election, someone who I had thought of as not someone who really got it reached out to me and said, “How can I help? What can I do?”

And it led to something that was a really awesome space for women of color—I did a stand-up comedy workshop for women of color. There was a woman who was like, “Thank you, white women, for giving up your privilege.” She actually—she said that. And that, to me, was an example of intersectionality.

MIKKI: We were having this conversation, me and some genderqueer and trans friends, about the fact that there’s nowhere left for you to avoid having to deal with different communities. For

disabled feminists, for whatever. It’s not just the election, it’s the appointments that follow the election. And someone was asking, “Well, why is this one being called out more than this one?” And I’m like, “It’s not that this one’s being called out more, it’s just that the people doing the calling out of the DOE head are more visible to you because that’s one of those areas where a lot of lives overlap and intersect.” And the people who are gonna call out, say, the Secretary of Agriculture or something like that, that’s gonna be a different group. But also, that’s gonna be a group that’s smaller just because some people don’t necessarily know they need to be over there speaking up, and there’s only so many people to go around. So if you want to see more voices talking about the thing that’s important to you, you’re gonna have to raise your voice.

You cannot wait for anyone else to speak.

CLAUDIA: I think it’s really important for people to just pick an issue or two to work on and to focus on that, because we can’t spread ourselves thin and do everything. And not every issue is going to call out to us in the same way. So for me, I know that in the next four years, the thing that I want to focus on is issues

CLAUDIA: Right, not all of us have to be on the streets. I think that there are so many different things that we can do.

And just even looking at different historical movements, there have always been different arms to the movement. So there have been people who did the legal research and defended those that needed to be defended because of an injustice in court, or there were people who were doing research to put out pamphlets, so I think that there are so many things that individuals can tap into and can get involved in different ways, and it doesn’t mean that everyone needs to hold a protest sign on the street. But I do want to welcome people who want to get involved, you know. I think we need people.

SAMEENA: There was a lot of discussion, pre- and post-Women’s March: Where were you when there was a [Black Lives Matter] protest? Or where were you when there was all these other things going on? And I, frankly, was not moved to attend a women’s march on that day. I didn’t feel like it was for me. But I realize that some people needed that as a catalyst, to get to that point—this is what I’m going to do, this is what’s going to light that fire under me. Or this election is what shifted my whole worldview.

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There was an op-ed in the Washington Post and I shared it by saying “Becky is woke now.” It was a woman who had never thought that any of these things affected her, and didn’t vote very often, and never voted in a midterm election, and just thought, “This didn’t affect me.”

And now she’s like, “My entire Facebook feed is no longer cat videos, it’s now political discourse.” And so, a few weeks ago or a few months ago I would’ve said, “Oh, god.” But now I’m like, “OK. I need people to be on my side.”

discussions about how fighting to be able to make more work was great, but we already worked. So you need to talk about being able to get the job, that kind of thing.

Womanism focuses more on black women specifically, because for a long time feminism did not define us as women.

ALICIA: It suggested that the women it affected were white women.

AIMEE: Even if it’s Becky in the pink hat?

SAMEENA: Exactly. I mean, oh my god, those hats.

ALICIA: As someone who’s worked in education for a long time, I know that I’ve come to an embracing of whatever gets you there. You know? I do think it’s important to allow people to get there even who have been absent and terrible. And what I’ve found, talking to white women and with white women, getting people to see privilege is so challenging. Getting people to see whiteness is so challenging. My feminism grew out of accepting my own complicity, like accepting the places where I’m part of the problem and that’s never gonna change. Like being white, I can’t do anything about the skin I’m in. I can do something about the way I live that. And same with my feminism and the choices that I make.

How to become a feminist ALICIA: I’d be curious to see how everyone came to their feminism, or their feminist identity.

MIKKI: I grew up with another feminist, but not a “book feminist.” My grandmother was a woman who worked. My aunt . . . everyone worked, right? And so I grew up leaning probably a little more womanist than feminist.

ALICIA: Were they defining as that? Like outwardly?

MIKKE: They were not terms that were being used. We had some very in-depth

sometimes conflicting demands of being both a woman and a person of color. Its title comes from a poem by Donna Kate Rushin that reads in part, “I’ve had enough. / I’m sick of seeing and touching / Both sides of things / Sick of being the damn bridge for everybody.”

5. After Beyoncé released Lemonade last spring, Bell Hooks published a scathing critique of the album that accused Beyoncé of capitalizing on stereotypes of black female victimhood.

6. In her book Where We Stand: Class Matters, Hooks wrote, “The only respectable women who lived alone in our communities were schoolteachers. Nobody expected them to marry.

After all they were the women who had chosen mind over matter. They had chosen to become women no man would desire—women who think. . . . Mama taught me to admire these women and to seek to be like them, to cultivate my mind. And it was mama who let me know that cultivating the mind could place one outside the boundaries of desire.

Inside the space of heterosexual desire, a woman had to depend on a man for everything.”

MIKKI: Well, and also literally. There was a saying: All the blacks were men, and all the women are white. And so womanism comes from Alice Walker.2 It’s created as an outgrowth of second-wave feminism, not specifically about second-wave feminism so much as it is the fact that we need a term that is for black women and inclusive of black women. Because a lot of the terms that we’re using in this conversation for women of color come from black women. We’re doing work, and then we reach out to include others, and so one of the things that we need to make sure we have are terms that are specifically for us, things that are specifically around us, because if we don’t, no one’s going to speak of us. I think of women as people who work, as women who have to achieve and succeed in all of these things. And then it becomes more about me realizing, “Oh, wait! These structural things, it’s not just—” Like, the definition of patriarchy is white men oppressing everybody else, but I have a term, and it’s not a great term, but I call it the white matriarchy, which is where we talk about white feminism, 3 and how it profits from the labor of women of color. Like the lean-in Sheryl Sandberg feminism, where she talks about how to get a CEO position but she doesn’t talk about the nanny. And so, in those conversations, I think about my grandmother. I think about my aunt who got her doctorate; she’s a Chicago Public Schools principal.

There was a weird idea that because we had done so much as women, we were going to be women men would not want.

SAMEENA: My mother worked, and my aunt—her sister—worked. They’re both physicians. But my grandmother, I don’t actually know her level of education because she died in childbirth. And then my paternal grandmother was married at the age of ten. So, OK, there’s been such a huge leap to go from marrying at ten or

dying in childbirth to my mother being a physician and then having five daughters who made very different choices. So I came to feminism early, whether I knew it or not—I think I feel like I was, like, a six-year-old feminist. I’m also a middle child, so that explains probably a lot. I was always sort of getting the shaft. But once I got to college, I discovered feminism with a capital F. That was at the same time I was dealing with coming to terms with my sexuality and exploring that. And so I started to read Betty Friedan and Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness, and that canon of feminism. But there were so few voices that were like mine. So when I found the anthology This Bridge Called My Back, by [Gloria] Anzaldúa,4 I was like, yes! And then I found Adrienne Rich and people like that. So I found academic feminism and tried to find where my voice was in it, and then postgrad I ended up working at Planned Parenthood and realized that I am kind of oblivious to the class question.

I was working at a Planned Parenthood on the west side of Chicago in the Austin neighborhood and that was—I got woke, guys. That was an intense experience. I was kind of a clueless twentysomething.

Most of our clientele was teenage. I think our median age was 15 to 18 and primarily African-American, and just the number of things, the assumptions I had to shed, that experience alone—there was no book that was going to teach me this. This was boots on the ground, realizing that “Wow, I am making a lot of assumptions,” and it was a life-changing experience. Even now I know there are class assumptions that I make because my mother was a physician and we grew up with a certain access to money, and there’s things I still need to learn. And so I’m thinking when I see people who are like, “I’ve figured this feminism thing out,” I’m like, “No, you haven’t.”

CLAUDIA: It’s a lifelong process.

SAMEENA: It is.

MIKKI: I was going to say, I think we all have to start from wherever we start from—Bell Hooks used to speak to me so much and then I got older and my life changed.

ALICIA: And then she got all antiBeyoncé5 and you were like, “What are you doing to me, Bell Hooks?”

MIKKI: Even before then because—well, one of the things is that I’m not a “respectable” girl.6 SAMEENA: Me either.

MIKKI: I didn’t grow up that way. I grew up on the periphery of that. But my parents thought the burbs would be safer. I end up in Downers Grove in the middle of high school. It’s the 1990s, so we’re going to call that the integration of Downers Grove North High School.

Let’s be clear about how many black kids there were, and they could all fit at this table. And I end up out there and I had, prior to that point, been to majority-black schools or majority-mixed-race schools in the city, and I had no idea what whiteness as a social construct was. I knew white people. I knew individual white people, but a white-flight burb is an entirely different reality. It was weird on a number of levels, not just because I was black and out-there, but also to watch white people take out at each other. They would get aggressive at kids who were disabled, there was all of this really rigid class structure, social structure stuff going on. Like cliques in the city are just not that serious. But out there you could be ostracized for talking to the wrong person.

AIMEE: It was like a John Hughes movie?

MIKKI: I thought John Hughes was making all of that up. At Whitney Young, you’re with kids from different neighborhoods, and we had our concerns, but our concerns were more, we’re all smart kids but there were bathrooms you had to be careful going in, because you might get jumped or you might get assaulted because Whitney Young is three buildings.

There’s Disciples over here, Vice Lords over there, and all of this other stuff you have to know. But none of that means you can’t talk to each other. I’m very comfortable—it’s hilarious, but it’s also true—with the fact that my neighbor is a former gang member who did ten years for arson, because he’s a really nice guy.

I’m really uncomfortable in a room full of white frat boys because white jock boys in the burbs taught me some hard life lessons and the white boy that helps me is the guy that they think is scum. The people who were kindest to me and J

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continued from 15 who have been kindest to me in my life at various points have always been folks without that much. So, I lived in public housing and did all of that as a single mom in college, and I was like, well, these people are fine. But the suburbs.

Like, I don’t even understand how you [can be constructive and intersectional] from that place that is created out there.

I get how they can vote for someone like Cheeto McTinyHands in office, but I also don’t know what happens when they leave that bubble.

AIMEE: They don’t leave that bubble. And they don’t need to. They have everything they need.

SAMEENA: In their minds they don’t need to. That was the whole conversation I kept having. “Oh, you know, I’m in this blue bubble,” and then I went, “No, I’m not, because all I have to do is go to O’Hare.” There is no bubble. And the irony is that the people who really are the snowflakes are the people who live in Downers Grove.

MIKKI: And Downers Grove has been forced to diversify somewhat.

SAMEERA: Yeah, I know brown people who live there.

ALICIA: My feminism definitely sprung out of that too, and similarly, like on the streets, in my lived experience, and I didn’t have the language until college.

But I was never a respectable girl. I was loud, I’ve always been loud; I cannot even talk at a lower volume. I lived alone with my dad, so I had a little bit of a strange relationship with my mother, even though I came from this family of strong women. My mom was sort of the leader in redefining relationships with men in the family dynamic. She left my father, and then shortly after, my grandmother actually left my grandfather. So there are these kind of actions in my life of women being strong and independent, and I was growing up super-independent myself, and my mom didn’t know what to do with it, and then my dad didn’t know what to do with it, and I was finding my own way through the world. And I moved from a super-integrated yet still segregated

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Claudia Garcia-Rojas o SCRAPPERS FILM GROUP

community in New Jersey where there were people of color around, largely black people, but they all lived, like, in the housing projects, and we lived in actual houses. I mean, we were all poor. And that’s the thing, I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately: that it was never really explained to me. You know, no one says to you why you can’t go to so-and-so’s house after dark. And then just when I was actually in grad school, I was reading these women who were challenging my positionality, even though I completely identified with everything they were saying. Like I knew that I felt the exact same way, I just felt it in different spaces. And that even my hurt and pain and oppression and marginalization was still in some way . . . like the privilege, it takes you a while to wrap your brain around that.

Like for Sameena, it was the class thing specifically that made you go, “Oh, wait, this fight I’ve been fighting has so many other tributaries.” And I think just for a lot of people, just in general, that’s overwhelming. It’s overwhelming to think about having to fight everything.

For me, I was able to embrace that, and I think in an academic sense too, I was like, “OK, I’m learning.” And then in this

lived experience, you’re like, “How do I start fusing these two?”

AIMEE: I think that’s the challenge. Like everybody comes to feminism through their own lived experience, and then they realize everyone else has experiences. You read about them, or you see them. And that’s the problem.

CLAUDIA: I think my experience goes similar to the three of you. I was raised really poor on welfare by a single mother, and was raised by five of my aunts, my mother, and my grandmother. So I was raised by really incredibly strong women, but women who had very traumatic life experiences dealing with gender-based violence, with rape, sexual assault, so I don’t think it’s a surprise that I’m doing the work that I’m doing. My mother had contemplated whether she was going to keep me or not, and decided to keep me at the end. And so, growing up, I just had all these confusing examples of women who are very strong, but when men are around, things are a little different. But I think that they did a good job raising me and my brothers, and when I got to high school, which is actually interesting because elementary school, high school,

was primarily people of color.

So the first time that I ever saw a majority of white people at an institution was when I went to go tour Northwestern after high school when I was thinking of going there. And I had never seen so many white people in my life. And I just remember thinking if I could get into this school, this would be like, I’ve made it. Like this would be winning the lottery. That’s the way I was raised—education is what matters. And so I just remember talking to some of the girls in the dorms, and one was, this was like during the beginning of the school year. She was crying because she didn’t get into Harvard, and I was like, wow.

You’re crying because you didn’t get into Harvard, and I’m freaking out because I don’t even know if I’m gonna get into any school. I was a public policy debater, and I won, was very successful, was a state champion I don’t even remember how many times, and I had been offered an opportunity to apply to Northwestern for a public policy debate fellowship.

And I didn’t believe in myself. Everyone encouraged me, and I said, “There is no way after what I saw that I will be able to make it into this institution,” you know.

And I just don’t know if I could actually

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function in that space. Like, I don’t see anyone that echoes the experience that I had, which was a very beautiful experience, going to a high school where it’s not just that we were racially mixed, but it was also that we had refugees who were, you know, teaching us about the experiences of living in war, and asylum seekers who were talking to us about what it was to try and resituate themselves in the United States, people who did not speak English as a first language.

And it was just such an incredible experience, so seeing that setting at Northwestern was really shocking to me.

But when I started at DePaul, my very first quarter, I took a class with someone who is still a mentor of mine. Her name is Ann Russo, and she’s just a fantastic scholar, and she would teach this class called Chicago Women Activists. And it was an amazing class. It transformed my life, and I ended up founding a women’s newspaper that quarter called Voices, specifically to address the issues that the DePaulia, DePaul University’s paper, would not address. And that’s when I also learned the term “feminist.” And it’s not a term, like many of you had expressed before, that my family would use, because no one in my family uses the term “feminist” to identify that way. But I realized that feminism is a politic, is about your positionality, and how you act in society.

And so I realized, like, wow, my aunts, my grandmother, my mom, they are all feminists, even if they don’t identify that way. But because I have access to this language, I felt it important to identify that way, and I’m not anyone who ever shies away from using that term. So now whenever I teach about feminism at Northwestern, I tell my students, feminism was not something that white women made. It’s something that indigenous and black women, women of color, gave white women. Because if we look at the history of the work the black women have done, the work that indigenous women have done, and you look at the politic that they engage in—eradicating and abolishing slavery, abolishing different oppressions of women not being able to work and get paid, those are all things that women of color have always championed. The fact that white women had particular access to introduce the term in a particular way and to advance it is different. But I always tell them it’s important to know that

this is not something that white women handed us, it’s something that has always been in us and we’ve always been doing.

AIMEE: That’s really beautiful.

CLAUDIA: I believe it. But I also understand some people don’t want to identify as feminist, and I get the issues, and I also think that it’s important to teach the different ways in which one can identify.

So a term like “womanist” I know is also incredibly powerful and also as critically important to have in our vocabulary as feminism.

How to talk like a feminist AIMEE: Do you think the vocabulary has been divisive?

ALICIA: Always and forever in America, yeah.

7. Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

by Bell Hooks is a basic guide to feminism that roots feminist theory in everyday experience.

8. A city’s level of diversity or segregation can vary widely depending on how you interpret the data, Nate Silver has argued. A 2009 study led by UIC sociologist Maria Krysan shows that, given the choice, most white people prefer to live in majority-white neighborhoods, while blacks prefer racially mixed areas. And data from the Census Bureau 2010-2014 American Community Survey indicates that population shifts are bringing more Hispanics and other groups into previously all-black neighborhoods.

MIKKI: Part of it is that we’re maybe not speaking the same English. Like I use “bitch” really casually. I do. I grew up with it, I joke about it with friends, whatever. My current Twitter tagline is “The bitch that starts and finishes shit.” And it’s in part because, for my community, reclaiming that term was happening before white women were doing whatever the hell white women are doing.

But you’ll see people get really upset . . .

“You called someone a bitch.” Well, but five seconds ago, she did everything but call me the N-word, so I’m not sure why we’re this focused on “bitch.” But also the way in which language is used can be divisive I think maybe is more accurate, because if I’m talking to a trans woman and she says, “Bitch, I love your lipstick,” all right, thank you. And we’re gonna stand there, and we’re gonna have a conversation about makeup, and my day is gonna go on, and her day is gonna go on, whatever. If, though, a white guy says, “Bitch, I love your lipstick,” we’re going down a different road there.

ALICIA: The reclamation is, I find, really challenging for a lot of people. I was just rereading one of the chapters in Feminism Is for Everybody,7 because I do give my students the intro chapter. One of the things Bell Hooks says is to under-

stand feminism, you have to understand sexism. And for me, to understand sexism, you have to understand normative gender roles. And people still have such trouble wrapping their brains around that, which is why you get this argument from people who think, “Well, if a trans person says ‘bitch’ to me and I’m this privileged white dude or privileged whoever, why can’t I say it too?”

SAMEENA: Language is important, but I don’t want to get caught in a discussion about terms and terminology when people are actually suffering. I mean, shit is going down. I worked on a feminist literary journal in college. And it was a lot of fun, and we had some diversity in terms of race and sexuality and that sort of thing, but I remember—this was my senior year—one of the editors wrote a poem about loving a black woman, and she used the phrase “chocolate love.”

And I was like, “We are not going to publish—this is the worst poem I’ve ever read in my life,” and I was adamant. But I know that in her mind, she’s like, “She’s dead to me. I’m never going to talk to this woman again.” In her mind, I wasn’t being feminist enough, I wasn’t being open enough. And I was like, “This is just hack bullshit. This is garbage.” But that is an example of not seeing the big picture, of making it about you. And that’s what I think a lot of this stuff is—it’s making it about you and not thinking about like, How does this really impact the world?

And so that’s where it’s been frustrating to me, when I went on my rants about 53 percent of white women voting for Trump—I’m sorry. I said it.

MIKKI: Cheeto McTinyPaws.

SAMEENA: OK, OK, OK. I liked Busta Rhymes’s “Agent Orange.” But essentially, that pissed me off. I remember sharing something that was like, [this is] choosing your race over your gender. That’s clear. And it was maddening to me. And then I said to myself, “OK, I need to figure out a way to not lead with anger, because it’s gonna eat me up. It’s gonna just burn me up.” And I think about it in the context of Islamophobia too. How many stereotypes do people have about Muslims, about Muslim women, and all that goes on with that? I remember I was in a feminist space, at a feminist bookstore, doing

a show with all women, and I broached the subject of Islamophobia. If you’re performing, you can feel the audience just recede. And I thought, Oh my god, he might win. I remember feeling just like this, and this was several months before the election. I thought, This is not good.

This should be my safe space, and it’s not.

‘But what about Chicago?’

MIKKI: One of the things that I think we skim over in this is that when we’re talking about language, sometimes language can be divisive, but also it can be a tell. Because of the people who respond to any discussion of police brutality with “Well, what about Chicago?” And in the middle of the “What about Chicago?” you already know how the rest of this conversation. Language has just told you that whatever discussion you think you’re having, the one they’re gonna have with you is that they can’t do anything about police brutality against black bodies as long as black people are violent with each other. But crime happens intraracially.

Because, frankly, what happens is that you and your neighbor are having a fight about whatever it is, and your neighbor has a gun or a knife, or you have a fistfight and you hit your neighbor too hard—all of that happens, period, in communities, because that’s how humans work.

SAMEENA: We’re in Chicago, one of the most segregated cities there are.

MIKKI: Actually, we’re not one of the most segregated cities. Chicago’s not even in the top 20 of segregated cities in America.8 However, if you take out the requirement that white people be in the neighborhood, Chicago’s actually a pretty integrated city in the areas that are not white dominated. I have neighbors that are Mexican, I have neighbors that are Muslim, I have neighbors that are a lot of things, but I live in South Shore.

What I don’t have a lot of are white neighbors. You see everything else out on the sidewalk in my neighborhood. If you go to Pilsen, if you go to a lot of the border communities like Austin, you’ll see a lot more integration. And even with the way segregation has worked in J

MARCH 23, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 17

continued from 17 Chicago, Chicago is not going to have that many white people in these neighborhoods because there’s just not that many white people in Chicago. White flight took most of them out. They come in, they go downtown—this is why there was the whole thing about people who say they’re from Chicago but they’re really from Evanston.

ALICIA: You’re really speaking to a lot of America that doesn’t have any experience with cities, urban settings, or having gone out of, like, ten miles of their town. Fox News is still the most-watched news network. Now it also is because maybe people like us just aren’t watching the news. This is what I try to remind my students. I have a PowerPoint, it’s like, we’re gonna look at the CEOs of the six media companies. That’s right, I said six. Did you think there were more?

There’s not! And it’s a PowerPoint of all white men. Like you’re looking at it, and they’re all old as fuck . . .

MIKKI: And they live in white-flight burbs, predominately white areas. Because this ties into a thing I talk about a lot—false history. When we’re talking about all of this, and what people are nostalgic for with that tagline about making America great—when you actually talk to the people who are saying that, and they describe the America that they think they should’ve had, you realize in the middle that they’re talking about Donna Reed.

ALICIA: Right, about an America that never really existed.

MIKKI: They are literally talking about TV shows. And then it’s the same thing with police brutality, what we don’t really talk about. But I’ve noticed more and more, and lately I’ve been thinking about this: We teach people police brutality is normal, with every Dick Wolf show, with every NYPD Blue, all of those shows, because by the end of the show, in order to save the kid, in order to save the pregnant woman, in order to stop the serial killer, someone’s rights have been violated. Several people’s rights have been violated. And the person at the beginning who was innocent, maybe we get a special episode where that person gets an apology, that person’s family gets

18 CHICAGO READER - MARCH 23, 2017

an apology because they’re dead. But mostly, there’s no impact for them, that they got beat up by a cop.

How to be an accomplice SAMEENA: OK, here, you’ve got the whole issue of class and gentrification, you’ve got not really understanding or not being culturally competent. And then we’re still dealing with sexism and racism and all this other stuff. And that’s a more comprehensive look at things, where it’s not just about race. And it’s not just about one thing. It’s like, how do we create that narrative and that dialogue?

And I think that still is a challenge. Because you look at people who are trying to be advocates—I’m actually a really big fan of Van Jones, but he’s got this Love Army thing he’s doing,9 and part of me is like, “I don’t know if I’m too angry to be a part of a love army.” You know?

CLAUDIA: That’s not going to address the institutional issues.

SAMEENA: I know, that’s what I’m saying.

It feels good to people who don’t want to feel bad.

MIKKI: I was gonna say, so this is Van Jones offering to do some version of emotional labor. I will not be joining the army. But this is a very respectable approach to oppression. Nobody wants to talk about how we fight once the fighting is not clean. What we do—because we all love those stories from our grandparents who fought Nazis—we sort of skim over the fact that there’s a body in the ground at the end of that story. We just hear that our heroic grandpa really fought the Nazis, or whatever. And I think this is a thing that’s sort of difficult, depending on your background or where you come from. The idea, like, we have a zero tolerance for fighting, and people are not supposed to fight. And then we get to a point where sometimes maybe violence is necessary, or maybe really not caring about someone’s feelings is necessary, or really hurting someone’s feelings is necessary, or whatever. And people are very uncomfortable with it. And I think that one of the things when we’re talking

about how this stuff intersects is it goes back to the idea that not everything is a feminist issue, when really, if it affects women, it is a feminist issue. That’s a messy place.

you’ve got the racial hierarchy where white people are at the top. But this class is amazing, because we get white students to talk to each other about whiteness, which you never see happening.

I did want to take us back specifically to the issue of language. One of the things that came up was when the thing came out that Agent Orange was sexually assaulting—or where we found out that he admitted he’s a sexual assaulter— the fact that all these white men were brought into the media to define what sexual assault is. And I think that that’s where we need to look at how language helps construct our society. It’s not the only element, but it’s one of many, and I think it’s important, because when you have a situation like that where women are not being brought in to actually define the terms of what that is, you have white men saying, like, “Sexual assault is really not a thing,” and they’re elected officials. This was happening towards the end of the election.

SAMEENA: I think about my own communities and I think, How have my own communities done racism? Or sexism?

And I’m coming from a community that is incredibly sexist and incredibly racist.

There was a major Muslim scholar who was speaking, and he was being interviewed, and he actually said something back to the whole narrative of like, “Oh, we have this issue because there’s so much black-on-black crime.” I’m like, “Really? You’re really gonna do this? As a Muslim scholar, you’re really gonna go there?” Like, shut the fuck up. Stop talking. It’s time to listen.

To be honest, people don’t really know the history or the context. There’s a reason why people are angry about white feminism, because the suffragist movement was incredibly racist. That is what is somewhat frustrating, and even something I’m still learning about. And people are making statements without having that context, having that history.

ALICIA: And this has been happening for our entire history.

CLAUDIA: Right, because everyone at the top of the media hierarchy is either a white man or, when we go down a little bit lower, it’s white women who tend to be media gatekeepers. When I look at that, I was just thinking about the fact that, wow, it really does matter how we use language, and how we’re thinking about it, because this is impacting people and it’s framing people’s minds and their psychology.

CLAUDIA: Or they have it, but they don’t want to acknowledge it, because then you have to talk about it and address it.

SAMEENA: Yeah. Somehow it’s funny, because it sort of works both ways. If you talk about racism, then it’s like, oh, I as a white people am feeling guilty, which is ironic. Because it’s like when a terrorist attack happens, it’s like, oh Muslim people, please take responsibility for it.

So it’s that weird desire to either place culpability or feel it—it’s like this weird continuum. It’s hard to shake. It’s like, no, that person isn’t responsible for everybody. And so that’s why I’m like, Wait, I can’t blame all white people for racism, but I can say, “You benefit from it.”

AIMEE: It gives us the terms to talk about things too. Like “sexual harassment,” there was no word for it. It happened but you couldn’t put a label to it.

A portrait of a feminist as a young girl

MIKKI: “And you sustain it.”

CLAUDIA: I was co-teaching a class called Unsettling Whiteness these past two, three years at Northwestern, and one of the ways in which the class is taught is that whiteness is a politic that we can all engage and advance. And obviously, whiteness benefits white people, because

9. Jones, an attorney and CNN commentator, has started the “Love Army” as part of his Dream Corps initiative that works to create jobs in order to keep young people out of prison.

ALICIA: We were all having these feminist experiences, and even if they were defined as another word that we felt more comfortable with, we were having these feminist experiences. I remember hearing the word “feminist” in one of my first classes in undergrad and being like, Oh, that’s what I am. People write

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limitations. As I got older, as I got more mature, I was like, “Oh, no, that doesn’t apply.” It was just slowly knocking down those barriers. For someone who has never felt barriers or felt limitations, it’s like, How can you think of yourself as a feminist if you’re covering your hair? How can you think of yourself as a feminist if you don’t feel like you can go and be in integrated spaces? If you go to a mosque today the women are praying in the back and men are in the front.

Sometimes there are separate entrances, sometimes they have completely separate buildings. But I think those women would consider themselves feminists.

Sameena Mustafa o SCRAPPERS FILM GROUP

books about this? And this light goes off. When I really started feeling like the word speaks to me, it was empowering, it really was like, there is a community for me. And even the process of starting to challenge my privilege, and starting to question all that—what was so disruptive about that for me was that feminism was thus far the only thing that I really felt like myself in. I’ve always felt strongly that being a girl or a woman is amazing, and I’m never gonna apologize for it, I’m never gonna say, like, my feminism isn’t about being these traditional things that they’ve told me to be.

I did a lot of research on girlhood, and one of my ideas around girlhood was the slumber party thing. It was what my experience of what girlhood looked like.

And I was like, “What? You mean some girls didn’t have slumber parties and roller skating?” It rocked my world.

MIKKI: And see, I never had that universal girlhood education.

ALICIA: I’m sure so many people haven’t.

Which I get now.

MIKKI: Well, I also didn’t have that universal girlhood expectation. I was in a

conversation, and someone was like, “You haven’t said much,” and I was like, “Well, part of the problem is that I didn’t know girlhood was supposed to be universal.” I always just assumed that we were all doing different things in those years, because we’re not all in the same situation. I didn’t have the suburban family and whatever that girlhood was being depicted as in the 80s. I’m born in ’76, so a lot of imagery didn’t reflect me until I started creating it. If you’re a black girl who grows up in the hood living with grandparents like my backstory, there was never a place in the definition of girlhood for us, except as one of the at-risk girls who deserves to be left behind, and I didn’t get that message either, because, dear god, if I had told [my grandmother] Dorothy Gamble that I was not gonna finish high school, the end of the world would have followed. Old black women from Mississippi, you do not tell them things like that.

When I came to “feminism” as a term, I never quite felt like I had to situate myself in this idea of gender over race. Because for me, they’re not divisible. They go together all the time. I’m not going to be more black than I am woman, or more woman than I am black. This is my iden-

tity, you’re gonna deal with it, was sort of how I grew up. You know, and womanism, I think, lends itself to that idea, that, like, the identity you inhabit is the one that belongs to you, and nobody else gets to tell you how you sit in that space.

There’s other problematic things about womanism—I’m not gonna say there’s nothing problematic about womanism.

I don’t identify as a womanist, but I did learn a lot about setting boundaries around identity and the idea that you had to be separated from womanism.

SAMEENA: Growing up and having those sort of role models and having that experience of girlhood, I always feel like my childhood and my girlhood was always defined by my limitations, by what I couldn’t do. I couldn’t wear shorts, or I couldn’t eat pork. I ate pork today. Growing up, the limitations were clear. And some of them were because I was a girl, some of them were because I was Muslim. So I remember telling other kids, “Oh, we can’t eat pork, we can’t wear shorts,” [and they were] like, “Your religion sucks.” That is a classic response. When you’re six years old, it’s like, “You can’t have hot dogs? Your religion sucks.” So it was always about the

CLAUDIA: But it’s about the work that they’re also doing. They might be in a separate room, but what work are they doing to advance whatever politic, or what kind of community work are they doing? Or even in the family. You might not be involved in five different organizations, but it might also just be how you’re raising your kids and what kind of ideology you’re passing on to them. But I was going to say I had a similar upbringing even though my family—well, we’re mixed race so I’m not going to go into all of the things that we’re made up of.

ALICIA: All your intersections.

CLAUDIA: Yeah, all of my intersections.

This arm is Mexican, this arm is— but it’s interesting, because I wasn’t allowed to wear certain things because my older brother was someone that would always watch over me and say I couldn’t wear lipstick because I was looking too much like a prostitute, I couldn’t wear shorts.

And because we’re poor I inherited a lot of my brother’s clothing, so I grew up very much a tomboy. And because my mother was working full-time I had to raise my younger brother. I can’t say I had an experience that is defined by girlhood because I was too busy to even think about that. I was busy thinking, I’m responsible for my younger brother, I’m responsible for getting us out of the situation, and I have to work hard to make sure that that happens. And that was really my childhood. So that’s why I wear lots of red lipstick nowadays and have the collection of different colors and wear all the girly things, because now I can do that for myself and I choose to.

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ALICIA: And being able to have that choice is empowering, but if somebody doesn’t have that choice or makes a different choice, that’s empowering too.

MIKKI: And I think it also is a very situational thing. I don’t remember being able to do a lot of things, but a lot of those restrictions were because of where we lived and gun violence.

Chicago’s actually not as violent as it was when I was a kid, particularly in the neighborhood where I grew up. So I spent a lot of time either in the house or in someone else’s house. But I didn’t associate that so much with me being a girl as I did with the fact that my grandmother was overprotective and also she had an entire coterie of other overprotective friends that meant that I was busy and I didn’t always feel the lack of being able to go outside, but also I think about the restrictions that sometimes kids are facing that sometimes kids don’t know about. They know they’re restricted, they know that there’s a reason given and sometimes that reason is, you know, something as mundane as their brother’s issues, but sometimes there’s no reason given because no one wants to tell kids the truth about their situation.

CLAUDIA: Right, yeah, I agree with that.

ALICIA: American culture is very individualistic, and I’m coming from a very communal culture. It’s not about you, it’s about the family and the community and what your impression is of the community, and so, so much of that is still at play here in America, and so that’s the challenge. Like, “OK, you’re shaming your family, your community, and you’re not respecting—”

CLAUDIA: The family name.

ALICIA: Right.

MIKKI: And my family didn’t have that. I was Ms. Gamble’s granddaughter, but Ms. Gamble ran numbers. So there was a certain caveat of respectability in the sense that if I wanted to buy drugs or something like that, I would not have been able to because everyone knew my grandparents, but the reasons for them

Mikki Kendall and Alicia Swiz o SCRAPPERS FILM GROUP

not telling me something like that were not entirely because I was too good of a girl.

What we do now SAMEENA: As far as intersectionality and feminism, on a hopeful note I feel like there’s been a lot more—“enlightenment” is the word I’m going to use today.

I feel like that’s a good thing, and that’s a shift. One good thing is that there’s been an awareness and people who have had their head in the sand for a variety of reasons, now they’re like, “Oh, this is a problem, and I can do something about it.” And so if there’s an opportunity to create more discourse like this or make people aware that this is possible—I think a lot of people don’t imagine that something like this is possible ’cause the country is too divided.

MIKKI: I think part of this is going to be about listening, being willing to listen and, like, listen, not just hear the words the other person said so you can respond to them, but, like, listen to what they said and sit with “You’re wrong” or sit with “You’re right” or sit with “You’re differ-

20 CHICAGO READER - MARCH 23, 2017

ent” or whatever. Because I think part of what made this really great, but also harder to construct on a large scale, is that we’re in a small quiet place, there’s food, we had to listen to each other to engage in this conversation. I’m not quite sure how we translate small-group work, but that might be an interesting thing to see is people creating groups like this: brunch, whatever, where you and four women who are nothing like you go out, sit down, and have that conversation, as a small-scale effort for folks who maybe don’t march or can’t march. I have a bum leg, I don’t do marches because after 500 feet my leg is going to have a conversation with me, but I’m totally willing to have a sit down at brunch or a mimosa and discuss feminism with you. I’d definitely do that.

CLAUDIA: I just want to say that I really appreciate this because, for instance, I am so inundated with work right now I really appreciate just being able to connect with new people. I didn’t know any of you before this moment, so whether we build relationships after this moment or not, I just really appreciate having had an opportunity to meet face-to-face with people—with all of you—and have really

great conversation and to also just learn about each of you individually.

ALICIA: Echoing the sentiments, I really feel that in real-life interactions and taking—when you were speaking, I was thinking about the risks that are hard for people to take, to even say, “Do you want to have brunch?” I’m really excited about this new idea of journalism, this idea of let’s bring women together to talk and it’ll be in print, but it will also be in this dynamic, sharing food and sharing these human creature comforts that connect us all. As safe as we can make a dialogue, we all came into it knowing that we were going to hear what each other has to say, and [it will] be nice if we can help empower people to just feel that comfortable in their lives, and I think we’re all working on that, right?

MIKKI: Right, that’s what I was going to say. In terms of the risk factor, I think that starting with people you already know and with whom you share interests, even if your directions are different, definitely made this easier. We know some people in common but I don’t think any of us knew each other before today, but I totally had fun. v

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ARTS & CULTURE

10 Out of 12 o CHARLES OSGOOD

THEATER

A trudge through tech

By TONY ADLER

H

ow many of us have sat around work, watching our colleagues act out one way or another, and thought, I should write a play about this? Lots. How many of us have followed through on that notion? Few. And that’s a good thing, because (a) most of us haven’t the talent and (b) what happens on the job seldom interests anybody else nearly as much as it interests us.

Anne Washburn is one of the few who followed through. Her 10 Out of 12 depicts what goes on at her job—specifically that part of it where a cast, crew, and director ready one of her scripts for performance. Running now at Theater Wit, it’s a show about a ten-hour tech rehearsal.

Nobody can say Washburn hasn’t the talent for the project. She’s the one who wrote Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play, which was deservedly a hit for Wit in 2015. This time around, however, she’s miscalculated the entertain-

10 OUT OF 12

Through 4/16: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 2 PM, Theater Wit, 1229 W. Belmont, 773-975-8150, theaterwit.org, $24-$36.

ment value of letting an audience bear witness as characters worry over hitting their marks in the dark, making a costume function correctly, and discussing the merits of Funyuns versus the other crap they eat. For two and a half hours. Some witty bits and a late-developing dramatic focus notwithstanding, 10 Out of 12 just isn’t all that interesting.

In a way, though, that’s the point. Keeping us on the edge of our seat doesn’t appear to be a priority with Washburn. Based on the little I’ve seen of her oeuvre so far, I’d say she cares less about telling a ripping yarn than about how that yarn gets unspooled and turned into warm metaphorical clothing over time. Take Mr. Burns. Set in a postapocalyptic America where the power grid is a thing of the past, it opens

MARCH 23, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 21

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b ALL AGES

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Chaon Cross

on a group of survivors gathered around a fire, keeping up morale by recounting the “Cape Feare” episode from The Simpsons. When we see them again, seven years later, they’ve formed a traveling theater company specializing in Simpsons episodes. After another 75 years, those episodes have become the basis for a kind of religion.

10 Out of 12 attempts to trace a similar evolution in a more constricted framework.

Wearing the headsets hung on each seat, audience members can hear the lighting technician (Martha Lavey) work through cues, the sound guy (NPR’s Peter Sagal) go in search of less Germanic mood music, and the electricians (John Mahoney and Riley McIlveen) talk about food, at least until one of them cuts himself with his Exacto blade. The director (Shane Kenyon) maintains his weariness as a point of style while flip-flopping, perhaps also as a point of style: pulling effects he asked for only to put them back and pull them again. This actress (Christine Vrem-Ydstie) does a kind of hula, fascinated by the hypnotic undulation of her long Victorian skirt. That actor (Gregory Fenner) sticks close to his cell phone lest he miss his big break. A third (Stephen Walker)— the oldest of the bunch and something of a legend—tells everyone, “We’re not paid enough to do shoddy work.” The stage manager (Dado) fails to maintain a reasonable schedule.

All this is meant to lead to that moment of transcendence when the false starts, grungy details, and dysfunctional personalities coalesce into a work of stage art, much as the campfire “Cape Feare” coalesces into mythology. The show’s real director, Jeremy Wechsler, and designers Adam Veness (set) and Diane Fairchild (lighting) do their damnedest to make it happen, engineering a climax that

o MICHAEL BROSILOW

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Adam Shalzi and Gregory Fenner o CHARLES OSGOOD

THEATER might get you thinking you’re having A Chorus Line finale flashback.

But it doesn’t take. Unlike the struggles and strivings of the Chorus Line dancers, the punch list Washburn leads us through in 10 Out of 12 doesn’t build to much other than a respectful awareness of how dedicated, how excruciatingly meticulous you have to be to put on a professional-quality show. That’s an important lesson, of course. It’s just not a compelling one.

Not that the piece is all nuts and bolts. As I mentioned above, there’s funny banter as the disembodied techies riff into our headsets, and even a sort of through line involving the angry older actor, Paul. Trouble is, the banter feels random and the through line kicks in late.

What’s more, Walker’s Paul comes off as more West End than Chicago, which is too bad: with the second wave of off-Loop theater artists coming into their AARP years, it wouldn’t hurt to see them lionized a little. v

ß @taadler

Mind over matter—or materialism over morals?

By DAN JAKES

T

he idea that there’s no such thing as moral goodness, the sort that can be distinguished from Spock-like cost-benefit analyses or Darwinian instincts, isn’t exactly novel. Noted contemporary philosopher Joey Tribbiani made that argument to Phoebe Buffay on Friends, which led her on a memorable series of botched attempts at selfless deeds. “I went down to the park and I let a bee sting me,” she announced to him in defiance. “The bee is happy, and I am definitely not.”

Tom Stoppard’s 2015 one-act drama The Hard Problem, his most recent work since Rock ’n’ Roll in 2006, opens postcoitus with two lovers—Hilary (Chaon Cross), a 22-yearold scientist, and Spike (Jürgen Hooper), her university tutor—enrapt in a heightened version of the same conversation. Having witnessed her kneeling to pray before sleep, Spike unloads a torrent of condescending questions about her belief system and notions of truth and motivation, which he insists are indistinguishable from those formed by natural selection over millions of years of interpersonal conditioning.

The counterargument that Stoppard, now 79, and director Charles Newell’s sleek Court Theatre production put forward seems squarely aimed at the University of Chicago intellectual elite for whom smug Spike and his like-minded industry colleagues feel like surrogates. As presented, it also feels like a straw man. WNYC’s Radiolab cohost Robert Krulwich regularly dismisses the idea that his personal spiritual and scientific beliefs

cannot coexist, and a few of the U. of C. professors interviewed for a feature in the show’s program similarly object to Hilary’s theologically inspired “trying to prove” versus “testing whether” methods.

More interesting, and perhaps more relevant now than during the play’s debut two years ago, is Stoppard’s depiction of the increasingly prominent and unholy matrimony between capitalism and research driven by private equity. After taking a job studying consciousness—the “hard problem” of the title—for the Krohl Institute, a firm run by an entrepreneur, Hilary finds her own philosophy at odds with the shortsale profiteering her research is ultimately meant to serve.

This element—drawn by Stoppard from an incomplete script about the 2008 global financial crisis—elevates the perfunctory faith-versus-fact argument to something quintessentially American and of the moment. It’s easy to envision hedge fund manager and Krohl founder Nathan Hosner as Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, or any of the other billionaires who’ve wrested enough influence to become household names. In these rough-and-tumble scenes from the real world, Newell’s cast mines the humanity from the thought experiments. After all, in a society that rewards self-growth above all else, where is there room for altruism? v THE HARD PROBLEM Through 4/9: Wed-Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 3 and 8 PM, Sun 2:30 and 7:30 PM, Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis, 773-7534472, courttheatre.org, $45-$65.

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ARTS & CULTURE

A scene from the second half of Tesseract

o COURTESY OF RASHAUN MITCHELL +

SILAS RIENER + CHARLES ATLAS

DANCE

Tesseract: A space odyssey

By MATT DE LA PEÑA

L

ong before he started dancing, the choreographer Silas Riener preferred reading science fiction novels and dreaming of far-off realms.

“It’s part of a queer identity—the ‘otherness’ of aliens or fantasy,” Riener says, noting his penchant for sci-fi. “It attracted me because of being in the closet, growing up with people who are different or ways that the world is different.”

A former member of Merce Cunningham Dance, Riener is one-third of the creative trio behind Tesseract, a two-part work based on otherworldly themes that will be performed at the MCA this weekend in conjunction with the exhibit “Merce Cunningham: Common Time.”

The other two-thirds: Rashaun Mitchell (also a former Cunningham dancer) and video artist Charles Atlas, who began working with the Cunningham company as a stage manager back in the mid-70s. Together, the trio bring a decidedly alien approach to movement.

Listening to Riener describe it, Tesseract is as much space odyssey as it is dance. The title refers to the four-dimensional analog

of a cube, which in this case is “moving from one world to another,” he says. The first half of the show features 3-D footage captured by Atlas using a mobile camera rig that moves in conjunction with the choreography, incorporating bits of animation. The second half is much more conventional from a dance perspective—a cast of six move in a proscenium setting—but here again there’s a second component, as Atlas will mix and project real-time live video onto the stage.

“We’re using dance as a language, but we’re also using things that are very familiar to people, like the projected image, the camera person, seeing something from multiple angles at the same time,” Riener says. “And we’re not trying to tell a story, we’re just putting you inside this world where things happen and letting you think and feel whatever you want.” vTESSERACT Thu 3/23-Sat 3/25, 7:30 PM, Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago, 312-280-2660, mcachicago.org, $30, $10 students.

“Top 10 Museum Exhibits of 2016.”

— CHICAGO TRIBUNE

FINAL WEEKS!

Must Close April 2, 2017 Alphawood Gallery 2401 North Halsted Street | Chicago

FREE General Admission

Media Sponsor

David Wojnarowicz. Untitled (Buffalo) (detail), 1988–89. Collection of Michael Sodomick.

#ArtAIDSChi

ArtAIDSAmericaChicago.org Art AIDS America was organized by Tacoma Art Museum in partnership with The Bronx Museum of the Arts.

In Chicago, this exhibition is made possible by the Alphawood Foundation, a Chicago-based, grant-making private foundation working for an equitable, just and humane society.

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ARTS & CULTURE

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Hélio Oiticica, PN27 Penetrable, Rijanviera, 1979. o COURTESY ART INSTITUTE CHICAGO

VISUAL ART

The Hélio sequence

By KERRY CARDOZA

M

y art was developed towards an increasing participation, and the mistrust in the gallery and museum business,” the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica wrote in a letter to an art critic in 1969. This disinterest in institutional art settings, coupled with the experiential, immersive nature of much of Oiticica’s work, makes him a difficult artist to exhibit. Perhaps this is why “Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium,” on view now at the Art Institute of Chicago, is the first full-scale retrospective of the artist in the United States.

“To Organize Delirium,” which was first shown last fall at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art and will travel to the Whit-

24 CHICAGO READER - MARCH 23, 2017

ney Museum of Art this summer, is also the first major showing of Oiticica’s work since many of his pieces were destroyed in a fire in 2009. Still, though his career was brief—he died in 1980, at the age of 42—Oiticica was incredibly prolific. More than 200 pieces are on display at the Art Institute. And while the museum does a respectable job of trying to stay true to the artist’s participatory ideals, “To Organize Delirium” falls short of the “suprasensorial” experience Oiticica longed to create, one that would “lead each person to find his or her own inner freedom.”

Oiticica’s work was always infused with ideas. He joined Rio de Janeiro’s Neoconcrete Group in 1959, while still a teen. Sprung from

“HÉLIO OITICICA: TO ORGANIZE DELIRIUM”

Through 5/7: Sun–Wed 10:30 AM–5 PM, Thu-Fri 10:30 AM–8 PM, Sat 10:30 AM–5 PM, Art Institute of Chicago, 312-443-3600, artinstituteofchicago.org. $25, $19 students, seniors ($5 discount for Chicago residents), free kids under 14; free for Illinois residents Thursdays 5-8 PM

b ALL AGES

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Grupo Frente, a small contingent of artists interested in nonreferential art and geometric abstraction, the Neoconcretists sought to free themselves from the formal rationalism of the earlier group.

His midcareer output was largely informed by burgeoning political awareness, prompted by the military dictatorship that took hold of Brazil in 1964. And though he grew up in a middle-class leftist family, Rio’s Mangueira favela influenced Oiticica considerably. He befriended many of its residents and attended the community’s well-known samba school, whose dancers he invited to perform in a piece—the first public presentation of Oiticica’s “Parangolé” series. The parangolés, which roughly translates to “chaos,” are colorful capes meant to be worn, danced in, or carried; the series marked a clear shift toward Oiticica’s interest in movement and participation in art. Yet the uncouth samba dancers weren’t allowed to enter the Museum of Modern Art in Rio, where the performance was meant to take place.

It’s easy to see why Oiticica soured on museum settings. In a 1965 journal entry, he elaborates on his evolving views on exhibitions: “Here is the key to what I will call ‘environmental art,’ ” he writes, “the eternally mobile, the transformable, which is structured by both the action of the spectator and that which is static,” he writes. “A pavilion, one of those used these days for industrial exhibitions (how more interesting they are than anaemic little art shows!), would be ideal for such a purpose—it would be an opportunity for a truly efficient experience with the people, throwing them into the creative participatory notion, away from the ‘elite exhibitions’ so fashionable today.”

Eden and Tropicália, his most iconic works, appear particularly lackluster in the Art Institute. Though viewers are encouraged to take off their shoes and enter the islandlike environments, the artificial lighting and institutional setting did little to encourage any kind of interaction when I was there on a busy Sunday. Sand covers the floor of both pieces, which are positioned side by side. Eden is reminiscent of a favela, full of tents and bright, colorful makeshift structures; cushions, books, and magazines are scattered throughout. Yet no one seemed to be lying around or reading any of the material. “Creleisure,” another term Oiticica coined, suggests that leisure is essential to creativity—by encouraging viewers to hang out in his installations, he hoped to share

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with them the joy of creating.

Tropicália is a livelier piece, and more successful. Two parrots, on loan from the Greater Chicago Cage Bird Club, are caged at one end—their mimicking cries are heard throughout the show. Tropical plants sit beside hand-painted signs featuring poetry by Roberta Camila Salgado. Though brief, the lines beautifully illustrate the turmoil Brazil was experiencing: “Dark sky / why do you not clear and light up my world . . .” Tropicália is a portrait of Rio, contrasting cliches of idyllic tropical life with the city’s poverty and harsh government.

After an eight-year sojourn in New York City—where Oiticica took a reprieve from Brazil’s political situation, got hooked on cocaine, and explored his homosexuality through rarely seen film and video work, the artist returned to Rio in 1978 for what would be the final two years of his life.

According to wall text accompanying the exhibition, he’d endured “harassing questions from U.S. immigration officials” and was disillusioned with New York. In Brazil he got clean and told friends he saw the city with fresh eyes.

In his final two years he produced a flurry of new work, from readymades to new architectural installations. In 1979 he made PN27 Penetrable, Rijanviera, in which visitors are encouraged to walk barefoot through sand, stone, and water.

Originally installed at the Hotel Méridien on Copacabana Beach, with a garden connecting it to the beach across the street, it seems like the perfect embodiment of the “creleisure” Oiticica envisioned.

At the Art Institute, PN27 is installed in its own room, far from any natural lighting. Oiticica held high the concept of vivências, or lived experiences, in which one’s presence and pure reactions were part and parcel of the art. With many of his pieces, Oiticica didn’t consider a work finished until someone was interacting with it: a parangolé when it’s worn, an installation when it’s occupied. What would he have made of “To Organize Delirium,” believing as he did that “any experiment in a formal gallery would be a turn back?”

Still, though the exhibit may not give you a “suprasensorial” experience, it will expose you to one of the 20th century’s most brilliant innovators. v

ß @booksnotboys

o MICHAEL LOCCISANO

ARTS & CULTURE

COMEDY

How Scott Adsit went from patio serenades to 30 Rock

By BRIANNA WELLEN

B

efore getting a gig as a cast member on Mr. Show With Bob and David or becoming Pete Hornberger, Liz Lemon’s right-hand man on 30 Rock, Scott Adsit studied improv at Columbia College Chicago and Second City. In the early 90s he spent his days wandering around Roscoe Village with comedy writer Dino Stamatopoulos (Late Night With Conan O’Brien, Moral Orel, Community) and a guitar in tow. The pair would find al fresco restaurants and pretend they worked there, then offer to play original tunes to diners until management eventually kicked them out.

They’d then return to Stamatopoulos’s apartment—which Adsit remembers containing only a mattress, Simpsons toys from Burger King, and a bag of potatoes in the fridge—and write. The duo stuck together and moved to LA, where they turned their love for bits into fruitful careers.

Adsit, 51, is fresh off a stint on Veep and provided voicing for the upcoming Big Hero Six TV series, but he’s taking a break to headline the Chicago Improv Festival, taking place at venues across the city from March 27 to April 2. He’ll perform with Susan Messing in her two-person show Messing With a Friend and with the all-female troupe Mama’s Boy, then will receive the Spotlight Award for his contributions to improv.

Adsit’s involvement in improv started early. He grew up in Northbrook and was first introduced to the craft in a junior high drama class; after that he joined the improv troupe at Glenbrook North High School.

“They were allowed and sanctioned by the school to satirize life in high school, including the administration and the rules and whatever else,” Adsit says. “It was a huge eye-opener for me, and I said, ‘If there’s a living in this, this is what I want.’”

In 1998 he moved to LA to make a TV show he cowrote with Stamatopoulos, Stephen Colbert, Robert Smigel, and Michael Stoyanov called Sometimes Live. It starred the five of them, along with Tina Fey, as a group of comedy writers working on a TV show that was kind of like Saturday Night Live (sound familiar?).

The pilot didn’t get picked up—though the cast read the script for a live edition of the podcast Skull Juice last year—and so Adsit picked up any acting jobs he could.

The one constant through it all was improv.

Whether or not he was able to get a gig onscreen, he was discovering his style onstage at places like iO West—where he did a show with fellow Chicagoan David Pasquesi. (“Before TJ and Dave, it was Adsit and Pasquesi!” he says.)

He grew to love two-person improv, which focuses more on the relationships between characters, performing with people such as Robert Dassie and Stephnie Weir. Adsit has always kept his Chicago connections close, and in 2005 Fey reached out to offer him a part in her own behind-the-scenes-of-a-sketch-show show. Of course, this one got picked up, then blew up.

Whenever Adsit returns to the city where he cut his teeth, he says he feels inspired to see so many young improvisers continuing to experiment, no matter how bad it can be.

“I see a lot of really bad improv and it’s hard to sit through, but I also feel a lot of empathy because I know I was that person 20 years ago or even a year ago,” Adsit says. “Sometimes it’s so good I get jealous—I’m fighting an impulse to get in the scene. If I’m just laughing, then it’s great. A great football player loves to watch football be well played.” v

R MESSING WITH A FRIEND WITH SCOTT ADSIT AND KEVIN DORFF Thu 3/30, 10:30 PM, the Annoyance Theatre, 851 W. Belmont, cif20.org, $15.

R MAMA’S BOY WITH SCOTT ADSIT Fri 3/31, 9 PM, Stage 773, 1225 W. Belmont, cif20.org, $20.

ß @BriannaWellen

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ARTS & CULTURE

ssss EXCELLENT

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WORTHLESS

T2: TRAINSPOTTING sss

Directed by Danny Boyle. R, 112 min. Landmark’s Century Centre, River East 21, Webster Place

Jonny Lee Miller and Ewan McGregor in T2: Trainspotting o NICOLA DOVE

MOVIES

Good from the first shot

By J.R. JONES

C

ook up and tie off—T2, the long-awaited sequel to Danny Boyle’s British black comedy Trainspotting, opens this weekend. Released in 1996, Trainspotting arrived in the U.S. as domestic heroin use was peaking, and its tale of five directionless Edinburgh lads, some of them avid junkies, connected with indie filmgoers like a spike into the main line. No movie ever made me want to do the drug more, not after Boyle married it to the irresistible bomp-bomp-bomp, bomp-bomp-ba-bomp of Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life.” Who could forget the image of young Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor) standing alone in his room, eyes shut, smoke in hand, tipping backward in sheer pleasure as the dope washes over him? “Take the best orgasm you ever had, multiply it by a thousand, and you’re still nowhere near it,” he enthuses in one of his frequent voice-overs. Interviewed

26 CHICAGO READER - MARCH 23, 2017

for a making-of video, Boyle cited this celebration of the drug experience as a virtue of Irvine Welsh’s source novel: “It doesn’t flinch to tell you what can happen to you, but it also tells you how extraordinary these drugs can be.”

Hollywood movies were never like this.

Since the 1950s, when Otto Preminger’s The Man With the Golden Arm broke the studio taboo against drug stories, American films and TV shows had portrayed heroin as a death sentence, stressing the need and desperation of addiction. The heightened realism of the New Hollywood brought a wave of serious dramas involving heroin—The Panic in Needle Park (1971), The French Connection (1971), Lady Sings the Blues (1972), Lenny (1974)—that portrayed junkies as pathetic if not disgusting. Even the relatively recent spate of films accompanying the Gen-X heroin boom—Drugstore Cowboy (1989), Rush (1991), The Bas-

ketball Diaries (1995)—had proven to be traditional cautionary tales. But Trainspotting, which American critics compared endlessly to A Hard Day’s Night, made heroin fun.

A day in the life of the Beatles was generally more productive than a day in the life of most junkies (or at least started earlier), but the Hard Day’s Night comparison holds true.

Trainspotting focuses on four mates—Mark, the athletic Tommy (Kevin McKidd), the geeky Spud (Ewen Bremner), and the cynical pop-culture critic Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller)—sharing crazy comic adventures as they drink, do drugs, play soccer, chase birds, and rock out. Mark, Spud, and Sick Boy are all hooked on H, though Tommy won’t go near it, nor will Francis Begbie (Robert Carlyle), the violent, two-bit hood who carouses with them occasionally. Mark and Sick Boy make intermittent attempts to clean up, inspired

in no small part by the horrifying day when Sick Boy’s infant daughter succumbs to crib death while mom, dad, and their drug buddies lie smacked out in the next room. By the end of the movie Tommy has taken up heroin and contracted HIV from a dirty needle. Trainspotting climaxes with a dope sale, orchestrated

by Begbie, that nets him, Mark, Spud, and Sick Boy the handsome sum of £16,000, but Mark betrays his mates, slipping away with the cash to start a new life in Amsterdam.

If you want to know the theme of T2, look no further than the scene in Trainspotting when Sick Boy uses the dwindling creative fortunes of Sean Connery to explain to Mark his “unifying theory of life.” Connery may be good in The Name of the Rose, Sick Boy concedes, but his post-Bond decline is irreversible. “At one point you’ve got it,” he says. “Then you lose it, and it’s gone forever. All walks of life.”

Mark asks for examples, and Sick Boy rattles them off: Georgie Best, David Bowie, Lou Reed, David Niven, Malcolm McLaren, Elvis Presley.

Mark is incredulous: “So we all get old, and we can’t hack it anymore? That’s your theory?”

It may not pass muster as a unifying theory of life, but it works just fine for a movie sequel.

With T2, original screenwriter John Hodge reunites the surviving characters 20 years later, when their hell-raising has been curtailed by middle age and a growing sense of mortality.

They’ve all lost it; the only question is whether it really might be gone forever.

Bad sequels try to re-create the original movie; good ones explore its narrative consequences. That’s certainly the case with T2 when Mark returns to Edinburgh to visit his widowed father, atone for missing his mother’s death and burial, and face the music with his former friends and accomplices.

Time hasn’t been kind to the old crew: Spud is unemployed and still mired in heroin addiction, and Sick Boy divides his time between running his late aunt’s desolate pub and blackmailing errant husbands with the help of his Bulgarian prostitute girlfriend, Veronika (Anjela Nedyalkova). Begbie has spent the last 20 years incarcerated, but manages to escape, and once he learns that Mark has come back to town, he vows revenge. But Mark hasn’t done much better than the others: as he confesses to Sick Boy, his wife back

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ARTS & CULTURE

Get showtimes at chicagoreader.com/movies.

in Amsterdam has left him, his business partners have elbowed him out of their company, and doctors have just inserted a metal stent into his left coronary artery. “I’m 46 years old,” he tells Sick Boy, “and I’m fucked!”

These are serious concerns, but Boyle and Hodge haven’t lost their sense of humor about the characters or even the original film. Trainspotting opens with a close-up of Mark’s sneakered feet hitting the pavement; he’s being chased down the sidewalk after a robbery, and after rolling over the hood of the car that’s emerged from an alley, he pulls back to laugh diabolically at the driver. For the opening shot of T2, Mark’s sneakered feet hit an exercise treadmill at a health club, and after suffering a coronary event, he collapses and rolls off onto the floor. These rhyming gags pop up all through the sequel. One of the funniest vignettes in Trainspotting showed Mark picking up a pretty young thing named Diane (Kelly Macdonald in her screen debut) and taking her back to her place for a shag; the next morning he comes downstairs to find Diane in a school blazer and her parents at the

breakfast table. When Diane turns up again in T2, she’s a high-priced attorney to whom Mark and Veronika turn when Sick Boy gets busted. As they’re leaving Diane’s office, she pulls Mark aside for a word of advice about his companion: “She’s too young for you.”

These in-jokes fit right in with the characters’ endless retrospection. “Where I come from, the past is something to forget, but it’s all you talk about,” Veronika tells Mark and Sick Boy. Ignoring her, they play foosball and listen to the Clash. Boyle inserts mock home-movie footage that shows the five mates as schoolboy chums, hanging out at the pub with their parents; at one point it’s backed by a piano rendition of Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day,” a key song from Trainspotting. But nostalgia has a way of turning into disappointment at a moment’s notice. At one point in T2, Sick Boy fondly reminisces with Mark about the day they first shot heroin, then interrupts himself to exclaim, “Will you stop lookin’ at your fuckin’ watch!” And when Mark treats Veronika to a reprise of his “Choose Life” rap from Trainspotting, a rebellious inventory of

everything shitty that modern life has to offer, it turns into a rant about the coldness and cruelty of the Twitter age, and his own coldness and cruelty in denying his sick mother the reunion she craved.

T2 wouldn’t be complete without Mark paying a visit to his old friend smack, though Boyle and Hodge no longer portray the drug as a force for jubilation. Mark takes Spud and Sick Boy out to a rural train crossing to memorialize their old friend Tommy, but before long Sick Boy is berating Mark for having introduced Tommy to heroin and Mark is dredging up Sick Boy’s culpability in the death of his daughter. Immediately afterward they’re sitting in a room together, rushing hard after shooting up (in a surreal touch, the walls pulse with upside-down video of African wildlife). This notion of heroin as self-medication for emotional pain fits right into the old dope-movie paradigm, which always made the user an object of pity.

Oddly, Boyle and Hodge never capitalize on the real-life phenomenon of heroin having made a giant comeback. Last year the United

Nations Office on Drugs and Crime reported that use of the drug, after dropping in the new millennium, had reached its highest point since 1996, the year Trainspotting was released. Here in the U.S., heroin abuse has skyrocketed in the past decade, particularly in the midwest and primarily because of the opioid crisis, as patients addicted to prescription painkillers turn to street drugs. T2 takes a more ambiguous stance toward heroin than its predecessor did, which stands to reason— when you’re getting coronary surgery, you should probably think about dialing it down.

For the final shot of T2, Boyle places Mark back inside his old childhood bedroom— where he sweated out a heroin withdrawal in Trainspotting—and turns the room, with its train-engine wallpaper, into an endless, moving tunnel that culminates in a distant point of light. This surreal image speaks to the issue of life rolling onward but also to the force of addiction: in both cases you have to ride the train to the end of the line. v

ß @JR_Jones

MARCH 23, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 27

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MUSIC

On Fillmore parlay a Brazilian epiphany into another rebirth With the new Happiness of Living, bassist Darin Gray and drummer Glenn Kotche have made the loosest, most accessible record of their 18-year collaboration.

By PETER MARGASAK

On Fillmore: Darin Gray and Glenn Kotche o NATHAN KEAY

G

lenn Kotche and Darin Gray have been making meticulous, minimalist instrumental music together as On Fillmore for more than 18 years, but if you ask each of them what he remembers about making their new album, Happiness of Living, you’ll get two different answers. They recorded the foundational material in Rio de Janeiro in December 2013, then finished the album in Chicago the following year—and that later work is where their stories diverge.

“We did some minor editing, and we did an overdub session,” says Kotche.

Gray recalls a more involved process: “There was so much editing. We overdubbed quite a bit.”

The three-year wait between the Chicago sessions and the eventual release of Happiness of Living probably acccounts for the duo’s inconsistent recollections. Indie label Dead Oceans, which in 2009 had released On Fillmore’s previous recording, Extended Vacation, rejected the new album, and it didn’t find a home for several years—it comes out on Northern Spy this Friday, March 24.

Both musicians keep busy in a wide range of projects, and the number of other sessions they’ve done since 2014 no doubt contributed to the confusion. Kotche drums in Wilco, and he’s also immersed in contemporary classical music, collaborating with the likes of John Luther Adams, Third Coast Percussion, and So Percussion. Gray plays bass in a dizzying array of ad hoc ensembles and working groups, among them the touring lineup of Tweedy, the backing band of guitarist William Tyler, and the trio Chikamorachi (with drummer Chris Corsano and Japanese saxophonist Akira Sakata). Their bustling professional worlds often overlap, but the most significant musical experience they’ve shared is a visit to Brazil that On Fillmore made in 2005. It reshaped their attitudes about performance, convincing them to rely less on preparation and more on spontaneous emotion.

Gray and Kotche met when they both appeared on Eureka, a 1998 album by Chicago musician and producer Jim O’Rourke (who now lives in Tokyo). They’ve been friends ever since, collaborating frequently, though On Fillmore have made only four albums since forming in 1999.

Each record has explored shifting, restrained textures that alternate between groove and atmosphere. On Fillmore’s music is relatively direct and sparse, but Kotche and Gray have usually labored over it—not J

MARCH 23, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 29

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continued from 29 just in the studio but also onstage, where they’ve often expended a great deal of effort to generate more layers of music than two people typically can in real time. When the duo played at the Percpan festival in Salvador, Brazil, on that visit in 2005, the other sets they saw made their own approach to live performance seem fussy and overthought to them.

“It made a huge impression on us, ’cause we’re down there playing vibes and bass, triggering MiniDiscs here and there, making sure everything was right, reproducing these collages onstage—and we saw these guys just playing music,” Kotche says. “And we’re like, ‘Yeah, let’s end all of this and keep it from here.’”

With that last word, he brings his hand to his heart. “The culture, the food . . . everything just had a massive impact on us.”

“These guys” were a crew of Rio musicians who at the time performed as the +2. The core group of Moreno Veloso (son of Brazilian legend Caetano Veloso), Domenico Lancellotti, and Alexandre Kassin operated within a circle of collaborators that included guitarist Pedro Sá and percussionist Stephane San Juan.

Gray experienced the same sort of epiphany as a result of that festival booking. “This whole group of people became very deep and close friends of ours,” he says. “The specific thing that impacted us was how they went about making music. How music for them was just like breathing—at least, that’s the way it appeared. When they weren’t playing music, it didn’t seem much different from when they were playing music—it was all part of a flow.”

Kotche, Gray, and the Rio crew built on their burgeoning friendship in September 2005, when a raft of Brazilians appeared at Chicago’s World Music Festival as Orquestra Imperial.

The +2s were part of that contingent, and they played a concert of their own at the Museum of Contemporary Art with On Fillmore opening. By the time On Fillmore wrapped up, several Brazilians had wandered onstage and joined the duo, improvising along with material they’d never heard. Their performance flowed seamlessly into the +2s set—and Gray and Kotche, similarly unrehearsed, returned the favor by sitting in with the Brazilians.

Kassin remembers that show fondly. “We played in Chicago, and for us it was one of the best concerts we ever did with the +2s,” he says. “We sounded like we were a band that had been playing together for 50 years.”

Kotche had fun too. “I remember Moreno saying, ‘What should I do when I come out?’” he recalls. “I was like, ‘I don’t care. Just crawl

around on the floor if you want to.’ And I believe he actually did crawl out and crawl around on the floor for part of it.”

It’d be eight years before the musicians would work together again, but Kotche and Gray stayed in touch with the Brazilians—especially Kassin, one of the country’s most respected producers. In the meantime, On Fillmore tried to embrace the lessons they’d learned in Salvador when they made the 2009 album Extended Vacation, with its tropical vibe and wildlife samples recorded in the Amazon. And their live performances continued in the same vein. “I think we’re less tied to having a meticulously thought-out and performed show,” Kotche says. “We’re more free—like, let’s just go with it and see what happens.”

“Our shows since then, especially when we toured on that record, there were a lot of moments that we would never have had before hanging out with those guys,” he continues.

“I remember playing at the Warhol Museum and pulling someone out of the audience, this woman, and putting her behind the drums.

I walked around and played stuff in the museum and went up into the light booth and came back down. Darin, pretty much at most of our shows now, will walk over the seats in the audience playing. We use noisemakers and shakers and things like that. It’s a lot more about—this isn’t a ‘performance’ or ‘we’re onstage.’ It’s that we’re in this together and you’re part of it.”

On Fillmore finally returned to Brazil in December 2013, having been asked to play a few dates in the country. They invited many of the same musicians from the +2s family to join them on the road, and they scheduled a recording session after the shows with Kassin.

When it came time to enter the studio, though, On Fillmore realized that most of their collaborators were leaving town for Christmas. Kassin and San Juan were in Rio to pitch in, and Kotche and Gray had discovered while touring Brazil that they could find new musical collaborators in unlikely ways. When the son of the tour organizer was driving them around Sao Paulo, for example, he accidentally

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MUSIC made himself a candidate. “One day we were driving and he was singing this song, and I was like, ‘Man, what is that?’” says Gray. “And he said, ‘It’s just something I made up.’ So Glenn and I talked about just inviting these guys to the studio to record. We told them the situation and that it was a low-key thing, but if they could find a way to get down there we were happy to have them.”

That driver, Guilherme Valerio, ended up singing one of the album’s most beguiling and infectious tracks, “Jornada Inteira.” Kassin’s wife, Chiara Banfi, and San Juan’s girlfriend Gabriela Riley contributed tape loops and vocals, respectively. New York-based Brazilian percussionist Mauro Refosco (Forro in the Dark, Atoms for Peace), who happened to be in town, played on the record too.

“It was beautiful to record—many friends showed up,” says Kassin. “It was loose because it was a friendship celebration, but I think this a wonderful thing for a record to be. At the same time, we recorded a lot—Glenn had written music, Darin had sketches and ideas.

So the days were busy and fun.”

Gray describes the process of recording Happiness of Living as “the exact opposite” of how On Fillmore made previous records.

“We had more time, and people were making dinner and hanging out,” he says. “There were friends around, and there was a dog there.

People were coming by to say hello. It was very laid-back. The rapport was immediate.

“Some of it is just an unexplainable thing that happens between musicians, but at the same time, Glenn and I didn’t go down there to make a bossa nova record or a forro record or a samba record or any combination of those things, so I think that’s something that’s allowed us to have a deeper relationship with Brazil and our friends down there. I think that’s what allowed us to make something that is maybe more Brazilian in a way—this combination of all of these things. That’s what Brazilian music is. Those guys know that music backward and forward, but I think they’re more open to playing with us because we’re not interested in doing that.”

After spending a few days in the studio, Gray and Kotche came home with eight hours or so of raw material—loose grooves, skeletal song fragments, and improvised retoolings of older On Fillmore material. Gray and engineer Pat Burns spent several days editing the recordings, adding overdubs (mostly textural tuned percussion), and sequencing the finished tracks in a way that suggests a spontaneous studio session, leaving in between-song chat-

ter and the occasional fragment. Happiness of Living is the first On Fillmore record to include vocals (from Valerio and Riley) and guitar (from Valerio and Kassin). It’s the hookiest, most accessible album they’ve ever released.

On Fillmore is already spread out geographically—Kotche is based in Chicago, and Gray lives near Saint Louis in Edwardsville, Illinois (though he plans to move here in November).

The Brazilians’ involvement aggravates this difficulty almost to the point of absurdity—in other words, On Fillmore won’t often perform the music from Happiness of Living. For their set this weekend at the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee, the duo will be on their own. The only shows they’ve got scheduled with any of the Brazilian guests are at National Sawdust in New York on April 9 (with San Juan and Riley) and at Wilco’s Solid Sound Festival in western Massachusetts in June (with San Juan, Riley, and Refosco).

Their Brazilian collaboration has rubbed off on Gray and Kotche in ways that extend beyond the specific material on the new album, though—it’s opened up their process.

“We can just follow our creative spirits,” says Gray. “We can take hard turns, because we know we’re still going to do this.” On Fillmore have already finished about half of their next record, which Kotche says ditches melody and takes a more austere tack.

“It’s not only no longer worrying ourselves sick about making a record, having this feeling where you have stomach cramps,” Gray continues. “It’s not so much of a loosening up, but it’s about actually enjoying what we’re doing. Before all of this, I don’t think we allowed ourselves to enjoy making music. We were so concerned about making it right that I think it prevented us from making it right. We couldn’t be in the moment, and one little thing could throw everything off. It’s not like that at all anymore—and that’s due to the Brazilians, especially Kassin. To Glenn and I, this is more than a band, more than a duo. It’s about friendship and family.”

Kotche agrees. Though he prides himself on his talent for interpersonal diplomacy, he doesn’t even need it with Gray. “That’s one skill I have in life, besides drumming—being able to deal with different types of personalities and still make my point,” he says. “But with Darin, we can just say whatever we need to say to each other and just be like, ‘No, I disagree,’ until one of us convinces the other.

That’s very easy. That’s more sibling-like.” v

ß @pmarg MARCH 23, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 31

MUSIC

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

THURSDAY23

PICK OF THE WEEK

Infatuated by Carly Rae’s purist pop, Jay Som signals a growing confidence

Kneebody 8 and 9:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $15, $10 in advance. 18+ Muscular quintet Kneebody have spent more than a decade pushing against the limitations of jazz, forging an instrumental approach distinguished by high-level improvisation and a bruising ensemble attack. The band’s strong new album Anti-Hero (Motema) builds on that tradition: it’s essentially jazz-rock fusion, though their sound underlines the uselessness of that coinage. Drummer Nate Wood, electric bassist Kaveh Rastegar, and keyboardist Adam Benjamin combine to create huge, swaggering grooves, while front-line melodies are deftly shaped by the powerful alloy of trumpeter Shane Endsley and saxophonist Ben Wendel. On the one hand Kneebody are about as subtle as an anvil here—the beats are punishing, the volume high, and the timbre viscous—but there’s also impressive agility on display. The horn players unleash slaloming bebop lines to open “Drum Battle,” an earlier version of which appeared on the group’s impressive collaboration with electronic music producer Daedelus; later the whole band tamp down their energy in a tender, sorrowful salute to prodigious keyboardist and composer Austin Peralta, who died in 2012 at the age of 22. But the most consistent pleasure Kneebody offer is the way they operate as a single organism, braiding strength and lyricism without being constrained by any single tradition.

—PETER MARGASAK

FRIDAY24 Boxhead Ensemble 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $10. 18+ o CARA ROBBINS

JAY SOM, COURTNEYS, FUNS

Fri 3/24, 8 PM, Schubas, 3159 N. Southport, sold out. 18+

MELINA DUTERTE IS loosening up. In 2016, under her Jay Som moniker, she released the compilation Turn Into, a collection of songs from the past few years that earnestly bounces between fuzzed-out folkie dream pop and more tightly wound shoegaze, though less with glee than with purpose. But with her new album Everybody Works (Polyvinyl) everything has started to blend. Songs rollick more, less bound to metronomic rhythms, and every once in a while Duterte just lets melodies fly, dabbing a little melisma here and unfurling her vocal rhythms a bit there. It’s tempting to point to the influence of Carly Rae Jepsen, whose Emotion was supposedly in constant rotation for Duterte during the recording of Works. But it’s more likely that the infatuation with Jepsen’s purist pop—along with Duterte’s growing willingness to relax on record—is just a sign of growing confidence, which was undoubtedly boosted by 2016 tours with Japanese Breakfast and Mitski. “For me, it felt like we had a mission,” Duterte told Pitchfork in February. And with Jay Som now holding top billing on its 2017 tour, Duterte seems committed to carrying that mission forward. —AUSTIN BROWN

32 CHICAGO READER - MARCH 23, 2017

It’s been 20 years since Dutch Harbor: Where the Sea Breaks Its Back first screened in Chicago. A black-and-white documentary about the encroachment of modernization on America’s last frontier, it was shot in the Aleutian Islands by directors Braden King and Laura Moya, but its gray-shaded score

ALL AGES

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was tracked at the South Loop’s Truckstop Audio by the Boxhead Ensemble. Guitarist Michael Krassner selected the ensemble’s members like he was casting his own film, directing different combinations of musicians from Gastr Del Sol, Tortoise, and Eleventh Dream Day to improvise along with scenes from the movie. Over the next year Dutch Harbor and Boxhead Ensemble toured the U.S. and Europe like a rock band, the continually morphing group (which included still more Chicagoans as well as members of the Australian band Dirty Three) improvising new accompaniment every night. Krassner eventually left Chicago in 2001 and ultimately settled in Tucson, but he’s maintained his connections here. He’ll observe the 20th anniversary of Dutch Harbor by convening a Boxhead Ensemble that includes Rick Rizzo, who was part of the first Truckstop Session; Jim Becker and Tim Rutili, former partners in Califone who both once toured with Boxhead; singer-songwriter Adam Busch, who plays on the 2015 Boxhead cassette La Hora Magica (Astral Spirits); and cellist Teddy Rankin-Parker. Over the course of the two sets Rizzo, Becker, Rutili, and Busch will play their own material, and the full group will gather for the finale. There will also be two new Boxhead records available: The Chicago Sessions, a double LP of material recorded for but not used in Braden King’s film Here, and Krassner’s first-ever solo guitar album, Electric Guitar, pressed for the show in a special edition of 33. —BILL MEYER

Lyric Opera Presents Charlie Parker’s Yardbird See also Sunday. 7:30 PM, Harris Theater, 205 E. Randolph, $35-$125. b Contemporary jazz saxophonist and composer Daniel Schnyder’s 90-minute chamber opera about legendary jazz saxophonist and composer Charlie Parker was first performed in Philadelphia in 2015, and it’s receiving its Chicago premiere under the auspices of Lyric Opera. The libretto by Bridgette A. Wimberly begins with Parker’s death at 34— brought on by drugs, alcohol, and a heart condition—and flashes back Christmas Carol-style to significant episodes in his life. Schnyder uses Parker’s music only as inspiration and a touchstone for his score, which will be played by a 16-piece orchestra.

Kneebody o COURTESY THE ARTISTS

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bottom lounge ONSALE FRI 03.24 AT NOON 4544 N LINCOLN AVENUE, CHICAGO IL OLDTOWNSCHOOL.ORG • 773.728.6000

tall heights / henry jamison UPCOMING SHOWS

Sons of the Never Wrong

03.22 DESPISED ICON

SATURDAY, AUGUST 12 8PM

CARNIFEX / FALLUJAH / RINGS OF SATURN / LORNA SHORE SILVER WRAPPER PRESENTS

03.25 SUNSQUABI ARTIFAKTS

03.28 NAILS

TOXIC HOLOCAUST / HARM’S WAY / GATECREEPER / LIKE RATS

03.31 BOWLING FOR SOUP RUNAWAY KIDS / DIRECT HIT RIOT FEST PRESENTS

04.01 FISHBONE

DOWNTOWN BROWN / SKAPONE / DJ CHUCK WREN AMERICAN GOTHIC PRODUCTIONS

04.01 BACK TO THE GRAVE 04.02 PARTY APPLE PEEL Kweku Collins of Closed Sessions o ZAKKIYYAH NAJEEBAH

WHITE SIBERIAN TIGERS / FREQUILIBRIUM / THE METRO PROJECT / WILDE

04.05 CHELSEA GRIN

ICE NINE KILLS / GIDEON / ENTERPRISE EARTH

But not to worry, members of Orbert Davis’s Chicago Jazz Philharmonic—with Rajiv Halim on alto sax—will be on hand to play a postopera Parker set.

The production’s fine cast includes tenor Lawrence Brownlee as Parker, baritone Will Liverman as Dizzy Gillespie, and soprano Angela Brown as Parker’s mother, Addie. Jazz critic and former Reader writer Neil Tesser will do the pre-event warm-up talk with Jesse Gram, Lyric’s audience education manager.

—DEANNA ISAACS

SILVER WRAPPER PRESENTS

04.08 SPAFFORD

Closed Sessions cofounders Alex Fruchter and Michael Kolar went into 2016 viewing it as a makeor-break year. Well, not only did the young hip-hop imprint put out two full-lengths that helped define the local scene during a period when Chicago’s hip-hop community made itself well-known nationally—that’d be Kweku Collins’s Nat Love and Jamila Woods’s Heavn—but Closed Sessions also ended 2016 being named Chicago artists of the year by the Tribune’s Greg Kot, as strange as that designation for a record label may seem. It’s long fostered a home for its artists, who are united by ambition if not by a signature sound. Every act has released music that conjures vast landscapes of ever-changing melodies, casting light on deep crevasses you can easily get lost in. Milwaukee’s WebsterX, who along with Cleveland’s Kipp Stone is making Closed Sessions a midwestern indie hip-hop force, hones immersive music on Daymares, which comes out the day of this show. WebsterX employs emotive pop-punk inflection on the autobiographical “Lost Ones,” which features cinematic, futuristic synths provided by in-house producer Boathouse (who is also celebrating the recent self-titled EP by his pop side project Feel the Love). Be sure to arrive early for in-house producer Oddcouple, who brings the kind of euphoric energy to his live sets I wish more rappers had. —LEOR GALIL J

25th Anniversary & Album Release

FRIDAY, MARCH 24 8PM

Mason Jennings with his band FRIDAY, MARCH 24 8PM

Jayme Stone's Folklife In Szold Hall

SATURDAY, MARCH 25 7PM

Jodee Lewis / Zach Pietrini In Szold Hall SATURDAY, MARCH 25 5 & 8PM

Lúnasa SUNDAY, MARCH 26 3PM

04.14 THE EXPENDABLES

Shanta Nurullah's Sitarsys

04.19 THE OBSESSED

FRIDAY, MARCH 31 8PM

MUNGION

RDGLDGRN / TRIBAL THEORY KARMA TO BURN / FATSO JETSON REACT PRESENTS

04.25 NO CEILINGS FEATURING BOOGIE KAIYDO / KEMBA / MICHAEL CHRISTMAS REACT & 1833 PRESENT ZERO FATIGUE PRESENTS

An Evening with Closed Sessions 8 PM, Metro, 3730 N. Clark, $21, $16 in advance. 18+

JUST ADDED • ON SALE FRIDAY!

04.26 SWEANITA TOUR FEATURING SMINO BARI / JAY2

04.29 FRANK IERO AND THE PATIENCE DAVE HAUSE AND THE MERMAID

Album Release • In Szold Hall

DakhaBrakha FRIDAY, MARCH 31 7PM

Keola Beamer & Jeff Peterson

Two Virtuosos of Slack Key Guitar • In Szold Hall

RIOT FEST PRESENTS

SATURDAY, APRIL 1 8PM SUNDAY, APRIL 2 7PM

FROM INDIAN LAKES / QUEEN OF JEANS

Loudon Wainwright III

05.01 BALANCE AND COMPOSURE RIOT FEST PRESENTS

05.11 SORORITY NOISE

Surviving Twin • In Szold Hall

MAT KEREKES / THE OBSESSIVES

SATURDAY, APRIL 8 7 & 10PM

THE YMF TOUR

Elephant Revival

05.12 AB-SOUL 05.14 EVERY TIME I DIE

with special guest Dead Horses

WAGE WAR / ‘68 / GOD ALONE RIOT FEST PRESENTS

05.18 THE STORY SO FAR TURNSTILE / DRUG CHURCH 1833 PRESENTS

05.21 JMSN

ALCORDO

05.23 WAVVES

POST ANIMAL

06.02 ZAKK SABBATH BEASTMAKER

06.30 THE SUBURBS www.bottomlounge.com 1375 w lake st 312.666.6775

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

4/7 4/8 4/15

Milonga Night! Tango at Old Town School with DJ Charrua Global Dance Party Thomas Mapfumo & The Blacks Unlimited Mark Eitzel & Howe Gelb

WORLD MUSIC WEDNESDAY SERIES FREE WEEKLY CONCERTS, LINCOLN SQUARE

3/29 Danilo Brito 4/5 Düm Rhythm Celebration

MARCH 23, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 33

MUSIC Regina Spektor o SHERVIN LAINEZ

continued from 33 Lambchop Sam Prekop opens. 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln, $22, $20 in advance.

It’s a bit strange to hear the drowsy, conversational singing of Kurt Wagner dipped in alien AutoTune effects on Lambchop’s recent album FLOTUS (Merge), but nearly every record in the band’s voluminous discography contains elements that distinguish it from its predecessors. Opener “In Care of 8675309,” a wry reference to the Tommy Tutone hit, unfolds languidly over 11 minutes, and the vocal treatment comes to make more sense as the track progresses and Wagner calmly considers an existential crisis via one quotidian event after another, with a refrain that keeps circling back to “the house of cancer.” The album is the band’s most strippeddown effort to date, a restrained and unornamented set where spare piano and guitar lines are draped over percolating electronic and live beats to convey a whispery intimacy—it’s a quiet storm that keeps its soulfulness miniature. The opener excepted, the bulk of FLOTUS is filled with short, bubbly balladry, but it concludes with the epic “The Hustle,” a bookend that gurgles electronically for 18 languid minutes, its expressions of devotion seeming to suggest the doubts that open the record have been erased.

—PETER MARGASAK

Jay Som See Pick of the Week (see page 32).

Courtneys and the Funs open. 8 PM, Schubas, 3159 N. Southport, sold out. 18+

34 CHICAGO READER - MARCH 23, 2017

scenti and celebrities alike, even though she hasn’t a produced a single as massive since. It’s a rare win for someone operating within her own sui generis sphere, where classical sophistication commingles with childlike singsonging and dark lyrics about heartbreak, regret, and the ugliness of politics and corporations. Last June, Chance the Rapper tweeted that not using a take of “Same Drugs” with Spektor on it for Coloring Book “may be my biggest mistake.” We may never be able to decide for ourselves—the version remains unreleased.

What’s certain is that Spektor’s point of view isn’t going anywhere (see: the theme song for Orange Is the New Black and her cover of “Dear Theodosia” on Lin-Manuel Miranda’s The Hamilton Mixtape). This tour is anchored by her very good 2016 album Remember Us to Life, which is dotted with the shadowy playfulness you expect from Spektor but adds to that a meditative posture and a layer of ambrosial orchestral strings. She’s grown up since 2007, becoming a mom while bearing witness to a new and horrifying American political climate—it’s no wonder she’s favoring minor keys these days.

Still, there are things to love about this album that could only come from Spektor, from the piano-driven prose poems of “The Light” and “Tornadoland” to the folktales in “Grand Hotel” and “The Trapper and the Furrier” and the pop qualities of “Bleeding Heart” and “Small Bill$.” Her albums have always managed to be sonically incongruent yet stylistically cohesive, and this is no exception. —ERIN OSMON

SATURDAY25

Regina Spektor 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre, 175 N. State, $36.50-$81.50. b

Rodney Crowell Joe Robinson opens. 8 PM, City Winery, 1200 W. Randolph, sold out. b

Since her chirpy single “Fidelity” from Begin to Hope became an unlikely earworm in 2007, Regina Spektor has been beloved by the cultural cogno-

Few songwriters are able to revisit their past with as much poetic effectiveness as Rodney Crowell, a roots master who regularly reflects on his early

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days—whether growing up in Texas or arriving in Nashville as a songwriting greenhorn. He does it again on the terrific new album Close Ties (New West), his first new effort in three years and one that stands as tall as anything he’s done. Crowell’s rarely sounded more pensive. The sorrowful “Life Without Susanna” is a tender elegy to the late songwriter Susanna Clark (whom he credits as a critical sounding board for his music along with her husband, Guy Clark, and Townes Van Zandt), while on “Reckless” he conducts an inner monologue about his self-destructive urges, which lead him to ignore his moral compass. On a similar note, “It Ain’t Over Yet,” his first recording with his ex-wife Rosanne Cash since 1990, almost seems like an apology. The production by Jordan Lehning and Kim Buie makes room for strains of honky-tonk, country rock, and rootsy pop—all lean, meticulously arranged, and warm— but it’s Crowell’s soulful vulnerability that ultimately makes it all come together. —PETER MARGASAK

Without Waves Outrun the Sunlight, Ideamen, Atonement Theory, and Zaius open.

8 PM, Cobra Lounge, 235 N. Ashland, $10. 17+ This Chicago progressive-metal quartet commanded a lot of ears with their 2011 debut, Scab Platter, and its follow-up EP, 2014’s The Entheogen. Now they’re set to celebrate the release of their Prosthetic Records debut, Lunar. So what about those ears they’ve commanded? They’re getting bruised and battered plenty, because Lunar never lets up.

You’ll hear strains of mathy meanderings and jarring jazz shifts mingled with atmospheric interludes of surprising beauty. Without Waves excel at both when they decide to focus and apply themselves to being a wild-and-woolly riff machine, as on “Poetry in Putrid Air,” and when they show a more tender side—“Us Against” is basically a postmodern power ballad. The double LP is a gener-

Angela Brown and Lawrence Brownlee in Charlie Parker’s Yardbird o DOMINIC MERCIER

ous heaping of ingenuity, and if I have a criticism at all it’s that the pacing could be better. But I certainly can’t complain about either quality or quantity—Without Waves are a band to watch for sure.

—MONICA KENDRICK

SUNDAY26 Lyric Opera Presents Charlie Parker’s Yardbird See Thursday. 2 PM, Harris Theater, 205 E. Randolph, $35-$125. A

SPECIAL GUEST:

BILLY STRINGS

THIS SATURDAY! MARCH 25 • VIC THEATRE

Daniil Trifonov 3 PM, Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan, $32-$99, $15 students. b The “classical piano virtuoso” feels almost like a marketing cliche at this point, but at the ripe old age of 26, Russian prodigy Daniil Trifonov embodies the role as much as anyone alive today. On last year’s Transcendental (Deutsche Grammophon) he shared his mastery of Liszt via a mind-melting solo recital that’s both draining and . . . transcendent. His readings almost render the difficulty of the pieces an afterthought—he sweeps the listener away on waves of fluidity that vanish if you focus too much on what his hands are actually doing. Earlier this year Trifonov supported Latvian violinist Gidon Kremer on Preghiera—a collection of Rachmaninoff piano trios—with playing that’s simpatico in its restraint and lyric splendor. He returns to Symphony Center with a solo program that promises to push his talents in other directions, essaying three classics by Schumann (Kinderszenen, Kreisleriana, and Toccata, op. 7) along with selections from Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes and Fugues and three movements from Stravinsky’s Petrushka. —PETER MARGASAK

NEXT THURSDAY! MARCH 30 VIC THEATRE

NORM MACDONALD

MONDAY27 Pontiak JOB and Matt Jencik open. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western. F Virginia trio Pontiak—brothers Jennings, Van, and Lain Carney—have spent years developing and refining a particular strain of groove-based hard rock, their indelible, fuzzed-out guitar riffs cycling hypnotically to summon a levitating power. Yet unlike so many bands purveying a similar stoner-rock sound—viscous, flanged guitar solos uncoiling luxuriantly but rudely over rhythms worthy of gentle headbanging—this trio construct their work around the voice. On their new album Dialectic of Ignorance (Thrill Jockey) the Carneys reveal a heightened ability to sing chantlike melodies with measured, beguiling grace. The effect resembles a lean, churning machine that simultaneously purrs and grinds—like Pink Floyd minus the philosophical gobbledygook and extraneous atmospherics.

Subtle keyboard layers on certain tracks lubricate the trio’s roiling gears, and at times the drumming of Lain Carney sounds robotic, thanks to a production that transforms his kit into something akin to a 90s drum machine. Pontiak’s seriously mesmerizing sound achieves a blend of heaviness and ethereality.

—PETER MARGASAK J

SATURDAY, APRIL 15 -10PM VIC THEATRE 7:30pm Show is SOLD OUT

FRIDAY, JUNE 16 VIC THEATRE ON SALE THIS FRIDAY AT 10AM! BUY TICKETS AT

MARCH 23, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 35

1800 W. DIVISION

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

MUSIC

(773) 486-9862 Come enjoy one of Chicago’s finest beer gardens!

THURSDAY, MARCH 23 ...... COME ON EVERYBODY TAYLOR RAYNOR FRIDAY, MARCH 24 ............ MIKE FELTON LETTER BOMB OBLIGATORY SATURDAY, MARCH 25 ....... THE TELEPATHS WHITEWOLFSONICPRINCESS SUNDAY, MARCH 26 .......... DJ WHOLESOME RADIO MONDAY, MARCH 27 ......... RC BIG BAND WEDNESDAY, MARCH 29 ... ANDREW A. HUBER THURSDAY, MARCH 30 ...... SJB FRIDAY, MARCH 31 ............ BROTHER K BAND SATURDAY, APRIL 1............. LOST IN THOUGHT MONDAY, APRIL 3 ............... MATECKI TRIO EVERY MONDAY AT 9PM ANDREW JANAK QUARTET EVERY TUESDAY AT 8PM OPEN MIC HOSTED BY JIMI JON AMERICA

EARLY WARNINGS

NEVER MISS A SHOW AGAIN

CHICAGOREADER.COM/EARLY

Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/soundboard.

Lawrence English o TRAIANOS PAKIOUFAKIS

CAN YOU SING???

Recording choir needs volunteer singers for debut CD and YouTube video projects. ALL VOICES (especially Tenor, Baritone & Bass) for multi-cultural, non-denominational, adult community choir.Widely varied repertoire includes traditional and contemporary gospel, anthems, spirituals, hymns, international, and acappella. Saturday rehearsals, 9:30 am to 11:30 am, Chicago (SE Side) – close to the University of Chicago. Text/Call NOW – slots are filling quickly. ClaimYour Star Power!

(312) 883-0716

continued from 35

TUESDAY28 Lawrence English Cleared and Mike Weis open. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $12.

On his bracing new album Cruel Optimism (Room40) veteran Australian sound artist Lawrence English subtly erases boundaries between ambient drift and industrial roar, forging aqueous instrumentals that seem to occupy an entire world. Normally he creates his turbulent recordings entirely on his own, as he did with the 2014’s bruising Wilderness of Mirrors—an appropriate precursor in terms of its visceral chill—but for the first time he’s enlisted a number of guest musicians. Saxophonist Mats Gustafsson, keyboardist Chris Abrahams of the Necks, and bassist Werner Dafeldecker each contributed, but in the end they’re so deeply woven into English’s astringent soundscapes they practically become swallowed by them. Designed as a response to an increasingly troubled and unstable world, the album offers nothing soothing: the music floats and billows, but beneath the airiness there’s a slashing violence at work. —PETER MARGASAK

WEDNESDAY29 Ecstatic Vision Creepoid headline; Ecstatic Vision, Bow & Spear, and Aurora L’Orealis open. 8:30 PM, Subterranean, downstairs, 2011 W. North, $10. 17+ As far as groove-driven heavy psych bands go, Philly’s Ecstatic Vision, right down to their grandiloquent name, ain’t necessarily cracking any mold. But then again, who says they’re trying to?

A blend of drenched, swirling MC5-style riffs, Krautrock-influenced rhythms, and Beefheart-like freak vocals, the new Raw Rock Fury (Relapse) is very much a shrine to the band’s makers, exist-

36 CHICAGO READER - MARCH 23, 2017

ing within a slow-pulling limbo bookended by two dynamic poles: extreme wild-out psych and laidback deep-pocket psych. Front man Doug Sabolik’s often indiscernible lyrics on the four wholly epic tracks—usually marked with a “baby!” or “yeah!” or “all right!”—tend to get drowned out by volatile blends of smoldering guitar effects, saxophone skronk, and sweaty blues harp . . . and, well, that’s just fine. Raw Rock Fury is no record you listen to through earbuds on your train ride into work. No way. Find a gaudy plush couch with springs so busted you melt into it, grow a horseshoe mustache instantaneously, apply vintage over-the-ear Koss headphones, light something born from the soil of the earth, and drop the needle. That’s the idea. —KEVIN WARWICK

They. 8 PM, Subterranean, 2011 W. North, $20. 17+ Blog posts about rising LA R&B duo They. tend to reference the genre they label themselves with on some of their Soundcloud uploads—“grunge&b.”—but otherwise describe them in quite different ways. That reflects producer Dante Jones and singer Drew Love’s chameleonic songwriting history as much as it does their marketing: before teaming up, Love wrote with Jeremih, while Jones worked on projects for Nickelodeon and got a Grammy for his contributions to Kelly Clarkson’s “Mr. Know It All.” But though Jones and Love appear almost as eager to name-check Taking Back Sunday and Fall Out Boy as interviewers are to bring up the duo’s affection for less conventional influences, They. excel simply because their songs fit right into the burgoo of contemporary R&B and hip-hop. Sure, they might sample Nirvana’s “Polly” on “Rather Die,” but that single bears more resemblance to the work of ax-wielding R&B lothario Miguel. With their recent debut full-length Nu Religion: Hyena (Mind of a Genius/Warner) They. blend pop sounds with the same goal as generations of R&B artists before them: creating the ultimate aphrodisiac.

—LEOR GALIL v

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with the Reader SATURDAY

• APRIL 8

ON TOUR BREWING COMPANY GREENSTAR BREWING DOVETAIL BREWERY BEGYLE BREWING

11AM | 12PM | 1PM departures

$40 gets you B E E R • G R U B • T R O L L E Y T R A N S P O R TAT I O N tickets available at C H I C AG O R E A D E R . C O M / B R E W E RY TO U R 21+ event

MARCH 23, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 37

S P O N S O R E D

N E I G H B O R H O O D

C O N T E N T

Chicago has always been a city of distinct neighborhoods with their own sense of identity and tradition — and each with stand-out bars and restaurants that are worthy of a haul on the El or bucking up for parking. Explore some local faves here, then head out for a taste of the real thing!

MOTOR ROW BREWING // NEAR SOUTHSIDE Thu, Fri, Tue, Wed: Happy Hour noon-6pm, $2 off all beers

SCHUBAS // LAKEVIEW All Lagunitas beers are $5.50

THE MEANINGFUL MANHATTAN // CHICAGO To find locations supporting this charity program visit

MOTORROWB REWI NG .COM

L H - S T. C O M

WOODFORDRESERVE.COM/MEANINGFULMANHATTAN

PHYLLIS’ MUSICAL INN // WICKER PARK Everyday: $3.75 Moosehead pints and $2.50 Hamms cans

ALIVEONE // LINCOLN PARK Wednesday: 1/2 price aliveOne signature cocktails

REGGIES // SOUTH LOOP $5 Absolut & Bacardi Cocktails Every Day special

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ALIVEONE .COM

REGGIESLIVE.COM

FITZGERALDS // BERWYN Two Brothers Cane & Abel Red Rye Ale $5 pints

LINCOLN HALL // LINCOLN PARK All Lagunitas beers are $6

RED LINE TAP // ROGERS PARK $3 PBR drafts & well drinks, $5 wine, M-Su Happy Hour 5-7pm

FITZGERALDSNIGHTCLUB .COM

L H - S T. C O M

R E D L I N E TA P. C O M

N ERAI R TH V ENRONR O R TSHI D E

SNARF’S // 6 0 0 W C H I C AG O // E AT S NA R F S .C O M In 1996, “Snarf” Jimmy Seidel opened the very first Snarf’s in Boulder, Colorado. Now, the family-owned business has grown to nearly 20 restaurants in Colorado, Chicago, St. Louis and Austin, Texas. Snarf’s award-winning sandwiches are made-to-order using only the finest ingredients including premium meats and cheeses, crisp veggies, their own blend of giardiniera peppers and homemade, oven-toasted bread. They also offer fresh salads with homemade dressings, soups, vegetarian options, desserts and a full catering menu. Free delivery is available.

“Great alternative for sandwiches! Their variety is what I enjoy the most.”

38 CHICAGO READER - MARCH 23, 2017

— AUGUST A / YELP

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FOOD & DRINK

A BITE OF SZECHUAN | $$ R 5657 N. Lincoln 773-878-8577

Dan dan noodles o JIAYUE YU

RESTAURANT REVIEW

A Bite of Szechuan adds to an undersung neighborhood dining scene

Chef Dingguo Cheng turns out uncompromising Chinese food in West Rogers Park.

By MIKE SULA

T

here was a feast of epic proportions under way a few weekends ago at the then monthold A Bite of Szechuan. At the center of the sunlit dining room the staff had pushed nearly half the restaurant’s tables together to accommodate a family of some two dozen grandparents, mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, and cousins, all celebrating some happy occasion with a long, leisurely Sunday lunch.

The new restaurant, specializing in the often face-numbing food of China’s southwestern province, is a bit of an outlier in this part of West Rogers Park even though it resides along a

stretch of Lincoln Avenue that’s home to a fascinating and sundry collection of eateries that includes a Vietnamese-owned po’boy shop, a kosher Argentine steak house, a Polish bakery, and a Guatemalan-Salvadoran family restaurant whose owners did a fair job of erasing the stains after the infamous Money Shot vacated the premises. Right next door to A Bite of Szechuan there’s the Angry Crab, the first Chicago restaurant to cash in on the Asian seafood-boil craze that’s since spread across the city. In fact, the restaurant that preceded A Bite of Szechuan was the Rim, the very first spot to bite the Angry Crab’s style. I’m betting a kitchen capable of producing the molten, buzzing head trip that’s the welcome side effect of eating Sichuanese food stands a better chance in this space than one that merely apes an all-you-can-eat crawfish joint.

It certainly seemed that way on that Sunday, when three servers hustled over to the party and back with plate after plate of spicy beef tendon, chile-oil pig ear, pork with garlic sauce, and browned panfried dumplings stuffed with pork and sea cucumber. They were also swift to meet the demands of the other tables on the periphery, occupied by diners lingering over bowls of dan dan noodles or roiling hotel pans filled with whole grilled black bass swimming among bits of bean sprout, pig’s blood curd, or lotus root slices.

Meanwhile, the open kitchen offered glimpses of chef Dingguo Cheng cranking out plate after bowl after hot pot with focused intensity, never once stumbling into the weeds. The succession of dishes was relentless: sizzling lamb with cumin, spicy fried fish fillets tossed with blackened dried chiles, piles of smoked duck parts with skin glistening like candy.

And that’s why A Bite of Szechuan seems to have already attracted a devoted following in its brief existence. Champions of the restaurant at LTHForum have generated a slight dilution of the homogenously Chinese gene pool that seemed to have instantly gotten word that Cheng, formerly chef at Chinatown’s grilled-fish hot-pot sensation Ma Gong La Po, had arrived on the north side.

Those butane-fueled hotel pans housing whole bass or tilapia luxuriating in a vigorously boiling red hell pool are also the main attraction at A Bite of Szechuan, and it’s mostly the case at lunch or dinner that the majority of tables are seated with people dissecting the contents with their chopsticks and sinking perforated ladles into the angry brew to net supplementary morsels of watercress, mushroom, tripe, or black fungus, all dripping J

MARCH 23, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 39

FOOD & DRINK continued from 39 with flavor, detoured to bowls of absorbent white rice, before rising up to the mouth.

A handful of dry hot pots have made the journey north as well, including the intriguing “gluttonous frog hot pot,” which somehow draws less of the menu reader’s attention than “dry pot duck head.” The latter is a large circular pan piled high with dried and pickled red chiles and bisected waterfowl skulls. It’s a dish that requires as much, if not more, digital assistance as the bags of greasy crustaceans next door. There’s a lot of edible bird material on and in the skulls; the skin is chewy, the tongue is a meaty prize, and the brain a custardy treat, but it’s the thick, savory, almost vinegary sauce that makes wrestling with the heads worth the effort.

There are other ways to get dirty. You can, of course, order spicy crawfish by the pound, or whole crabs plucked alive from a tank in the entryway—which might be the primary source of confusion when people stumble in looking for the Angry Crab only to find tables full of people happily nibbling crispy deep-fried pork ribs or house-made pickled cabbage.

To name this restaurant A Bite of Szechuan is a hilarious understatement relative to the manifold array of tactile pleasures on the menu. Cold chunks of bone-in rabbit and chicken in chile oil require a certain degree of lingual and dental dexterity to extract the tiny shards of bone from the silky, tender flesh.

Long, slippery, square rice-gluten noodles will test your chopstick skills as they slither from your grasp like living serpents. Scraps of cumin-scented lamb contrast with crunchy, wok-charred chunks of green bell pepper and onions, while beef treated with a similarly tenderizing process lurks among soft tofu half sunken in a pool of crimson oil.

Eating is athletic at A Bite of Szechuan, but the time spent working at it is time to appreciate the great degree of variance in the seasoning. While much of the food may appear to be drenched in the same chilesaturated rufous hue, it’s a currency that’s traded in many denominations across the menu. The aforementioned boiled beef with tofu is pure chile heat. That rabbit buzzes with the Sichuan peppercorns’ storied ma la electricity. The pickled red chiles with spicy fish fillets could be eaten by the fistful with little to no ill effect, while the cumin-dusted barbecue lotus root could join in a fantasy

40 CHICAGO READER - MARCH 23, 2017

Cumin-dusted barbecue lotus root o JIAYUE YU

lineup of movie theater snacks.

The chile pepper and its varying extracts and infusions are endemic to the food at A Bite of Szechuan, but it’s well balanced against other flavors—the pickled, the fermented, the sweet, and the savory. Cold green jellied preserved duck egg is the sulfurous foil to diced tofu and pork floss. The deep, savory fermented funk of bean paste is the anchoring element of a bowl of ma po tofu. Kung pao chicken is licked with black vinegar, while crackly nuggets of lightly fried fish fillet tangle with just-cooked-through slivers of garlic. The intense salinity of the house pickled cabbage and long beans is a far cry from the Zhong’s dumplings in subtly sweet oil, or dan dan noodles, the pork-and-fermented-bean Sichuanese spaghetti bolognese.

There are a few sweets on the menu to broaden the flavor spectrum even further— fried sweet potato cakes, glutinous rice balls in sweet wine. But the large family at the center of the dining room that afternoon had opted for a custom cake from Rowie’s Bakery across the street, strengthening Filipino pastry’s reputation for versatility. A few months ago I griped about the user-friendly ersatz Sichuanese food at Won Fun in the Fulton Market district. A Bite of Szechuan is its polar opposite: an uncompromising expression of one of China’s great regional cuisines, quietly thriving in one of the city’s most interesting eating neighborhoods. v

ß @MikeSula

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○ Watch a video of Emily Stewart working with umeboshi in the kitchen at chicagoreader.com/food.

BREWS AND BLUES

KEY INGREDIENT

A pie fit for a samurai warrior

By JULIA THIEL Umeboshi pie o JULIA THIEL

2337 S Michigan Ave, Chicago, IL 60616 (312) 624-8149 www.motorrowbrewing.com

Thursdays 6 PM - 10:30 PM

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MILY STEWART, executive chef at BANG BANG PIE & BISCUITS, says that UMEBOSHI “tastes like a Warhead that’s been tossed in vinegar, but with the texture of a pickled smushy fruit.” Made from the ume fruit, which is often referred to as a Japanese plum but is actually more like an apricot, umeboshi are packed in salt and left to ferment in their own liquid. “[Ume] are naturally salty and sour, and then [the Japanese] really lean into that flavor profile,” Stewart says. Famously, samurai warriors would eat umeboshi to promote vitality and energy before going into battle.

Challenged by Ben Lustbader of Giant to create a dish with umeboshi, Stewart stuck with what she knows best: pie. “I definitely thought it would be easier to do a savory biscuit,” she says. “But it was much more of a challenge to go sweet.” The salty, sour flavor of umeboshi isn’t a natural fit for pie, so she considered what has a similar flavor profile.

“Lemon is the most puckery, sour fruit you can bake with,” she says. “Once I started thinking of it as a parallel to that, it really helped me come up with ideas of how to use it in a sweet application.”

Stewart considered blanching the umeboshi to remove some of the salt, but says that because the fruit is so mushy to start with, “it basically disintegrated.” She settled on a take on Shaker pie, which is traditionally made with lemons. The lemons are sliced thin and macer-

ated in sugar for 24 hours or more, which is essentially what Stewart did with umeboshi for her pie. Stewart combined one part umeboshi with three parts sugar and let the mixture sit for 36 hours, which breaks down the fruit.

“The natural pectin from the plum is drawn out with the sugar, and it almost turns into a jelly,” she says. After folding in a few tablespoons of flour, several eggs, and a little butter and honey, she poured the mixture into a pie crust she’d rolled out. “Most recipes, we add salt,” she says. “This doesn’t need any more salt.” Shaker pie always has a top crust, so she laid another piece of rolled-out dough over the filling. Over the top she sprinkled Sugar in the Raw to add texture, sweetness, and caramelization, then baked the pie.

Cutting into the finished pie, Stewart appeared disconcerted. “It’s very pink,” she said. “That is a lot of umeboshi there, that’s for sure.” But after tasting it, she pronounced the flavor good. “It’s really bright, tart; the saltiness has been cut by the sugar but you get a lot of that bright citric acid flavor.”

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WHO’S NEXT:

Stewart has challenged JOHN KIRCHNER of GT PRIME to create a dish with JET-PUFFED MARSHMALLOW CREME. “Make me a steak with that, Johnny,” Stewart says. v

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orthoinfo.org

ß @juliathiel MARCH 23, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 41

JOBS

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STUDIO OTHER

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Huron Consulting Services, LLC is seeking an Oracle Consultant Manager in Chicago, IL with the following reqs: Bach deg in Info Tech, Comp Sci or Finance or rel field or foreign academic equiv + 7 yrs related exp.

Prior exp must incl: implement & upgrade risk, performance & compliance apps using OFSAA in banking industry (5 yrs); dvlp & customize Rules, Scenarios, User Interface & workflows in AML, KYC & RRS solutions (6 yrs); deliver high-level presentations to audience ranging from execs to business users on OFSAA risk & compliance app (6 yrs); & prep design, process flow & architecture document as per OFSAA app (6 yrs). Periodic travel may be reqd to various unanticipated worksites in the US; individuals may reside anywhere in the US. Apply on-line at www. huronconsultinggroup.com, Careers, & search for Keyword: 2439 ACTUARIAL SENIOR ASSOCIATE – ACTUARIAL INSURANCE MANAGEMENT SOLUTIONS (MULT. POS.),

PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, Chicago, IL. Help clnts w/actural modrnztn, prcs imprvmnt, risk & captl mgmt, deals, & fin’l rprtng. Req BS in Actural Sci, Stats, Econ, Math, or rel + 3 yrs rel work exp; OR MS in Actural Sci, Stats, Econ, Math, or rel + 1 yr rel work exp. Travel up to 20% req. Apply by mail, referencing Job Code IL1211, Attn: HR SSC/Talent Management, 4040 W. Boy Scout Blvd, Tampa, FL 33607.

Consultant (Systems Analyst) needed for IBS, Inc., Oak Brook, IL. Provide services as a Sharepoint architect. Will engage in both Functional and Technical design of Sharepoint solutions.

Will utilize Sharepoint designer, JAVA, .Net, SSRS, Bootstrap, and SQL Server. Will provide services to clients located throughout the US. Must have a BS degree in computer science, math, business or engineering and 5 yrs. of overall progressive IT exp. which includes 2 yrs. of exp. in the skill sets listed above.

Must be willing to travel/relocate.

Send resumes to: hr@ibs.com SOFTWARE ENGINEERING ASSOCIATE MANAGER (MULTIPLE POSITIONS) (Accenture LLP; Chicago, IL):

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For complete job description, list of requirements, and to apply, go to: www.accenture.com/us-en/careers (Job# 00460099).

CUSTOMER SERVICE REP Small Wrigleyville insurance agency looking for immediate Full-Time/ Part-time Customer Service Rep. Bi-lingual a plus. For more information call 773-929-9400

REAL ESTATE RENTALS

STUDIO $500-$599 Chicago, Beverly/Cal Park/Blue Island Studio $575 & up, 1BR $665 & up, 2BR $885 & up. Heat, Appls, Balcony, Carpet, Laundry, Prkg.

708-388-0170

42 CHICAGO READER | MARCH 23, 2017

CROSSROADS HOTEL SRO SINGLE RMS Private bath, PHONE,

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Parking & Apts. Are Subject to Availability. TOWNHOUSE APARTMENTS 773-288-1030

MIDWAY

AREA/63RD

û NO SEC DEP û

6829 S. Perry.

Studio/1BR. $465-$520/mo.

HEAT INCL 773-955-5106

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hdwd floors. appls incl, fin basement. near beach & Metra. $1250/mo, utilities not incl. 708-868-3225

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1 BR $700-$799 HUMBOLDT PARK. ONE

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bedroom apartment for rent. Newly remodeled. Next door to food store. $800 per month plus security deposit. Near shopping area. Monica, 773-592-2989.

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Rent is based on 30% of annual income. For details, call us at 847-546-1899 ∫

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HUD/Veterans Welcome. Call 773-712-1642 LANSING, 1BR CONDO, a v a ilable now, new appliances, off street parking, $750/month.

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2BR, $790. CALL MIKE, 773744-3235

Ave) RENT SPECIAL 1/2 Off 1 month rent + Sec dep. Nice,lrg 1BR $575; 2BR $675 & 1 3BR $850, balcony, Sec 8 Welc. 773-995-6950

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CHICAGO SOUTH SIDE Beauti-

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773-637-5957

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2 BR UNDER $900

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SECTION 8, 2BR, 5RMS, All new

rehab, New, clean, quiet. $850 rent.

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INGLESIDE & 82ND, Modern

secure bldg, 1BR, new kit & bath, hdwd flrs, heat & hot water incl, laundry. $615/mo. 847-903-9097

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Find hundreds of Readerrecommended restaurants, exclusive video features, and sign up for weekly news chicagoreader.com/ food.

DOLTON - 14526 C o t t a g e Grove. 2 BR, heat, A/C, fridge, & stove incl. $940/mo + sec. Section 8 Ok. Call 708-846-5342 W. HUMBOLDT PARK. 1302-08 N. Kildare. Division/ Pulaski. Newly Rehabbed, 2BR, $785. Sec 8 OK. 773-619-0280 or 773-286-8200 WOODLAWN - 1528 E. 65th Pl. 2BR, 2BA apt, 1st floor, with all hardwood floors. $900/mo.

773-614-9876

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the beach at 1240 West Jarvis, five rooms, two bedrooms, two baths, dishwasher, ac, heat and gas included. Carpeted, cable, laundry facility, elevator building, parking available, and no pets. Non-smoking. Price is $1200/mo. Call 773-764-9824.

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2 BR $900-$1099

4300 BLOCK OF AUGUSTA, 2BRs, 1st & 2nd floor, laundry

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WINTER SPECIAL $500 To-

kit cabinets & Kolher prod., tenant pays heat, 8632 Escanaba, $650/mo + security. Call 773-415-4970

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WEST PULLMAN (INDIANA

2BR W/ NEW CARPET, cherry

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7000 S. Merrill 2BR, hdwd flrs, lrg FR/sunrm, new remod., cable ready, lndry, O’keefe Elem, $800/ mo. Section 8 welcome. 708-3081509, 773-493-3500 SECTION 8 WELCOME! 7406 S. Vernon 1 & 2BR, 2nd flr, remod, hdwd flrs, appl inc, laundry on site $800+ Zoran 773.406.4841 CHICAGO

7600 S Essex 2BR

$599, 3BR $699, 4BR $799 w/apprvd credit, no sec dep. Sect 8 Ok! 773287-9999 /312-446-3333

3227 W. MAYPOLE. Newly remod 5 rooms, 2BR Apt in family building, hdwd flrs, tile kitchen. $800/mo. 7773-696-0025

facility on site. $1125/mo, utils incl.

Sect 8 ok. No pets/no smoking.

773-418-0195

Chicago, 6627 S. Drexel, 2BR, 1.5BA Condo, SS appls, granite ctrs, $1100/mo, heat included. Section 8 ok. Call Gerry, 773-699-5774 MATTESON 2BR TOWNHOME.

Section 8 OK. $1150/mo + 1 mo sec.

Call 708-625-7355 for info.

Chicago, 9540 S. Yates, newly renovated 2BR Townhome, 1BA, $1150/mo. Contact Michelle if interested, 708-248-2704 MORGAN PARK , 2 BR Duplex, 1BA, 11327 S Aberdeen, tenant pays utilities,Newly rehabbed, $1150/ month 708-408-7075

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Available Now! 773-902-7011

2 BR OTHER

2 BR APT

located at Clark & Diversey across from the Century Mall. 1st floor apt has been completely updated and a garage space is also available.

GREAT LOCATION 3 blocks from the lake, 1 block from Trader Joes, and excellent transportation in a half blocks walk to the Broadway and Clark St. busses. 6-flat bldg. is neat and clean. Apt is immediately available. Call Mike 312-3391400

CHICAGO, PRINCETON PARK HOMES. Spacious 2-3 BR Townhomes, Inclu: Prvt entry, full bsmt, lndry hook-ups. Ample prkg. Close to trans & schls. Starts at $844/ mo. w w w . p p k h o m e s . com;773-264-3005 BEAUTIFUL NEW APT!

6150 S. Vernon, 4BDRM 7649 S. Phillips Ave 2 & 4BDRM Stainless Steel!! Appliances!! Hdwd flrs!! Marble bath!! Laundry on site!!

FREE 42IN TV Sec 8 OK. 773- 404- 8926 ROUND LAKE BEACH, IL Cedar

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

AFFORDABLE 2 & 3BRS FROM $575.

Newly decorated, heated/ unheated. 1 Month Free for qualified tenants.

CRS (312) 782-4041

ENGLEWOOD 2-4BR unit apts in 2 unit gated bldgs, hdwd flrs, pets OK, no sec dep, W/D & appls incl, tenant pays own utils 872-3153900 CHATHAM, 720 Newly remodeled hardwood floors, & heat included.

533-5463.

E. 81st St. 2BR, 1BA, appliances Call 847-

CHICAGO WEST SIDE ATTN: Sec 8 holders!

rNo Sec Dep + $100 Back 2-5 Bdrms. Everything New + Lndry & A/C. Call 312-493-6983

AUBURN GRESHAM, 8311 S. ELIZABETH LARGE , 2BRs, hdwd floors, heat incl, no pets, Section 8 Welcome. 312-371-4001

NEAR BEVERLY Huge 2BR apt, with bonus room.

Sect 8 Welc 312.809.6068

3 BR OR MORE UNDER $1200

LINCOLN PARK 3 BEDROOMS

Webster House Section 8 Three Bedrooms Waitlist to open 3/24/17 Call 773-348-6800 on 3/24/17 4pm 5pm if interested Equal Housing Opportunity 5021 S. RACINE, B e a u t i f u l 3BR, 1.5BA, fenced yard. $850/mo + sec. Tenant pays utilities.

Section 8 ok. Call 708-9229069

8943 S. ADA. SAFE, SECURE 2-3BR, SEPARATE HEATING, SCHOOL & METRA 1 BLK AWAY, $875 & UP. SECTION 8 WELCOME. CALL 708-465-6573

CHICAGO. 7 RM, 3BR APT, 2nd flr, Close to Kennedy King College. $900 + $900 Sec, Heat Incl. Call btw 10am-7pm. 773501-9977

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

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CHICAGO S: Newly renovated, Large 3-5BR. In unit laundry, hardwood flrs, very clean, No Deposit!

Available Now! 708-655-1397

SEC 8 WELCOME 7523 S. NORMAL - 3BR, 1st flr, tenant heated, new appliances. $890/mo + move-in fee.

773-848-8675

12135 S Bishop 4BR, 1.5BA street parking, Section 8 ok, Available now 312-458-9804

SECTION 8 WELCOME Dolton 3BR, 1BA, no basement,

side driveway. $1000/mo.

Available Now! Appls incl and sec dep req. Call 773-447-1990

FOREST PARK, hdwd flrs, tenant ies. Laundry area 1150/mo. No pets.

773-486-1838

CHICAGO HOUSES FOR rent.

Section 8 Ok, w/app credit $500 gift certificate 3, 4 & 5 BR houses avail.

312-446-3333 or 708-752-3812

3BR Apt, pays utilitavailable. $ Call Terry,

68th/Rockwell. Newly decorated 3BR, LR, DR, kit, bonus rm, heat incl. nr schools & trans. $1000/mo. $700 move in fee 773-851-2232

GENERAL LINCOLN 2600W/5224N

SECTION 8 WELCOME. NO SECURITY DEPOSIT. 1311 E 69th St. 5BR, 2BA house, appls incl., $1300/mo. Call 708-288-4510

3 BR OR MORE $2500 AND OVER

CHICAGO - 7112 S. EUCLID

GARY NSA ACCEPTING appli-

Garden apartment 2BR, all ceramic. $695/mo. Call 773-285-3206

3 BR OR MORE $1200-$1499 E. GARFIELD PK Adams/ California 3BR, 2BA + Den, 2nd flr, A/C, tenant pays heat. Avail 4/1. $1370. Credit check req.

847-951-2515

3 BED/2 BATH apartment, $1300

per month in Calumet City. No smoking/pets. Heat included. Hardwood floors. Call American Management 708-774-8010

WASHINGTON PARK, SPACIOUS 4br, 2ba, dinning rm, laundry, off street parking, balcony, avail now, $1300 mo, 773-552-5228 SPACIOUS 3BR, 1.5BA.

7939 S. EBERHART. nice block in Chatham, hdwd flrs, new kitchen and bath. $1200/mo. 773-375-3323

BRONZEVILLE AREA, 3 Bedroom Town Home, Section 8 ok, $1469 month.

Call 312-501-0509

CHICAGO: 68TH AND JEFFREY 4BR, 2BA Stove & Fridge Incl. $1400/ month + 1 Mo Deposit Section 8 Welcome. 773-667-6304

3 BR OR MORE $1500-$1799 SECTION 8 WELCOME . No Security deposit. 7047 S. Aberdeen, 4BR, 2BA house, appls incl, $1300/ mo. 708-288-4510

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

UKRAINIAN MASSAGE. CALLS in/ out. Chicago and sub-

urbs. Hotels. 1250 S Michigan Avenue. Appointments. 773-616-6969.

GET ALL THE NEWS YOU NEED DELIVERED TO YOU.

NOTICES all the people that make this paper happen every week. Y’all are the best, STAY WAVY, BABY! Love, Brian.

SQUARE

SECTION 8 WELCOME. No Security Deposit. 7721 S Peoria, 3BR apt, appls incl. $1050/mo.

708-288-4510

CHICAGO - 6747 S. PAXTON ,

FULL BODY MASSAGE. hotel, house calls welcome $90

THE READER ROCKS! Shouts to 3 BR/1 BTH. Apartment in quiet owner occupied building. $1600/month, includes heat, water. Hardwood floors, minblinds, new kitchen, laundry in building, easy street parking laundry. $2000 security deposit. Tenant pays cooking gas and electricity. Please see our online ad for more info. Call Joe 773-339-4673 only after checking out the online ad.

garden apartment, 2BR, 1BA. No gas or electric bill. $800/mo.

Call 773-285-3206

HEALTH & WELLNESS

cations for studio, 1 & 2 bedroom SUBSIDIZED apartments. Apply Tuesdays and Thursdays from 9am to 1pm ONLY at 1735 W 5th Ave. Applications are to be filled out on site. Adult applicants must provide a current picture ID and SS card.

MESSAGES AN AFFECTIONATE, PROTECTIVE, fun married couple look-

ing for a healthy newborn to love, tell stories to, be silly with, and explore all life’s offerings. Heidi & Jay Call Toll-free 1-855-643-3822 www.heidiandjayadopt.com

2101 S MICHIGAN Apts Elderly

(62+) Sec 8 Wait List open 3/22– 3/23 only btwn 11 am-3 pm. Must come to building to apply.Please bring photo ID. EHO $1700 4 BD,1 ba,Chgo Beverly! Qt nbhd, gd sch! Newly remodel! Gd loc fam liv! Huge bkyd! W/D hookup & much more! Elton 312-841-6798

3 BR OR MORE

non-residential

86TH & COLFAX 4bdrm / 2 ba

SELF-STORAGE CENTERS. T W O locations to serve you. All

OTHER

newly remodeled sec 8 welcome $1000/mo. 1 mo security Cemjprop4@yahoo.com 773.995.7209 CALUMET PARK 12946 S Carpenter, 3BR, 1.5 BA, fireplace & basement, 1 car garage, Sec 8 Welc 773-995-9370 or 773-718-1142

86TH & JUSTINE, Newly remodeled, 5BR, 2BA, hardwood floors, appliances incl. Near trans. Sec 8 Welcome 773-430-3100

4 BR Home for rent, Chicago Southside, centrally located, Available Immediately! Section 8 Welcome. Contact 708-845-0655 8322 S BAKER , 4 & 5BR apts

available in beautiful 2-flat house, Sec 8 ok. 2BR voucher ok. Call 847312-5643.

498 W 17TH ST, Chicago Heights, 3BR, 1BA, off street parking, Section 8 ok Available 4/1 312-458-9804 SOUTHSIDE, NEWLY REMODELED 3BR/2BA with appls & was her/dryer. Also, newly remod 2BR with appls. 773-908-8791 SOUTHSIDE TOTALLY RENOVATED, Sec 8 Welcome,

units fully heated and humidity controlled with ac available. North: Knox Avenue.

773-685-6868.

South: Pershing Avenue. 773-523-6868.

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

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legal notices NOTICE IS HEREBY given, pur-

suant to “An Act in relation to the use of an Assumed Business Name in the conduct or transaction of Business in the State,” as amended, that a certification was registered by the undersigned with the County Clerk of Cook County. Registration Number: D17149786 on February 23, 2017 Under the Assumed Business Name of QUALITY CLIMATE CONTROL with the business located at: 6602 S TROY, CHICAGO, IL 60629. The true and real full name(s) and residence address of the owner(s)/partner(s) is: KEVIN MOORE, SR 6602 S TROY CHICAGO, IL 60629, USA TYSON KING, SR 6602 S TROY CHICAGO, IL 60629, USA

NOTICE IS HEREBY given, pur-

suant to “An Act in relation to the use of an Assumed Business Name in the conduct or transaction of Business in the State,” as amended, that a certification was registered by the undersigned with the County Clerk of Cook County. Registration Number: D17149799 on February 23, 2017 Under the Assumed Business Name of CREATIVE MINDS COMMUNITY CENTER with the business located at: 3751 S LANGLEY AVE APT 102, CHICAGO, IL 60653. The true and real full name(s) and residence address of the owner(s)/partner(s) is: SANDRA FRANKLIN 3751 S LANGLEY AVE, CHICAGO, IL 60653, USA

3BR, 1.5 BA House, finished basement. 773-392-3095

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SUBSCRIBE TODAY! SUNTIMES.COM/SUBSCRIBE OR CALL 1.800.680.2068 MARCH 23, 2017 | CHICAGO READER 43

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chicagoreader.com/early 44 CHICAGO READER - MARCH 23, 2017

STRAIGHT DOPE

By Cecil Adams Q : When and why did humans start

wiping or manually cleaning themselves post-defecation, since animals generally don’t do this? —ROGER

A : Many of humanity’s greatest pioneers—

Newton, Edison, Rubik—have been fortunate enough to achieve household-name status for their groundbreaking work. Sadly, we’ll never ID the first human to slide a digit or foreign object between the buttocks after doing number two, just as we’ll never locate the first person who decided it was a good idea to wash up afterward. But we can figure out roughly when evolution would have made it necessary for our ancestors to develop a species-appropriate method of anal cleansing.

As you say, animals in general don’t make a habit of wiping after defecation—limbwise, few are up to the task anyway. Birds and fish would seem to lack means, motive, or both.

Some mammals, it’s true, do clean themselves when necessary—think of your cat licking itself.

(Maybe don’t think about it too long, though.)

Only the most flexible hominids would be able to pull off that grooming trick, though, and the rest of us, I’d imagine, aren’t generally envious.

Our pressing need to wipe is the result of a significant anatomical difference separating us from the rest of creation. You and I may be so used to having them that we don’t think of our uniquely fatty, muscular posteriors as an evolutionary development that makes us stand out as humans—or, more precisely, stand up. Considered strictly as an adaptation, the glutes certainly don’t get all the good press that, say, the opposable thumb does. Nonetheless, the development of a stronger set of gluteal muscles was a major leap forward in enabling us to become an exclusively bipedal species.

It didn’t happen all at once—Australopithecus was strolling around upright nearly four million years ago with a body more akin to an ape’s than to ours. But eventually, between one and two million years ago, those of us who had sturdier hips and stronger muscles supporting them began to outrace our peers and our predators. The evolutionary advantage of the thickened layers of fat that cushion the glutes is less evident—some scientists speculate they offered a reserve that could be burned off for energy when food grew scarce.

Essential as they proved to be, butts came with issues. Our anal cavity was now tucked away within two mounds of flesh. From our present-day acculturated vantage point, this might seem like an obvious improvement,

SLUG SIGNORINO

FIND HUNDREDS OF

helping to keep the anus out of sight and mind. But for prehistoric folks it created a hazard that our animal friends, what with their exposed bungholes, rarely faced: fecal residue might linger in there, and the accumulation of bacteria in so moist a locale could cause infection. Women were especially vulnerable, given the proximity of the exposed vagina and urethra.

So one of these buttock-equipped humans— named by science Homo erectus, after their default posture—was probably the first wiper.

Some rectal discomfort must have inspired this innovator to impulsively run a finger or two through the crevice and (ideally) wipe the accumulated crud off somewhere.

As human culture progressed, of course, taboos and rituals developed around our eliminatory regimens, some apparently rooted in prudence, others in disgust. By the time of Deuteronomy, divinely ordained pooping instructions had been set forth, enjoining the Israelites to scoot out of camp before doing their business and bring a little shovel along to cover up the evidence. At length toilet paper enters the picture—though as I mentioned in a TP column way back in 1986, folks were ripping pages out of the Sears Roebuck catalog before softer tissue became more widely available. Even today, many cultures prefer the gentle cleansing of the bidet, as we discussed at some length last year when someone wondered if wiping was necessary at all.

Bear in mind that our ancestors might not have needed to wipe as vigorously or diligently as we do. Their diet, however omnivorous and haphazard, lacked the modern poisons that gunk up our GI tracts—Cheetos and Twinkies were hard to come by in paleolithic times, you know. And toilet use hadn’t yet trained them to relieve their bowels in an unnatural seated position. Squatting in the woods not only puts less strain on the system (possibly making squatters less prone to hemorrhoids) but allows smoother fecal passage, alleviating some of the need to wipe. Homo erectus had more to teach us, it seems, if we’d only been wise enough to listen. v Send questions to Cecil via straightdope.com or write him c/o Chicago Reader, 350 N. Orleans, Chicago 60654.

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SAVAGE LOVE

By Dan Savage

Questions from Curious Minds

Dan addresses threesomes, butt plugs, Justin Trudeau, and more I RECENTLY SPOKE at Curious Minds Weekend in Toronto at the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema. Audience members submitted questions on cards before the show—anonymously—but the moderator, Lisan Jutras of the Globe and Mail, and I were having so much fun talking with each other that we didn’t get to very many. So I’m going to quickly answer as many of the questions from the audience at Curious Minds as I can this week.

Q : My husband and I have been seeking a third for a threesome. After a very palpable night of flirtation, I asked a mutual friend (as we shared a cab) if he would be down for a threesome. He said yes, but I was not about to spring him on my husband that night. So I texted him later about it, and he has ignored me. What should I take from this?

A :The hint.

Q : A friend’s BF won’t go

down on her no matter how much she asks. She still won’t break up with him, even though she told me that oral is the only way she has ever had an orgasm. How do I get her to realize her sexual pleasure is a priority?

A : If your friend’s BF doesn’t

know oral is the only way she can orgasm, she should tell him. If she told him and he doesn’t care, she should dump him. If she told him and he doesn’t care and she won’t dump him, you’re not obligated to listen to her complain about the orgasms she’s not having.

Q : I’m a bisexual 42-year-old

female with an extremely high sex drive who squirts with every orgasm. How do I deal with friends—even people at a sex club—who

think you’re a freak because “women aren’t supposed to be horny all the time.”

A: If your friends—

presumably people you aren’t fucking—complain that you’re horny all the time, maybe it’s because you don’t talk about anything other than the sex you just had or the sex you hope to have soon.

If people at sex clubs (!) are complaining about how horny you are . . . either you’ve accidentally wandered into a yacht club or even people at a sex club wanna talk about something other than sex every once in a while.

Q : My very Christian friend is about to get married.

Though she’s socially very liberal, she is pretty sexually repressed. I want to do something to encourage her to explore her sexuality a bit before she takes a try at partnered sex. How weird would it be to buy her a vibrator as a shower present?

A : Don’t give your friend a

the process by incorporating self-stimulation breaks into the blow jobs, hand jobs, et cetera jobs you’re giving him.

He strokes himself while you take a quick breather and/ or an Advil, he gets himself closer, you get back to work.

Q : I’m 47 and my wife is 31. I take a lot longer to come and recover than she would like. Could you please explain to her that it’s normal for a man my age to “slow down” and it’s not her?

A : Happy birthday. And, yes,

it’s normal for a man to slow down as he ages—it’s not her—and there are younger men who take a long time to come. But such men need to take their partners’ physical limitations into consideration and take matters into their own hands.

Q : Two guys divorced in

Q : Would you share your

Q : I am 31. My husband

(newly married) is 46, almost 47. He takes FOREVER to come, no matter what I do.

How do we speed up this process? My jaw, fingers, etc, are all very sore.

A : Your husband speeds up

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Q : I have been reading

vibrator at her shower—gifts are opened in front of guests at showers—but go ahead and send her one. Tell her it’s a pre-bachelorette-party gift. order to bring a third man into their relationship on equal terms, and they now plan to start a family with their sisters acting as surrogates. Thoughts?

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about butt plugs anymore.

Butt plugs have their own Wiki page now, so nobody needs to. thoughts on our prime minister, Justin Trudeau?

A : I think Justin needs to

stop fucking around and legalize weed already, like he promised.

Q : When are you going to move to Canada already?

A : See above. v Send letters to mail@ savagelove.net. Download the Savage Lovecast every Tuesday at savagelovecast. com. ß @fakedansavage

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MARCH 23, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 45

b Ugly God 5/20, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, on sale Fri 3/24, noon b

UPDATED Laurie Anderson 5/5, 8 PM; 5/6, 8 PM; 5/7, 7 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, third show added b Modern Baseball 4/18, 5:30 PM, Concord Music Hall, canceled Jean-Luc Ponty 6/19, 8 PM; 6/20, 8 PM, City Winery, second show added, on sale Thu 3/23, noon b 070 Shake 4/20, 6 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, canceled

UPCOMING Margaret Glaspy o EBRU YILDIZ

NEW

Daniel Bell 4/22, 10 PM, Smart Bar Ben UFO 5/13, 10 PM, Smart Bar Birds at the End of the Road 8/12, 9:30 PM, Martyrs’ Boyce Avenue 9/23, 7 PM, the Vic, on sale Fri 3/24, 10 AM b Break Science 4/15, 8:30 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Julie Byrne 7/20, 8 PM, Schubas, on sale Fri 3/24, noon, 18+ ChameleonsVox 9/14, 8:30 PM, 1st Ward, 18+ Dawn of Ashes 5/10, 9 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint Destruction, Jungle Rot 5/28, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ B. Dolan, DJ Abilities, Cas One, Dope Knife 4/29, 9 PM, 1st Ward Jermaine Dupri 5/28, 5 PM, Chicago Theatre, on sale Fri 3/24, 10 AM Enrique Iglesias, Pitbull 6/3, 7:30 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont, on sale Fri 3/24, noon Rachelle Ferrell 8/4, 7 and 10 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 3/23, noon George FitzGerald 5/5, 10 PM, Smart Bar Freddy Jones Band 7/6, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 3/23, noon Diamanda Galas 4/17, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ The Geek x VRV 4/27, 9:30 PM, 1st Ward, 18+ Giuda, Sueves, Mama 5/31, 9 PM, 1st Ward, 18+ Margaret Glaspy 7/26, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, on sale Fri 3/24, 10 AM, 18+ Gorguts, Defeated Sanity 6/7, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Gutter Demons 6/2, 8 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint

Handsome Ghost 5/26, 7:30 PM, Beat Kitchen, on sale Fri 3/24, 10 AM, 17+ Juliana Hatfield 5/1, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, on sale Fri 3/24, noon Don Henley 6/17, 7:30 PM, Huntington Bank Pavilion, on sale Fri 3/24, 10 AM Robyn Hitchcock 6/17, 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, on sale Fri 3/24, 8 AM b Garland Jeffreys 6/15, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 3/23, noon The Joy Formidable 6/6, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 3/24, noon b Jucifer 4/29, 8 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint Tim Kasher 6/8, 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, on sale Fri 3/24, 10 AM, 17+ Laser Background 5/7, 9 PM, Empty Bottle, on sale Wed 3/22, 10 AM Leopold and His Fiction 5/5, 10 PM, Schubas, on sale Fri 3/24, noon, 18+ Little Hurricane 4/21, 10 PM, 1st Ward, 18+ Malcolm London, Femdot 4/20, 8:30 PM, 1st Ward, 18+ Lyle Lovett & His Large Band 7/29, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre, on sale Fri 3/24, 10 AM Lucero 6/10, 9:30 PM, Subterranean, on sale Fri 3/24, 10 AM Lydia Lunch Retrovirus 7/20, 9 PM, 1st Ward, 18+ Harvey Mandel, Ryley Walker Band 5/13, 9 PM, Martyrs’ Mac McAnally 7/19, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 3/23, noon Moonrunners Music Festival with Urban Pioneers, Legendary Shack Shakers, Escape From the Zoo, and Shooter Jennings 5/5-6, Reggie’s Rock Club

46 CHICAGO READER - MARCH 23, 2017

Alison Moyet 9/19, 8 PM, Park West, on sale Fri 3/24, 10 AM, 18+ Murder Junkies 5/28, 8 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint Nengo Flow 5/26, 9 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ New Standards 6/23, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Protomartyr, Melkbelly 6/3, 10 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Quivver 4/27, 10 PM, Smart Bar Ruby the Rabbitfoot 5/28, 9 PM, Empty Bottle, on sale Wed 3/22, 10 AM Sadistik 5/7, 8:30 PM, 1st Ward, 18+ Samothrace, He Whose Ox Is Gored 5/21, 7 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint The Shelters 4/12, 7 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Smino, Monte Booker, Jay2 4/26, 7 PM, Bottom Lounge b Sons of the Never Wrong 8/12, 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, on sale Fri 3/24, 8 AM b Stooki Sound, Joker 5/18, 8 PM, 1st Ward, 18+ SUSTO 6/16, 10 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 3/24, noon b The Sword 5/22, 8 PM, Metro, on sale Fri 3/24, 10 AM, 18+ Taake 6/1, 7:30 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Tall Heights 5/19, 9 PM, Bottom Lounge, on sale Fri 3/24, noon, 17+ Thou 7/3, 5 PM, Subterranean b Thriftworks, Edamame 4/1, 10 PM, 1st Ward, 18+ Tigers Jaw, Saintseneca 6/15, 7 PM, Metro, on sale Fri 3/24, 10 AM b Mary Timony plays Helium 6/15, 9 PM, Empty Bottle, on sale Fri 3/24, 10 AM Joe Lynn Turner 4/27, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+

Anvil, Night Demon 4/8, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Richard Ashcroft 3/30, 9 PM, House of Blues, 17+ Bastille 4/3, 7:30 PM, Aragon Ballroom Bear Grillz, Terravita 3/31, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Adrian Belew Power Trio 4/1, 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b Boo Seeka 4/1, 7:30 PM, Beat Kitchen b Candlebox 3/31, 8 and 10:30 PM, City Winery, early show sold out b Shemekia Copeland 4/1, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Allison Crutchfield & the Fizz 3/31, 7:30 PM, Schubas b Dakhabrakha 3/31, 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b Deap Vally 4/3, 8 PM, Schubas Dickies 3/31, 8 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Dude York, Paws 4/1, 6 PM, Cobra Lounge Flaming Lips 4/17, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ Floating Points 4/9, 8 PM, Metro, 18+ Future 6/2, 7 PM, Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, Tinley Park Gucci Mane 4/12, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre Hurray for the Riff Raff 4/28, 8 PM, Thalia Hall b Lil Suzy 4/8, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall Mastodon, Eagles of Death Metal, Russian Circles 5/13, 7:30 PM, Aragon Ballroom b Modern English 4/6, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Mono, Holy Sons 4/22, 9 PM, Subterranean Thao Nguyen 4/4, 7 PM, Lincoln Hall Omni 4/5, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Pallbearer 3/31, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Margo Price 4/7, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Real Estate, Frankie Cosmos 5/12, 8 PM, the Vic, 18+

ALL AGES

WOLF BY KEITH HERZIK

EARLY WARNINGS

CHICAGO SHOWS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT IN THE WEEKS TO COME

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Jonathan Richman 4/15, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ 75 Dollar Bill, Mind Over Mirrors 4/8, 9 PM, Hideout Six Organs of Admittance 4/9, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Slapshot 4/2, 7:30 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint Sleaford Mods 4/3, 8 PM, Metro, 18+ Son Volt 4/1, 8 PM, Thalia Hall b The Story So Far, Turnstile 5/17-18, 7 PM, Bottom Lounge, 5/17 sold out b Straight No Chaser, Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox 7/13, 7:30 PM, Huntington Bank Pavilion Marty Stuart & the Fabulous Superlatives 4/9, 8 PM, Thalia Hall b Styx, REO Speedwagon, Don Felder 6/1, 10 PM, Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, Tinley Park Tash Sultana 10/9, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Supersuckers 4/27, 8 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint Sweet Crude 4/22, 10 PM, Schubas Sweet Spirit 4/7, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Deb Talan 4/2, 7 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Aaron Lee Tasjan 4/11, 8 PM, Schubas Otis Taylor Band 4/28, 7 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Teenage Bottlerocket 4/21, 8 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Kate Tempest 4/3, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Terry Malts 4/20, 8:30 PM, Beat Kitchen Testament, Sepultura, Prong 5/2, 6 PM, Concord Music Hall, 17+ TFDI 4/13, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Toro Y Moi (DJ set) 3/31, 10 PM, the Mid Voodoo Glow Skulls, Pilfers 3/30, 8 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Rufus Wainwright 4/6, 8 PM; 4/7, 7:30 and 10 PM, City Winery b Max Weinberg & the Weeklings 4/7, 7:30 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Winger 3/31, 8:30 PM, Joe’s Live, Rosemont Xiu Xiu 3/31, 9 PM, Empty Bottle The XX 5/1, 6:30 PM, Aragon Ballroom Zombies 4/13-14, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ v

GOSSIP WOLF A furry ear to the ground of the local music scene NOT THAT THIS wolf is complaining, but Ty Segall seems to play in Chicago every two months! Dude just can’t stay away from our fair city. On Sunday, March 26, the grungy California rocker will put a different side of himself on display for us— and you can take “display” quite literally!

That night, Drag City Records hosts an opening reception for the first solo show of Segall’s paintings, “Assterpiece Theatre,” at the label’s performance and exhibition space, Soccer Club Club (2923 N. Cicero). The evening includes a live set

by Drag City head of sales and staff Rian Murphy (who’s played with the likes of Will Oldham and Edith Frost), a set from DJs Hippie Whorehouse, and refreshments from Land and Sea Dept. Segall will attend, but he isn’t scheduled to play. His show will stay up till Friday, April 28.

All Smiles, the monthly hip-hop showcase run by local rapper Rich Jones, celebrates its fifth anniversary in April—but you don’t want to miss this month’s installment, which is at Tonic Room on Friday, March 24. It features producer Brian Matos (aka Death Juke), teaching artist Jasmine Barber (aka rapper J. Bambii), hip-hop band Sex No Babies, and resident mix master DJ Elliven. Rising MC Ju headlines, and Gossip Wolf loves his collision of snarling rap and woebegone poppunk—check out his recent single “Funeral.” The show starts at 8 PM and costs $8.

After receiving a cease-and-desist letter from TED Talks this month, the organizers of Drunk TED Talks have dropped the “TED.” They’re carrying on as Drunk [Redacted] Talks, with the same boozy modus operandi. The next edition, held at the Whistler on Thursday, March 23, features A.V. Club senior editor Kyle Ryan, rapper ShowYouSuck, and the Reader’s Leor Galil, who doesn’t drink but will probably be drunk on power. Leor promises to discuss “Hot Topic stores, contemporary parties like Emo Night LA, and SoCal MySpace-style emo rapper Lil Peep.” It’s free. —J.R. NELSON AND LEOR GALIL Got a tip? Tweet @Gossip_Wolf or e-mail gossipwolf@chicagoreader.com.

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MARCH 23, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 47

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