Print Issue of May 10, 2018 (Volume 47, Number 31)

C H I C A G O ’ S F R E E W E E K LY S I N C E 1 9 7 1 | M AY 1 0 , 2 0 1 8

Is it legal to proselytize at CTA stations? 3

The hidden

ME too ME was once thought to be a rare condition affecting “hysterical” white women. But the debilitating disease impacts a diverse group of up to 100,000 in Illinois alone—and Chicago researchers are hunting for a cure.

By MEGAN DOHERTY 8

Expanding the right to vote 4, 6

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FEATURES

CITY LIFE

3 Transportation Is it legal for Jehovah’s Witnesses to proselytize inside CTA stations?

4 Politics | Joravsky You’re innocent until proven guilty—but that doesn’t mean you can vote.

CITY LIFE

The hidden ME too

ME was once thought to be a condition affecting affluent white women. Now Chicago scientists are pursuing a cure for the debilitating disease by tracking a more diverse group of subjects.

BY MEGAN DOHERTY 8

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16 Photography The exhibit “In Their Own Form” takes a long look at the Afrofuturism beyond Black Panther.

17 Movies Like Juno, Diablo Cody’s new comedy Tully is a tale of motherhood and waning youth.

18 Movies Let the Sunshine In and more new releases, reviewed by our critics

MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE

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IN THIS ISSUE

6 Politics | Mizuo Are 16-year-olds smart enough to vote? Vote16 Illinois thinks so.

25 On Culture After nearly nine years, Logan Hardware shuttered last month with little fanfare—but it’ll host one last big sale in a couple weeks.

26 Shows of note Shabazz Palaces, Heffyraps, Andrew Trim Quintet, and more of the week’s best 28 Secret History The Weaker Sex crashed the boys’ club of the music biz in the late 60s.

ARTS & CULTURE

FOOD & DRINK

11 Fashion At Susan Hat, her Rogers Park storefront, Susan Abelson creates hats from recycled materials.

12 Visual Art Ai Weiwei’s new Chicago exhibition “Trace” features portraits of his fellow dissidents and political prisoners—all done in Legos.

13 Theater Aaron Posner and Teller’s Macbeth is no Tempest.

14 Theater Julia Sweeney: Older and Wider, plus seven more new shows, reviewed by our critics

31 Restaurant Review: Moccozy This Boystown Korean mom-and-pop does three things extraordinarily well.

33 Cocktail Challenge A Sportsman’s Club bartender creates a sweet-and-sour cocktail to pair with crab rangoon.

MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE

Eight hands make light work for Third Coast Percussion Their collaborative spirit has already made them one of the best percussion ensembles in the country—and their upcoming projects could make them the biggest.

BY PETER MARGASAK 20

15 Dance In CDC in 4-D, the Comedy Dance Collective indulges its oral fixation.

CLASSIFIEDS

34 Jobs 34 Apartments & Spaces 35 Marketplace 36 Straight Dope “Why is coca only cultivated in South America?”

37 Savage Love “Help, my penis is bent up at a 90-degree angle!”

38 Early Warnings Ty Segall, 50 Cent, Roky Erickson, Phil Collins, and more shows to look for in the weeks to come 38 Gossip Wolf Psych-pop group Roommate play their first Chicago show in more than two years, and more music news.

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CITY LIFE TRANSPORTATION

Can I get a witness?

Jehovah’s Witnesses at the CTA’s Roosevelt station é JOHN GREENFIELD

The story behind those sharp-dressed religious folks hanging out at CTA stations.

By JOHN GREENFIELD

A

nyone who regularly takes the el has seen them.

They stand quietly smiling with carts of religious publications, out on the sidewalk when it’s nice out, in the “unpaid” area of the station near the Ventra machines or turnstiles when the weather is inclement. The women are dressed modestly but sharply, and the men look natty as well, often wearing sports jackets and fedoras.

They are volunteers from the Jehovah’s Witnesses, a Christian denomination that claims 8.4 million members in 240 countries.

Though I’m not interested in converting, I sometimes stop and say hello and pick up a copy of The Watchtower or Awake! out of courtesy, since I find their cheerful vibe oddly comforting. They’re certainly more agreeable than the Old Navy Street Preacher, who hangs out at Randolph and State railing against fornicators and cigarette smokers.

But not everyone appreciates the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ presence at transit stations. Kevin Havener, an Edgewater resident who often commutes via the Red Line, contacted me to share a message he sent to the transit authority. He claimed that the Witnesses’ practice of offering literature inside el stations violated a guideline in the agency’s Rules of Conduct warning against the distribution of written materials on CTA property.

“I find this inexplicable permission deeply, personally offensive,” Havener’s message read. “Would the CTA allow other religious proselytizing [by groups] such as [Orthodox Jews], or Buddhists, or Hare Krishnas? OF COURSE NOT.” Havener eventually revealed to me that a decade ago he and other members of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, an activist group, wanted to hand out leaflets inside the Fullerton el stop in Lincoln Park. When they asked the CTA customer assistant for permission,

they were told they needed to be out on the public sidewalk far away enough not to block any station doors.

Still, it was an interesting question: Is the CTA giving the Jehovah’s Witnesses preferential treatment by allowing them to camp out in stations?

No, according to agency spokeswoman Catherine Hosinski. “The protections afforded by the First Amendment prevent the CTA from regulating the content of speech that is distributed in its unpaid area, regardless of whether it is religious, political, or social, or espouses a particular religious, political, or social viewpoint.”

Hosinski directed me to guideline #23 of the CTA’s Rules of Conduct, and it was clear that Havener hadn’t read the document carefully enough. “Distributing of advertisements or any other written materials or soliciting or petitioning” is indeed prohibited on trains and buses, as well as in the “paid” areas of stations.

But under the rule it’s permitted in the unpaid areas as long as it doesn’t impede pedestrian flow. So not only can religious groups proselytize inside stations, but the CTA even allows people to offer commuters flyers for appliance sales or hip-hop shows within el stops.

Martin Redish, a Northwestern professor of constitutional law, told me this policy departs

from a ruling in the 1992 Supreme Court case The Society for Krishna Consciousness v. Lee. There the court found that the Hare Krishnas could not do outreach within New York-area airports because airports are not a “traditional public forum.” “It’s clearly better that the CTA is erring on the side of allowing free speech,” Redish said. “Of course, if the speakers start harassing people or not taking no for an answer, you’ve got a different situation.”

Even Tom Cara, director of the local chapter of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, which advocates for the separation of church and state, agreed that the CTA’s rule seems to be OK. “We look at this the same way as we look at a public street,” he said. “Obviously people are allowed to stand out on a street corner and hand out literature if they like. If the CTA has established this space as a public forum, then the policy appears to be legal.”

Cara compared the situation to Daley Plaza during the holidays, when in addition to the city’s official “holiday tree,” different groups have been permitted to erect a creche, a menorah, and a star and crescent. Freedom From Religion itself puts up a nine-foot banner celebrating the winter solstice and the 1791 ratification of the Bill of Rights and a lighted “A” sign—the international symbol of atheism and agnosticism.

But if it’s OK for anyone to do low-key proselytizing or handbill distribution within the unpaid area of a CTA station, why does it seem like the Witnesses are the only ones taking advantage of it, and why did the Fullerton station attendant tell the Buddhists otherwise?

First off, the Fullerton attendant likely just didn’t know the rules. And based on a talk with Paul Schmidt, the coordinator for Jehovah’s Witnesses’ “Bible literature displays” in Chicago, it appears that the keys to being allowed to proselytize are being familiar with those rules, consistently showing up at the same stations day after day, and maintaining a pleasant demeanor.

Schmidt said the Witnesses have been turning up at el stations on a regular basis since 2012. He said his organization, Chicago Special Metropolitan Public Witnessing, coordinates some 1,900 volunteers, some from as far afield as Indiana and Wisconsin, who distribute literature 12 hours a day, seven days a week, at 19 different locations. The majority of these are downtown CTA and Metra stations; Navy Pier, the UIC student center, and the el stops at Midway and O’Hare are among the other locations.

I’ve also recently spotted Witnesses at the 95th/Dan Ryan and Wilson Red Line stations.

Facebook friends told me they’ve encountered the snappily dressed evangelists at the Kedzie Pink Line and Montrose Brown Line stops.

Schmidt said his organization has never formally requested permission from the CTA to conduct what he calls “Bible education work,” but volunteers usually approach the station attendant to tell them what they’re up to. “We want to make sure we’re in compliance with any laws, but also exercise our legal right to publicize our faith.

“One of the reasons that the CTA and the police have been so good to us over the years is because we’re not aggressive,” Schmidt added. “We’re not going to shove a piece of literature in people’s faces. We’re there if they want to talk to us.”

That doesn’t mean that the volunteers don’t occasionally get static from train riders.

“When you put your faith out there in a public setting, some people are going to disagree with you,” Schmidt said. “Some do it more vocally than others. We have the right to exercise our religion and freedom of speech, but everyone around us does too, so that’s just part of the deal.” v

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EXPANDING DEMOCRACY

No bond, no ballot

You’re innocent until proven guilty—but that doesn’t mean you can vote.

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POLITICS

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n the statehouse, Democratic and Republican state representatives sit on opposite sides of a narrow aisle, but they might as well be on different sides of an ocean as far as their worldviews go.

The latest evidence is a contentious debate that occurred last month over the voting rights of pretrial detainees—folks who have been arrested and jailed but are awaiting trial so aren’t technically guilty of a crime.

On one side of the debate were Democrats, all of them black. On the other side were Republicans, all of them white.

The issue was HB 4469, sponsored by state rep Juliana Stratton, a bill intended to give “pretrial detainees” the right to vote while they’re in jail. Right now, they aren’t allowed to cast ballots in most cities and towns across the state.

And, yes, that’s the same Juliana Stratton who’s J.B. Pritzker’s lieutenant governor running mate in November’s election.

The debate began with Stratton explaining that some counties already allow pretrial detainees to vote. Her bill’s intended to make the policy uniform throughout the state.

State rep Peter Breen, a Republican from Lombard, rose to say that “in our rush to show concern for everyone who is incarcerated . . . we appear to have lost concern for the people who have been victimized to put them into jail.”

Stratton pointed out—again—that they were advocated for a group of people who are not necessarily guilty of anything other than not having enough money to post bond. Nothing prevents those who are able to afford bond from voting once they’re out.

Which prompted Jim Durkin, Governor Bruce Rauner’s floor leader, to bemoan the “imbalance between victims of the crimes and those who perpetrate the crimes.”

That inspired state rep Mary Flowers, from Englewood, to try to explain, one more time, that pretrial detainees aren’t necessarily perpetrators of any crime.

She spoke especially slowly, because, obviously, this is a tough concept for Republicans to comprehend.

State rep C.D. Davidsmeyer, from downstate Jacksonville, changed the subject to ask: “Why does the city of Chicago get to make their own rules?”

Not sure what he was getting at, other than reassuring his constituents that he’s against anything that anybody from Chicago is for.

Stratton explained that Chicago is a city, located in a county called Cook.

And that Cook County is in fact covered by the bill.

To which Davidsmeyer said: “Looks to me like there’s a different standard. I urge a no vote.”

Stubborn fella, that C.D. Davidsmeyer.

Christian Mitchell, Democrat from Bronzeville, accused the Republicans of “nativist dogwhistling”—that is, suggesting something without really coming out and saying it.

Making that point more specifically, Jehan Gordon-Booth, a Democrat from Peoria, noted that “unless [it’s] the Second Amendment, all the rest of [constitutional rights] are negotiable when it comes to the rights of people who don’t look like you.”

Then she got a little personal: “I stand as a victim of gun violence.” (Gordon-Booth’s 22-year-old stepson, Derrick Booth Jr., was murdered in 2014 by a man with a handgun.)

“My family received a call that no one wants to ever receive—ever. So please don’t play that tough-on-crime feeling anymore. ’Cause it doesn’t work anymore.”

In other words, it’s possible to respect and protect the rights of crime victims and still

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é SETH PERLMAN

POLITICS

believe in the fundamental precepts of the Constitution.

“We’re going to stand against that kind of language,” she continued. “It reeks of racism.”

That brought groaning from the Republican aisle. As though they were shocked that anyone could accuse Donald Trump Republicans of having a racial bias.

“You may be tired of hearing it,” Gordon-Booth responded. “But I’m tired of experiencing it.”

Margo McDermed, a southwest-suburban Republican, then spoke. “It’s always a oneway street. We have bills. We have concerns.

I’m tired of giving away my support for social justice reform bills for free. I’m over it, y’all.”

In 2017, McDermed introduced a bill that would have prohibited state legislators from serving as the chairman of their parties. It was clearly aimed at house speaker Michael Madigan, the only legislator who chairs a state political party. It died in the House Rules Committee, as do most bills that Madigan opposes.

Closing the debate was Litesa Wallace, Democrat from Rockford: “We’re not in preschool anymore—we are all adults. We should work as hard as possibly to move our legislation.”

In other words, if you don’t want to vote for Stratton’s bill, don’t vote for it. But you shouldn’t abandon your support for social

justice just because Madigan didn’t let your anti-Madigan bill out of committee.

In the aftermath, I’m left with several thoughts.

One, you’d think Republicans obsessed with President “witch hunt” Trump’s due process rights would appreciate the concept of a constitutionally protected presumption of innocence.

Two, did I tell you that state rep Jim Durkin is a TIF lawyer? I realize this has nothing to do with this debate. But I mention it in case anyone still believes the so-called Rauner revolution has anything to do with reform.

Finally, Representative Wallace makes an excellent point. Man, these statehouse Republicans are soft. They wouldn’t last one minute in Mayor Rahm’s City Council, where common-sense legislation proposed by independents is routinely killed in the rules committee.

Eventually, Stratton’s bill passed—winning three Republican votes. I’d name those Republicans, but I worry Durkin might try to banish them from the party.

The bill moves to the senate, where it will probably pass. My guess is Governor Rauner—always eager to look tough on crime—will veto it.

And so the great debate will continue. v

m @joravben MAY 10, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 5

POLITICS Students march against gun violence during the March for Our Lives campaign earlier this year.

EXPANDING DEMOCRACY

Are 16-yearolds smart or mature enough to vote?

é ASHLEY MIZUO

The student-led organization Vote16 Illinois thinks so.

By ASHLEY MIZUO

A

s students walk out of classrooms and onto the streets in protest, young people across the country are politically mobilizing.

However, many of the very students who led the estimated one million people across the country in the March for Our Lives campaign against gun violence cannot vote.

Some of those same teens are now working to change that.

Vote16 Illinois is a student-led organization established in August 2016 with more than 100 student members. Its goal is to lower the voting age from 18 to 16 in Illinois.

“So many kids are rising up, and they’re demanding change,” said Daviana Soberanis, a junior at Northside College Prep who’s a field organizing chair and board member of Vote16 Illinois. “Kids especially want to have their voices heard.”

Takoma Park, Maryland, was the first U.S. city to lower the voting age to 16, in 2013.

During the first election it held when 16-yearolds were allowed to cast ballots, 17 percent of eligible minors voted. That was double the percentage of voters 18 and older that turned out, although the election had no contested races or referendums.

Since then, Huntsville, Alabama, and Greenbelt, Maryland, have followed suit. Berkeley, California, has given 16-year-olds the right to vote in school board elections. And Washington, D.C., is considering giving 16-year-olds the right to vote for president.

Illinois state rep Kelly Cassidy supports letting 16-year-olds vote and is working with

6 CHICAGO READER - MAY 10, 2018

Vote16 Illinois on strategies to get the voting age lowered.

“We trust kids at 16 alone behind the wheel of a 2,000-pound vehicle on the road,” said John Pearl, Cassidy’s chief of staff. “I mean, at some point you have to realize that 18 is extremely arbitrary. It’s not like when you turn 18 you automatically have a serious increase in understanding of political knowledge.”

In Illinois, giving 16-year-olds the right to vote would require a change to the Illinois Constitution, which was amended in 1988 to lower the minimum voting age to 18.

The constitution also requires that voting laws be consistent across the state. Vote16 Illinois is working with lawmakers to introduce legislation next year that would modify the constitution to allow municipalities with more than 25,000 people—which makes them governed by home rule—to lower the voting age.

“What they are talking about really is allowing municipalities to make that choice on their own. Currently, election law in Illinois is incredibly convoluted, which makes this more difficult,” said Pearl.

Vote16 Illinois has also been working with Chicago and suburban officials. The group is currently pushing for nonbinding referendums and resolutions across the state to demonstrate support for lowering the voting age.

Alderman Harry Osterman (48th) said he supports Vote16 Illinois and might introduce a nonbinding resolution to City Council, although he hasn’t drafted anything yet.

North-suburban Wilmette is also considering doing the same thing, Vote16 Illinois said.

Still, nationally, the move to lower the voting age faces opposition from those who have

questioned whether 16-year-olds have the mental maturity to vote responsibly.

“People always say, ‘You know you’re 16.

What do you know? You can’t do a lot of things.

Why do you think that you should be able to vote?’” said Pooja Patel, 17, political outreach chair and board member at Vote16 Illinois.

When it comes to evaluating the intellectual capacity of teenagers, researchers working on the issue point to two types of cognitive abilities recognized by psychologists: “cold” and “hot.”

“Cold” cognitive abilities help people make logical, individualized decisions. These cognitive abilities are in place by age 16, and are key to being able to vote, according to a study published in 2009 by the American Psychological Association.

Meanwhile, “hot” cognitive abilities govern how a person reacts in emotional and stressful situations. These cognitive abilities don’t mature until the mid-20s, according to a study published in the journal Developmental Science. Many argue that hot cognitive abilities are not needed during voting, but others disagree, including Emory University psychology professor Drew Westen, author of The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation. He says such issues play a huge role in voting decisions. But either way, 16- and 18-year-olds both fall short of mature hot cognition, researchers say.

Advocates in favor of lowering the voting age also say the current system means many teens are voting in their first election at 18, a time of major transition. It comes as many teens are finishing high school and going to college in a different city than their hometown.

“Many 18-year-olds are in the middle of their move for the first time away from home,” said Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, director of the Tufts University Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, which does research on youths’ development and their potential contribution to democracy.

Many college students have to either quickly familiarize themselves with the voting process in a new city or state or navigate absentee voting back home. Moreover, some college students could see their financial aid status change depending on where they are registered. If they vote absentee, that could hurt their efforts to get in-state tuition, for example.

“So if you think about adapting to a new environment, whether you’re going to college or not, and then being asked to do all this stuff: whether you’re eligible, where you can vote, are you going to lose your financial status?”

Kawashima-Ginsberg said. “I can see why they don’t think it’s necessarily worth their time.”

One difficulty of the whole process is just how long it will take to see any change. Pearl and Cassidy have been working with Vote16 Illinois for enough time that the original students who approached him have turned 18 and aged out of the program.

Although any change wouldn’t take effect for several years, the students urged those in favor of lowering the age not to get frustrated.

“From other legislatures I’ve heard this is not a 50-year project. This is like a five-year project,” Soberanis said. “They think feasibly five years seems like a good enough time frame. It seems like a long time, but it makes total sense.” v

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AAG charges an origination fee, mortgage insurance premium, closing costs and servicing fees (added to the balance of the loan). The balance of the loan grows over time and AAG charges interest on the balance.

Interest is not tax-deductible until the loan is partially or fully repaid. Borrowers are responsible for paying property taxes and homeowner s insurance (which may be substantial). We do not establish an escrow account for disbursements of these payments. A set-aside account can be set up to pay taxes and insurance and may be required in some cases. Borrowers must occupy home as their primary residence and pay for ongoing maintenance; otherwise the loan becomes due and payable. The loan also becomes due and payable when the last borrower, or eligible non-borrowing surviving spouse, dies, sells the home, permanently moves out, defaults on taxes or insurance payments, or does not otherwise comply with the loan terms. American Advisors Group (AAG) is headquartered at 3800 W. Chapman Ave., 3rd & 7th Floors, Orange CA, 92868.

(MB_0911141), (Illinois Residential Mortgage Licensee; Illinois Commissioner of Banks can be reached at 100 West Randolph, 9th Floor, Chicago, Illinois 60601, (312) 814-4500). V2017.08.23_OR

1

These materials are not from HUD or FHA and were not approved by HUD or a government agency.

MAY 10, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 7

The hidden

ME too

ME was once thought to be a rare condition affecting “hysterical” white women. But the debilitating disease impacts a diverse group of up to 100,000 in Illinois alone— and Chicago researchers are hunting for a cure.

By MEGAN DOHERTY

KATHERINE STREETER

W 8 CHICAGO READER - MAY 10, 2018

hat if, on a daily basis, you had to choose between taking a shower or doing laundry?

Making dinner or taking out the trash? Reading a book or catching up on e-mail?

You need to pick. You can’t do both today.

If you do, you’ll suffer for it.

These are the kinds of calculated trade-offs that people suffering from myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) are forced to make. Our lives exist on the razor’s edge between functioning and crashing.

I say “our” because this is now my life, too.

With a relatively mild case, I can walk and talk—except for those times I can’t.

ME is a debilitating neuroimmune disease recognized by the World Health Organization since 1969. Yet it was given what many advocates say is a misleading set of diagnostic criteria and a trivializing name, chronic fatigue syndrome, by researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control 30 years ago. This moniker doesn’t do justice to what patients suffer,

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which includes an array of symptoms that can go far beyond unrelenting fatigue. From neurological to cardiovascular, ME affects nearly every system in the body—especially if you do too much. That crash after exertion of any form makes everything worse.

And by “worse,” I mean near-paralytic muscle weakness and the feeling you’ve been poisoned.

Not surprisingly, a Danish study of the quality of life experienced by those with a range of diseases found that people with ME have the lowest scores of those suffering from diseases, including multiple sclerosis, chronic renal failure, stroke, lung cancer, diabetes, and heart failure. A quarter of ME patients are homebound or completely bedridden, and as many as nine in ten lose their jobs because of the illness, according to the Solve ME/CFS Initiative, an advocacy group. The economic cost in lost productivity and health care expenses is estimated to be in the billions, according to a report by the National Academy of Medicine. That report also estimates that there are up to 2.5 million people with ME in the U.S., with up to 91 percent of cases undiagnosed.

That would amount to nearly 100,000 people in Illinois, and would make the disease more common than Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, or HIV/AIDS. Despite this, there’s still no consensus about the cause of ME, although a viral origin has been suspected. There is neither an FDA-approved treatment nor cure.

But recent research coming out of Chicago could help explain one of ME’s most destructive symptoms: the cognitive impairments that leave patients lost in a “brain fog” of slowed comprehension and short-term memory loss.

P

art of the problem with understanding ME has been that early brain research, and even some research through the 1990s, failed to examine how the brain functioned as a whole, experts say.

“The brain research from the 1800s was very focused on saying this piece of the brain does this function,” says Leonard Jason, director of DePaul University’s Center for Community Research. “But the brain actually comes together to take on tasks. The brain can change, but there’s a possibility that the brain can become dysregulated. If so, it can become very hard for it to function.”

He and his team study communication between neurons and how the brain functions as a system. Dysregulation occurs when different parts of the brain don’t communicate correctly, leading to functional impairment, he says.

In the case of ME patients, our brains are far less efficient than they should be, perennially stuck in low gear.

The name debate:

ME vs. CFS vs. SEID

Myalgic encephalomyelitis: first used

in the British medical journal the Lancet in 1956 to describe a 1955 outbreak.

Initially also labeled “benign,” that was subsequently dropped from the name.

It is the name favored by patients, advocates, and disease experts.

Chronic fatigue syndrome: created in

1988 by researchers at the Centers for Disease Control to describe a spike in cases in the United States. Many argue the name trivializes the debility suffered by people with the disease.

Systemic exertion intolerance disease: created in 2015 by the National

Academy of Medicine. Advocates and experts rarely, if ever, use the name.

To glimpse what your brain is doing, you could get an EEG, which is a readout of the electrical activity at the surface of the brain.

But from this information alone you can only discern major disruptions like seizures. To detect the subtleties of what’s going on inside the brains of ME patients, you need to go deeper.

Jason and fellow DePaul researchers Marcie Zinn and Mark Zinn are conducting neuroimaging studies by taking the raw EEG data—the squiggles on a page you’d see at the doctor’s office—and feeding them into a program that applies complex math using a method called exact low-resolution electromagnetic tomography (eLORETA). The resulting quantitative EEG (or qEEG) traces brain activity down to the source, on a millisecond timescale.

Serious symptoms

While researchers have made inroads using this technology to study other neurological disorders like Alzheimer’s, the DePaul group is the only one in the world using it to evaluate the association between how neural networks communicate and the cognitive symptoms of ME patients.

Although it only weighs three pounds, the brain consumes 40 to 60 percent of the body’s total blood glucose, Marcie Zinn says.

To do everything it needs to do as efficiently as possible, the brain organizes its neurons into smaller clusters, relying on fewer long-distance connections between groups of clusters—because these connections require more energy.

In ME, the balance between local clustering and global processing is thrown off, resulting in significantly fewer neurons being recruited to perform a function than normal, and the neurons that are engaged aren’t given enough time to do their jobs, the DePaul research has found. ME patients’ brains also have reduced alpha-wave activity—associated with being alert but relaxed—and more delta waves, which typically occur during deep sleep. If your frontal cortex is hanging out in delta, this suggests your arousal level will be lower and higher cortical functions will be suppressed, which the Zinns noted in a 2016 study in the journal NeuroRegulation.

It feels like I’m awake, but my brain hit the snooze button.

When I sat down to participate in one of these studies after suffering from the worst of this disease nearly three years ago, I wasn’t sure what to expect as I filled out a lengthy screening questionnaire to confirm whether I fit the criteria for participating. I’d long since come up against the limits of standard medical testing: no matter how bad I felt, all my blood work always came back frustratingly labeled normal. There’s no single, easy blood test available that can make an ME diagnosis.

• sleep that is not restorative

• extreme exhaustion and muscle weakness • short-term memory loss

MILLIONS MISSING Day of “visibility action” Sat 5/12, 11:30 AM The Paul and Gabriella Rosenbaum Garden, 140 E. Oak bit.ly/MillionsMissingChicago F

noted. British psychiatrists even suggested ME was actually just “mass hysteria” because most patients were women. This thinking eventually extended to researchers at the National Institutes of Health and the CDC, according to journalist Hillary Johnson in her book Osler’s Web: Inside the Labyrinth of the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Epidemic. The idea that the illness was psychological led to treatments focusing on exercise and changing how one thinks about the disease—which, ineffective at best, are more often harmful for ME patients. It wasn’t until 2017 that the CDC (mostly) removed recommendations for these therapies from its ME web page.

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ME impacts the central nervous system, which means nearly every bodily system is affected. Among the ailments patients suffer:

• “brain fog” and slowed comprehension

• severe headaches

Marcie Zinn says modern medicine still has too many blind spots, even for major medical problems. “Anything in the ‘black box’ called the skull is very, very hard or impossible to diagnose,” she says.

Compounding the diagnostic problem further, only one-third of medical schools in the U.S. even teach their students about ME, the DePaul researchers said. Doctors can’t know how to test for something they don’t understand, and this lack of understanding can also hurt patients. Starting in 1970, ME was often misconstrued as having a psychological origin rather than a physiological basis, the National Academy of Medicine has

• temperature dysregulation

• alcohol intolerance

• vivid dreams or nightmares

• hypoglycemia

• inflamed lymph nodes

• vision disturbances

• lightheadedness

• persistent sore throat

• chronic pain in joints and other parts of the body

• vertigo

• sensitivity to light, sound, odors, chemicals, foods, and medications

• gastrointestinal problems

• rapid heart rates

Source: Solve ME/CFS Initiative; Hummingbirds’ Foundation For M.E.

MAY 10, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 9

The blue sections represent areas of abnormally low brain activity in an ME patient. é DEPAUL CENTER FOR COMMUNITY RESEARCH

continued from 9

As I sat in an office at DePaul’s Lincoln Park campus, 19 electrodes were fixed to my head for five minutes while I had my eyes closed, then five minutes with them open. That produced a 3-D model of my brain bathed in blue, representing abnormally low activity. At last I had my hard evidence that there is something wrong with me.

I wept with relief.

The DePaul group is charging ahead with its qEEG studies without grant support. “If you look at NIH, [ME] is not funded at the level it probably needs to be,” says Jason.

Historically, research on ME has been underfunded. In 2016 ME research received just $7.8 million from the National Institutes of Health, hardly more than hay fever. That’s less than NIH gave to studies of multiple sclerosis ($97.1 million), Parkinson’s ($161.1 million), and HIV/AIDS ($3 billion). ME fund-

ing increased in 2017 but it still trails many other diseases.

The researchers’ hope is that their study will help doctors make and confirm ME diagnoses as well as monitor the disease’s progression.

“We want to use this knowledge to help people with all neurological disorders regain their cognitive function,” says Marcie Zinn, who said that one potential treatment for ME is learning to regulate your brainwaves through neurofeedback, which also shows promise in treating other problems like traumatic brain injury.

A

s much as there is still to learn about ME in adults, there has been even less research involving children and adolescents. The Center for Community Research is currently finishing data collection for two NIH-funded studies on the prevalence and predictors of the illness in young people.

ME by the numbers 20 million

with ME worldwide*

2.5 million

with ME in the U.S.

99,000

with ME in Illinois

10 CHICAGO READER - MAY 10, 2018

1 in 4 89

ME patients bedridden or homebound percent of ME patients lost jobs because of it

“Chicago will have two data sets on relatively young people, and that’s been totally understudied. Almost all the research is on adults,” says Jason. “No one is doing this in the world.”

To determine the youth prevalence rate, his team called more than 5,000 households in the greater Chicago area. Those with ME-like symptoms had medical examinations at Lurie Children’s Hospital in Streeterville. The collaborators, including Northwestern’s Dr. Ben Katz, a professor of pediatrics, will use blood samples to continue looking for biomarkers to help differentiate between the ME group and healthy control subjects.

The center is also wrapping up a prospective longitudinal research project that followed 4,000 Northwestern University students, tracking those who got mononucleosis. Characterized by flulike symptoms, that disease is caused by the Epstein-Barr virus, a possible risk factor for ME. Katz oversaw the collection of blood samples from the entire cohort when they were healthy. Further samples were taken from those who came down with mono, with additional samples taken six and 12 months later. This could help researchers find clues as to why some infected students go on to develop ME while others fully recover, and whether there is any correlation between the diseases.

These studies rely on samples from a more socially and demographically diverse group of people than was used in much prior research, which was often based on patients who could afford to go to clinics and enroll in studies, Jason says. While there had been outbreaks in recorded cases of ME since the 1930s, the surge of cases in the United States in the 80s was dubbed the “yuppie flu”—and something that predominantly plagued “overachieving” white women. This was partially due to the

$24 billion

in lost wages and health care costs in the United States annually

77

percent of patients took over a year to get diagnosed; for nearly one-third, it took more than five years

*based on estimates that 90 percent of ME cases are undiagnosed Sources: Solve ME/CFS Initiative; National Academy of Medicine; MEAction

Underfunded

ME National Institutes of Health 2016 funding: • HIV/AIDS: $3 billion • Parkinson’s: $161.1 million • Multiple sclerosis: $97.1 million • ME: $7.8 million Source: National Institutes of Health

fact that the people who suddenly became the face of the disease were those who had the means to continue going from doctor to doctor searching for answers. While approximately 75 percent of those diagnosed with ME are women, a 1999 study Jason published in Archives of Internal Medicine showed it is actually even more common in minority groups and those with lower socioeconomic status.

Jason hopes these projects will bust another common myth: the belief that kids with ME symptoms are just faking them to skip school and have nothing actually wrong with them. A UK study found that ME is the biggest cause of long-term health-related school absence.

ME has interrupted the studies of Lizzie Mooney, 12, of west suburban Riverside, who has been homebound with ME for more than three years. When able, she works on English and math with a private tutor, but the rest of her studies have stopped.

“These kids are fighting for their health. It’s not just emotional drama,” says her mother, Amy Mooney, who said she’s often had to convince school personnel that her daughter wasn’t just trying to avoid going to class. “You always have to explain, just to be heard, that your child is not well. And that’s the frustrating piece that I don’t think any other illness has to go through.”

This Saturday, May 12, Mooney is hosting a “visibility action” event, part of a global campaign for parity in ME medical research and education. Called Millions Missing—there are an estimated 20 million people worldwide with ME—it will feature talks by the DePaul researchers and patient testimony. There will be dozens of pairs of shoes, representing people with ME who are simply too sick to attend.

“They are with us in spirit,” says Mooney.

“These are the shoes they wore when they lived an active life.” v Megan Doherty is a Hyde Park writer and photographer.

@MeganEDoherty

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ARTS & CULTURE Susan Abelson é KRISTAN LIEB

FASHION

‘A milliner of sorts’

At Susan Hat, her Rogers Park storefront, Susan Abelson creates hats from recycled materials.

By AIMEE LEVITT

V

ery few people these days set out to be milliners, and, although she owns a store where she makes and sells hats, Susan Abelson is no exception. As a young woman in the 1970s, she was a merely a connoisseur and collector. She preferred 1940s styles, with veils. “I was young,” she says. “I could pull it off.” But then her entire collection was stolen from the storage space of the Minneapolis loft where she was living at the time. All that remained was a book filled with illustrations of hats throughout history.

Even though she was primarily a painter, Abelson was always looking at hats. “I was thinking about hats, sketching hats, dreaming of hats. I don’t know why.” Then one day

in 2010 she took an old, shrunken sweater, amputated the neck, cut another circle from the body, sewed the two pieces together, and voila! an instant tam. She began to make hats in her dining room, using more old sweaters and upholstery fabric and whatever scraps she could find. Over time, she expanded into rescuing old hats that her friends found for her at estate sales, sewing on extra trimmings or “drawing” on them with thread. She began selling the hats, which she calls Susan Hats, at craft fairs and online, and taking commissions, most notably for a vagina dentata hat for the first Women’s March.

Susan Hats have very little in common with one another, except for a general sense of whimsy. They range from relatively conserva-

tive tams, hoods, and cloches to tall, brightly colored statement pieces that cause people on the el to look twice and take another seat. “You have to have balls to wear my hats!,” she says.

Abelson works only from recycled materials and, although she owns a few old hat blocks and two antique hat sizers, she doesn’t like to use patterns, so no two pieces are the same. “I make it up as I go along,” she says. “I thought about taking classes to learn the proper way of doing things, but I was afraid it would squash my originality and looseness. It takes an hour to make some hats. Others I piece together over hours and hours. I have to sit with them. Real millinery is intimidating. It can be tedious. It’s more repetitive. I call myself ‘a milliner of sorts.’”

When Abelson moved to Rogers Park two years ago—she wanted to live near the lake— she noticed a small storefront on the ground floor of an apartment building on Sheridan Road, right next to Leone Beach Park. At the time, it was occupied by the Rogers Park Chamber of Commerce, but Abelson decided that if it ever became vacant, it would be the perfect spot to open a hat store. One day this past fall, she saw that it was empty and decided it was meant to be. She spent the winter refinishing the floors, and opened for business in March. She set up her sewing machine in the front showroom so customers could see her at work. “I want to be visible to the neighborhood,” she says. She has a few regular visitors, including a retired couple who check up on her and a burly guy who tells her she’s bringing class to the neighborhood.

Abelson is her own best advertisement. She has the sort of face that looks good in all sorts of hats, no matter the shape or style, and she takes a certain glee in bustling around her showroom and popping her creations onto her head, as though she’s a human hat stand. She encourages customers to try on as many hats as they’d like, and she’s not shy about making suggestions. Matching a person and a hat is a delicate process. “It’s sad when someone puts on a hat and it doesn’t fit,” she says. “If they’re really in love with it, I try to alter it.” That’s where the hat stretchers come in handy. She’s also been experimenting with using elastic to make her hats fit different-size heads.

Now that the weather’s getting warmer and more people are headed toward the beach, Abelson hopes that she’ll get more foot traffic.

Her lease is up in July, and she hopes to renew it. But she’s running her business in the same improvisational spirit in which she makes her hats. One thing she is certain about is keeping the price of her hats below $60. (Couture milliners can charge hundreds of dollars.) “I do grapple with the price,” she says. “Am I undervaluing me? Am I undervaluing my art? Or am I making things affordable to people? It’s insulting to open up a shop in Rogers Park and be out of reach for the people who live here.

“My neighbor here is a therapist,” she continues. “I tell her that after a good session, her patients can get a hat. Or after a bad session, a hat will make things better.” v

m @aimeelevitt MAY 10, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 11

CITY LIFE

Installation view on Alcatraz Island, San Francisco; Ai Weiwei é COURTESY OF AI WEIWEI STUDIO; COURTESY OF AI WEIWEI STUDIO

CULTURE

Ai Weiwei leaves more than a ‘Trace’ in Chicago The artist’s new exhibition features portraits of other dissidents and political prisoners—in Legos.

By DEANNA ISAACS

I

f the art gig ever stalls, Chinese dissident and global activist Ai Weiwei could give stand-up comedy a try. The acerbic humor that’s a primary driver of much of his art was on display during an appearance at the Auditorium Theatre last week.

Question from the audience: Did the Chinese government help elect Trump?

Ai Weiwei: I don’t think the Chinese government would be so stupid.

Question: What about Russia?

Ai Weiwei: They use chemicals. I worry about that every time I have a cup of tea. The Chinese just put you in a secret place.

Starting this week, Chicago will get a firsthand look at an already famous project by Ai Weiwei, himself the victim of a notorious detainment in a secret place. In 2011 he was arrested by Chinese authorities, apparently fed

12 CHICAGO READER - MAY 10, 2018

up with his anti-totalitarian blogging, which had attracted worldwide attention. He was released after 81 days, but his passport was confiscated for another four years—in effect, keeping him a prisoner in China.

The project is “Trace,” a set of large portraits of activists and prisoners of conscience executed in Lego bricks. It was commissioned as part of a larger solo show mounted at the former federal prison at Alcatraz in 2014 and was shown at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., last year. The original version—which used nearly one million Legos and was viewed by roughly the same number of visitors—contained images of 176 activists, identified by Amnesty International and other human rights organizations. The Chicago version will consist of 113 portraits and digital kiosks that will tell the subjects’ stories.

As Ai Weiwei explained during a conversation with Hirshhorn director Melissa Chiu at the Auditorium Theatre event, the portraits will be installed on the floor, because at Alcatraz, they couldn’t put any holes in the walls.

Arms folded over an untucked shirt and rotund midsection, the wryly unflappable, aphoristic 60-year-old, who’s also been promoting Human Flow, his recent documentary film about dispossessed migrants and says he’s done “more than 350 interviews since last October,” recapped his trajectory.

Why did he become an artist? “To escape being a farmer.” Why this expanded, socially active practice? (His media, besides sculpture, film, and photography, include Twitter and Instagram.) “To have a moment like this.”

On a screen above him, images flashed of two pictures in his “Study in Perspective” series of selfies. In the first, he’s giving the finger to Tiananmen Square; in the second, to the White House.

Ai Weiwei’s father was a well-known poet who got in the crosshairs of Mao’s Anti-Rightist Campaign in the 1950s and was banished first to a remote area in northeast China and then to the even more distant northwest province of Xinjiang. Ai Weiwei grew up without electricity and recalled last week that when he came to New York in the 1980s, the sight of the city lit up at night was a near-religious experience for him. Still, he said, New York—where he studied at Parsons School of Design under

Sean Scully (“an Irishman, drinking whiskey all the time”); became a freelance photographer (waiting at the newsstand at 3 AM to see his photo credit in the New York Times); and lived as an undocumented immigrant (with roommates who included filmmaker Chen Kaige and composer and conductor Tan Dun)—was very lonely, “so desperate,” and “the least romantic city on earth.”

He returned to China, where he became not only the country’s most famous artist and a codesigner of Beijing’s iconic “bird’s nest” Olympic Stadium but a prolific and provocative online presence who, for example, started a “citizen’s investigation” when the government failed to reveal how many children were killed in a devastating 2008 earthquake.

When the government installed 25 surveillance cameras around his home and studio, Ai Weiwei responded by setting up his own cameras and live-streaming all of his activities, 24/7. “A million people watched,” he said. “The police called and said, ‘Please shut it down.’ I said, ‘I made this for you.’”

He’s been living in Berlin since his passport was returned in 2015.

The idea of rendering the portraits for “Trace” in Lego bricks occurred to him as a way to compensate for the uneven technical quality of the activists’ photographs he was able to collect. In the Chicago exhibit, underwritten by the Alphawood Foundation, the portraits will be spread through three floors of what should prove to be a very interesting new gallery that’s being carved out of a vintage Lincoln Park residential building at 659 W. Wrightwood.

Ai Weiwei told the appreciative Auditorium audience that he prefers nontraditional exhibit venues, like prisons, because “you can put almost anything there and call it art.” He said his own studio walls are empty; if visitors ask where the art is, he tells them, “I am the artwork.” As for the plight of undocumented immigrants today, he advises them to go with it: “To be deported can be a fashionable thing now.”

Question: What about young artists who want to challenge their government?

Ai Weiwei: If it’s a choice, don’t do it. v “AI WEIWEI: TRACE IN CHICAGO” Through 6/30: Wed 10 AM-5 PM, Thu-Fri 10 AM-7:30 PM, Sat 10 AM-5 PM, Alphawood Exhibitions, 659 W. Wrightwood, 773-437-6601, alphawoodex.org, reservations required. F

m @DeannaIsaacs

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ARTS & CULTURE Lady Macbeth (Chaon Cross) is taunted by the unseen Weird Sisters (Theo Germaine, McKinley Carter, Emily Ann Nichelson). é LIZ LAUREN

THEATER

The Tempest’s lightning doesn’t strike twice

But Aaron Posner and Teller’s Macbeth makes a worthwhile storm of its own.

By TONY ADLER

F

ollow-ups seldom meet expectations. I’m not the fan type, but I was so awestruck by Shozo Sato’s 1983 Kabuki Macbeth that I made a keepsake of a little piece of iridescent fabric that had fallen off somebody’s costume and landed in the aisle. I still have it.

Sato went on to create kabuki versions of lots of other western classics, but none of them could hold me the way the first did. Because it was the first, and perfect.

In 2015, Aaron Posner and Teller (the silent member of Penn & Teller) collaborated on a staging of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, presented at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, and I was awestruck again. The show, I wrote at the time, was “not just visually striking and plenty of fun, but willing and beautifully able to get at the paradoxes that have made the play fascinating to audiences since, oh, say 1611. . . . Nothing exists merely to make us say wow—though plenty does.”

You see where I’m going with this, don’t you? Posner and Teller are back at Chicago Shakespeare now, following up on their Tempest with a Macbeth that’s sharp and intriguing and definitely worth a look. But if you loved the earlier production and you’re hoping to recapture the magic—in any sense of

that word—I suggest you adjust your thinking.

It’s not just the problem of high expectations that makes this Macbeth feel like a disappointing success. To some extent it’s the material. The Tempest harbors an awful lot of ugliness, when you think about it. Prospero’s narcissism makes him an erratic and angry ruler; he’s got a lot to answer for, both on his island kingdom and back home in Milan. But his every motion through five acts propels him toward redemption by way of wonder. There’s a silly delight in watching Ariel the sprite bollix up his master’s enemies and a solemn joy in the wedding masque prepared for the young lovers, Miranda and Ferdinand. The whole script offers opportunities for delight that Posner and Teller exploited to the fullest.

Macbeth? Not so much. The new Thane of Cawdor and his wife are doomed for sure by the start of act two. In place of sprites they’ve got witchy Weird Sisters; in place of august fertility goddesses, Hecate. Abandon all hope of delight ye who enter here—though the proceedings get a nice shake of humor thanks in large part to Ian Merrill Peakes’s wry, unorthodox Macbeth.

Of course, there’s still the possibility of a good scare. But the awe is lacking in that regard as well. Two of the play’s staple mo-

ments of horror—Macbeth’s visions, first, of a floating dagger and then of the murdered Banquo (Andrew White) at a banquet—unfold in less than surprising ways. Indeed, the Banquo passage is marred by blocking that telegraphs an upcoming effect: you’ve got to wonder what’s going on behind courtiers when they bunch up unnaturally, as if posing for a group selfie.

The Weird Sisters (McKinley Carter, Theo Germaine, and Emily Ann Nichelson), on the other hand, are appropriately uncanny, and the big moment when they conjure up malign spirits (“Double, double, toil and trouble”) satisfyingly creepy. They’re also ubiquitous in Posner and Teller’s telling, showing up to watch and intervene even when their presence isn’t specified in the text.

Which is telling in itself—an indication that this Macbeth is ultimately less about generating coups de theatre than about the source of the mayhem it chronicles. Crucially, the Sisters are onstage for the opening scene, created by the directors out of whole cloth, in which Chaon Cross’s Lady Macbeth mourns over a small coffin containing what appears to be her own stillborn baby. Before long they gather around her to perform a transformation, making Peakes’s Macbeth appear in her place.

The sequence is apt in a literary sense: the lives and deaths of children is a constant theme of the Scottish tragedy, as is Lady Macbeth’s desire to become a man and, failing that, to play out her ostensibly masculine ambitions through her husband. But what does it mean? That the couple’s bloodthirsty behavior can be traced back to a particular trauma? Too modern, psychological, and reductive. I’m inclined to think the Sisters embody something primal and parasitic, and that they pick their victims pretty much the way the otherworldly beings in The Mothman Prophecies do. As a professor in the movie explains: “You noticed them, and they noticed that you noticed them.”

I don’t know. I could be wrong about that.

The Posner/Teller Macbeth at least makes it worth the wondering. v MACBETH Through 6/24: Wed 1 and 7:30 PM, Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3 and 8 PM, Sun 2 PM; also Tue 5/29-6/12, 7:30 PM, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Navy Pier, 800 E. Grand, $48-$88.

m @taadler

THEATER

Birdbrained

Greenhouse Theater’s Birds of a Feather never really takes flight.

Marc Acito’s jumpy, effortful play is, charitably, children’s theater for adults, which makes sense, since it’s tangentially based on Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson’s picture book And Tango Makes Three. Its main characters are two anthropomorphized animal couples—Silo and Roy, the famous male penguins in Central Park Zoo that pair-bonded and parented, and Pale Male and Lola, the equally famous red-tailed hawks that nested atop Paula Zahn’s Manhattan co-op—but their problems (jealousy, infidelity, anticapitalist angst, internalized homophobia) are decidedly grown-up. It’s a promising setup, but Acito paints most everything in such broad strokes that the story never takes flight.

Acito seems to want to explore the myriad travails of long-term relationships (and to lecture about tolerance), but he concocts such cartoonishly mismatched protagonists it’s difficult to care about their romantic travails. Silo is brooding while Roy is flighty. Pale Male is cocky while Lola is sensitive. Both relationships, which form the emotional core of the show, seem designed to disintegrate. More successfully drawn are the Zookeeper and the Birder, lonely urbanites whose numerous insecurities keep them perpetually single. And entirely unsuccessfully drawn are a third couple, Zahn and her real estate developer husband, Richard Cohen, who do little but epitomize wealthy self-absorption.

Acito touches on numerous pressing social issues— gender self-determination, marriage equality, the pathological lust for Internet notoriety—without developing them. And while the four-person cast show impressive range and depth, especially given the material, director Jacob Harvey often pushes them to breathless extremes that rob the evening of subtlety and truth. —JUSTIN HAYFORD BIRDS OF A FEATHER Through 6/17: Thu-

Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 2:30 PM, Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln, 773-404-7336, greenhousetheater.org, $30-$41, $15 students and industry.

Oh boy?

Go see Buddy for the tunes, not the story.

It’s not hard to see why Alan Janes’s 1989 jukebox musical charting the rapid rise and early death of seminal rock and roller Buddy Holly ran in London’s West End for 14 years or why it has been produced all over the world. The show really rocks. Holly’s high-spirited tunes are featured front and center, and if the band is even half good, it sells the show.

The cast of talented actor-musicians assembled for American Blues Theater’s current revival is sharp and energetic. As Holly, Zachary Stevenson is utterly believable. But then, he’d better be. According to the program, he’s played Holly in more than ten other productions of this show. At intermission, you can even buy CDs of him performing rock ’n’ roll classics by Holly and others.

In contrast, the nonmusical portions of the show, in which Janes tells Holly’s story, are minimalist and often devoid of surprise or nuance. Janes fills his script with lots of standard rock-star tropes (example: stodgy, stickin-the-mud record producer proclaims the artist’s songs are crap; younger, hipper producer takes the same bB

MAY 10, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 13

ARTS & CULTURE TK caption é TK CREDIT

hard to balance gravitas and blather, this is an enjoyable crime comedy. Rieger directed with Jenny Magnus, Beau O’Reilly, and Stefan Brün. —DMITRY SAMAROV

CROSSING AVIVA Through 5/26: Fri-Sat 8 PM,

Sun 3 PM, Prop Thtr, 3502 N. Elston, 773-492-1287, curioustheaterbranch.com, $15 or pay what you can if you’re broke.

R It’s Julia Sweeney!

The former SNL cast member, now Older and Wider, looks back on life post-Pat.

songs and turns them into gold). If you know anything about Holly’s short life, you know the story. Jones also soft-pedals the seamier sides of the music industry (racism, economic exploitation of artists) or overlooks them entirely. The sole exception, Holly’s triumphant color-line-busting performance at Harlem’s Apollo Theater, feels a little cringy, less like history and more like an evocation of a white performer’s ultimate wet dream. —JACK HELBIG BUDDY: THE BUDDY HOLLY STORY Through

the production a heightened intensity and authenticity, especially in the intimate surroundings of Steppenwolf’s 1700 space. Ervin Tobar and Brian Baren as Harris and Klebold don’t look much like the boys they play, but their portrayal of two outsiders bound by a common sense of aggrievement and murderous purpose is raw and painful. —ALBERT WILLIAMS COLUMBINUS Through 5/26:

R Columbine generation

It’s a crime

5/26: Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3 and 7:30 PM, Sun 2:30 PM, American Blues Theater, 1225 W. Belmont, 773327-5252, americanbluestheater.com, $19-$49.

Columbinus is a look back at April 20, 1999, by a young ensemble that has grown up with gun violence.

The Yard, a professional company of teenage actors, brings extraordinary urgency to its mounting of this powerful theater piece about the Columbine High School shooting in Littleton, Colorado. Created by the United States Theatre Project and written by P.J. Paparelli and Stephen Karam, Columbinus is drawn largely from documentary sources—including diaries, e-mails, Internet posts, and homemade videos left behind by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the Columbine seniors who on April 20, 1999, went on a shooting spree at the school, killing 12 students and one teacher before turning their guns on themselves. But this isn’t your standard factfocused docudrama. It employs choral speech, ritualized group movement, and multimedia elements to explore the ecosphere of identity crisis, anxiety, and alienation that is high school for many adolescents.

Watching this show, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that the young ensemble—gifted, passionate, and focused—is part of the “Columbine generation,” people who were born after the tragedy and have grown up in a new century of seemingly endless escalating gun violence in America.

Director Mechelle Moe’s expansion of the play’s cast from the originally intended eight to 16 players gives

14 CHICAGO READER - MAY 10, 2018

Wed-Fri 8 PM, Sat 4 and 8 PM; no performances Sat 5/12 or Wed 5/16, Steppenwolf Theatre, 1700 Theatre, 1700 N. Halsted, 312-335-1650, steppenwolf.org, $25.

Crossing Aviva might be enjoyable if it left any room to breathe.

Curious Theatre Branch presents the world premiere of Matt Rieger’s overloaded whodunit about underworld struggles with a lot of hand-wringing over morality.

When a neighborhood kid is mugged while running an errand for a mysterious figure named Hart (Rieger), it sets off a series of killings and reprisals that upends the power dynamic of the town.

Told in four acts through a breathlessly listed series of dozens of scenes—none much longer than five minutes—this is an intermittently amusing but often baffling stew of snark and philosophizing masquerading as a mystery. Salet the Messenger (Cat Jarboe), for instance, is an arch, Cheshire Cat-type trickster who’s funny at first but wears out her welcome and function by the third or fourth time she repeats the same shtick.

Rieger seems to be aiming for a David Mametor David Milch-style smart-aleck patter, but he lands closer to Tarantino verbosity. Rick Paul’s witty visual design—which includes a background of lit-up buildings and an LED crawl announcing the endlessly changing scenes—goes a long way to mitigate the overly busy text.

Rieger does the piece no favors by signalling deaths by having the killer literally x out his victim with a marker or by naming one of his characters Persephone—queen of the underworld, get it? Still, when it’s not trying so

Former Saturday Night Live cast member Julia Sweeney considers herself “the Al Jolson of androgyny.” She’s best remembered from SNL for portraying Pat, a character whose ambiguous gender is the subject of much speculation.

In her one-woman show Older and Wider, Sweeney breezes past her career in comedy and shares charming stories about what came next: the life of a stay-athome mom in Wilmette, having the idyllic “bread-eater” fantasy with a husband and their daughter, Mulan. Her material concerns suburban-parent rites of passage.

When Mulan was learning how to drive, Sweeney had her practice in a place where she could do no harm to fellow motorists: a cemetery. When Mulan began dating a Trump supporter, Sweeney meddled with their relationship and sent her husband to pry into the reasons behind the boyfriend’s political leanings. Sweeney’s past TV work is addressed only in the context of her screening It’s Pat: The Movie for Mulan when she was in grade school. Her daughter’s initial excitement evaporated with every passing minute.

The rhythm of Older and Wider is reminiscent of a sitcom. Sweeney’s in awe of Wrigley Field’s long history and ivy-covered walls. “Then I realized I was now required to watch a baseball game,” she says, cringing and grinning. Though she lacks some polish and abandons topics too rapidly, her conversational tone and self-effacing humor welcome audience members into her friendship circle. By the end, Sweeney’s comfortable enough to share secrets. One of them: It’s Pat: The Movie, she says, “is a terrible movie. It’s taken me 27 years to admit.” —STEVE HEISLER JULIA SWEENEY:

OLDER AND WIDER Through 5/30: Wed 8 PM, Sun 4 PM, Tue 8 PM; no performances Tue 5/22 and Wed 5/23, Second City E.T.C., 1608 N. Wells, 312-3373992, secondcity.com, $26.

Full-frontal Vitruvian nailedness!

Prometheus Bound remains inert.

Prometheus, impaled forever on a rock for tipping humanity off about fire and freedom, has stood since antiquity for the unstoppable triumph of reason over religious orthodoxy and raw power. In more recent, radical circles, he has stood for the spirit of iconoclasm itself, as noble as he is fierce. However, in this pious new adaptation from the Greek by renowned classicist Nicholas Rudall, directed by Terry McCabe, Prometheus is seen not so much as standing for anything as he is standing, basta. Because for almost the entirety of City Lit Theater’s 85-minute performance, Mark Pracht is entirely stationary. I’m talking full-frontal Vitruvian nailedness at center stage, baby. Oh yeah.

This could have been hilarious if it were allowed to be. In general a brutal yammerer under the ridiculous constraints of his part, Pracht is winning when he allows himself a little disrespectful jab in the ribs at Aeschylus for writing him into this mess. I mean, come on: Pracht stands before us covered in blood for practically the whole play with the head of a humongous styrofoam bolt protruding from his chest. Puppet deities—the hideous mug of Brute Force for one, a sort of Terry Gilliam meets Dragon Ball Z monstrosity—parade into view and browbeat him. A chorus of ladies on a platform, the Oceanids, mimed onstage by puppeteers, coo to him about divine order and human law over piped-in MIDI flutes.

Von Orthal Puppets’ pesky airborne Hermes lends the one glimmer of charm to this otherwise painfully unspectacular outing. —MAX MALLER PROMETHEUS

BOUND Through 6/10: Fri-Sat 7:30, Sun 3 PM; also Mon 6/4, 7:30 PM, City Lit Theater, 1020 W. Bryn Mawr, 773-293-3682, citylit.org, $32, $27 seniors, $12 students and military.

R The sting

To Catch a Fish re-creates a government operation gone terribly wrong.

As far as shitty tenants go, EPA administrator Scott Pruitt has nothing on the men and women of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. In 2012, as part of an unregistered sting dubbed Operation Fearless, agents rented a storefront in Milwaukee’s Riverwest neighborhood—disguised as a clothing and housewares outlet—in order to ensnare low-level criminals by luring them into a gun buyback scheme. The operation was a model of ineptitude: guns were stolen, wrongful arrests were made, and Chauncey Wright, a mentally handicapped man who worked for the agents and sold them guns and drugs, ended up serving six months of house arrest and four years of probation. The agents also left in their wake $15,000 in damages and unpaid rent and utility bills.

Brett Neveu’s world-premiere two-act drama, presented as the first product of TimeLine’s Playwrights Collective, is inspired by those events as reported by Raquel Rutledge and John Diedrich in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Though TimeLine Theatre has a long history of successfully transforming seemingly unstageable stories of bureaucracy and institutional malfeasance into ground-level human dramas, Neveu and director Ron OJ Parson focus almost entirely on the day-to-day interactions of their Wright surrogate (Geno Walker) and his guardian/grandmother (Linda Bright Clay), cousin (Al’Jaleel McGhee), and girlfriend (Tiffany Addison).

Foregrounding the ripples in the lives of low-income people of color who otherwise get buried in stories about government corruption makes sense; as Neveu puts it in a program interview, “It has to be about the effect of the con, not the con itself.” Still, I wonder how To Catch a Fish would play without TimeLine’s immaculately detailed lobby display that fills in seemingly critical contextual blanks, particularly the systems at play that incentivized agents to behave like corporate sales bros goosing their numbers by any means necessary.

—DAN JAKES TO CATCH A FISH Through 7/1: Wed-

Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 4 and 8 PM, Sun 2 PM, TimeLine Theatre, 615 W. Wellington, 773-281-8463, timelinetheatre.com, $40-$54. v

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ARTS & CULTURE

MAY 12 + 1 3 é MICHAEL COURIER

11-6pm

Halsted St. Chicago Arts District in Pilsen

INVISIBLE FORCES AT PLAY

DANCE

Oral fixation

CDC in 4-D is best consumed in a state of inebriation.

IN THREE ESSAYS ON THE THEORY OF SEXUALITY, Sigmund Freud describes the first phase of a child’s psychosexual development as “cannibalistic pregenital sexual organization,” popularly known as the “oral stage.”

During this period, which is said to occur between birth and the age of two, the child focuses on receiving pleasure via the mouth.

According to Freud, children overindulged or neglected during this stage may develop neurotic oral fixations that manifest as talking, eating, drinking, and smoking too much.

Smoking does not occur during Comedy Dance Collective’s CDC in 4-D, and neither does time travel. But excessive noise and humor that primarily focuses on dancers eating are the primary characteristics of this show. It is also probably better consumed in a state of inebriation.

Directed by Carisa Barreca (who also performed in the Hubbard Street-Second City

collaboration The Art of Falling), CDC in 4-D is one skit clambering on top of the next without consideration for logic of any variety.

These include pseudo balletic swans horrified by the fauna that frequent Lake Michigan, a sleeping couple vying for space in their bed, a gardener on stilts zealously misting her plants, and the aforementioned dances about food, glorious food: a woman ravening after pizza, a man and his bag of chips, someone making a milkshake to (of course) Kelis’s “Milkshake,” a ritual staged around opening a bottle of Dr. Pepper, and so on. This makes the sudden eruption of solid Irish step dancing by twins Megan and Teresa Leahey shine even more. “Most people dance only when they are drunk,” remarks company member Sarah Barnhardt. Guess why. —IRENE HSIAO THE COMEDY DANCE COLLECTIVE PRESENTS: CDC IN 4-D Through 6/8: Fri 8 PM, iO Chicago, 1501 N.

Funk Dreamscapes from the Invisible Parallel Universe: Renée Stout installation view at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, 2018.

FUNK DREAMSCAPES FROM THE INVISIBLE PARALLEL UNIVERSE: RENÉE STOUT On view through August 5 FREE admission This exhibition series is supported in part by a grant from the Wisconsin Arts Board with funds from the State of Wisconsin and the National Endowment for the Arts. Funding was also provided by the Kohler Trust for the Arts and Education, Kohler Foundation, Inc., and the Frederic Cornell Kohler Charitable Trust. The Arts Center thanks its many members for their support of exhibitions and programs through the year.

Kingsbury, comedydancecollective.com, $18.

MAY 10, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 15

ARTS & CULTURE

Alun Be, Potentiality (2017) é COURTESY THE ARTIST

PHOTOGRAPHY

Beyond Black Panther

“In Their Own Form” takes a long look at the Afrofuturist movement.

By KATE SIERZPUTOWSKI

O

n the third floor of the Museum of Contemporary Photography’s current 13-artist, 33-piece exhibition, “In Their Own Form,” are two sets of work that depict the dreamscapes of Senegalese children. On the right side of the exhibition space is Senegalese photographer Alun Be’s series “Edification” (2017), well-composed snapshots of young boys engaging in common activities (assisting each other onto the back of a bus, bathing in the sea) while peering through virtual reality masks.

At the back of the room, French photographer Alexis Peskine’s “Aljana Moons” (2015) presents posed portraits of young people dressed in handmade astronaut suits, designed by Peskine from food packaging detritus: old tomato cans and discarded rice bags.

Peskine’s photographs are metaphorical

16 CHICAGO READER - MAY 10, 2018

representations of talibé children, Senegalese youth who often collect money on the streets for their religious teachers. “I used talibé children because I wanted to create a visual oxymoron,” Peskine says. “Tomato cans represent a precariousness. There is not a future in begging, even if you learn a couple of useful tricks. When you are a kid you dream that the sky is the limit, which is I why decided to incorporate the astronaut suit into the series.”

Both series address notions of escapism subtly wrapped in youthful daydreams.

They are also examples of Afrofuturism, a wide-ranging cultural and aesthetic philosophy specifically tied to people of the African diaspora that combines elements of history, science fiction, magical realism, and futurism to imagine an existence beyond the present reality.

Afrofuturism and its themes of nostalgia, escapism, and speculative futures permeate the photographs and films presented in the exhibition, which is curated by Sheridan Tucker Anderson, the MoCP’s curatorial fellow for diversity in the arts. Anderson specifically chose works that underpin this movement, long represented by musicians such as Sun Ra and George Clinton and writers such as Octavia E. Butler and recently popularized by the blockbuster hit Black Panther, Kendrick Lamar and SZA’s “All the Stars” video, and Janelle Monáe’s music-centered short film Dirty Computer. But Anderson wants to emphasize that the movement existed long before author and culture critic Mark Dery gave it a name in the early 1990s.

“I didn’t exactly want [Afrofuturism] connected to the title of the exhibition, because it has been dressed up as this very new, trendy thing,” she says. “There are a number of reasons why that is the case, and I think that is both good and bad. It gets people talking, and gets people interested, but I wanted to focus on Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. DuBois in my [exhibition] essay because they had been working toward an Afrofuturist-style thought very early on. I want to highlight Afrofuturism as much more historical and consider their

important contributions. I wanted readers to realize that alternative realities [like those imagined by Douglass and DuBois] have always been something that marginalized people, people of color, have kind of accessed to buffer experiences here in the U.S. and elsewhere.”

Although photography is the focus of the exhibition, Anderson weaves in other media.

American artist and writer Teju Cole frames his diaristic images—such as the photo Brazzaville (2013), which features a young boy grasping a railing above a body of rushing water—with short poems and texts that examine memory. Belgian-Beninese documentary and fashion photographer Fabrice Monteiro explores the world as it might be after humans in The Prophecy (2014), dressing models as postapocalyptic monsters thriving at the edge of human-designed disasters such as oil spills and forest fires. South African photographer and filmmaker Mohau Modisakeng’s film Passage (2017), an exploration of the still-apparent effects of the transatlantic slave trade, presents three subjects confronting the rising water in their slowly sinking rowboats. Alongside the captivating visuals, a deeply engaging soundtrack connects the three-channel work, which compels the viewer to stay seated for the full length of the 19-minute film.

During his lifetime, Douglass posed for hundreds of photos to spread a subjective view of himself and other African-Americans, a tactic Ralph Waldo Emerson explored in his 1844 antislavery essay “Emancipation of the Negroes in the West Indies.” Anderson pulled the title, “In Their Own Form,” from Emerson’s text, which imagined the opportunities that people of color, specifically enslaved people in the West Indies, might have had without the horrific imposition of slavery. This theme is represented through the figural image in the bulk of the exhibition’s works, which aim to present subjective views of the black experience from a wide-reaching global perspective.

“Representation is having an opportunity or agency to present yourself as you see fit,” says Anderson, “regardless of what someone might want to impose or attach onto your experience or existence.” v “IN THEIR OWN FORM” Through 7/8. Mon-Sat 10 AM-5 PM, Sun noon-5 PM. Museum of Contemporary Photography, 600 S. Michigan, 312-663-5554, mocp.org. F

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ARTS & CULTURE Charlize Theron in Tully

MOVIES

Mom, the ticking bomb

Like Juno, Diablo Cody’s new comedy Tully is a tale of motherhood and waning youth.

By J.R. JONES

W

hen fledgling screenwriter Diablo Cody was nominated for an Academy Award in 2008, feature writers across the U.S. clicked their heels to learn that she’d once worked as a pole dancer. Her 2005 memoir Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper provided an easy angle on Cody and, combined with her irreverent sense of humor, helped turn her into a media darling.

Inevitably she’s become an object of fun, parodied as an empty vessel on Saturday Night Live and skewered in Bobcat Goldthwait’s movie God Bless America as “the only stripper with too much self-esteem.” Very few screenwriters become even minor celebrities, and one might argue that Cody’s experience has colored her writing; two of her lesser screenplays, for Young Adult (2011) and Ricki and the Flash (2015), deal with women boxed in by their wild reputations.

Despite Cody’s image as a libertine, her two smartest movies—Juno (2007), which won ssss EXCELLENT

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her the Oscar, and Tully, which opened last weekend—both focus on a decidedly more conservative topic, the emotional journey of motherhood. Directed by Jason Reitman, Juno (2007) told the story of a pregnant 16-year-old (Ellen Page) who agrees to give her child up for adoption to a wealthy thirtysomething couple but then gets too intimately involved in their lives for her own good. Tully, also directed by Reitman, unfolds from the perspective of a wife and mother (Charlize Theron) whose postpartum depression following the birth of her third child is alleviated by her growing friendship with a free-spirited, 26-year-old night nanny. In addition to the films’ common concerns, each is driven by a generation gap between the characters, which seems only natural for a writer so concerned with the waning of youth.

When Juno was released, conservatives attacked it for normalizing teen pregnancy, yet over the course of the movie, the cocky title character (Page) learns how messy and

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challenging adulthood can be. Pregnant by a classmate and unwilling to abort the baby, she answers an adoption ad and strikes up a legal agreement with Vanessa (Jennifer Garner), a professional woman who longs for a child, and her husband, Mark (Jason Bateman), a frustrated rock musician now writing commercial jingles. At one point Juno thoughtlessly tells Vanessa how lucky she is not to be pregnant, and the pained expression on the older woman’s face could be Garner’s single best screen moment. Juno bonds with Mark—an overgrown adolescent with his guitars, comic books, and horror videos—and begins dropping in at the couple’s home. Eventually she discovers that their picture-perfect marriage isn’t as stable as it appears, and Mark stuns them both with his decision to divorce Vanessa and give his performing career one last shot. As it turns out, he envies Juno’s youth as badly as Vanessa envies her pregnancy.

Tully also involves a young woman sharing a baby with an older one, though in this case the older woman is the protagonist. Once an aspiring writer, Marlo (Theron) is now hugely pregnant with her third child and exasperated beyond endurance by her second, Jonah, whose kindergarten teachers are complaining about his neurotic meltdowns in class. The birth wipes Marlo out, and her wealthy brother (Mark Duplass), alluding to an earlier episode of postpartum depression, insists on hiring her a highly credentialed night nanny who will mind the baby and bring it to mom only to nurse. Expecting an older woman, Marlo is startled by the arrival of Tully (Mackenzie Davis), a skinny, beatific young woman in a belly T-shirt. When Marlo asks Tully her age, she replies, “I’m older than I look.” But she turns out to be well schooled in infant care, and her cooing attention to the baby allows Marlo, who looks like a train wreck, to begin sleeping more peacefully through the night.

Tully explains that her job is to care for the mother as well as the child, and as the story progresses, she becomes Marlo’s friend, comforter, and life coach. She cleans the house while the family is asleep, and after Marlo makes a chance remark that good mothers send their children to school with cupcakes, Tully leaves a batch for her to find in the morning. The two women begin drinking and

chatting together in the wee hours, and Tully treats Marlo to a makeup party. “You can’t be a good mother unless you practice selfcare,” reasons Tully. Eventually the nanny persuades Marlo to leave her infant with her steady-Eddie husband, Drew (Ron Livingston), and embark on a wild night out to her old neighborhood in Brooklyn, where the two women get hammered at a club and rock out to a deafening band.

Like the husband in Juno, Marlo sees in her lithe young friend a sense of freedom and possibility she has lost. “If I had a dream that didn’t come true, at least I could be pissed off at the world,” she tells Tully. “I’m pissed off at myself.” One of the most humbling scenes in a movie full of them shows the tubby Marlo (Theron gained 50 pounds to play the role) huffing and puffing along a footpath as a fit college student passes her by; incensed, Marlo steps up her pace and manages to pass the student before tumbling to the ground. “It’s milk,” she explains to the student, who stares in disgust at the twin wet spots on her shirt.

Marlo’s nocturnal adventure with Tully provides a temporary thrill, but as it wears on into morning, Marlo realizes she can’t be young again. “Your 20s are great,” she warns Tully, “but then your 30s come around the corner like a garbage truck at 5 AM.” Tully may not win Cody another Oscar, but it’s much better written than Juno, reflecting a decade of practical experience in the screenwriting trade. As a character, Juno functions mainly as a one-liner machine, unloading every comic idea Cody can think up, and Juno’s father (J.K. Simmons) and stepmother (Allison Janney) have a way with words too. Even the shopkeeper who sells Juno pregnancy tests (Rainn Wilson) dispenses such well-polished quips as “What’s the prognosis, fertile Myrtle?” After a while the whole movie begins to feel a little arch. Tully has just as many laughs or more, but they tend to grow out of the action, particularly the physical punishment Marlo endures in bearing a child and caring for it afterward. The story has a philosophical dimension, but fewer things need to be spoken out loud. This stylistic maturity is typical of writers, who tend to improve well into old age and long after most rock stars and strippers. v TULLY sss Directed by Jason Reitman. R, 96 min. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Landmark’s Century Centre, River East 21.

m @JR_Jones

WORTHLESS

MAY 10, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 17

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ARTS & CULTURE

Rachel Weisz, Rachel McAdams, and Alessandro Nivolo in Disobedience

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www.BrewView.com 3145 N. Sheffield at Belmont

Movie Theater & Full Bar 0 $5.0 ion s admisthe for ies Mov

18 to enter 21 to drink Photo ID required

Tue-Thr, May 15-17 @ 7:00pm

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MOVIES

Orthodox Jewish girls in love

With Disobedience, Chilean filmmaker Sebastián Lelio delivers a heavyhanded message about following your heart.

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isobedience, the first English-language feature by Chilean director Sebastián Lelio (Gloria, A Fantastic Woman), considers the constrictive nature of traditional Jewish culture, particularly as it affects the lives of women and homosexuals who grow up within it. The film tells the story of a woman named Ronit (Rachel Weisz), the estranged daughter of a prominent Orthodox rabbi, who returns to the close-knit Jewish community of her youth after her father dies. Having lived amid secular society for years, she inspires contempt in many of her relatives and old acquaintances upon her return; they look down on her (some of them more openly than others) for not being a practicing Jew and for expressing little desire to marry or have children. Two of her childhood friends, Dovid (Alessandro Nivola) and Esti (Rachel McAdams), welcome her back, however, and let her stay in their home.

This leads to problems when it comes out that Ronit and Esti were in love as teenagers and still experience desire for one another. As homosexuality is taboo in Orthodox Judaism, the women face persecution once their secret is revealed, and Esti struggles to reconcile her love for Ronit with her religious faith.

Lelio, who is neither gay nor Jewish, aims to make the story feel universal, emphasizing the women’s feelings of longing and guilt, and

to some extent he succeeds. As usual in the director’s work, the performances are sensitive and relatable, and the leads establish a realistic sense of intimacy. These strengths make Disobedience a compelling tale of forbidden love—one wants to see Ronit and Esti realize their passion and escape the strictures of the Orthodox community. Yet Lelio’s depiction of that community leaves something to be desired. The film lacks the inside feel of Joshua Z. Weinstein’s recent drama Menashe or the documentary Trembling Before G-d (which also considered the plight of homosexuals growing up in Orthodox Jewish communities), not to mention any number of Israeli films on Orthodox life. It’s not that Lelio’s portrait of the community is implausible—the director recruited the help of multiple consultants and the details indeed feel accurate—it’s that the romance so overwhelms the community portrait that one doesn’t really sense the hold that Jewish tradition has over many of the characters.

This problem is evident in the film’s miseen-scene. Whereas superior films about Orthodox life (Menashe, Ronit and Shlomi Elkabetz’s Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem) employ rigid visual compositions that make the characters seem trapped in their lives, Lelio’s framing is loose and sloppy. The characters of Disobedience have plenty of room to

move around within shots; it never feels as though they have to wrestle with their fates.

As a result, Jewish tradition doesn’t register as an especially powerful force—the characters have every opportunity to resist it. One doesn’t really fear for Ronit and Esti, even after their secret is exposed. Rather, one simply waits for them to reject the Orthodox order and act on their love for each other. Lelio still generates some suspense with the premise, inspiring viewers to wonder when the women will choose happiness over repression, but his visual design strongly suggests that they’ll make this choice eventually.

Disobedience isn’t totally without merit on a visual level; the film’s drab color scheme conveys the joylessness of a repressed life where the compositions do not. Lelio and cinematographer Danny Cohen emphasize blacks, browns, and grays, conjuring up a world drained of color. (In fact the film may have been more powerful had it been shot in black and white.) This strategy forces viewers to concentrate on the characters’ behavior, as it’s nearly the sole source of visual interest.

Yet because Lelio fails to convey how repressive Esti’s life is, her rekindled romance with Ronit—which should register like a flash of lightning—doesn’t make the impact that it should. That’s not to say that Weisz and McAdams lack chemistry; it’s just that the performances so clearly delineate the characters’ buried passions that their affair doesn’t seem that shocking once it occurs.

Lelio and cowriter Rebecca Leniewicz also fail to develop Dovid’s character to a satisfying degree. The protege of Ronit’s late father, Dovid applies himself to rabbinical studies with the same devotion he brings to his marriage to Esti. He’s a sensitive soul who clearly wants his wife to be happy, yet the movie is elusive about where his sensitivity comes from. Dovid’s reaction to the women’s romance is oddly understated—it’s possible that he feels stifled under Orthodox culture as well, but the movie provides so little information about his background that it’s difficult to say for certain. The filmmakers operate under the presumption that any sensitive soul would reject a repressive, homophobic culture on principle, and in doing so they trivialize the culture they wish to explore. v DISOBEDIENCE ss Directed by Sebastián Lelio. R, 114 min.

Landmark’s Century Centre, River East 21.

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ARTS & CULTURE Mod Fuck Explosion

MOVIES NEW REVIEWS

Ghost Stories

A real layer cake, this horror lark from British TV guys Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman uses a mystery plot to present a trilogy of scary stories, which are then twisted into the narrative frame as if it were a Möbius strip. A documentary filmmaker who specializes in debunking paranormal events (Nyman) is summoned by a mysterious academic who hands him the files for three unsolved cases; he manages to dispose of the first two (featuring Paul Whitehouse and Alex Lawther respectively) but isn’t prepared for the sophisticated country gentleman (nicely essayed by Martin Freeman) who holds the final piece of the puzzle. Dyson and Nyman subscribe to the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it school of horror: the ghosts are frighteningly graphic but flash onscreen for only an instant, leaving an ugly afterimage in the imagination.

—J.R. JONES 98 min. Fri 5/11, 2:30, 9:30, and 11:40 PM; Sat 5/12, 9:30 and 11:40 PM; Sun 5/13-Mon 5/14, 9:30 PM; and Tue 5/15-Thu 5/17, 2:30 and 9:30 PM. Music Box.

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Hitler’s Hollywood

Critic Rüdiger Suchsland follows From Caligari to Hitler (2014), his documentary history of German cinema between the world wars, with a sequel on the moviemaking of the Third Reich, as controlled by propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. The giant UFA studio, taken over by the Nazis in 1933, was a dream factory on par with any American movie operation, and the documentary challenges viewers to appreciate the extraordinary beauty of the clips presented without forgetting the heinous philosophy they promoted (or sometimes concealed). Suchsland, a careful and observant critic, argues that the Nazi cinema was more varied and politically ambivalent than we might imagine, and he examines a broad range of movies from the era, from anti-Semitic propaganda like the infamous Jew Süss (1940) to “films of legitimization” whose stories softened people up for fascism to dramas released near the end of the war that offered coded critiques of the Nazi regime, just as Hollywood movies hinted at sexual subjects during the same period. Udo Kier narrates.

—J.R. JONES 105 min. Fri 5/10, 2 and 8:15 PM; Sat 5/12, 2 PM; Sun 5/13, 5 PM; Mon 5/14, 8:15 PM; Tue 5/15, 6 PM; Wed 5/16, 8:15 PM; and Thu 5/17, 6 and 8 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center.

In the Last Days of the City

The city is Cairo, and the days are the year leading up to the Egyptian Revolution of 2011. Writer-director Tamer El Said, making his debut feature (2016), follows his filmmaker protagonist (Khalid Abdalla) as he visits his ailing mother, wrestles with a documentary that won’t come together in the editing room, and travels around and around the city looking for a new flat, which allows Said to present a wide range of social detail and note the growing social influence of the Muslim Brotherhood. (In one apartment building, the elevator passes a bumper sticker at each floor reading “Thou shalt not look at women.”) The filmmaker’s project involves refugees from Lebanon and Iraq who send him footage of their new lives in Europe; this is incorporated into the hero’s endless meanderings, which El Said punches up with news-broadcast audio about the growing political tension across Egypt. In Arabic with subtitles. —J.R. JONES 118 min. El Said attends the Sunday screening. Sun 5/13, 4:45 PM; Tue 5/15, 8 PM; and Wed 5/16, 6 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center.

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fishing village, where he finds an unlikely confidante in a sweet, mermaidlike creature, or ningyo, named Lu. The boy discovers that Lu is one of several ningyo living in the ocean beyond the town’s walls, and that music makes these merfolk grow legs and dance, inspiring humans to do the same. The townspeople fear the creatures, so the hero, a fish out of water himself, attempts to unite the two worlds in musical harmony. The loose and dizzy animation style feels crude at first but ultimately registers as fluid and surreal, culminating in a psychedelic sequence near the end. Unfortunately Yuasa and cowriter Reiko Yoshida stay at surface level with the narrative, missing an opportunity to delve into the impact of divorce. —LEAH PICKETT PG, 112 min. At Gene Siskel Film Center, in Japanese with subtitles: Fri 5/11, 6 PM; Sat 5/12, 7:45 PM; Tue 5/15, 8 PM; and Thu 5/17, 8 PM. At Gene Siskel Film Center, dubbed in English: Fri 5/11, 1:45 PM; Sun 5/13, 2:30 PM; Mon 5/14, 6 PM; and Wed 5/16, 6 PM. Also: Century 12 and CineArts 6.

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Mod Fuck Explosion

Jon Moritsugu’s underground film must have been the epitome of cool back in 1994; since then the movie has crossed over from cool to cute, but like its teenage heroes, it goes its own way. A retro plot about warring gangs of mods and rockers collides with Moritsugu’s more timely exasperation with Asian stereotypes in U.S. media; obnoxious punk conceits such as a garden of raw meat are undercut by a tender romance between two virgins deeply concerned about their sexual adequacy. Given the unprintable title, sick jokes, and defiantly low-grade look, this won’t be showing up on Netflix anytime soon, but no one can say it hasn’t survived its moment. —J.R. JONES 67 min. 16mm. Visit chicagoreader.com/movies for Jones’s long review and, posting May 11, Ben Sachs’s interview with Moritsugu. Fri 5/11-Sat 5/12, midnight. Music Box. v

Let the Sunshine In

Loosely inspired by Roland Barthes’s nonfiction book A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments—which dives into the absurd language of solitude and mythology that lovers and would-be lovers recite to themselves and others—this rapturous and faintly comic concerto for Juliette Binoche may well be the most pleasurable and original film Claire Denis has made since Beau Travail (1999). Binoche plays a divorced painter whom Denis pairs sexually, amorously, and/or tentatively with a succession of men played by everyone from Xavier Beauvois to Alex Descas to Gerard Depardieu. The filmmaker’s skill in framing her protagonist’s various trysts, moods, and dialogues, sometimes even setting them to music, is matchless. Novelist Christine Angot collaborated with Denis on the script. —JONATHAN ROSENBAUM 95 min. Fri 5/11-Sun 5/13, 2:45, 5, 7:30, and 9:40 PM; Mon 5/14, 5, 7:30, and 9:40 PM; Tue 5/15, 2:45, 5, 7:30, and 9:40 PM; Wed 5/16, 2:45, 5, and 9:40 PM; and Thu 5/17, 2:45, 5, 7:30, and 9:40 PM. Music Box.

Lu Over the Wall

In this family-friendly anime from Japanese writer-director Masaaki Yuasa, a dispirited teen whose parents have divorced moves with his father from Tokyo to a small

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“A complete delight whether you’re a kid or adult, animation fan or not.” — The Film Stage

“One of the greatest pictures ever made.” — Bilge Ebiri, Village Voice

www.siskelfilmcenter.org MAY 10, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 19

MUSIC

s d n a h t h Eig t h g i l e k ma r o f k r o w t s a o C d Thir n o i s s u c Per Their collaborative spirit has already made them one of the best percussion ensembles in the country—and their upcoming projects could make them the biggest.

By PETER MARGASAK

20 CHICAGO READER - MAY 10, 2018

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ast year Chicago quartet Third Coast Percussion won their first Grammy: Best Chamber Music/ Small Ensemble Performance, for a 2016 album of music by minimalist icon Steve Reich. Reich’s distinctively pulsing music has been part of Third Coast’s repertoire since the ensemble’s founding in 2005, and recently they’ve been invited to perform his work by prestigious institutions such as Columbia University and the Cleveland Museum of Art. For their next season, beginning this fall, TCP will take several programs on the road, includ-

ing a selection of music by another minimalist icon, Philip Glass—he’s even writing a piece for the group, his first ever for a percussion ensemble.

Third Coast Percussion are also thriving in territory less well traveled by new-music groups. In September 2018 at the Harris Theater, they’ll premiere a collaboration with Hubbard Street Dance that also involves Los Angeles-based choreographers and movement artists Emma Portner, Lil Buck, and Jon Boogz—TCP will perform commissioned music composed by pop polymath Devonté Hynes, aka Blood Orange. And this

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Third Coast Percussion, from left: David Skidmore, Peter Martin, Robert Dillon, and Sean Connors é SAVERIO TRUGLIA

weekend Third Coast play music from their latest album, Paddle to the Sea (Cedille), at Thalia Hall—they appear on the venue’s schedule between Andrew Bird and indie-rock band Wye Oak. Spektral Quartet were also nominated for the same Grammy that Third Coast won, but in the past two decades the only other Chicago group to claim such an honor has been Eighth Blackbird. Between that award, their current flurry of high-profile projects, and the vitality of their performances, TCP seem to be on the cusp of breaking out—perhaps to an

international audience (they’re already well-known in the stateside new-music community), perhaps to a crossover crowd outside traditional classical circles.

Since 2013, when TCP landed a five-year appointment as an ensemble in residence at the University of Notre Dame, the four members—David Skidmore, Robert Dillon, Peter Martin, and Sean Connors—have been able to support themselves solely through the group (their residence was recently extended through 2019). Collaborations with artists famous outside the world of classical music—the upcoming project with Hynes, for instance, or their 2015 partnership with Wilco drummer Glenn Kotche, who composed the multimedia work Wild Sound for them—always have the potential to bring in new listeners in large numbers. It’s difficult to determine why one group succeeds and another fails, but TCP have gotten this far in large part due to their self-sufficient business model and cooperative creative process. Before hiring Liz Pesnel, formerly of Windish Agency, to be their managing director in 2015, Third Coast had no outside help running the group, and each musician continues to play a nonmusical role today: Skidmore is executive director, Dillon is development director, Martin is finance director, and Connors is technical director.

From a listener’s point of view, though, the important methodology is musical, not administrative. In 2013, when Third Coast launched their Emerging Composers Partnership to solicit new work from young talent, they stipulated that the process be rigorously interactive. Customarily a composer writes a commissioned piece, sends the group the score, and then gets together with the musicians for a few rehearsals before the premiere. By contrast, TCP ask each composer in this program to visit them at their Ravenswood studio (in a building they share with the likes of Eighth Blackbird and Ensemble dal Niente) at least three times during the writing process, so they can all workshop it together. Currently they’re partnering with composer, singer, and multi-instrumentalist Ayanna Woods (sister of rising soul star Jamila Woods) for a June 17 concert at Constellation. (Disclaimer: It’s part of the Frequency Series that I program.) Even when Third Coast work with more established composers, they prefer to take a hands-on approach whenever possible.

TCP also distinguish themselves by writing music collectively—though composer-performers are common in the new-music world, it’s unusual for the composer to be an entire group. Their second collective work, Paddle to the Sea, is intended as a live score for the 1966 Canadian short film of the same name by Bill Mason (itself based on a 1941 children’s book by Holling C. Holling called Paddle-to-theSea). The 28-minute composition is the centerpiece of their recent album, as well as of the evening-length program they perform on Sunday.

Compared to, say, string quartets, percussion ensembles are a relatively young phenomenon—they became established in the mid-20th century through works by the likes of John Cage and Iannis Xenakis, and Reich’s output in the 1970s helped cement their place. As a result, the repertoire for such groups is relatively paltry, and Third Coast have always actively sought out new work. They’re all Northwestern grads (including cofounder Owen Clayton Condon, replaced by Connors in 2013), and at the suggestion of acclaimed composer Augusta Read Thomas, whom they’d met as students when she still taught there, they began approaching some of their favorite composers in late 2005, not long after forming TCP.

They chose composers who were also teachers and asked them to recommend students who could write something for Third Coast—the fledgling quartet couldn’t pay, but they promised to record each work and perform it several times.

“We learned a lot,” says Skidmore. “We came up with a set instrumentation and asked all of the composers to write for that. We told them what the possible instruments were—so each player had a keyboard instrument, some drums, and some other sounds, basically—and what we found was that every single composer wrote for every single instrument, and they all added three or four extra instruments, so by the time we did a concert of three of the pieces it was a ridiculous setup.” Martin explains that Third Coast also gave all the student composers the same parameters for the duration of their pieces—in combination with the more or less fixed instrumentation, this produced a frustratingly monochromatic body of work. Within a year TCP backed away from those preconditions.

“We gave them lots of instructions up front,” says Dillon, “but we didn’t have a lot of conversations with them as they were writing the pieces, and that was a big takeaway—to have an ongoing discussion as the piece was being written.”

The creative possibilities opened up by such a discussion became beautifully clear to Third Coast in 2011, when they commissioned Thomas to compose what would become Resounding Earth, a concert-length work employing more than 300 bells and other resonant metal objects. “Augusta came up with the idea of the bells, since she loves that sound world, and she recognized early on that she would need it to be very collaborative, and she asked us if we were OK with that,” says Skidmore.

“In the end she must’ve visited the studio at least a dozen times, first to hear all of the instruments we had and decide which ones we should order. We would order a bunch, and she would try them out and send back half of them. Then she would write 15 minutes of music, we’d sight-read through it, and she’d cut ten minutes of that and then go and write 20 minutes more, the whole time asking us what parts we liked and what parts felt right, how to notate it. It was an incredibly collaborative process, and the result was one of the favorite pieces we’ve commissioned. And it’s a piece that would’ve never happened without a really close collaboration between a renowned composer and performers. That experience made us take a step back and realize that we should do it with every composer.”

Thomas sees the process in the same light. “I like it when I get the chance to really work with people and get to know them and talk through and try things differently,” she says.

“I always come super prepared, with, you know, 50 pages of totally notated music, but I’m always willing to say let’s try it slow, let’s try it with different mallets or different bowing—so I’m interested in that kind of spirit and setting up an environment as a composer where it’s positive and it’s fun. It’s about really honoring the artists you’re working with—what can they do, what do they want to do, and how do they do it.”

The experience with Thomas led TCP to require workshopping as part of their Emerging Composers Partnership and motivated them to push for more interaction in their commissions from relatively established composers. “Because we’ve been insistent upon that, we’ve gotten pieces like Donnacha Dennehy’s Surface Tension,” says Skidmore, “which is for specifically tuned tom-toms that you change the tuning of by blowing into them with surgical tubing—not an idea a composer would come up with on their own if they weren’t a J percussionist.”

MAY 10, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 21

TCP play at a TED event at the University of Notre Dame in January 2014, where they also delivered their talk “Never Compromise, Collaborate.” é BARBARA JOHNSTON

Third Coast Percussion perform the third movement of Steve Reich’s Mallet Quartet at the 2017 Grammys with guest saxophonist Ravi Coltrane. é RICH POLK

continued from 21 Kotche credits the members of Third Coast with making his 2015 commission possible. “After they approached me, I came to them with the concept and eventually all of the music and the structure of Wild Sound,” he says. “But that still left plenty of room for collaboration in respect to the multitude of unspecified details concerning setup, transitions both physically and musically, how some of the sounds and instruments would be designed and assembled, as well as many other aspects. Also, they chose the creative and technical team for the actual shows, and all of those individuals had a great impact on the staging and final production. The piece would still exist on paper, but if it hadn’t been done with TCP, I doubt it ever would have actually been performed. The strengths, decisions, and personalities of those four—they poured themselves into the piece and ultimately made it what is was.”

When that sort of intimate interaction hasn’t been possible for TCP’s commissions, it’s often been because they’re working with veteran composers who can’t be so available—Glass is 81 and lives in New York, for instance, and Gavin Bryars is 75 and lives in the UK. Glass plans to finish his piece for Third Coast by this summer, and they’ll visit him to read through it before it’s done. The ensemble skyped with Bryars for The Other Side of the River in 2016.

Intensive collaboration on commissions is the norm for TCP, though, and it allows everyone involved—the composers included—to learn from one another. Though the members of Third Coast rehearse together constantly, there’s still room

22 CHICAGO READER - MAY 10, 2018

for them to strengthen their rapport, and this open, exploratory process accomplishes that—it’s a rarity among classical ensembles, which tend to largely or exclusively play music by outside composers.

Of course, Third Coast also play their own work, most of it written by one member or another—the earliest such piece in their repertoire is Skidmore’s “Echoes” from 2003. Their first collective composition, Reaction Yield, premiered at Thomas’s Ear Taxi Festival in 2016. It was commissioned by the Sounds of Science Commissioning Club, a Utah-based organization that describes itself as “dedicated to the expression of science through music.” According to a blog post by the SoSCC’s president, Glenn Prestwich, “Reaction Yield draws the analogy between the creation of a new composition of music from motif building blocks of tones, aural colors, rhythms, dynamics, and tempi with the process of creating a new composition of matter using a chemical catalog of molecules and a synthetic strategy.”

Paddle to the Sea is a more impressive accomplishment for Third Coast in several ways. It’s the centerpiece of a thematically linked multimedia program, not a stand-alone composition. It arose from a more rigorous process, and it’s a more complex and interesting piece of music. The 65-minute live program (a bit shorter than the CD version) includes film and video projections and three works by outside composers: Glass’s Aguas de Amazonia (in a percussion arrangement by TCP), Jacob Druckman’s Reflections on the Nature of Water (a

suite of solo pieces), and an adaptation of a traditional Shona song called Chigwaya (arranged by Musekiwa Chingodza).

Paddle to the Sea was commissioned by several presenting partners: the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Meany Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Washington, ArtsLive at the University of Dayton, and the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center at Notre Dame. They provided financial support, both in up-front grants and in the form of promised paid gigs at each institution (all of which happened earlier this year).

Tom Welsh, director of performing arts at the Cleveland Museum of Art, came to Third Coast with what turned out to be the seed for the project. He remembers loving the film of Paddle to the Sea as a child. “Somehow I was sure it’s a film that could have real impact on audiences of all ages,” says Welsh.

“So I called the National Film Board of Canada to ask them whether I could commission a new score for the film, and they were agreeable. I immediately thought of Third Coast Percussion, because I know how superb and inventive they are. Plus they’re also composers themselves, meaning for a project like this, the sky’s the limit.”

Connors describes the way the program took shape: “We knew that we wanted to use previously composed music as part of an evening-length performance, so not just the original score but other music as well,” he says. “We wanted the music involved to be connected to the new piece—so we brainstormed and listened to a lot of music and ended up picking what our influences for the composition would be—specifically music that dealt with water, since it’s such a central theme of Paddle to the Sea. We made some arrangements of Philip Glass’s music that became part of the program; we studied music by the master Shona musician Musekiwa Chingodza, who taught us a Shona song about water spirits. Then we brought to the table lots of ideas that were connected—like musically inspired—and we started testing some out in a

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laboratory setting. We spent a full year before a concert could even have been performed developing the ideas.”

In spring 2016, Third Coast began plotting out sections of the score for Paddle to the Sea by developing themes that corresponded to visual elements in the film, such as rushing water or calm water—they created storyboards that specified what each second of footage required before writing any longer pieces of music. They did the bulk of the actual composing that fall, during an intensive two-week residency at the Yellow Barn chamber music center in Putney, Vermont.

“The benefit of cocomposing a long-form work like this is that you have four people, and so you have a never-ending well of ideas,” says Martin. “There is so much content that can be created as a result of working with four people. The difficulty comes with funneling it into a cohesive piece and making sure it sounds like a single voice.”

Early in 2017, Third Coast began collaborating with theater producer and U. of C. assistant professor Leslie Buxbaum Danzig, with whom they’d first worked on the Kotche piece.

They also enlisted video artist Joseph Burke, whose abstract imagery uses the film as source material—a kind of analogue to the way TCP drew ideas from Glass, Druckmann, and Shona traditional music, as Connors notes. The Paddle to the Sea program premiered in October 2017 at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, and Sunday’s concert at Thalia Hall will be its Chicago debut.

“We’ve already recorded our next album, which will come out in February or March of 2019. And we’ve got time set aside in our calendar to record the album after that, and we don’t even know what’s going to be on it yet,” Skidmore says. “This speaks to the organization that was required to create Paddle to the Sea. When we’re at our best creatively, it’s when we aren’t focused on logistics and shit—but that only happens when we focus on logistics and shit, so that when we get to Vermont where we have nothing to do but be creative for two weeks, we can crank out a whole 30-minute film score no problem. But keeping these different areas of our headspaces pretty siloed —it’s a challenge.”

Martin sees Third Coast’s ability to meet that challenge as crucial to their success. “It’s a strength of this ensemble that we’re all willing to do all of this other administrative stuff,” he says. “But our willingness to do it allows us to create exactly the art that we want to create, and we are the people that make those artistic decisions together. I think Paddle to the Sea is the most direct statement of who we are as artists, individually and as an ensemble.” He explains how the elements of the program express different facets of Third Coast’s identity: the Druckman pieces are key building blocks of the percussion repertoire, Glass is one of the group’s favorite composers, and the Shona song represents their interest in non-Western music. The film score they wrote themselves, of course, captures their identity even more directly.

“Third Coast Percussion are outstanding players, and an incredibly tight unit,” Welsh says. “They have that exceedingly rare talent to be able to make appealing even the most difficult or unusual musics. This must be due, in no small part, to their unendingly buoyant personality—rigorous but friendly, never dumbing anything down.”

This versatility and accessibility augur well for Third Coast’s latest project with Hubbard Street Dance. In 2014 the group played Reich’s Drumming to accompany the troupe’s performance of Jiří Kylián’s dance piece Falling

Angels, but their upcoming collaboration will take TCP far from that familiar ground: working with Hynes and with Portner, who’s done videos and tour pieces for Justin Bieber, definitely widens the group’s range of artistic partners.

“Third Coast are, collectively, an undeniably brilliant group of music artists who collaborate very often,” Portner says.

“They are already so open to our ideas and really know what it takes to collaborate successfully. I know they will bring Dev’s ideas to life and beyond. I’m excited for all of these elements to come together.”

Third Coast will no doubt continue to find even bigger opportunities with an even wider range of presenters and collaborators, but their members maintain a level-headed attitude about the niche position of classical music in the larger world—they know that most of the people they reach as their audience grows will be newcomers to these sounds. Because they take pleasure in introducing listeners to what they love, rather than getting frustrated that they still have to do so, they’re in a great position to enjoy a long and healthy career.

“When you’re well versed in contemporary classical music, it’s easy to see Steve Reich or Philip Glass as having some kind of a hegemony on the repertoire,” says Skidmore. “But that’s such an incredibly tiny portion of the world’s population.

THIRD PADDLECOAST PERC US T O TH E SEA SION PRESEN Sun 5/13 TS ,

Allpor t

7:30 , $2 3 - $ 4 PM, Thalia H all, 18 0 0, all-ag 7 S. es

Almost every time we play Steve Reich, I think at least 75 percent of the audience have never heard his music before. I mean, when we left school we assumed everyone in the world had heard of Jacob Druckman, and then all of a sudden no one knows who he is or what a marimba is. It doesn’t lead us to dumb things down, but it does provide a good perspective that when we go onstage and play Steve Reich’s Mallet Quartet, even though we’ve played it hundreds of times, it’s almost certainly the first time everyone in the audience has heard it.

So that keeps it fresh in my mind.” v

m @pmarg

Third Coast Percussion perform Paddle to the Sea at the University of Washington’s Meany Hall on January 25, 2018. é PHILIP D. LANUM

MAY 10, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 23

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MUSIC Logan Hardware on Sunday, May 6. At least it was a lovely day to discover that one of your favorite record stores had thrown in the towel. é LEOR GALIL

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Logan Hardware closes

Owner John Ciba has decided to shut down the Logan Square record store rather than wait for gentrification to kill it.

By LEOR GALIL

A

fter nearly a decade selling music in Logan Square, Logan Hardware quietly said goodbye last month.

After a big sale the weekend of Record Store Day, according to owner John Ciba, “We didn’t open back up again.”

Before abandoning its space on 2532 W. Fullerton, the store will host one final blowout sale on Sunday, May 20, followed by a pop-up sale at nearby Logan Arcade on Wednesday, May 30. When Ciba decribes his decision to close the store, he invokes Lee “Scratch” Perry, who burned his legendary Black Ark studio in 1979 because it had “bad energy.” “The only thing he could do was burn it down,” Ciba says.

“That’s kind of where we’re at.”

In November 2009, when Logan Hardware soft launched at its original 2410 W. Fullerton location, it became the first contemporary record store to open in Logan Square; Saki Records and Bucket o’ Blood Records opened in the neighborhood in spring 2010.

Bucket o’ Blood Records changed ownership

and moved to Avondale in summer 2015, and Saki closed in late 2016. With Logan Hardware closed, the neighborhood’s best-known shops aren’t in Logan Square proper. Bric-aBrac Records is technically in Avondale, as is Record Breakers, which last fall left its space above Reggie’s Rock Club on the near south side and relocated to Avondale near Logan Square. (Disco City, a Latinx music shop right by the Logan Square Blue Line station, has been going strong since 1976.)

“The neighborhood’s changed so much,” Ciba says—and he’s not just talking about its prospects for buying and selling records.

Nearby neighborhood fixture Quenchers, for example, will close in June, six months or so after owner Earle Johnson put the building on the market. Logan Hardware used to face a couple run-down residential buildings—the one on the corner of Fullerton and Maplewood had one of my favorite pieces of neighborhood street art, with JC Rivera’s Bear Champ character boxing Ali 6’s Richie the Raccoon.

Those buildings were razed after a six-story mixed-use building got its construction permits last August; the new building will cost an estimated $2.1 million to build, and according to DNAinfo the rent on its 19 apartments will be $2,500 per month. “It’s better to go out this way now, the neighborhood the way it is, than keep doing it for six months, a year, two years,” Ciba says.

Logan Hardware was where I’d go to buy records, especially when I wasn’t on the hunt for a specific release. The shop largely dealt in used inventory, though it also carried plenty of new music I had trouble finding elsewhere—a cassette compilation from primo underground punk label Not Normal Tapes, for instance, or the latest from the store’s inhouse record label. Digging through the stacks at Logan Hardware could feel like a treasure hunt. The collections were organized by genre and sometimes alphabetically, but beyond that you were on your own—that could be an intimidating prospect, and it was even more so when the store opened its basement, which was stacked with seven-inches from floor to ceiling and in every conceivable crevasse. But I’d rarely leave the shop empty-handed, and I often found more than I expected. Back when I used to go every other week, I’d frequently emerge with a couple cheap emo singles, a stray punk cassette comp, or an armload of unloved but charming private-press LPs. More recently I liked to pick up obscure Dance Mania singles that looked like they’d spent a couple decades in the basement of label owner Ray Barney.

Logan Hardware was also where I found like-minded listeners. I’ve found loose communities at other record stores, but I’ll miss the one that formed at Logan Hardware.

Ciba had a knack for connecting people, even in the shop’s waning months—he recently introduced me to house producer DJ Emanuel, who’d released music on the Relief, Contact, and Trax labels in the 90s. I stopped by the storefront Sunday afternoon to find it closed. Full record crates were stacked up by the door, and potted plants sat in the windows facing Fullerton where rows of seven-inches once stood. The neighborhood had changed again. v

m @imLeor

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Recommended and notable shows and critics’ insights for the week of May 10

MUSIC

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ALL AGES

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PICK OF THE WEEK

Hip-hop duo Shabazz Palaces create their own norms on their two Quazarz albums

é VICTORIA KOVIOS

SHABAZZ PALACES, LEAF SET, DJ JILL HOPKINS

Fri 5/11, 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $20, $18 in advance, 21+

THURSDAY10 Nik Bartsch’s Ronin 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $25. 18+

After Ronin, the long-running band of Swiss pianist and composer Nik Bartsch, dropped its 2010 studio album, Llyria (ECM), the group experienced some major personnel shifts. In 2011 six-string bassist Björn Meyer left the group and was replaced

by Thomy Jordi, who plays a conventional fourstring model. When percussionist Andi Pupato split a year later, Bartsch chose to shrink his quintet into a foursome. This month, the new lineup has finally released a new record. While Awase (ECM) is clearly the product of a leaner combo than that heard on Llyria—with Jordi taking a more rhythmic approach to the bass lines than Meyer—the leader has held fast to his minimalist vision, producing a hypnotic matrix where individual parts

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move furtively in improvisational flurries. Bartsch calls his work “ritual groove music,” and while I’m not sure what the ritual is, there’s no missing the groove. His piano lines form inextricable connections to the stuttery percussive patterns of drummer Kaspar Rast and the steely architecture of Jordi’s electric lines, while reedist Sha remains perpetually free, locking in with the group or roaming as he desires. All of the musicians get their opportunities to leave the nest with extended solo passages, but they never lose their keen sense of groove; solos in Ronin are always woven into the rhythm versus strutting out front and center. The new album is the first to include a tune by someone other than the leader—“A” is by Sha—and a couple of the pieces are reconfigured versions of pieces the quintet recorded. In the case of “Module 60” (all of Bartsch’s pieces use the word module followed by a number), they’ve revamped a piece recorded by the leader’s acoustic project, Mobile. —PETER MARGASAK

LAST JUNE, when Rolling Stone contributor Andrew Matson asked Shabazz Palaces’ Ishmael Butler about the negative critiques of social media he’d gleaned from the songs on the Seattle duo’s 2017 albums, Quazarz vs. the Jealous Machines and Quazarz: Born on a Gangster Star, Butler deflected him, responding, “No, it’s not mostly negative. I just feel like [social media is] too much. It’s too widely accepting without being considered. That’s all.” The interaction reminds me of how critics too often read Shabazz Palaces’ most far-out qualities in comparison to what’s hot at the moment—the music is “delightfully experimental” (the Quietus), filled with “discordant sounds and bizarro abstract lyrics” (Pitchfork), and, uh, whatever mind-numbing hyperbolic drivel A.V. Club writer Clayton Purdom tried to pass off as insight. The point usually concerns where Shabazz Palaces stand in hip-hop, be it in relation to Butler’s past as a member of Digable Planets or in some sort of absurd conversation with current mainstream fare, but all that overthinking ignores the fact that whatever they put out is a natural extension of their personalities—they aren’t actively trying to be weird so much as they’re expressing themselves in a way that’s normal and makes sense to them. And that’s what I find so endearing about Shabazz Palaces: their ability to create a space of their own where their hazy, funk-inflected soundscapes, metallic-overdubbed vocals, and interstellar lyrics are the only sounds that matter. Though the band didn’t initially envision their Quazarz albums as a pair, Sub Pop released them both on the same July day last year. As Butler told Bandcamp, Shabazz Palaces had already put Jealous Machines to bed when he traveled to LA and emerged from a brief stint at an local studio with the songs that became Born as a Gangster Star. Intent aside, by releasing the albums in tandem, Shabazz Palaces built a hip-hop galaxy. Though it’s not without its faults, the joint release is as immersive as it is imposing in size. —LEOR GALIL

Loma é BRYAN C. PARKER

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FRIDAY11

Sun Speak é JACOB BOLL

Loma Jess Williamson opens. 9 PM, Schubas, 3159 N. Southport, $12. 18+ Though I’ve tried often in the past, I’ve never been particularly moved by the music made by either Shearwater or former Chicagoans Cross Record, but there’s something about Loma—the new project from Jonathan Meiburg of the former and Emily Cross and Dan Duszynski of the latter—that’s gripped me these last few weeks. The group’s self-titled Sub Pop debut is a slow dazzler, with Cross at her most smoky and soulful as the group unfurls melodies at a crawl worthy of Low. Their thrilling soundscapes continually shift; the dramatic tilt of “Joy” conjures a boat being tossed around by giant waves, and the ephemeral, almost weightlessly gauzy electro-throb of “Relay Runner” suggests what Fleetwood Mac might sound like if they were still willing to make an interesting record. Cumulatively it comes across as if the members of Loma have found endless inspiration together, imagining one disparate setting after the next, and studding each tune with little sonic details. The songs deliver a series of poignant existential meditations. “I Don’t Want Children” is a devastating dreamscape where Cross imagines the tenderness and unity she can’t see in a lover through the eyes of the children she knows they’ll never have

together. The rustic “Sundogs” offers weathered, bittersweet memories of a lost love that was snuffed out by death—“I could live twice / If I could see you alive and unfrozen,” sings Cross with weary resignation. —PETER MARGASAK

Shabazz Palaces See Pick of the Week on page 26. Leaf Set opens, and Jill Hopkins DJs between sets. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $20, $18 in advance. 21+

Sun Speak with Sara Serpa 9 PM, Hungry Brain, 2319 W. Belmont, $8. 21+ The first time I heard “Bogalusa,” the soulfully grooving jam that closes Sun Speak’s new album, Sun Speak With Sara Serpa (Flood Music), I had to double-check to make sure it wasn’t a cover. It has a melodic sprawl that oozes southern charm, with an opening lick that evokes Sam Cooke’s immortal “A Change Is Gonna Come,” but as drummer Nate Friedman lays out the massive, loping beat and

Matt Gold rips into his meaty chords, it’s clear that the duo is tapping into a familiar tradition and putting a spin on it that suggests the Dirty Three rolling through Memphis. The tune is an anomaly on the record in a couple of ways; it’s the only one of the six that doesn’t feature the weightless singing of Portuguese jazz vocalist Sara Serpa, and it’s the only track that eschews the sparkling, shape-shifting arrangements that mark the rest of the recording.

The glistening opener, “Place in Time,” sets the Wendell Berry poem “Sabbaths” to a consistently changing arrangement that toggles between a gliding, skipping rhythm and beatless fantasias that give full flight to Serpa’s improvisational instincts.

Serpa has excelled in small-group settings, whether singing against the austere piano of Ran Blake or supported by the bossa-kissed arrangements of her husband, guitarist Andre Matos. While Sun Speak often follows suit, the duo isn’t afraid of some scuffed-up, slightly rude accompaniment that underlines the gossamer fineness of her singing.

My favorite piece is “Basin,” where Gold evokes the undulating twang of Bill Frisell and Serpa creates an entirely wordless sound world with an extended melody that gently flutters, shimmies, and slides as it cradles the outlines of the terse grooves forged by her partners. Tonight the duo celebrates the release of the album with Serpa. —PETER MARGASAK

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MAY 10, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 27

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SATURDAY12 Vijay Iyer Sextet 8:30 and 10 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $35, $30 in advance. 18+ Composer and pianist Vijay Iyer has taken advantage of his heightened visibility as a Harvard professor, MacArthur fellow, and ECM Records artist to pursue multiple projects, a puzzle of disparate interests that form an intriguing mosaic of his creative mind-set. While Far From Over (ECM), the debut from his agile sextet, certainly shares ideas he’s explored in his trio and in an old quartet with saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa (especially the ongoing influence of his piano mentor, Andrew Hill), it carves out its own driving, rhythmically limber space. Few tracks illustrate Iyer’s range like the opener, “Poles,” in which a chamberlike, meditative introduction featuring the ghostly arco lines of bassist Stephan Crump, the cymbal skitter of drummer Tyshawn Sorey, and the leader’s slowly accreting melodies suddenly explodes into a sleek, jittering groove as the band’s three horn players— alto saxophonist Steve Lehman, tenor saxophonist Mark Shim, and cornetist Graham Haynes—navigate a pointillistic arrangement with unison lines pulling apart into off-kilter triads only to masterfully snap back into place. As the piece opens up, Lehman forges a corkscrewing, elliptical solo that feeds on a polyrhythmic fury churned out by Iyer and Sorey. That’s followed by an introspective exploration by Haynes as Iyer deftly switches to Fender Rhodes and brakes the groove into eventual silence. The title track pulsates like a jacked-up Morse code transmission, bursting with energy in a triumphant, almost martial theme, while on “Nope” Sorey brilliantly leads the group into a heady funk.

For every bit of explosive, tightly coiled energy within tracks such as “Down to the Wire,” there’s an opposing loose, expansive vibe, such as that on the soulful trio performance of “For Amiri Baraka.” For tonight’s performance Marcus Gilmore, the spectacular percussionist in Iyer’s working trio, subs for Sorey. —PETER MARGASAK

MONDAY14 Yonatan Gat The Eternals with Nick Mazzarella and Health & Beauty open. 9 PM, Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, $12. 21+ Israel-born, New York-based guitarist Yonatan Gat is still best known for his stint in Tel Aviv trio Monotonix, who made a lasting impression on rock audiences last decade with their maniacal anythinggoes showmanship and fiendish take on heavy garage rock; in fact their performances were so legendary their records often got short shrift in comparison, possibly due to lack of Smell-o-Vision and the slight but real chance of physical danger that came with being in their crowds. Ever since the band parted ways in 2011, Gat has been doing his best to remedy that injustice with a series of solo records

28 CHICAGO READER - MAY 10, 2018

that showcase his chops to mesmerizing effect.

For his first full-length, Director (2005), he restlessly roamed the globe for inspiration and came back with Brazilian beats and Middle Eastern melodies as well as jazz experimentations and eerie avant-garde stylings. The new Universalists (Joyful Noise) has the same multicultural spirit as well as the meditative space to breathe on songs such as the gorgeous “Medicine,” a collaboration with the Eastern Medicine Singers, an Algonquin drum group. It all culminates in a mind-vibrating sonic collage, “The Imaginary.” —MONICA KENDRICK

Mutoid Man Lazer/Wulf and Armed open.

8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 2100 W. Belmont, $18. 17+ When Mutoid Man formed in 2012, it seemed their goal was simply to shred—and shred they did.

Originally conceived as the two-piece of Stephen Brodsky of prog-rock/space-metal act Cave In on guitar and vocals and Ben Koller of obtuse artcore legends Converge on drums, Mutoid Man took the most over-the-top elements of their other bands and ran with them—combining eight-armed drumming, mind-numbing time shifts, spaced-out guitar wizardry, and theatrical vocal hooks. Last summer Mutoid Man—now fleshed out to a trio with bassist Nick Cageao—released their third record, War Moans (Sargent House). As many techy hardcore dudes tend to do as they get a little bit older, they take a deep breath of sorts this time around. With a sharper focus on groove and melody, the album finds the band members laying out the most digestible, catchy choruses of their careers over straightforward driving rhythms. The shred still lives—the title track even features a guest guitar solo from speed-metal master Marty Friedman of Cacopho-

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Vijay Iyer Sextet é LYNNE HARTY ny and Megadeth—but Mutoid Man’s love of pop and regular ol’ rock ’n’ roll is fully on display as well.

Continuing with this formula, Mutoid Man’s latest project is an online cover series that started last month; the first track is a take on the swinging Tom Jones classic “She’s a Lady.” —LUCA CIMARUSTI

Midori Takada 7:30 PM, Rubloff Auditorium, Art Institute of Chicago, 230 S. Columbus, $20, $10 members. b A little over a year ago, New York label Palto Flats collaborated with Swiss imprint WRWTFWW to reissue Midori Takada’s beautifully meditative 1983 solo album Through the Looking Glass, galvanizing an unlikely comeback, and—for many listeners—a discovery. Takada is an imaginative Japanese percussionist whose work in the 80s and 90s gracefully dissolved lines between free jazz, minimalism, and new age. The sound she developed still rings utterly contemporary, melding pulsing rhythms on tuned percussion and sharing Steve Reich’s adaptation of the circular rhythms of West Africa—but creating something more fragile and less mechanistic. On both Through the Looking Glass and Lunar Cruise, her ravishing 1990 collaboration with jazz pianist Masahiko Sato, which was also reissued last year, she created a dynamic vision, strewn with mesmerizing epics that build from slowly alternating patterns of marimba, keyboards, and drums.

The latter album, which features Yellow Magic Orchestra vet Harumi Hosono on bass and sounds a bit dated in its booming drum sound and production, puts a pop veneer on a wide range of grooves and atmospheres, as on the Arabic-tinged “A Vanished Illusion.” Before making those solo records Takada collaborated with traditional musicians from Ghana, Burkina Faso, and Senegal. She distilled those experiences in her Japanese group Mkwaju Ensemble—whose 1981 debut, Ki-Motion, will be the latest Takada title to be reissued by WRWTFWW when it comes out this June. Rather than baldly emulating what she experienced in

those collaborations, she created modern, richly pulsing music that refracts African rhythms as drum beats pile up and pull apart within a seamless mixture of electronics and marimba. Video of a recent solo performance indicates that her current practice features deftly programmed, bracing, and meditative drum and marimba music. —PETER MARGASAK

WEDNESDAY16 Heffyraps $ike the Drug and Sammy L open.

9 PM, Subterranean, 2011 W. North, $10. 17+ On a March episode of Roy French’s Chicago rap YouTube series 106 & Clark (a riff on defunct BET show 106 & Park), HeffyRaps talked about focusing on a specific sound on his latest self-released EP, February’s Dead by V-Day. “I’ve been only rapping for a year, so I’ve just been kinda fuckin’ around trying everything,” he said. “I really started getting my shit together for this EP and figuring out what I wanted to do—and I started embracing that vulnerability inside.” That eureka moment shows on the EP. When it came out, those sounds he made for himself turned out to be on point with what everyone— including thirsty rappers, Soundcloud-savvy teens, and major-label A&R execs—appeared to want. On Dead by V-Day he blends pop-rap inspired by emo’s 2000s pop-punk phase with buttery R&B and a hint of the aggression that first defined so-called Soundcloud rap. The best results, such as the melting soul vocal hook on “White Ladders,” feel like something Post Malone would want to steal—it emanates pop but retains rap in its core. —LEOR GALIL

Rival consoles 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $15. 21+ Last month London DJ and producer Ryan Lee West (aka Rival Consoles) told PopMatters J

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that his latest LP, April’s Persona (Erased Tapes), has “lots of subtlety across the record that excites me more than something that is loud or more intense.” Indeed, Persona has enough sonic complexity to whet the appetite of a filmmaker searching for ambitious, fluid, and immersive electronic instrumental music for her soundtrack without the 80s-nostalgia trappings of Stranger Things or the overdramatic blasts that fester in Inception that are both so common in film and music these days.

Loosely inspired by the 1966 Ingmar Bergman film of the same name, Persona blossoms as West explores meditative states. Take the quiet, echoing synths that nudge along the sedate “Be Kind,” or the razor-sharp synth patterns that twist and turn throughout “I Think So”; the minor changes in those crucial elements help alter their environ-

Midori Takada

ments, making each track feel like uninhabited terrain worth exploring over and over again. —LEOR GALIL

é COURTESY THE ARTIST

Andrew Trim Quintet 9 PM, Fulton Street Collective, 1821 W. Hubbard. Suggested donation $10, or $5 with student ID. b The longer jazz exists, the more it broadens and splinters into new directions—a situation that in recent decades has not only made it harder to define but also to determine its high-water marks.

That’s one of the reasons I admire the wide net cast by Chris Anderson, who runs the Jazz Art Record Collective, a live-music series that enlists local musicians to interpret some of their favorite albums front to back. Anderson doesn’t place

strict parameters on their choices, and I was thrilled to see that one of my all-time favorite albums—and certainly one of the best jazz recordings of the last 30 years—is getting the treatment from former Chicago guitarist Andrew Trim. Ask the Ages (Axiom) is the 1991 masterpiece by guitarist Sonny Sharrock, a jazz guitarist who fearlessly enfolded some of the most ferocious noise and abrasiveness ever waxed into his best work. The record capped a triumphant comeback for a musician who’d been overlooked in his youth. Joined by titans including saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, drummer Elvin Jones— both crucial sidemen of John Coltrane—and bassist Charnett Moffett, he forged a mix of devastatingly beautiful melodies and lacerating, soul-searching

improvisations that balanced lyric tenderness with uncharted leaps into the abyss. The rest of the band followed his example, turning in performances at the peak of their abilities. I have to salute Trim’s chutzpah in taking on a set of music so inextricably linked to the personality of its high-octane roster.

In order to accurately replicate the arrangements, which often feature overdubbed lines, he’s enlisted a second guitarist, Matt Gold of Sun Speak (see Friday), to join him. Fortuitously, Gold had also been thinking about interpreting the record for the JRAC series when Trim approached him. The rest of the very capable band includes saxophonist Nate Lepine, bassist Matt Ulery, and drummer Quin Kirchner.

—PETER MARGASAK v

3855 n lincoln ave.

chicago ANNA SOLTYS

& THE FAMILIAR

ALBUM RELEASE FRI 5/18 W/ ODE, AMI SARAIYA

MAURICE MOBETTA BROWN

FRI JUNE 1 for complete listings, tickets, and social updates...

martyrslive.com 30 CHICAGO READER - MAY 10, 2018

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FOOD & DRINK

MOCCOZY | $ R 3333 N. Broadway 872-802-4030

From left: paejeon (savory pancakes); haemul dolsot bibimbop (seafood bibimbop); kimchi and rice é NEIL BURGER

RESTAURANT REVIEW

Scorched rice, charred pancakes, and pork-and-kimchi stew

The Boystown Korean mom-and-pop Moccozy does three things extraordinarily well.

By MIKE SULA

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ots of cultures find beauty in burnt rice. In Spain it’s socarrat, the crispy layer of bomba that adheres to the paella pan. In Persia it’s tahdig, the saffron-stained crust of basmati that scrapes up from the bottom of the pot. In Senegal, the chef treats herself to the xoon, the dark matrix of broken rice that lurks beneath her thiebu djeun, the national dish of fish and rice.

Koreans call it nurungi, and they, like the rest of the world, know that this is the very best part of whatever dish it appears in. In

this case that’s dolsot bibimbap, which is the apogee of Korea’s most popular culinary export outside of barbecue and kimchi.

If you’ve flown in or out of Korea, you’ve probably been served bibimbap on the plane.

That’s the dish’s lowest form, but it still beats steamed salmon and peas. Bibim means “mixed.” Bap means “rice.” And the infinite forms bibimbap takes suggests that there are no limits on what can contribute to it. In rare cases it comes with raw fish, or beef tartare, or snails and soybean paste, but most often

it’s topped with a combination of steamed and/or pickled vegetables and very often a fried egg or some other kind of protein. At the point of service you’re meant to squirt it with a thick, hot, sweet sauce made from long red chile peppers, then mix it all up and spoon it in in great mouthfuls, because its warm, wet, spicy, sweet, crunchy comfort makes you lose all inhibition.

But nurungi adds another dimension to the mix, a toasty, chunky crunchiness that takes it to another level. Prepared properly,

it’s pleasing to all the senses. Usually you can hear it snap, crackle, and pop before you see it leave the kitchen, but when you do it’s in a blazing hot stone bowl—a dolsot—that would crush your foot if your server dropped it. Hopefully he doesn’t, and when he places it in front of you, its billowing steam fogs your eyes and bathes your face with its perfume.

You can get dolsot bibimbap at lots of Korean restaurants, barbecue and otherwise, but the quality of its execution can be just as variable as the bulgogi and galbi can. Haste, sloppiness, and insufficient heat are the enemies of a good nurungi.

It’s rare to come across a specialist, so when I hear of one I investigate. Sleuths at LTHForum recently found one in an unlikely place. Moccozy is a small, five-month-old restaurant in Boystown that does dolsot bibimbop extremely well. At times it sounds like there’s a brush fire in the tiny kitchen behind the register, where 46-year-old Kim Young Hee heats her dolsot to a ferocious temperature, which produces an extraordinarily thick nurungi that, when you dig at it with your spoon, lifts from the bowl to be distributed among the softer rice and vegetables in chunky mouthfuls of crispiness. It’s a relatively minimal presentation—steamed spinach, bean sprouts, mushrooms, shredded raw carrot, and cucumber—but the sesame-seed-sprinkled proteins offered are a little more varied. In addition to the common fried egg, you might try it with tender, sweet slices of short rib or squid, shrimp, and a fat green-lipped mussel. Anyway you take it, what’s key here is the rice, which after all is the foundation of the Korean table.

Some people don’t take nurungi in its crispy form. They refuse to scrape the rice when it’s served, and when they’ve eaten to the bottom of the bowl, they pour hot tea or water into it, extinguishing the scorch and creating a thin porridge called sungnyung.

Personally, I can’t relate to this, but if it’s the way you roll, Kim’s husband, Kwon Young Sok, works the front of the house with J

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FOOD & DRINK

Bibimbap; galbi (short ribs) é NEIL BURGER

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gentle deliberation, pouring refills of the roasted corn tea that will start your gruel.

Moccozy is a minimalist mom-and-pop shop. No vast array of banchan, side dishes, will supplement your meal (bibimbap historically was seen as a way to dispatch leftover banchan). But with whatever you order you’ll receive a few—a small dish of kimchi, perhaps a salad of cauliflower and brussels sprouts, perhaps some sliced fish cake.

Much of the remaining menu is straightforward: sizzling-hot platters of galbi, beef or chicken bulgogi, fried rice, chap chae, and

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dumplings, steamed or fried. But there are two other common dishes that are uncommonly well prepared.

Pajeon, the thick, savory pancake that too frequently arrives gummy and undercooked, takes after the dolsot bibimbap, arriving with a fetching, smoky char. Here it’s haemul pajeon, so it’s bulging with seafood—squid, shrimp, and strips of surimi—and sliced into wedges you dip in the vinegar-soy cocktail to the side, then savor their crispy edges and soft interior.

There’s a single soup on the menu, an ordi-

nary version of the soft-tofu soup sundubu, but unlisted and lurking within Kim’s kitchen is a secret stew, a roiling kimchi jjigae, thick with tofu, pickled cabbage, and chunks of fatty pork belly in a bubbling broth, whose predominant spiciness is undercut with a delicate sweetness.

I’m a partisan of specialists, and though they may not think of themselves as such, the husband-and-wife team behind Moccozy are specialists of rare power. v

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○ Watch a video of Kelton working with sweet-and-sour sauce in the kitchen—and get the recipe—at chicagoreader.com/food.

FOOD & DRINK

Carryout Cobbler é CHRIS BUDDY

COCKTAIL CHALLENGE

Tiki takeout time A Sportsman’s Club bartender creates a sweet-and-sour cocktail to pair with crab rangoon.

By JULIA THIEL

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AURA KELTON (SPORTSMAN’S CLUB) and ELIZABETH MICKIEWICZ (EZ INN) have a habit of ordering “a lot” of sushi when they’re together, Kelton says—and the sweetand-sour sauce that comes with the crab rangoon is one of her favorite parts. So naturally, when Mickiewicz was choosing an ingredient that Kelton would have to use in a cocktail, she settled on sweet-and-sour sauce.

Though no one knows for sure where crab rangoon originated, the Trader Vic’s Polynesian-themed restaurants are often credited with inventing the appetizer common on Chinese, Thai, and other Asian menus, an association that Kelton decided to play on by making a tiki drink in the style of a sherry cobbler. “It’s light and low ABV, but it’s still got a lot of fun tropical flavors that I think are really highlighted by the sweet-and-sour sauce,” she says.

Sweet-and-sour sauce is usually made with pineapple juice, a flavor that Kelton highlighted by infusing Peychaud’s Aperitivo with pineapple pulp and using a “beautiful, robust, naturally flavored pineapple rum” as the main spirit. A couple different sherries “pull out the nuttiness and bring some richness to the drink,” while the aperitivo highlights the fruit notes while adding a little bitterness and an anisette quality, she says. For the sauce itself Kelton stuck with tradition, squeezing packets of it into her cocktail rather than making her own version.

In honor of the drink’s origins, Kelton named it the Carryout Cobbler. “We’re going to serve it large format in a deli [container], and much like when I’m ordering copious amounts of takeout food, it’s meant to be shared with a friend.”

CARRYOUT COBBLER

2 OZ LUSTAU EAST INDIA SOLERA SHERRY 2 OZ LUSTAU OLOROSO SHERRY 2 OZ PLANTATION STIGGINS’ FANCY PINEAPPLE RUM 2 OZ PINEAPPLE-INFUSED PEYCHAUD’S APERITIVO 3 PACKETS SWEET-AND-SOUR SAUCE PINEAPPLE, ORANGE, AND LEMON SLICES MINT, SOY SAUCE, AND PINEAPPLE LEAVES (FOR GARNISH) In two mixing tins, muddle several pineapple, orange, and lemon slices. Add the other ingredients (half in each tin), ice cubes, and shake. Line the sides of a large deli container with lemon and orange slices, add crushed ice, and pour in some of the cocktail through a strainer. Repeat until the container is full, then garnish with orange slices, pineapple leaves, and a sprig of mint doused in soy sauce. Serve with two straws.

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WHO’S NEXT:

Kelton has challenged CARLY GASKIN of CELESTE to create a cocktail with GAS STATION PORK RINDS. v

m @juliathiel MAY 10, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 33

JOBS

SALES & MARKETING Telephone Sales Experienced/aggressive telephone closers needed now to sell ad space for Chicago’s oldest and largest newspaper rep firm.

Immediate openings in Loop office. Salary + commission.

312-368-4884.

TELEMARKETING/ FUNDRAISING/VETERANS

Spring/Memorial Day Campaign.

Part-time, Full-time, Set your own schedule. START TODAY!

Call/text 312-256-5035

General THE FEDERAL HOME Loan Bank

of Chicago is seeking a Credit Analyst in Chicago, IL with the following requirements: BS in Mathematics, Finance, Accounting or a related field and 2 years related exp. Prior experience must include the following: develop and implement credit analysis models including Impairment Analysis, Risk Rating, and Loan Loss Reserve (1.5 yrs); conduct credit-related analysis based on asset quality, debt obligation and liquidity condition (2 yrs); perform financial statement analysis to determine financial health and credit worthiness of businesses or institutions (2 yrs); evaluate the performance of statistical models, including linear regression and time series models (1.5 yrs); use software and programing languages including SQL Server, Access, Visual Basic and R to query, process and manage data from relational databases (1.5 yrs). Send resume to recruiting@fhlbc.com.

IDEANOVA TECHNOLOGIES seeks SOFTWARE ENGINEER (Android) in Naperville (Chicago area). Duties: research/design/ development of new applications & modification of existing applications focusing on secure Android & web-based interfaces, video streaming & encryption, playback of encrypted media; development & use of testing tools. Requires: bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and 36 months experience as software developer or computer programmer (experience must have included: frequent use of Android development, JavaScript/HTML5, SQL, C#; some use of encryption/

security & video encoding/ programming; some experience learning a new programming language/protocol/technology).

Email résumé to: info@ideanovatech.com.

MONTESSORI PRESCHOOL DIRECTOR Work in Chicago, IL. Plan, direct & monitor curriculum impl &

activities. Responsible for running facility, programming integration, resources request, staff hiring, evaluation & training, open house & staff mtgs, policy & procedures, program offering, schedule & duty assignments, budget & funding, parents & community relationship, standards & goals, maintaining attendance, planning & records, writing articles, manuals & promotional literature distribution.

Bachelor Degree in Montessori Education, 1 yr Montessori Lead Teacher exp, AMS Early Childhood Credential req’d. Mail resume to JC Mountainbear, Montessori Gifted Prep LLC, 4754 N. Leavitt St. Chicago, IL 60625. EOE

TECHNOLOGY ADVISORY MANAGER, CYBERSECURITY (MULTI.POS.),

PricewaterhouseCoopers Advisory Services LLC, Chicago, IL.

Software Automation Test Engineer – Comcast Cable Comm, LLC, Chicago, IL. Contribute w/i Multichannel Video Program Distributor QA team, resp. for ensure SW apps are thoroughly tested thru release process. Reqs. Bach in CS, Engin or rltd & 2 yrs. exp. build & maintain test automation scripts & frameworks, use Java, JavaScript, C# & Selenium. Apply to: Kintul_saxena@comcast.com.

Refer to Job ID #2216 PT Adm Asst/ Acctg & HR Part time position in Schaumburg office for Acctg and HR. Required to have good skills in communications, phone, PC & Microsoft Office.

Call Zoila 847-995-1300, zchavarria@asen.com, www.asen.com.

PART-TIME HOUSE CLEANERS: Daytime hours. Drivers license

a plus. No experience necessary. We do background checks. Next to Purple Line Call our recruiter Nicolette 847-875-6463.

PLEASE APPLY WITHIN With resume 1155 North Wells Chicago IL 60610

RENTALS

STUDIO $500-$599 CHICAGO, BEVERLY/CAL Par k/Blue Island: Studio $625 & up; 1BR $700 & up; 2BR $885 & up.

Heat, Appls, Balcony, Carpet, Laundry, Parking. Call 708-3880170 WHITE/HISPANIC MALE receiving SSI + back pay installments

seeking cheapest studio apartment.

Southwest side. 773-621-4479

king crab house 1816 N. Halsted St., Chicago

Implement, design & maintain security architecture & strategies to deliver consulting security solutions to clients. Req. Bach’s deg or foreign equiv. in MIS, Comp.

Sci. or rel. + 5 yrs post-bach’s prog. rel. work exp.; OR a Master’s deg or foreign equiv. in MIS, Comp. Sci. or rel. + 3 yrs rel. work exp. Travel up to 80% req. Apply by mail, referencing Job Code IL1740, Attn: HR SSC/Talent Management, 4040 W. Boy Scout Blvd, Tampa, FL 33607.

HELP WANTED!

THE FEDERAL HOME Loan Bank

(Some Experience Needed)

of Chicago is seeking a Sr. Quality Assurance Analyst in Chicago, IL with the following requirements: BS in Computer Engineering or a related field and 5 years related exp. Prior experience must include the following: design Reusable Actions in Rstar and Dstar to build test cases and test data (3 yrs); develop automation scripts using any testing framework (5 yrs); create SQL queries to test back end data of applications in SQL Server Management Studio and Oracle (5 yrs); develop automation scripts using Selenium and Vb.Net (2 yrs). Send resume to recruiting@ fhlbc.com.

Prep Cook

& Dishwasher Apply In-Person (after 4:00 pm)

{ { SERVERS NEEDED

REAL ESTATE

R U O Y AD E R E H

312-280-8990

STUDIO $600-$699 Chicago, Hyde Park Arms Hotel, 5316 S. Harper, elevator bldg, phon e/cable, switchboard, fridge, priv bath, lndry, $165/wk, $350/bi-wk or $650/mo. Call 773-493-3500

STUDIO $700-$899 LARGE STUDIO APARTMENT

near Morse red line. 6824 N. Wayne.

Hardwood floors. Pets OK. $750/ month. Heat included. Available 7/1 (773) 761-4318

LARGE STUDIO APARTMENT

near Loyola Park. 1329 W. Estes.

Hardwood floors. Cats OK. $775/ month. Heat included. Available 6/1 (773) 761-4318

STUDIO $900 AND OVER 2650 N. LAKEVIEW

#403, roomy studio in high rise, on site: indoor pool, gym, grocery, prkg. $1400/mo. Rich, 773-621-2045 773288-0640

STUDIO OTHER EAST CHICAGO - Harborside Apartments accepting applications for SECTION 8 1 & 2 Bedroom Apartments. Apply Wednesdays ONLY from 12pm to 4pm at 3610 Alder St. Applications are to be filled out on site. Adult applicants must provide a current picture ID and SS card.

û NO SEC DEP û 6829 S. Perry.

2.5 room. $475/mo. 1BR. $530/mo HEAT INCL 773-955-5105 CROSSROADS HOTEL SRO SINGLE RMS Private bath, PHONE,

CABLE & MAIDS. 1 Block to Orange Line 5300 S. Pulaski 773-581-1188

Ashland Hotel nice clean rms.

24 hr desk/maid/TV/laundry/air.

Low rates daily/weekly/monthly.

South Side. Call 773-376-5200

1 BR UNDER $700

1 MILLION

PEOPLE MONTHLY IN PRINT & DIGITAL.

bly Clean Highrise STUDIOS, 1 & 2 BEDROOMS Facing Lake & Park.

Laundry & Security on Premises.

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

SPRING INTO SAVINGS! "Let Us Help" qualified applicants receive 1 month FREE RENT. Newly Remod. 1 & 2 BR w/heat start at $650. 3BR & up start at $900. Section 8 Welcome. For info call: (773)412-1153 Wesley Realty 65TH & EBERHART - 2BR apt in

quiet 6-flat. washer/dryer on premises, CAC, $775/mo. 1st and last month rent, background & credit check required. Call Matt at (312)4769474

PRE-SPRING SPECIAL - CHICAGO South Side Beautiful Studios, 1,2,3 & 4 BR’s, Sec 8 ok. Also Homes for rent available. Call Nicole 312-446-1753; W-side locations Tom 630-776-5556; NEWLY REMOD 1BR & Studios starting at $580. No sec dep, move in fee or app fee. Free heat/hot water. 1155 W. 83rd St., 773-619-0204

CONTACT US TODAY!

312-222-6920

WOODLAWN 2BD-$900 3BD-$1000M OVE in by Jun 1 Free TV & No Security Niki 773-8082043

CHICAGO W. SIDE 3859 W Maypole Rehabbed studios, $450/ mo, Utilities not included. 773-6170329, 773-533-2900 Newly updated, clean furnished rooms in Joliet, near buses & Metra, elevator. Utilities included, $91/wk. $395/mo. 815-722-1212 NICE ROOM w/stove, fridge & bath Near Aldi, Walgreens, Beach, Red Line & Buses. Elevator & Laundry. $133/wk & up. 773-275-4442 BIG ROOM with stove, fridge, bath & nice wood floors. Near Red Line & Buses. Elevator & Laundry, Shopping. $121/wk + up. 773-561-4970

SEC 8 WELC 7446 S. Vernon.

1BR, 1st flr, remod hdwd floors, appls & heat incl, laundry on site. $700/mo & up. Z. 773-406-4841

7425 S. COLES - 1 BR $620, 2

BR $735, Includes Free heat & appliances & cooking gas. (708) 424-4216 Kalabich Mgmt 6930 S. SOUTH SHORE DRIVE Studios & 1BR, INCL. Heat, Elec, Cking gas & PARKING, $585-$925, Country Club Apts 773-752-2200

NO SEC DEP

7801 S. Bishop. 2BR. $610/mo. HEAT INCL 773-955-5106

1 BR $700-$799 LARGE SUNNY ROOM w/fridge & microwave. Near Oak Park, Green Line & Buses. 24 hr Desk, Parking Lot $101/week & Up. (773)378-8888

7022 S. SHORE DRIVE Impecca-

REACH OVER

7520 S. COLES - 1 BR $520, 2 BR $645, Includes appliances & AC, Near transp., No utilities included (708) 424-4216 Kalabich Mgmt

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

773-637-5957

WEST HUMBOLDT PK, 1 & 2BR Apts, spacious, oak wood flrs, huge closets. heat incl, rehab, $815 & $915. Call 847866-7234 2032 EAST 72ND Pl. 2BR, 1BA,

condo, 2nd floor. appliances incl. No Pets. $1,050/month plus security. heat included. 312-497-2819

1 BR $800-$899 HUMBOLDT PARK APARTMENT with one bedroom. Near

shopping area. Walking distance to Walmart. Near public transportation CTA and blue line train. 290 and 90 expressways 10 minutes drive distance. 880.00 per month plus security deposit. Includes heat gas.

773.592.2989

MONTROSE/ CLARENDON VINTAGE one bedroom. Sunny/

bright, across from park, heat/ gas included. Miniblinds/ ceiling fans.

Free laundry, private porch, block Montrose Harbor. $895. 773-9733463.

SECTION 8 WELCOME 110th & Vernon. Huge 1BR w/DR,

Quiet Bldg w/long term tenants, heat/appls incl, Laundry Rm, $875/ mo. No sec/appl fee. 312-388-3845

APTS. FOR RENT PARK MGMT & INV. Ltd. SUMMER IS HERE!!

Most units Include..

HEAT & HOT WTR Studios From $475.00 1Bdr From $550.00 2Bdr From $745.00 3 Bdr/2 Full Bath From $1200 **1-(773)-476-6000** PTS. FOR RENT PARK MGMT & INV. LTD. SPRING IS HERE!!!

HEAT, HW & CG PLENTY OF PARKING 1BDR FROM $785.00 2BDR FROM $925.00 3 BDR/2 FULL BATH FROM $1200 **1-(773)-476-6000*** SUNNY & LARGE 2 & 3BR, hd wd/ceramic flrs, appls, heat incl’d, Sect 8 OK. $900 plus.

70th & Sangamon/Peoria. 773456-6900 CHICAGO - BEVERLY, large studio, 1 & 2BR Apts. Carpet, A/ C, laundry, near transportation, $680-$1020/mo. Call 773-2334939 UP AND COMING ENGLEWOOD

AREA - Newly rehabbed, 3br, near transp, appls incl, utils not incl.

Sec 8 OK. $1100 + Fee. 773-544-8057

SUBURBS, RENT TO OW N! Buy with No closing costs and get help with your credit. Call 708868-2422 or visit www.nhba.com CHICAGO, RENT TO OWN! Buy with no closing costs and get help with your credit. Call 708868-2422 or visit www.nhba.com ACACIA SRO HOTEL Men Preferred! Rooms for Rent. Weekly & Monthly Rates. 312-421-4597

2 BR UNDER $900 CHICAGO 7600 S ESSEX PRE-SPRING SPECIAL - 2BR $599, 3BR $699, 4BR $799 w/apprvd credit, no sec dep. Sec 8 Ok! Also Homes for Rent avail. South Side office: 773-287-9999; West Side office: 773-287-4500 7159 S. MARSHFIELD 2BR, 1ST FLR APT, TENANT PAYS UTILITIES. $77 5/MO + SECURITY. 773-9311224 CHICAGO 94-3739 S. Bishop.

2BR, 5 Rms, 1st & 2nd flr, appls, parking, storage, near shops/ trans. $950 + sec. No pets. 708335-0786 BRONZEVILLE SEC 8 OK! 4950 S. Prairie. Remod 1BR. $700+. Heat, cooking gas & appls inc, lndry on site. Z. 773.406.4841 S. SUBURBAN NEAR 159th/

1 BR $900-$1099 HYDE PARK LARGE 1BR with dining room. $1095. FREE HEAT 1st floor, newly decor, hdwd flrs, appls, free credit check, no app fee. Section 8 Welcome.

1-773-667-6477 or 1-312-802-7301 ONE BEDROOM near Loyola Park, 1333 W. Estes. Hardwood floors. Cats OK. $925/month. Heat included.

Available 6/1. 773-761-4318.

1 BR OTHER 6748 CRANDON & 7727 COLFAX MOST BEAUTIFUL APARTMENTS! 1 & 2BR, $625 & UP. OFF STREET PARKING. 773-947-8572 / 312-613-4424

Halsted, newly decorated, 2BR, new appl, oversized dining area, Avail 6/1! $785 + 1 mo. sec. 708-289-5168

2 BR $900-$1099 CHATHAM AREA, Gorgeous, 2BR, 1st flr, updated kit & bath.

$900/mo + 1 mo sec. Clean & Quiet.

No Pets. 773-930-6045

75 S.E. YATES - Renovated 2BR Apt, Family Room, 1.5BA, LR, DR, Eat in Kitchen, 3 flat, tenant heated, $950/mo. Call 773-375-8068 GLENWOOD, Updated lrg 2BR Condo, HF HS, Balcony, C/A, appls, heat/water incl. 2 pkng, laundry. $990mo. 708.268.3762

CALUMET CITY 2-3BR, 2 car gar, fully rehab w/ gorgeous finishes & hdwd flrs. Beautiful bkyd.

Sec 8 ok. $900-$1150. 510-735-7171

please recycle this paper 34 CHICAGO READER | MAY 10, 2018

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2 BR $1100-$1299 ANIMAL LOVERS AND LGBT

FRIENDLY BUILDING, SPACIOUS 2BR APARTMENT CENTRAL A/C, LAUNDRY BELMONT CRAGIN $1200 with GARAGE CALL LOUIE 773 889-9880.

GARFIELD RIDGE, 4552 S Lavergne beaut rehab, 3+1BR, 2BA house, fin bsmt, granite ctrs, SS appls, 2-car gar, $1625/mo 708288-4510

SECTION 8 WELCOME. NO SECURITY DEPOSIT. 7335 S Morgan, 5BR, 2BA house, appls incl., $1400 /mo. 708-288-4510 8223 S. MARYLAND XL 2BR $1200/mo. Appls incl, c-fans, LR, DR, beautifully remod. No Sec Dep. Sec 8 OK. Call 312-915-0100.

ASHBURN 7601 S Maplewood, beautiful rehabbed 4+1BR, 2BA house, granite ctrs, SS appls, fin bsmt, $1625/mo. 708-288-4510

2 BR $1300-$1499

GARFIELD RIDGE - 3049 West Arthington, beautiful 3BR, recently remodeled and painted, across from grade school, close to trans & Blue line, 5 mins from downtown, fridge and stove incl. Section 8 Welcome, $900/mo. 773-317-7450 CHICAGO, 1945 S. Drake, 3rd floor, 2BR, 2BA, newly renovated, hardwood floors, storage, no dogs, $1050/mo.

Call 773-4853042 SECTION 8 WELCOME, Newly updated 3BR near 80th & Hermitage, heat & stove included. Ceiling fans, pergo floors. 773-4904677

CHICAGO 6747 S. PAXTON , newly renovated, 2BR,

2BA, HWFs thru out, $975/mo, appls, heat & prkg space incl., 773-2853206

SECTION 8 WELCOME No Deposit 13356 S Brandon. NICE

4BR/1BA, W/D incl $1300. 225 W. 108th Pl. 2/1 w/ ht & hot wtr. $1000. appls incl w/ both 312-683-5174

Chicago, 6 rooms, 3BR, 5242 W. Congress, heat included, enclosed porch, $1110/mo + security. Available now. Call 773-6264239 66TH AND HOYNE. Renovated 3BR House.

$895/mo. Tenant pays utilities.

773-905-4567

RIVERDALE: MUST SEE

Quiet 3BR Apt Newly decorated.

Carpet, nr metra, no pets, $900/mo +sec. Avail Now 708-829-1454

OLD IRVING PARK/ Elston

2bd/1bth this a 3 flat building (2nd floor) the floors will be resand and a new shining coated. Water is paid for and the rest you would pay.

Willing to sell any furniture if interested. very quite area and upcoming Free street parking. NO PERMIT PARKING close to the blue line and metro train

FOREST PARK 1300 SF 2BR, 2BA, 2 parking spots, heat & water paid. Safe & quiet, Close to xpressway. $1350. Roland 708224-8520

2 BR OTHER 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

XL 2ND FL., 78th & S. Sangamon St., 3BR, 1BA, $1000/mo + sec.

Heat incl. No pets, credit check 773-874-0524, 9am-10pm Garden apartment 2BR, all ceramic. $695/mo. Call 773-285-3206

3 BR OR MORE $1200-$1499 BUDLONG WOODS, 5500N/ 2600W. Three bedrooms, full

dining room, spacious living room, 1.5 baths, many closets, near transportation, $1485 includes heat. Marty 773-784-0763.

SAUK VILLAGE- RANCH, 3 sm

Chicago - Hyde PARK 5401 S. Ellis.

2.5 Room Studio. $475/mo.

3 BR OR MORE OTHER

MORGAN PARK/ WEST PULLMAN Newly decorated 4BR, 1.5Ba, Appliances included.

Section 8 ok. 847-606-1369 PRE-SPRING SPECIAL CHICAGO Houses for rent. Section 8 Ok, 3, 4 & 5 BR houses avail. Call Nicole: 773-287-9999; West Side 773-287-4500

Call 773-955-5106

New kitchens & new bathrooms.

69th & Dante, 3BR. 101st & May, 1 & 2BRs. We have others! Section 8 Welcome. 708-503-1366

roommates SOUTH SHORE, Senior Discount. Male preferred.

Furnished rooms, shared kitchen & bath, $450/mo. & up. Utilities included. 773-710-5431

TOUHY & WESTERN , Newly remodeled 3BR & 1BR apts available hdwd flrs, granite countertops.

Sec dep req’d.

773-908-1080

AUSTIN & MARQUETTE PARK AREAS, furnished rooms with use

CHICAGO HEIGHTS, 3BR, 1BA, NEWLY REMODELED, APPLS INCL , SECTION 8 OK. NO SEC. DEPOSIT. 708-822-4450

MARKETPLACE

of hsehld. $115 per week, 1 week security. 773-378-7763 or 773-556-3230

GOODS

AUSTIN AREA. Newly remodeled, spacious 3BR Apt. hardwood flrs, appliances incl.

Section 8 welcome! 773-593-1456

AUSTIN Laramie/Madison 2, 3 & 4BR apts, nr trans, updated kit & BA, w/d hookup, no pets, $875$1550+ util. & sec. 708-265-3611 AUSTIN AREA 5BR, 2BA, newly remod BA & kitchen, hdwd flrs, resp for lawn maint. No pets . $1650+ utils & sec. 708-265-3611

8037 S. HOUSTON, 4BR, hrdwd flrs, lndry. 2nd flr, Sec. 8 ok. 3 or 2 BR Voucher ok. Call 847-312-5643.

POOGLE PUPPIES 8 weeks

GENERAL

HARRIS 5 MINUTE BED BUG

br, 1 mast br, 2 ba, large backyard, appl. incl, laundry hookup, $1250. 1 & 1/2 mo sec., sec 8 ok, 708-307-5003

6943 S WOODLAWN 4bdrm 8129 S INGLESIDE

6119 S. ADA. Beautiful 4BR, 1.5ba, lrg bckyrd, quiet, well kept area, appls & utils not incl.

Sec 8 OK. $1350. 773-720-9787

1BR, 2BR, & 4BR 6155 S. KING 2bdrm & 3bdrm 6150 S. VERNON 4 bdrm Stainless steel appliances, hardwood flrs, granite countertops, laundry on site No sec deposit $500 lease signing bonus Section 8 welcome 312-778-1262

S. Artesian. 2BR, formal DR, two pantries, heat incl & 1430 W. 77th St. 2BR heat incl. 312-608-7622

NR 77TH & STONY ISLAND 2 story, 3BR/2BA, appls. $1250/mo + fee & utils. Credit check req.

Sec 8 OK Quiet area 646-202-3294

3 BR OR MORE UNDER $1200

3 BR OR MORE $1800-$2499

ADULT SERVICES

MONEE 1.5 ACRE,1 level, 3000SF, 4BR, 3BA, full bsmt, 3 car attached garage, fireplace. $2500/mo + sec. 708-243-7628

CHICAGO SOUTH - You’ve tried the rest, we are the best.

Apartments & Homes for rent, city & suburb. No credit checks.

773-253-2132 or 773-253-2137

CHICAGO - 7112 S. EUCLID

SECTION 8 WELCOME - 7340

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

708-288-4510

3 BR OR MORE $2500 AND OVER

OLYMPIA FIELDS Newly remodeled 4 bedroom, 2.5 bath house, full basement. Beautiful area. $1995/mo.. 708-935-7557.

ADULT SERVICES

1bdrm & 4bdrm

7655 S. PHILLIPS

ROOMS FOR RENT/NEW RE-

HAB South Side. $500+$100 move in fee. Furn. Util incld. Elderly male.

Near Whole Foods, Starbucks, Walgreens, Aldi, Green Line. Call 773569-1896

ADULT SERVICES

Vet checked & vaccinated $800 facebook.com/poodlexbeagle 815-944-8209

KILLER! Exclusive Formula Used By Professional Exterminators.

Effective and Long Lasting.

Residential and Commercial Use. Available: Hardware Stores BUY ONLINE: homedepot.com

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

CASH PAID FOR COMIC BOOKS;

MOVIE Magazines/Posters; TV GUIDES; SPORTS Magazines; ADULT Magazines; 773-680-2847

ADULT SERVICES

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

MAY 10, 2018 | CHICAGO READER 35

STRAIGHT DOPE

By Cecil Adams

Try FREE: 312-924-2066 More Local Numbers: 1-800-811-1633

Q : All lucrative plants are grown in

60 MINUTES FREE TRIAL

THE HOTTEST GAY CHATLINE

1-312-924-2082 More Local Numbers: 800-777-8000

36 CHICAGO READER - MAY 10, 2018

NATIONAL A SS

ION OF STA IAT TE OC

STERS RE FO

SMOKEYBEAR.COM

www.guyspyvoice.com

Ahora en Español/18+

vibeline.com 18+

Only YOU Can Prevent Wildfires.

multiple locations, as far as I know. So why is coca only cultivated in South America? —PARDEL LUX

SLUG SIGNORINO

Meet sexy friends who really get your vibe...

FO

U N D E D 192

0

A : Thinking about buying a hillside in Sono-

ma County and getting into the biz, Pardel?

Legal niceties notwithstanding, it could probably be done—with a sufficiently green thumb you could grow it in a variety of climes. As to why it’s not, well, you’re looking at the usual historical contingencies: colonialism, drug panics, international conventions, world wars, yada yada.

Let’s start with the sociobotanical angle.

Coca is indigenous to the Andes, where for millennia people have been cultivating a few species whose leaves they chew as a stimulant. Anthropologists have theorized that chewing coca may offset adverse effects of high-altitude life. But as an intoxicant, coca leaf packs no more punch than a strong cup of coffee. Spanish colonists in South America paid it little mind, being understandably focused on things like gold and silver.

So coca didn’t really show up on the world’s radar till the late 1800s, once German chemists managed to process it into cocaine. Western doctors used it topically as an anesthetic, but saw serious potential in its stimulant properties when ingested (Sigmund Freud was a big fan, to say the least). Its tendency to induce feelings of exhilaration and euphoria didn’t make it any less popular.

Unregulated cocaine quickly found its way into legit pharmaceutical practice and dodgy patent medicines alike (not to mention one extremely well-known soft drink). Peru was the world’s major supplier at the turn of the 20th century, when other countries got hip.

The Dutch soon became dominant players, growing coca in the colonial East Indies and processing it back in Amsterdam. The Japanese, meanwhile, started plantations on what’s now Taiwan. At this point it looked like the plant was on the verge of breaking out globally. What happened?

It’s on the U.S., which in the early 20th century began an international drive for cocaine prohibition. By this time, addiction problems among both therapeutic and recreational users had become impossible to ignore.

But our about-face on coke was complicated: valid public-health concerns intermin-

gled with a good old American moral freakout (remember, we prohibited alcohol around then too). The result? The U.S. restricted the drug at home and leaned on other nations to crack down as well.

It took a while, but we got our way. The final blow to legitimate global coke production was World War II, which scrambled national industries, finished imperial Japan, and cemented the U.S. as a global superpower. The German and Japanese pharmaceutical infrastructure lay in ruins, and U.S. occupying forces were in position to implement America’s anti-drug stance. Coca cultivation had effectively been driven back where it started: the Andes.

America didn’t stop flexing its muscle there, but pushed hard-line coca-eradication policies throughout the southern hemisphere; in 1961 a UN narcotics agreement pledged to wipe out even the traditional chewing of coca leaf within 25 years. Of course this same 25-year postwar period happens to be when America made itself into an enormous customer base for South American coke.

This morass of conflicting incentives—zero tolerance on one hand, massive demand on the other—meant we spent the latter half of the 20th century playing cocaine whack-amole in Latin America: zapping facilities in one location only to send them deeper into the jungle, further into the mountains, over a porous border, etc. So despite appearances, Pardel, coca cultivation is in fact on the move.

A few years ago a plantation was discovered in the state of Chiapas, in southern Mexico— as far as anyone knows, the first of its kind that far north. “My only question is why it took so long,” one drug policy expert told Vice News. Chiapas, after all, has got “cheap labor, remote land, and good climate. Add corruption, crushing poverty, and poor infrastructure for other types of commerce and you’ve got a perfect storm.” When you put it that way, we should start seeing U.S. coca in no time. v Send questions to Cecil via straightdope.com or write him c/o Chicago Reader, 30 N. Racine, suite 300, Chicago 60607.

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SAVAGE LOVE

HOT GIRL

By Dan Savage

BODY RUBS

‘Help, my penis is bent up at a 90-degree angle’

WTF? A urologist explains. Plus: Dan counsels an HIV-positive lad in the UK. Q : First let me say that I

think you give excellent advice, even if it is a bit pedestrian at times. I have a small problem: Last fall, my penis bent up and to the left at an almost 90-degree angle. I know from Google that this is not that unusual.

And at 59, I’m thankful that things are working as well as they are. But I fly gliders, and the relief system is a “Texas catheter” with a drain line to outside the glider. I believe that the bending on my penis may be the result of trauma caused by removing the catheter. In your many years of dealing with penis problems—I know you are not a urologist, but still—have you run across problems of a similar nature? Gliding season will be starting soon, and I dread using the same system if it will cause more damage. My partner is an amazing woman—70, by the way, and by far the best partner I have ever had (oh, my brethren, do not look only to youth!)—but I dread further damaging my member. —HANGING UNDER NICE GLIDER

A : First let me say thank

you for the qualified compliment—I’ll try to keep my trademark excellent if pedestrian advice coming, HUNG. Also, you’re right, I’m not a urologist. But Dr. Keith Newman is. He’s also a fellow of the American College of Surgeons and my go-to guy for dick-related medical questions.

“It is not likely that HUNG’s drainage system caused the problem,” said Dr. Newman. “His condition sounds like Peyronie’s disease, a possibly autoimmune disease thought to be related to microtrauma, though some penile fractures may result in similar deformity.”

Men with Peyronie’s dis-

ease come down with, well, bent dicks. Sometimes the bend is slight and doesn’t interfere with reasonable penile functions. Sometimes the bend is severe enough to make erections painful and intercourse impossible.

“Most sufferers will return to within 10 to 20 percent of their baseline curvature within two years without intervention,” said Dr. Newman.

“Ninety degrees is quite a big bend, however, and less likely to resolve spontaneously, but it’s still worth waiting. The only real therapies are Xiaflex injections and surgical repair.

The former is not approved for patients less than two years from diagnosis or with less than 35 degrees of curvature. The latter is fraught with increased complication rates due to scarring so near the tip. Both can straighten the penis, but at a cost of length in many cases. As for drainage alternatives while gliding, I suggest the following product: freedom.mensliberty.com.”

Q : I’m a 32-year-old English guy, and this morning I was diagnosed as HIV positive. I’m in a bit of a state. I haven’t told anyone, and I needed to get it out.

I’m in a long-term, mostly monogamous relationship, but my boyfriend is overseas for work at the moment, so I can’t really talk to him about it. So I’m talking to you.

—DIAGNOSED AND DAZED AND CONFUSED

A : I’m so sorry, DADAC. I

hope you have a friend you can confide in, because you need a shoulder to cry on, and I can’t provide that for you here.

What I can provide is the perspective of someone older. I came out in the summer of 1981—and two years later, healthy, young gay men

started to sicken and die.

During the 1980s and most of the 1990s, learning you were HIV positive meant you had a year or two to live. Today, people with HIV are expected to live a normal life span— so long as they have access to treatment and they’re taking their meds. And once you’re on meds, DADAC, your viral load will fall to undetectable levels and you won’t be able to pass HIV on to anyone else (undetectable = uninfectious).

Arguably, your boyfriend and your other sex partners are safer now that you know than they were before you were diagnosed. Because it’s not HIV-positive men on meds who are infecting people, it’s men who aren’t on meds because they don’t know they’re HIV positive.

I don’t mean to minimize your distress, DADAC. The news you just received is distressing and life changing.

But it’s not as distressing as it once was. I remember holding a boyfriend on the day he was diagnosed as HIV positive more than 25 years ago, both of us weeping uncontrollably. His diagnosis meant he was going to die soon.

Yours doesn’t. You have a lot of time left, and if you get into treatment and take your meds, DADAC, you will live a long and healthy life, a life filled with love, connection, and intimacy. Spend some time feeling sorry for yourself, and then go live your life—live it for all the guys who didn’t get to celebrate their 33rd birthdays.

PS: Don’t wait until your boyfriend returns to tell him.

He needs to get tested right away. v Send letters to mail@ savagelove.net.

Download the Savage Lovecast every Tuesday at savagelovecast.com. m @fakedansavage

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American Idol Live! 9/7, 7 PM, Rosemont Theater, Rosemont, on sale Fri 5/11, 10 AM Anderson, Rabin, and Wakeman 9/7, 8 PM, Ravinia Festival, Highland Park, on sale Thu 5/10, 10 AM Average White Band 9/5, 6:30 and 9 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 5/10, noon b Ballroom Thieves 10/27, 9 PM, Schubas, on sale Fri 5/11, 10 AM Beach Boys, Righteous Brothers 8/24, 7 PM, Ravinia Festival, Highland Park, on sale Thu 5/10, 10 AM Tony Bennett 9/8, 8:30 PM, Ravinia Festival, Highland Park, on sale Thu 5/10, 10 AM Joep Beving 10/30, 8:30 PM, Constellation, on sale Fri 5/11, 10 AM, 18+ Jade Bird 10/7, 8 PM, Schubas, on sale Fri 5/11, 10 AM, 18+ Buttertones 9/28, 10:30 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Cake, Ben Folds 8/22, 6:30 PM, Ravinia Festival, Highland Park, on sale Thu 5/10, 10 AM Canned Heat 9/17, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 5/10, noon b Phil Collins 10/22, 8 PM, United Center, on sale Tue 5/15, 10 AM Cracker 6/17, 7 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, on sale Fri 5/11, 8 AM b Culture Club, B-52s 8/31-9/1, 7 PM, Ravinia Festival, Highland Park, on sale Thu 5/10, 10 AM Dead Milkmen 7/12, 8 PM, House of Vans Earth, Wind & Fire 8/17, 8 PM, Ravinia Festival, Highland Park, on sale Thu 5/10, 10 AM

Roky Erickson 11/9, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, on sale Fri 5/11, 11 AM Family Crest 8/7, 8 PM, Schubas, on sale Fri 5/11, 10 AM, 18+ 50 Cent 9/6, 8 PM, Ravinia Festival, Highland Park, on sale Thu 5/10, 10 AM Eleanor Friedberger 10/5, 9 PM, Empty Bottle, on sale Fri 5/11, 10 AM Gallant 11/3, 6:30 PM, Concord Music Hall, on sale Fri 5/11, 10 AM b Ghost of Paul Revere, Jonah Smith 8/15, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 5/11, 10 AM b Gipsy Kings 9/14, 8 PM, Ravinia Festival, Highland Park, on sale Thu 5/10, 10 AM Healy, Elujay 7/10, 7:30 PM, Schubas, on sale Fri 5/11, 10 AM b Haley Heynderickx 7/12, 9 PM, Martyrs’ John Hiatt & the Goners, Sonny Landreth 8/30, 7:30 PM, Ravinia Festival, Highland Park, on sale Thu 5/10, 10 AM Hip Hop House Party with Naughty by Nature, 2 Live Crew, Kool Moe Dee, Kid N Play, and more 11/2, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre, on sale Fri 5/11, 10 AM Hyukoh, Inner Wave 9/28, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, on sale Fri 5/11, 10 AM, 18+ Iceage 6/21, 8 PM, House of Vans J. Cole 9/22, 7:30 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont, on sale Sat 5/12, 10 AM Jethro Tull 9/3, 7:30 PM, Ravinia Festival, Highland Park, on sale Thu 5/10, 10 AM Howard Jones 7/9, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 5/10, noon b

38 CHICAGO READER - MAY 10, 2018

Angélique Kidjo’s Remain in Light, Femi Kuti & the Positive Force 8/6, 7:30 PM, Ravinia Festival, Highland Park, on sale Thu 5/10, 10 AM Marcus King Band 9/26, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 5/11, 10 AM, 17+ La Misa Negra 6/17, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle Julian Lage Trio 10/5, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall Lyle Lovett & His Large Band 8/28, 7:30 PM, Ravinia Festival, Highland Park, on sale Thu 5/10, 10 AM b Mandolin Orange 6/14, 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, on sale Fri 5/11, 8 AM b Lori McKenna 8/4, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 5/10, noon b Lea Michele & Darren Criss 6/26, 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre, on sale Fri 5/11, 10 AM Mind Over Mirrors, Laraaji 7/1, 7 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 5/11, 10 AM b Ashley Monroe 6/14, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Sam Moss 7/17, 9 PM, Hideout Jason Mraz, Brett Dennen 8/25, 7 PM, Ravinia Festival, Highland Park, on sale Thu 5/10, 10 AM O.A.R., Matt Nathanson 9/2, 6:30 PM, Ravinia Festival, Highland Park, on sale Thu 5/10, 10 AM Princess Nokia 6/8, 8 PM, House of Blues Billy Prine Band 7/23, 7 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Rich Homie Quan 7/3, 8 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 18+ Ty Segall, William Tyler 11/2, 7:30 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 5/11, 11 AM b Shakey Graves, Wild Reeds 9/26, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, on sale Fri 5/11, 10 AM, 18+

b Amanda Shires, Leah Blevins 9/20, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 5/11, 10 AM, 17+ Shwayze 7/11, 8 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Sleigh Bells 8/17, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ Nate Smith & Kinfolk 7/19, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 5/11, 10 AM b Straight No Chaser 12/15, 3 and 7:30 PM, Lyric Opera House, on sale Fri 5/11, 10 AM Sugarland 8/23, 7 PM, Ravinia Festival, Highland Park, on sale Thu 5/10, 10 AM Tacocat 8/10, 9 PM, Empty Bottle, on sale Fri 5/11, 10 AM Talisk & Doolin’ 8/15, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 5/10, noon b Teitur 9/18, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Tigue 6/6, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Unknown Mortal Orchestra 7/27, 8 PM, House of Vans Unsane, Child Bite 7/14, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle Vacationer, Sego 7/19, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, on sale Fri 5/11, 10 AM, 18+ Vic Mensa 5/31, 8 PM, House of Vans Wolf Parade 8/8, 8 PM, House of Vans Young Fathers 11/19, 9 PM, Bottom Lounge, on sale Fri 5/11, 10 AM, 18+

UPCOMING Alestorm, Gloryhammer 9/21, 7 PM, Concord Music Hall, 17+ Alt-J 6/7, 8 PM, Huntington Bank Pavilion Bahamas 8/6, 6:30 PM, Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park Fb Lee Bains III & the Glory Fires 6/5, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle James Bay 10/1, 8 PM, Aragon Ballroom, 17+ Broken Social Scene 6/13, 7:30 PM, the Vic b Charly Bliss 5/17, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle Citizen, Angel Dust 6/5, 6:15 PM, Cobra Lounge b Code Orange 6/28, 7:30 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ David Allan Coe 6/16, 8:30 PM, Joe’s Bar Deafheaven, Mono 7/30, 7 PM, Metro, 18+ Depeche Mode 6/1, 7:30 PM, United Center Dimmu Borgir 8/21, 8 PM, the Vic, 18+ Dirty Projectors 5/22, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Jeremy Enigk 6/30, 8:30 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Exhorder, War Curse 7/14, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Tav Falvo’s Panther Burns 5/21, 7 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint Full of Hell, Gatecreeper 6/6, 8 PM, Cobra Lounge

ALL AGES

WOLF BY KEITH HERZIK

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Glassjaw, Quicksand 7/8, 6:30 PM, Concord Music Hall, 17+ Helmet, Prong 5/17, 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Hop Along 6/10, 8 PM, Metro, 18+ Idles 9/14, 10 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Jayhawks 7/13, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard 6/10, 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre b King Tuff, Cut Worms 5/25, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ La Luz, Gymshorts 5/31, 8 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Lemuria 7/27, 10 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Jeff Lynne’s ELO 8/15, 8 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont The Matches 7/14, 7 PM, Metro b Meat Puppets 6/29, 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b Melvins 7/31, 7:30 PM, Park West b New Pornographers 6/21, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Oh Sees, Timmy’s Organism 10/12, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Over the Rhine 8/12, 8 PM, City Winery b Owl City 10/13, 8 PM, House of Blues b Paramore, Foster the People 7/2, 7 PM, Huntington Bank Pavilion Alan Parsons Project 6/5, 7:30 PM, Copernicus Center b Pelican, Cloakroom 7/26, 9 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Martin Rev, Wolf Eyes 6/1, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Self Defense Family, Sannhet 6/16, 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Slayer, Anthrax, Testament 5/25, 5 PM, Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, Tinley Park Sleep 8/1, 7 PM, Riviera Theatre b Spits 5/25, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Suuns 5/30, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle Tinariwen 8/13, 7:30 PM, Thalia Hall b Ufomammut 5/27, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ U.S. Bombs, Dwarves, Murder Junkies 6/17, 6:30 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 18+ Rufus Wainwright 11/20, 8 PM, the Vic Wax Idols, Shadow Age 9/9, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle Wet 5/25, 8:30 PM, House of Blues, 17+ v

GOSSIP WOLF A furry ear to the ground of the local music scene OUTSTANDING CHICAGO psych-pop group Roommate have made barely a peep since playing a June 2015 residency at the Hideout and releasing the album Make Like that month. But main dude Kent Lambert has resuscitated the project, dropping the single “Kepler-452B” on Bandcamp last week—and in a departure from the full-band sessions for Make Like, he recorded it alone (with some mixing by Nick Broste). “I’ve been playing guitar for the last couple of years for the first time since high school, and I went a little crazy with pedals and overdubs,” he says. “Its debts to MBV are fairly gratuitous.” The Roommate live band of Lambert, bassist Gillian Lisée, drummer Seth Vanek, and guitarist Sam Wagster will be joined by Broste on electronics and Amanda Kraus on percussion for a show at Sleeping Village on Friday, May 11. Lightfoils headline; opening is Sip, the self-described “bohemian electronics” project by Jimmy Lacy (late of Black Math and Population).

In April ghetto-house and footwork producer DJ Clent celebrated his birthday at Hales Franciscan High School in Grand Boulevard. On Saturday, May 12, he returns to the school to spin at the Low End Reunion, another huge party full of juke, ghetto house, and footwork! Ghettohouse architect DJ Deeon, footwork pioneer DJ PJ, and juke master DJ Slugo join Clent, along with scene veterans DJ Stew, DJ Monty, and DJ Lemo. It’s an old-school event in more than one way—only people 30 or older can attend. It starts at 7 PM and costs $10 for women, $20 for men.

Punky underground band Swimsuit Addition finished recording their final full-length, Dumb Dora, in 2016, and though they’re split up they’ll finally drop it on Monday, May 14. Midwest Action will release it on tape and digitally, and more formats may be coming. Also keep your eyes peeled for the companion graphic novel, made by singer-guitarist Jen Dot and Indiana-based artist Brett Manning!

—J.R. NELSON AND LEOR GALIL Got a tip? Tweet @Gossip_Wolf or e-mail gossipwolf@chicagoreader.com.

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MAY 10, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 39

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