Print Issue of May 17, 2018 (Volume 47, Number 32)

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 7, 2 0 1 8

Hope vs. hype in the state’s opioid crisis 8

Deadpool 2: Not enough orgies 17

THE VIXEN’S REAL DRAG RACE IS JUST BEGINNING

The journey she began at the south side’s venerable Jeffery Pub has already taken her to RuPaul’s stage and beyond.

By THE TRIIBE 22

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FEATURES

CITY LIFE

CITY LIFE

Hope vs. hype

The pharmaceutical firm Alkermes has launched an aggressive campaign touting its $1,000-a-pop drug Vivitrol, and officials are increasingly turning to it to help combat the state’s opioid crisis. But is it worth the risk and cost?

BY BILL MYERS 8

ADVERTISING DIRECTOR CHRISTOPHER BEST SENIOR ACCOUNT MANAGER EVANGELINE MILLER DIRECTOR OF DIGITAL JOHN DUNLEVY ADVERTISING COORDINATOR HERMINIA BATTAGLIA

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18 Movies Things look up (for once) in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day. 20 Movies Pope Francis—A Man of His Word and more new films, reviewed by our critics

MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE 21 In Rotation Anna von Hausswolff, Asmahan, SPF420, and other current obsessions 27 Shows of note Fever Ray, Courtney Bartnett, Mike Donovan, and more of the week’s best

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4 Chicagoans A domestic violence counselor finds hope in reconciliation, however rare.

5 Joravsky | Politics Nine candidates for mayor means they’ll have a hell of a time getting enough nominating signatures.

6 Transportation Thousands of new bike racks are coming to city after an “incredibly annoying” 18-month snag.

12 Home Improvement The blog Two Flat: Remade chronicles one family’s ten-year struggle to rehab a roach-infested fixer-upper in Logan Square.

14 Theater Raven Theatre can’t deliver on Suddenly Last Summer’s mythic, monstrous potential.

15 Theater Flies! The Musical! and five more new shows, reviewed by our critics

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IN THIS ISSUE

MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE

The Vixen revisits the starting line of her personal drag race

She didn’t win over RuPaul, but she’s carrying on the fight for inclusivity that she began at the south side’s venerable Jeffery Pub.

BY TIFFANY WALDEN AND OLIVIA OBINEME 22

16 Visual Art Photojournalist Nancy Abrams looks back on her years in West Virginia in The Climb From Salt Lick.

17 Movies Deadpool 2: Not enough orgies

FOOD & DRINK

32 Restaurant Review: Mordecai Antique spirits and goat brats are hits at Matthias Merges’s restaurant across from Wrigley Field.

33 Booze Chicago Craft Beer Week is no more; all hail Illinois Craft Beer Week.

CLASSIFIEDS

34 Jobs 34 Apartments & Spaces 35 Marketplace 36 Straight Dope “How did the terms nuts and bananas come to refer to something or someone crazy?”

37 Savage Love “I keep having sex dreams about Kanye West.”

38 Early Warnings Neil Young, Drake, Joy Formidable, and more shows to look for in the weeks to come 38 Gossip Wolf The Chicago Zine Fest celebrates publishing by the people, and other music news

MAY 17, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 3

é JESS BENJAMIN

CITY LIFE

Chicagoans

The therapist

Luana Lienhart, 39, domestic violence counselor

AN ALARMING NUMBER of my clients, 30 percent at least, were in an abusive relationship and didn’t realize it. One was upset that her partner had changed something on her Facebook page. I said, “How did that come to pass?” The partner said, “Oh, I’ve got her password. I’ve got all her passwords. I’ve got to make sure nothing funny is going on.”

When that happens, I’ll say something to the effect of, “It seems to me you would benefit from each having individual counseling,” and I’ll keep one client and refer the other to a colleague. That works out probably 10 percent of the time. The other 90 percent of the time, the perpetrator says, “There’s nothing wrong with me. Just fix her,” and the victim will continue in counseling, and the perpetrator will not follow up. When I have that next session with the victim, I’ll say, “This is why I did this. Does your partner do anything else that makes you feel unsafe?”

People will ask me, “Do you think he can change?” I say, “Yes, it’s possible, but you can’t

4 CHICAGO READER - MAY 17, 2018

do anything to make that happen.” They’re told so often by their abusers, “If you didn’t do this, I wouldn’t have to hit you,” that they think they can also affect their behavior for the good—that if they love them enough, they can be better. I always stress, “If you could change his behavior, you would have done that by now.” But it’s tough. It’s really tough. Their self-esteem is so low that they think this is what they deserve.

And usually by that point the abuser has systematically cut them off from their support system. A lot of times abusers will sabotage their victims from working outside the home or being financially independent in some way. Sometimes the abuser will destroy passports or photo IDs. So when people say, “Just go!,” it’s like, “Go where and do what?

With what money?”

In one case, the abuser was undocumented, and the victim was afraid of him being deported and her children not ever being able to see their father. Once I reassured her

“Sometimes the abuser will destroy passports or photo IDs,” says Lienhart. “So when people say, ‘Just go!’ [to victims of domestic violence], it’s like, ‘Go where and do what?

With what money?’”é JESS BENJAMIN

that her leaving the relationship or getting a protective order would not put him in danger of deportation, she began that process, and he was mandated into perpetrator intervention counseling. I don’t know what the catalyst was that helped him see the light, but he was able to identify that he was abusive because he grew up watching his father abuse his mother, and that’s what he learned being a man was supposed to be about.

He was in counseling for two years. His wife, to her credit, would not allow him to move

back in until a year had passed after counseling without there being any kind of abuse.

Fast-forward three years, and I was shocked to run into them together. They explained that he had moved back in, and they were just remarkably different people. His whole demeanor, everything about him had changed, and she was visibly more comfortable asserting herself and speaking her mind. That can happen.

It’s a unicorn thing. It’s not even statistically significant enough to be studied. But it does give me hope. —AS TOLD TO ANNE FORD

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CITY LIFE

POLITICS

Do the hustle

Nine candidates for mayor means they’ll have a hell of a time getting enough nominating signatures.

By BEN JORAVSKY

W

ith former Police Board president Lori Lightfoot jumping into the mayoral race last week, it’s going to be harder than ever for mayoral candidates to get the nominating signatures they need to qualify for the ballot.

And trust me, it’s always hard.

There are nine announced candidates— that’s right, count ’em: nine. Who knows— maybe each candidate will successfully challenge each other’s nominating petitions and we’ll wind up with no candidates.

It probably wouldn’t be worse than Rahm’s first term.

As I’ve written before, getting on the ballot is easier said than done. A candidate’s nominating petitions are subject to challenge in a rigorous process that’s overseen by the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners.

It takes 12,500 signatures to get on the mayoral ballot—and not just any old signature will do. They must be valid signatures that can withstand the careful scrutiny they’re all but certain to get.

For instance, petition signers must actually live where they say they live. And

the signatures on the nominating petitions must resemble the ones on file with the elections board.

IF ONE CANDIDATE SUCCESSFULLY CHALLENGES ENOUGH OF ANOTHER CANDIDATE’S NOMINATINGPETITION SIGNATURES, THEN POOF! THE CHALLENGED CANDIDATE GETS KNOCKED OFF THE BALLOT. And you can only sign for one mayoral candidate. So if you sign for two, the second signature is invalid.

The rule of thumb is that candidates actually need two or even three times the number of required signatures to stave off a challenge. For mayor, that means at least 25,000 signatures.

In the old days, elected officials could just send out their employees to gather the signatures. But anti-patronage judicial rulings have liberated city workers from having to toil in

the political fields.

So now a candidate needs a big family, lots and lots of friends, and/or a deep purse— enough money to pay people to gather signatures for them.

The going rate runs from $1 to $2 a signature, and the rate goes up as the filing deadline nears.

Candidates may have to spend thousands just to get on the ballot. And that’s before hiring an election lawyer to scrutinize their petitions and handle potential challenges.

If one candidate successfully challenges enough of another candidate’s nominating-petition signatures, then poof! the challenged candidate gets knocked off the ballot.

There are lawyers who make a living challenging candidates or defending candidates who have been challenged—or both.

Mayor Rahm’s election lawyer is the legendary Michael Kasper, who bounces out of bed each morning reciting obscure passages of the city’s election code the way other people begin their day with yoga stretches.

(Just kidding—I think.)

As I said, at the moment, nine candidates have announced their intentions to run.

They are: computer techie Neal Sales-Griffin; former Chicago Police Department superintendent Garry McCarthy; former schools CEO Paul Vallas; businessman Willie Wilson; Chicago Principals & Administrators Association president Troy LaRaviere; 22-year-old entrepreneur and activist Ja’mal Green; Cook County Clerk of the Circuit Court Dorothy

JANE ADDAMS RESOURCE CORPORATION

Brown, and Lightfoot.

And there’s Rahm. How could I forget?

Sorry, Mr. Mayor.

Cook County commissioner Bridget Gainer is also talking about running, as is city treasurer Kurt Summers.

If all these people run, they’re going to be looking to gather up to 300,000 nominating-petition signatures between them. That’s a third of the registered voters in Chicago.

You know, if this keeps up, we may not have enough voters to accommodate all the nominating-petition requirements of the candidates who want to be our mayor.

You’re probably wondering why we require so many signatures to make the ballot. Good question.

And the answer is: There is no good reason—other than it gives incumbents another advantage. And, come to think of it, that’s not a good reason at all.

Mayoral candidates used to need 25,000 signatures to make the ballot. The state halved that number in 2005. So look on the bright side—as bad as things are, they used to be worse.

My old friend Adolfo Mondragon, an election lawyer, suggests we try something a little more practical—like replacing the stringent petition requirements with a nominal filing fee. Maybe $25.

Let’s give it a try. It’s never too late to have a real democracy. v

@joravben

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Thousands of new bike racks are coming to Chicago after an “incredibly annoying” 18-month snag.

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an’t find a place to lock your bike?

Rack it up to bureaucracy.

The city hasn’t installed any new bike racks since 2016, but that snag, thankfully, should be ending soon, and thousands of new racks should be coming in the next five years.

First, some disclosure is needed before I dive into this tale about a major bike parking snafu at the Chicago Department of Transportation. In the early- to mid-2000s, I worked for the Active Transportation Alliance as a consultant to CDOT, getting roughly 3,500 bike racks installed across the city. After I’d marked the locations for the fixtures on sidewalks, the contractors would show up to bore holes in the concrete with a hammer drill and anchor the racks on top of the spray-painted orange dots with mushroom-headed expansion spikes.

The bike parking program is bankrolled

by federal Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality Improvement grants, which come from gas tax revenue, funneled through the Illinois Department of Transportation. While an average of 700 bike racks were installed per year while I was there, after I left in early 2007 CDOT slowed the pace to roughly 500 racks annually. Chicago currently has more than 15,000 racks, likely the most of any U.S. city. But since the percentage of Chicago commuters who bike to work has more than tripled in recent decades, from .5 percent in 2000 to 1.7 percent in 2017, the demand for bike parking continues to grow, so it’s important for the city to keep installing the fixtures at a steady pace.

In early March, however, a bike industry contact, who asked not to be named, told me that there had been a roughly two-year gap since the last rack installation contract expired in spring 2016. By October 2016, IDOT

had authorized Chicago to advertise the next contract, called Citywide Commuter Bike Parking and Promotion, and CDOT issued a request for proposals in March 2017. According to the city’s Bid Tracker website, by May 2017 CDOT had selected the contractor with the lowest bid, a South Deering-based company with the memorable name Speedy Gonzalez Landscaping. But almost a year later the contract still hadn’t been finalized, which meant that Speedy Gonzalez’s workers still couldn’t start swinging their sledgehammers.

The issue became more pressing earlier this month, when the city rolled out a dockless bike-share pilot on the far south side.

After July 1, all of those cycles must be “lockto” models with a built-in U-lock or cable for securing them to a rack, pole, or decommissioned parking meter.

Earlier this month, CDOT spokesman Mike Claffey confirmed that the old installation contract ended in spring 2016. Claffey also acknowledged that while the new, roughly $1.5 million contract was officially awarded to Speedy Gonzalez on February 9, the company still hadn’t been given the green light to start installation. Asked about the reason for the two-year contract gap, he replied, “Because it’s a federal contract, there are extra layers of bureaucracy.”

In the meantime, residents, small business owners, and the aldermen who represent them have grown impatient. “I’ve had customers asking me, ‘Can’t you get some bike racks out here?’” said John Brand, owner of Beverly’s Open Outcry brewery. He asked for a rack in summer 2017 via the city’s bike parking request web page, and a CDOT consultant stopped by and marked the orange dots last fall, but the fixture never got installed.

The Logan Square cafe Cellar Door Provisions ordered new bike racks in December 2016 after its rack was removed during a Peoples Gas project and never replaced. A year and a half later restaurant manager Emily Sher told me the holdup has been “incredibly annoying.” She said she’s called 32nd Ward alderman Scott Waguespack and CDOT deputy commissioner Sean Wiedel several times to follow up. “Lots of our customers and employees ride bikes and have to lock up to signs in front of other people’s property, and our neighbors are not into it,” she said.

Waguespack’s chief of staff, Paul Sajovec, forwarded me an update from March 30 on Cellar Door Provisions’ request from CDOT:

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CITY LIFE “We’re waiting on some paperwork from [the city’s Department of Procurement Services] so we can finalize the contract approval with IDOT,” the message read. “As soon as we have that, we can start installing racks, including this request.”

Charlie Short worked at the CDOT bike program for a decade, managing safety programs such as the city’s Bicycling Ambassadors. He also arranged bike rack installations between fall 2012 and spring 2014, when there was no dedicated bike parking manager. In May 2017 he left the department to take a job at a transportation consulting firm.

Short blamed the current two-year contract gap on the federal Grant Accountability and Transparency Act, passed in 2015, which requires additional state oversight of federal grants to cities. He said the delay caused by this extra red tape was exacerbated by layoffs at IDOT during the state budget crisis.

“When IDOT got back to full strength, they became stricter about GATA, and getting bills and contracts processed became harder and harder,” he said.

IDOT spokeswoman Gianna Urgo denied that, and said the federal law doesn’t apply to the bike rack contract. Claffey also said he doesn’t think the rules were a factor in the delay. But Short told me that, out of an excess of caution, CDOT’s contract adminis-

tration staff insisted on extra paperwork and oversight that mirrors the stricter oversight guidelines for all federally funded contracts, even ones that don’t require it. “That’s the ridiculous thing,” he said.

On the bright side, it looks like the bike rack logjam is finally broken. On Wednesday, May 9, Claffey said the preconstruction meetings for the contract would happen starting this week. Immediately afterward, Speedy Gonzalez can get to work installing 500 to 1,000 racks annually over the next five years. Consultants from Sam Schwartz Engineering and AES Services will arrange the installations.

More good news: CDOT will use some of the money from the dockless bike-share permitting fees to install extra racks in the pilot area. The department hopes to put in about 100 racks within the coverage zone before the lock-to requirement kicks in July 1.

As a former CDOT consultant, I can attest that the city bureaucracy can be maddening.

But now that the installation contract is finally moving forward and we’re getting some bonus fixtures to boot, it looks like we finally may have locked in a win. v

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

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Scars on the sidewalk where a rack was taken out by a driver by the 32nd Ward service office in Lincoln Park é JOHN GREENFIELD

MAY 17, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 7

HOPE VS. HYPE The pharmaceutical firm Alkermes has launched an aggressive campaign touting its $1,000-a-pop drug Vivitrol, and officials are increasingly turning to it to help combat the state’s opioid crisis. But is it worth the risk and cost?

BY BILL MYERS CHRIS REISENBICHLER

8 CHICAGO READER - MAY 17, 2018

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the state, including in McHenry, DuPage, Lake, Kane, Will, and Cook County Jails, state records show.

Vivitrol is also being dispensed by other public health officials and in private treatment clinics all across Illinois. Alkermes’s website lists at least 60 different Vivitrol providers in Chicago and the suburbs. Last year, Vivitrol was written into Governor Bruce Rauner’s “Opioid Action Plan” along with two more-established drug treatments. State officials have also been testing it on prisoners in the Sheridan Correctional Center in LaSalle County since October and have indicated they hope to expand its use throughout Illinois’s prisons, public records and interviews with therapists and state officials reveal.

“The early results are promising,” Illinois Department of Corrections spokeswoman Lindsey Hess said. Hess said 19 men are enrolled in the program, which is voluntary. (Results of an earlier pilot program examining the effects of Suboxone on parolees from Sheridan and downstate Southwest Illinois Correctional Centers were not released.)

While the pilot just started in Illinois, the company has locked in exclusive public contracts and grants that make Vivitrol the favored medicine in other states. In 2011, state Medicaid agencies around the country spent $13 million on Vivitrol; by 2016, that figure had risen to more than $156 million, an analysis by the Urban Institute found. Alkermes has told investors it expects Vivitrol sales to reach $1 billion by 2021. That’s not bad growth, considering Alkermes only began marketing the drug for opioid therapy in 2010.

But how well Vivitrol works—and whether it’s as safe and effective as Alkermes claims—is an open question.

“Their marketing has gotten beyond the evidence,” says Kevin Fiscella, a professor of family medicine and public health at the University of Rochester who specializes in addiction treatment and research. “We don’t know, exactly, what the long-term risks are.”

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multinational drug company has quietly carved out a lucrative, publicly subsidized market for an expensive—and risky—medicine that the company promises can help rescue Illinois from its opioid crisis.

Alkermes, a $6.7 billion biotech company founded in Massachusetts but now headquartered in Ireland, has been hawking its drug, Vivitrol, as an answer to the prayers of those fighting the epidemic for nearly a decade. An army of sales reps and lobbyists has convinced federal, state, and local officials across the country to buy Vivitrol to treat addicts nearly everywhere, from public health clinics to prisons.

As the opioid crisis worsens in Illinois, Alkermes has arrived, promising a clean break from opioids for the legion of addicts the state is struggling to treat. Ads for the drug, which have come under fire elsewhere, can be seen all over the city.

As part of a two-year, $32.6 million grant from the Trump administration awarded last year, Illinois officials are testing or planning to test Vivitrol on inmates in 13 counties across

V

ivitrol is one of only three drugs to have won federal approval for the treatment of opioid addiction.

On the surface, there are a lot of reasons to recommend it. Its two competitors, methadone and buprenorphine-naloxone (commonly known by its brand name, Suboxone), are both opioid based and addictive themselves, which makes Vivitrol attractive to legislators and policy makers who worry that those treatments replace one addiction with another. What’s more, there can be a black market for those drugs in prison and on the street, law enforcement officials say.

Another advantage is that Vivitrol is delivered in a oncea-month injection, which means it’s easier for patients and caregivers to manage. Methadone and Suboxone, by contrast, require daily doses—often at state-licensed clinics where they have to be carefully monitored.

No one disputes that Vivitrol can help. A study by the Canadian Agency for Drugs and Technology in Health that was published in February found that at least half of the patients who used Vivitrol remained drug free a year after starting treatment.

There are drawbacks to Vivitrol, though. For one, it’s not cheap—$1,000 or more per injection, which is much more expensive than either of the other two drugs. In fact, a 2013 study by Illinois Medicaid officials found that Vivitrol was nearly twice as expensive as Suboxone and nearly three times pricier than methadone. Nonetheless, Medicaid pays for prescriptions of Vivitrol and Suboxone but not methadone, public records show.

There is also far more research on the safety and efficacy of the alternative drugs since they’ve been in use for much longer.

“Right now, we have evidence for two other drugs. We don’t have that for Vivitrol,” Fiscella says.

What research there is on Vivitrol has not yet established whether it’s worth its risks or costs as compared to the other drugs, experts say. In a 2017 study published in the British medical journal the Lancet, researchers compared six-month recovery rates for addicts taking Vivitrol with those taking Suboxone and found them to be very similar.

Vivitrol, meanwhile, can be dangerous. Addicts have to be clean for at least seven days before their first injection. If they’re not, Vivitrol can cause them to go into immediate, precipitous withdrawal, a study published last month in the American Journal of Medicine found. A 2015 Australian study found that patients taking an oral version of generic Vivitrol were three and a half times more likely to die than patients taking methadone. There’s also risk of accidental overdose, especially within the first month of usage. (The FDA has put a “black box” label on Vivitrol—its strongest possible warning— telling users that, because Vivitrol lowers the body’s tolerance of opioids, those who relapse face a higher risk of overdose, especially in the first month of drug treatment.)

And some experts like Fiscella are also worried about the long-term risk of overdose if someone gets clean and then starts using again.

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t’s easy to see the appeal of anything that might offer relief from the opioid crisis. Illinois isn’t the worst of the 50 states for opioid abuse, but it’s heading in the wrong direction.

Between 2013 and 2016, deaths from heroin overdose nearly doubled, and deaths from prescription-opioid overdoses nearly quadrupled, state public health data show. Drug overdose death rates grew by more than 34 percent between 2015 and 2016, the ninth-highest increase in the country, according to federal data. Trips to Illinois emergency rooms jumped by nearly 66 percent between 2016 and 2017, also among the highest increases in the country, federal data show.

Chicago is home to much of the devastation. In 2015, 426 people died from opioid overdoses in Chicago. By 2016, the number had risen to 741, according to the city’s Department of Public Health. Roosevelt University found that 35 percent of the city’s hospitalizations for opioids in 2013 took place along the “heroin highway” on the west side; another 20 percent were on the south side. From 2013 to 2015, opioid-related deaths jumped by 16 percent in Chicago’s suburbs, Cook County Public Health data show.

Rural Illinois is also faring poorly. In Whiteside County, about 120 miles west of Chicago, the situation got so bad a few years ago that Natalie Andrews reached out to Alkermes for help.

A licensed clinical social worker and the director of the Sinnissippi Centers, one of the few mental health clinics in that part of northwestern Illinois, Andrews and her colleagues found themselves at the forefront of the growing crisis. Visits to the emergency room related to opioid or heroin overdoses leaped by 90 percent in Whiteside County between 2010 and 2015, Illinois Department of Public Health records show. She was ready to listen to anyone with ideas.

Drug reps from Alkermes were happy to oblige, Andrews recalls. “All of the sudden they came out and they were J

MAY 17, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 9

continued from 9

going everywhere, it seems like,” Andrews said in an interview. “You know, they went to the jail, they went to every treatment provider and that.”

Alkermes’s sales rep, Julie Naples, is a “very professional, friendly marketing person. I mean, she bends over backward to come over,” Andrews says.

When Andrews worried about the cost, Naples offered to help her write grant requests to Alkermes’s nonprofit foundation, Andrews says. Free samples from the company are often available.

Naples couldn’t be reached for comment.

Last year, Alkermes spent more than $34 million on advertising nationwide, according to its latest SEC filing. That includes large ad buys with the CTA and Metra for campaigns running through late June. There are ads on digital screens in 75 locations throughout the Metra and CTA systems as well as on el cars and buses and at Union Station and Ogilvie, the agencies confirm.

Alkermes has hired at least 100 sales reps to push Vivitrol across the country, company documents show. Its operations elsewhere follow a pattern similar to the one that Andrews observed here in Illinois: sales reps fan out through stricken areas, targeting drug-court judges, treatment-center therapists, doctors, cops, legislators—anyone looking for a way out of the opioid nightmare.

But that has led to concerns that Alkermes—rather than taking a cautious approach after opioid manufacturers pushed pain pills and drove the country into the current crisis—has instead copied their sales model: hiring and rewarding reps who move its product in high volumes, using “speakers’ bureaus” that pay doctors fees to hype the drug, and even employing reps who got their start with opioid manufacturers.

The concern over Alkermes’s hyperaggressive sales pitch has won the company some unwelcome attention. In November, California senator Kamala Harris, a Democrat, sent a letter to the company demanding an explanation of its sales practices. A shareholders’ class-action lawsuit is currently pending in New York, alleging that Alkermes “systemically engaged in deceptive marketing campaigns to influence policymakers to use Vivitrol in addiction treatment programs over more scientifically proven and efficacious alternatives.”

(Alkermes’s stock price plunged after Harris’s letter went public. In legal documents, the company has argued the complaint should be dismissed.)

In addition, in its 2017 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Alkermes acknowledged that it had “received a subpoena from an Office of the U.S. Attorney for documents related to VIVITROL. The Company is cooperating with the government.” The company did not release any more details of the investigation or where it originated.

Other concerns have risen about the company’s tactics. In 2014, Vice News reported that Alkermes was one of several drug companies bankrolling doctors to bad-mouth medical marijuana. And in 2016, Alkermes’s Arizona lobbying firm poured money into the fight against a referendum that would have decriminalized pot. (Studies, including research published in March in the Journal of Health Economics, have consistently found that states with more liberal marijuana laws have lower rates of opioid overdoses; the Arizona ballot measure narrowly failed.)

Through a spokesman, Alkermes declined to comment for this story. But in previous statements and SEC filings, the com-

10 CHICAGO READER - MAY 17, 2018

pany has said it uses “customary pharmaceutical company practices to market our product and to educate physicians.”

In a statement issued last year, the company said it was “disappointed with some of the recent media coverage about our company and Vivitrol. . . . The opioid epidemic is the public health crisis of our time. . . . Alkermes is committed to helping address this serious disease with Vivitrol.”

It said it had demonstrated the safety and efficacy of the drug and noted that more than “180 scientific articles have been published about Vivitrol. And since its approval, tens of thousands of patients have been treated with Vivitrol.”

Richard Pops, Alkermes’s chief executive, testifying in September at the President’s Commission on Combating Drug Addiction, said that Vivitrol offers “a treatment option that has no risk of abuse and that is not diverted, traded, or sold illicitly on the street.”

In addition to its robust sales operation, the company has been a lobbying force. Alkermes reps have targeted a range of politicians at all levels, the New York Times has reported. That includes a $4,600 donation to the congressional campaign of a Massachusetts sheriff who criticized Suboxone, but also efforts to win over then-U.S. Health and Human Services secretary Tom Price, who toured the company’s Ohio plant last year and who touted the drug and criticized other treatments (although he later said all three opioid-abuse treatments are useful).

Going after Price represents a relatively new strategy for the company, which spent most of its earliest lobbying efforts building its clout at the state level. After a decade and a half keeping a relatively low Washington profile, the company has spent about $4 million per year in each of the last three years to lobby federal officials, according to an analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics, a campaign finance reform group based in Washington, D.C. The lobbying seems to have been effective. In Ohio, for instance, one of the states hardest hit by opioids, officials bought 100 doses of Vivitrol in 2012; by the end of 2016, the state had paid for more than 30,000 doses—at a cost of more than $38 million. In Arizona, Republican governor Doug Ducey praised Vivitrol in back-to-back state-of-the-state addresses.

And earlier this year, President Donald Trump incorrectly

OPIOID DEATHS SPIKE

oreferred to Vivitrol as an opioid “vaccine” and made it the exclusive antiopioid drug of the federal prison system.

The efforts have helped the drug—which has been on the market since 2006 but only won FDA approval for opioid treatment in 2010—become a blockbuster. Between 2015 and 2017, sales of Vivitrol rose 86 percent, company records show, to $269 million in 2017, the company says in its SEC filings.

Here in Illinois, the company has employed the Nolan Group to do its lobbying, state records show. Based in Hinsdale, Nolan has given thousands of dollars in campaign contributions to Illinois politicians, although the group has a variety of other clients, including the Home Care Association of America. Nolan Group principal Thomas M. Nolan didn’t respond to requests seeking comment.

While Illinois-specific sales figures weren’t available, Alkermes reps have certainly been busy in the state beyond Whiteside County.

Last year, for instance, when the Illinois Association of Problem-Solving Courts held its annual meeting in downstate Bloomington, the group’s networking reception was sponsored by Alkermes (and hosted by its sales rep, Julie Naples), records show. Both the city of Chicago and Sangamon County have been awarded $3 million in state funds over the next three years to administer Vivitrol (as well as methadone) to ex-Sheridan inmates, records show. When Rauner convened an opioid advisory council, Alkermes’s top lobbyist for the midwest, Adam Rondeau, took a seat at the table, public records show.

Rondeau’s career illustrates the way in which drug companies’ sales models can work on both sides of the opioid crisis. Trained as a nurse, Rondeau spent most of his career selling drugs, including five years with pharmaceutical giant Cephalon, his LinkedIn profile states. From February 2003 until January 2006, Rondeau’s bio states, he was “responsible for sale of products in therapeutic areas including: Neurology, Psychiatry, Neurology/Pulmonary (Sleep Disorders), and Pain.”

In 2008, Cephalon agreed to pay the federal government $425 million to settle claims that, from 2003 until 2005, it illegally marketed three drugs—Gabitril, for the treatment

District of Columbia

108.6

Maryland

58.9

Florida

46.3

Pennsylvania

44.1

New Jersey

42.3

Delaware

40

Illinois saw one of the largest increases in drug overdose death rates of any state from 2015 to 2016

Maine

35.4

Virginia

34.7

Illinois

34

Source: CDC

Vermont

32.9

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CHRIS REISENBICHLER

of epilepsy, Provigil, for the treatment of daytime sleepiness related to narcolepsy, and Actiq, a particularly potent opioid designed for late-stage cancer patients. Federal authorities alleged that Cephalon sales reps had illegally oversold general practitioners on the benefits of the drugs and failed to warn them of the drugs’ risks. Their efforts were so fruitful that people with ordinary back pain, for example, began getting prescriptions for Actiq, federal prosecutors said.

In a brief phone interview from his home in Michigan, Rondeau denied that he had ever sold Actiq for Cephalon but said he had sold Provigil. He also defended Alkermes’s sales and lobbying approach.

“The reality is you’re dealing with a public health crisis,” he said. “There’s not a lot to choose from. You try to make the choice that fits best for the patient. It’s a huge issue that we’re dealing with, and you have limited options.”

Other Cephalon alumni who have worked for Alkermes include Daniel Still, now a regional medical science director at the company; Katie Driscoll Alberta, Alkermes’s global head of

quality; Kerri (Knauer) Daman, a territory sales manager; and Greg Keck, a vice president of Alkermes’s addiction division (whose LinkedIn profile identifies him as a “President’s Club winner representing Provigil, Actiq and Gabitril” from 2003 until 2005).

A

lthough its use has skyrocketed recently, Vivitrol is not new. It’s the brand name of a drug called naltrexone, which has been on the market since the 1980s, the University of Rochester’s Fiscella says. Naltrexone was initially sold as a daily tablet and marketed as a treatment for heroin addiction and then, later, for alcoholism. It didn’t show much promise—in fact, it seemed to show a lot of risk—and fell out of favor through the 1990s, Fiscella says. (Even early studies showed that the tablet naltrexone increased the risk of heroin overdose deaths in the first 30 days of treatment.)

Alkermes discovered a way to deliver naltrexone as a oncea-month injectable and beginning in 2006 sold it as a treat-

ment for alcoholism. But as the opioid crisis intensified, the company shifted its focus.

Vivitrol works by blocking the brain’s opioid receptors, including opioids that the body produces naturally. That can put users at risk for overdose if they relapse, Fiscella says.

It’s also not clear that Vivitrol offers its patients any “pharmacological incentives” to keep taking the stuff, Fiscella says.

For example, if you stop taking Suboxone or methadone, you can go into withdrawal, which is painful. That helps ensure you keep showing up for treatment, Fiscella says.

“They’re less likely to use and [therefore] less likely to overdose while they’re being treated” with Vivitrol, Fiscella acknowledges. “But that’s not the issue. The issue is, are they going to continue to show up [for treatment]?”

This question is more—not less—critical when you’re talking about prisoners like those in Sheridan, Fiscella says.

Vivitrol may help them stay clean while in prison, but what happens when they’re released?

Hess, the Department of Corrections spokeswoman, says that inmates released from Sheridan will be “monitored by a licensed Division of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse provider” and will be offered case management.

Despite his concerns, Fiscella acknowledges that Vivitrol can help some addicts. The drug seems best suited for those who are committed—or even well into—a long-term recovery.

“I think it has roles,” Fiscella says of Vivitrol. “The problem is, it has some very small niche roles. But that’s not what the company wants to hear.”

Cook County Jail is currently using methadone, Suboxone, and Vivitrol to treat opioid addictions.

“More than 250 individuals have benefited from our Medication Assisted Treatment programs at the jail since we started in 2017,” Cook County Health and Hospital System spokeswoman Caitlin Polochak said in an e-mail. “The regimen varies from patient to patient. More than 50 individuals have been treated with Vivitrol to date. CCHHS staff also work to link these individuals to community-based outpatient services upon discharge.”

For those on the front lines like Andrews, the questions about Alkermes’s aggressive marketing lobbying are less significant than its effectiveness—and certainly not enough to make them refuse Vivitrol altogether. People are dying and families are being destroyed, leaving little room to say no to any kind of help, she says.

“You have to get what works with that person, not just dosage, but with lifestyle and everything,” Andrews says. “It takes some time to find out what works best for which person.

“We used it at Sinnissippi,” Andrews says of Vivitrol. “And it helps people.”

Which is why Illinois might not be in a position to slow things down.

“The opioid epidemic is the most significant public health and public safety crisis facing Illinois,” the state’s Opioid Action Plan, released last September, stated. “It is also a human crisis—even a single death is one death too many, and we must take action to turn the tide.”

The main goal of the plan is to cut overdose deaths from more than 2,700—the projection for 2020 if trends continue— to 1,800, just under the actual number who died in 2016. v Bill Myers is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C.

m @billcaphill

myers101@outlook.com

MAY 17, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 11

ARTS & CULTURE

HOME IMPROVEMENT

Housewarming partly

The blog Two Flat: Remade chronicles one family’s ten-year struggle to rehab a roach-infested fixer-upper in Logan Square.

By STEVE HEISLER

M

atthew and Sarah Johnson own a spacious two-flat in Logan Square, nestled in a tidy tree-lined street around the corner from the “square” proper. The house was built in 1896. It has five bedrooms, three and a half bathrooms, high ceilings, a spacious yard, and a quaint front stoop. Yet the Johnsons live with their two children in the basement.

Seven years ago the Johnsons purchased their home for $180,000, which was way under market, even then. Of course, there’s always a catch, and in this case it was a real fixer-upper.

Matt outlines the original state of the house thus: “It was full of cockroaches and rats. The kitchen cabinets were molding and rotting away, the toilets weren’t attached, and the whole house stank of animal urine and mold.

The previous tenants were hoarders and they had giant fish tanks, which meant the humidity caused mold everywhere. Sagging floors, leaking roof, moldy basement, and rotting structure. The rats had made nests everywhere and chewed through studs. Nearly everything that had been done to the house by the previous owner was done cheaply, incorrectly, or both.

The new windows were the wrong size, they leak, and many were broken. The vinyl siding lets water in, the roof was redone recently in [a] hilariously wrong fashion, and the . . . garage was amateurishly expanded.”

He expands on this description in an e-mail: “When we pulled out the kitchen cabinets it was like a sporting event had just ended with a mass exodus of roaches scurrying for cover in every direction.” He adds that the bases of support columns in the

12 CHICAGO READER - MAY 17, 2018

basement had rotted away and were steadied by load-bearing beer cans.

Despite possessing no major renovation experience whatsoever and a tool kit consisting of a hammer, a screwdriver, an assortment of nails, and nothing else, the Johnsons took the plunge to transform the two-flat into a single-family home. In January 2011, they started a blog, Two Flat: Remade, to chronicle their insanity. Today it serves as a reference for other Chicago DIYers. In confessing that they have no idea what they’re doing, the Johnsons have inadvertently inspired others who also have no idea what they are doing and created a community of home-rehab bloggers.

Marcus de la Fleur, for instance, posts updates about home-improvement projects he has taken on, with the goal to transform homes into sustainable, energy-efficient affairs. Yellow Brick Home follows Kim and Scott Vargo’s adventures in indoor construction, such as installing an entire wall of cabinets. The bloggers comment freely on each other’s sites, sharing advice and recommendations for local contractors. “I feel very connected to Matt’s trials and tribulations, as we both had to navigate the same maze and jump the same hurdles,” de la Fleur says. “I recall commenting on some of his posts with suggestions of what could be done different, if I thought it would make a difference. That kind of exchange is priceless.”

In Matt Johnson’s most recent entry, from March 2018, he describes his attempts to install an attic window. “The process took so long I only got the one side up, so I have yet to finish the window,” he writes ruefully. The

Two-flat: in progress é GONZALO GUZMAN; PHOTO ASSISTANT: RACHEL RUTTLE

post drew three commenters who requested window recommendations for their own projects; Sarah replied that they’d paid $4,800 for eight windows, including tax and delivery. The Johnsons always reveal the exact prices. So far they’ve invested $150,000.

When the Johnsons started their renovation, they optimistically divided the rehab plan into four “phases.” The first was to scrub every surface of the second floor, transforming it into a habitable space. The second was to de-

molish the first floor and rehab the basement and install a new boiler and water heater. The third, which began two years ago, called for the whole famly to move into the basement while contractors installed ducting, plumbing, electrical wiring, drywall on the first and second floors, and a new roof and porch. So far, only the move has occurred.

The family’s living quarters are roughly the size of a small one-bedroom apartment—800 square feet. The entryway is in the backyard,

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REVOLUTIONARY IMAGINATION: Chicago Surrealism from Object to Activism

An exhibition, symposium, tour, surrealist salon, musical performances at various locations Thurs. June 7 through Sun. June 10, 2018

Matthew and Sarah Johnson and their family have been living in the basement of their Logan Square home as it’s gutted and rehabbed by hand. é GONZALO GUZMAN; PHOTO ASSISTANT: RACHEL RUTTLE

Sculpture: Robert Green which is currently stocked with dozens of wooden boards in various sizes and a fine selection of dirt piles. There are many temporary walls in the basement. One divides the living-room-esque nook into a narrow TV space and the two bedrooms—one for mom and dad, one shared by the kiddos. On a recent tour of the space, Sarah proudly grabs the inside of a door frame and shakes it. The entire wall sways. Still, the basement is far more habitable than the rest of the house. Though a bit musty, it’s warm and cozy, furnished with a comfy couch and a small dining room table.

Though Matt says his children don’t mind living in such close quarters with each other and their parents, the house poses some hazards. When their six-year-old, Derek, was younger, he wanted to help upstairs, but a piece of flooring fell on him, cutting his head and hand. Four-year-old Emily was once tested for lead levels, and the results were disturbingly high—though they tapered off soon after.

Meanwhile, the house appears far from finished. The front facade is still covered in house wrap, and the inside resembles a large shed.

The entry foyer of sorts overlooks even more boards, and a pile of insulation reaches the ceiling, enveloping a washer-dryer. The walls are missing on both the first and second floors.

The Johnsons work during the day: Matt is in IT, and Sarah is a project manager for a supply chain and logistics company. What little time they have is spent with the kids, playing

Diablo III, or inching through phase three.

Matt hopes to hit phase four—putting the finishing touches on the house and landscaping—soon; during it the family will finally occupy both of the above-ground floors.

The Johnsons originally planned to spend five years rehabbing the house. Then that estimate crept to ten. With three years left, the Johnsons say they’ve seriously considered handing the entire project over to contractors, terminating their plan altogether. “I think part of what keeps me going, and keeps us wanting to stay in the house, is how much help [friends and family] have given us over the years, even if it’s just watching the kids so we can get some work done,” Matt writes in a follow-up e-mail.

“If we gave up, it feels like we’d be throwing all that away somehow.”

As long as the Johnsons feel it benefits homeowners, they plan to keep Two Flat: Remade accessible, comprehensive, and regularly updated.

“There’s a lot of comments from people starting their own project that have found answers, inspiration, or even realized it’s too much for them to take on,” Matt says. “That’s the biggest reason I’ve kept up with the blog.

I haven’t found a lot of other resources for this sort of thing, and while I’m not an expert, most experts just tell people not to do it themselves.” v

Penelope Rosemont, Ron Sakolsky, Paul Garan, Winston Smith, V. Vale, Michael Richardson, Etc Organized by Jennifer Rose Cohn More information at dadachicago.com Or go to: artdesignchicago.org arthistory.uchicago.edu/happenings/events/

m @steveheisler MAY 17, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 13

ARTS & CULTURE

R

Grayson Heyl, Janyce Caraballo, Mary K. Nigohosian, and Wardell Julius Clark é MICHAEL BROSILOW

THEATER

There’s a mythic, monstrous story in Suddenly Last Summer But Raven Theatre doesn’t deliver on it.

By TONY ADLER ”. . . with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.” —Allen Ginsberg, from “Howl”

I

n his weird, great 1948 opus The White Goddess, Robert Graves writes at length about the sacred kings of goddess-worshipping societies: royal consorts, like drones in a beehive, who were permitted to enjoy their luxuries for a short while before being ritually slaughtered and replaced. Jesus giving his disciples bread-flesh and wine-blood? Repurposed sacred king lore, according to Graves’s theory. The Bacchic women tearing Orpheus to shreds? Ditto. And ditto Suddenly Last Summer, as well.

Running now at Raven Theatre in a flawed production directed by Jason Gerace, Tennessee Williams’s 1958 one-act is less a play than a lurid bit of storytelling set in an elaborate frame. The subject of the story, Sebastian Venable, is dead but far from forgotten. His mother, Violet, positively—not to say creepily—reveres him. A wealthy old New Orleans dowager possessing a hauteur Marie Antoinette might envy, Violet spent three months of every year trotting the globe with him on a kind of perpetual Grand Tour. But when a

14 CHICAGO READER - MAY 17, 2018

stroke made travel impossible for her, Sebastian picked a new companion from among his poor relations: his high-strung young cousin, Catharine. They vacationed together one summer at a seedy Spanish beach resort town called Cabeza de Lobo.

And that was where Sebastian died. Unnaturally. Catharine came home broken, telling a tale so grotesque, so perverse, so impossible to reconcile with Violet’s conception of her son as a chaste, poetic seeker after God, that the old woman unilaterally declared Catharine mad, got her committed, and started making plans to have her lobotomized—that is, to get the offending narrative literally cut from her brain.

That’s the background. The play itself unfolds in the courtyard of Violet’s mansion, next to Sebastian’s “well-groomed jungle” of a garden. Violet has summoned a psychiatrist, expecting him to OK the lobotomy in exchange for her promise to subsidize his work. Also present are Mrs. Holly and George, Catharine’s impecunious mother and brother, already wholly owned Venable subsidiaries. Catharine herself arrives in the charge of a tough nun from the asylum.

The first three scenes set up the stakes, and also the atmospherics—that combination of

biography and surreal poetics that constitutes the Williams cosmos. Biography: Williams famously had a sister, Rose, whose life was destroyed by a lobotomy; he brooded on the loss in various ways in various plays. Here, he pushes all the way to wish fulfillment, creating a fictional chance for Rose-as-Catharine to fight back. Poetics: Ever surreal and selfconsciously florid, Williams communes with the mythic in approaching the subject of Sebastian’s fate.

Then comes scene four, i.e., the payoff, the whole of which is essentially a long monologue finally telling The Story in full.

Gerace’s staging is surprisingly dull considering all the vivid opportunities—comic, tragic, and monstrous—Williams hands him.

Violet is a true piece of work, telling people where to go and what to do and how few fucks she gives about them as long as they don’t come between her and her 5 PM daiquiri. The doctor has a hell of a time trying to maintain a semblance of professional integrity in the face of Violet’s frank attempts to buy him.

(Maybe it hasn’t occurred to her in her—in her innocence, he stammers, trying to finesse the unfinesse-able, but someone might “possibly interpret this offer of a subsidy as—well, a sort of a bribe?”) And the Holly contingent are pure, pathetic farce—especially George, to whom it doesn’t occur that it may be a tad insensitive to wear the clothes he inherited from Sebastian on a visit to Sebastian’s mother.

Even the tough nun cuts a memorable figure.

But Mary K. Nigohosian’s Violet is all one-note, and a screechy one at that: merely querulous when the character has it in her to be everything from a magnificent harridan to a grieving mother (with something of the lover thrown in). Similarly, Wardell Julius Clark fails to exploit the doctor’s full potential, maintaining his probity at the cost of any question about what choices he’ll make. Grayson Heyl overplays Catharine’s skittishness at first, yet she comes into her own in time for that harrowing sacred-king story, effectively communicating the sense of a trauma relived. While she’s doing that, though, something strange happens: Gerace adds a piece of action that isn’t in the script, makes no sense, and undercuts everything Heyl’s built up to that point. I’d like to think it was an opening-night mishap. Everything but good sense suggests it wasn’t. v SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER Through 6/17: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM, Raven Theatre, 6157 N. Clark, 773-338-2177, raventheatre.com, $15-$43.

m @taadler

READER RECOMMENDED

b ALL AGES

F

THEATER

in tooth and claw and R Red puppet strings Flies! The Musical! imagines Lord of the Flies with songs.

By the time Nicky Mendelsohn steps into his follow spot as Stephen, a socially inept teenage vegan, the drama kids of Lovely Valley Performing Arts Magnet High School are already in trouble. Having moved rehearsal to a wilderness area for their upcoming production of a musical based on Lord of the Flies, they’re already settling into the delirious state of nature William Golding wrote his book to interrogate. Hungry and rowdy, a detachment leaves Stephen behind to forage alone while they hunt for meat. Suddenly, as Mendelsohn’s falsetto extols nature’s glories in song . . . well, it’s hard to describe what happens next, because it involves a raccoon, a deer, and a wild boar, all played by hand-operated puppets. Suffice it to say that this Pride Films and Plays production, with book and lyrics

by Larry Todd Cousineau and music by Cindy O’Connor, is a giddy frolic of a musical comedy with equal doses of frame-breaking irreverence and warmed-over cliche.

The standout is Pigtails (Missy Wise), the play’s substitute for Piggy, a meek and humble boy in Golding’s book. Whereas Piggy has his brains splattered onto a rock, Pigtails assures us in an early aside that no one will die here. The lowered stakes only ensure a more hilarious disproportion between act and feeling, light comedy’s formulaic stock and trade. This entire cast’s singing is remarkable; they have such marvelous comedic timing all around that you wish their jokes had been a little less obviously written. Michael Driscoll directs.

—MAX MALLER FLIES! THE MUSICAL! Through 6/10:

Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 5 PM, Pride Arts Center, 4139 N. Broadway, 800-737-0984, pridefilmsandplays. com, $25.

Divine predestination

In the world of Grace, no amount of foreshadowing is too much.

Steve credits his self-described “prayer warrior” ethic with netting him a soon-to-be-delivered $18.6 million in Swiss francs to start a chain of gospel-themed hotels (the slogan: “Where would Jesus stay?”). For him, belief in God’s capitalist-friendly grace is all anyone needs to succeed. Sam, who lives in an apartment identical to Steve’s in the same complex, is his calculated opposite: having lost his fiancee and half his face in a horrific, metaphorically overdetermined automobile accident (hit by an orange juice delivery truck on a Tropicana access road in Sunrise, Florida), he now has faith in nothing. Caught in the middle is Steve’s perpetually belittled wife, Sarah, for whom Sam’s newfound nihilism offers a restorative antidote to her husband’s condescending certainty.

Welcome to the stacked deck of Craig Wright’s sporadically brilliant 2004 one-act, which reduces the complexities and consequences of commercialized faith to a tidy fable in which no amount of foreshadowing is too much. Which isn’t to say the play’s a bust. Far from it. Wright’s characters are engaging and carefully observed throughout (and brought compellingly to life in director Georgette Verdin’s beautifully acted production for Interrobang), and the script’s numerous brutal monologues are stunning. But Wright’s untroubled

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Flies! The Musical! é PAUL GOYETTE

plotting turns most every messy predicament into a foregone conclusion.

And that’s particularly problematic when the play opens with one character murdering the other two, then rewinds a few weeks to discover why it happened.

Once the answers are obvious (somewhere around the halfway point) the play’s squandered its dramatic purpose. —JUSTIN HAYFORD GRACE Through 6/3:

Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 2 and 7:30 PM, Sun 2 PM, Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N. Southport, 773-935-6875, interrobangtheatreproject.com, $32, $17 students.

R

to ask.

What’s on your mind?

Mark Toland, mind reader, doesn’t need

As we entered the upstairs theater at the Greenhouse Theater Center, a young man with a trim beard and large glasses that accentuated his deep-set eyes greeted us.

When my companion asked him if he was Mark, he said yes. “You know my name already, right?” she joked. “No,” he answered, “I haven’t turned it on yet.”

Our greeter, of course, was Mark Toland and the “it” he was talking about was mentalism—the illusion of reading minds. Over the next 75 minutes, Toland correctly recited audience members’ memories, repeated words they hadn’t uttered, and identified objects brought to the stage while he was blindfolded. He moved the show along with self-deprecating patter that put everyone at ease and had us eating out of his hand. He repeatedly stressed that he wasn’t actually clairvoyant yet left everyone baffled nonetheless.

To ease a mark’s mind is a mentalist’s biggest magic trick. No one wants to be made a fool of, so a mind reader must make the con a pleasure to his prey. We knew that Toland was making us play his game, but we played it anyway and were happy to do so.

For the grand finale, Toland made three people add up a bunch of numbers on an iPhone that wound up totalling that day’s date plus the exact time at which the show ended. I have no idea how he did that or any of the tricks that preceded it, but I’d happily let him bamboozle me again anytime. —DMITRY SAMAROV MARK

TOLAND: MIND READER Through 10/31: Wed 8 PM, Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln, 773404-7336, greenhousetheater.org, $30, $28 seniors, $18 industry and students.

R Somebody loves you, baby

A New Attitude does the great Patti LaBelle proud.

Among the staff at Uptown’s Black Ensemble Theater, company founder and CEO Jackie Taylor is colloquially referred to as “the Queen.” I wonder if that makes

associate director Rueben D. Echoles—whose influence and directorial interpretation of the jukebox biomusical is recognizable up and down BE’s roster of original plays—a duke. For better and worse, as writer and director, Echoles’s latest rundown of a diva’s discography exhibits all the cogs audiences have come to expect in BE’s well-oiled machine.

These include (a) at least two pair of heels being kicked off during paint-peeling, goosebump-triggering renditions of hits like “Lady Marmalade” and “On My Own;” (b) gaudy bass and cymbal-brush underscoring during every instance of domestic violence or family tension; (c) healthy doses of gospel, both religious and secular, throughout; and (d) informative chronological tidbits presented in no particular order. As a senior LaBelle narrating her journey from 60s girl-group frontrunner to disco icon to legacy diva, Dawn Bless gives a larger-than-life performance that taps into LaBelle’s electric stage presence and mannerisms without sacrificing her own personable and affable stage presence.

Likewise, as a young Patti, Cherise Thomas showcases extraordinary chops and the spirit of a master who knows her value in a studio—even if the rest of the world is just catching up.

The way in which A New Attitude blazes through Behind the Music-style milestones makes LaBelle’s unique career journey look almost indiscernible from that of just about every other diva BE has covered, but as a pastiche of a legend, there’s no denying how hot this revue burns. —DAN JAKES A NEW ATTITUDE:

again structure Ofrenda (“Offering”), a new play devised by the 32 teenagers of the Albany Park Theater Project, written by Isaac Gomez, and directed by Stephanie Paul and Maggie Popadiak. There’s an earnest sweetness to many of these tales—one girl celebrating her first hijab with ice cream in Damascus, another feeding chickens in the Ecuadoran countryside—but pain, loss, alienation, and injustice keep them from being stories “for” children. And yet the persistent conversion of loss into art, the hope it engenders, and the beauty that results is a powerful lesson at any age. The performers dance together, sing together, protest together. A bombed city becomes a landscape drawing unfurling across the stage. For theater as activism, you couldn’t ask for more.

—IRENE HSIAO OFRENDA Through 6/2: Wed 7:30, Fri

8 PM, Sat 4 and 8 PM; no performances Fri 5/26Sat 5/27, Laura Wiley Theater, 5100 N. Ridgeway, 773-866-0875, aptpchicago.org, $18-$38, sold out, waitlist available.

Posers

Only a passing el train makes Throatpunch feel real.

Attitude is essential to selling a punk play, but Nothing Without a Company’s production of Sharon Krome’s Throatpunch doesn’t deliver on the promise of its aggressive title. Flat performances plague this tale of

ARTS & CULTURE

three young punks holed up in a small apartment in 1983 Chicago, where they play bad music, experiment with drugs, and hook up in different configurations. The script demands a level of intensity that the ensemble fails to reach, and the actors are still at the line-reading stage rather than fully embodying characters.

Adam Huizenga is the most confident member of the cast as British guitarist Zig, but the rest of the production is so tepid that he pushes into overacting to compensate. Krome doesn’t adequately build up to the play’s big emotional shifts, and while this story has the bones of a more engaging drama, it needs more meat on its skeleton. The musical element is especially flimsy, and a climactic guitar showdown at the end lands with a thud.

The best moment in the play came by chance at my performance. When Cyn (Tarina Bradshaw) and Nat (Alicia Jade) silently lay together on the couch, the el passed through the Granville stop. The train could be seen in the window behind them, and it was the one moment when the world of the play felt real. That’s due to coincidence, but director Anna Rose Ii-Epstein makes a smart decision staging this play in a real apartment overlooking the street. This feels like a real place, even if the cast hasn’t filled it with believable people.

—OLIVER SAVA THROATPUNCH Through 6/3: Thu-

Sat 8 PM, Sun 7 PM, Chicago Mosaic School, 1101 W. Granville, nothingwithoutacompany.org, $20, $10 students and industry. v

A TRIBUTE TO PATTI LABELLE Through 6/17: Thu

7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 3 and 8 PM, Sun 3 PM; no performance Sun 5/20, Black Ensemble Theater, 4450 N. Clark, 773-769-4451, blackensembletheater. org, $49.50-$65.

R A beautiful Ofrenda

Albany Park Theater Project’s latest teendevised show is a powerful example of theater as activism.

A girl walks onto a stage that’s bare but for a suitcase in the center. Like any teenager entering a room, she’s looking down at the small flat object in her hand. There’s a chime that sounds like a text message coming in. But it’s not a cell phone—it’s a virgencita, an icon of the Virgin Mary. “Have you seen one of these before?,” she asks, before launching into a story, half told in Spanish, about her family history. A boy opens his mother’s fan, remembering how she loved to watch him dance.

Another boy waves a pot of Vicks VapoRub in the air, in his family a cure for everything from backache to depression. Their voices start to overlap. Their trinkets fill the suitcase.

Transformations of objects into stories and back

MAY 17, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 15

ARTS & CULTURE

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est Virginia gave me the opportunity to make a home, make a claim to some land, choose my tribe,” says photographer Nancy Abrams. She tells the story of her life there in the 70s and 80s in her lively new book, The Climb From Salt Lick: A Memoir of Appalachia (West Virginia University Press), in which she paints a vivid picture of what it was like to make her way in an unfamiliar territory during a turbulent time in the nation’s history. The release of the book will be accompanied by the first major exhibition of her photographs at Rare Nest Gallery in Avondale.

An aspiring photojournalist at the University of Missouri, Abrams accepted a summer internship at a West Virginia newspaper in the summer of 1974, and it changed her life. Her professor, Bill Kuykendall, had friends who ran a weekly called the Preston County News in Terra Alta, West Virginia—a town of less than 2,000, located about 100 miles south of Pittsburgh—and had recommended Abrams.

So in May of that year, she packed up her car and drove east into Appalachia, a place she’d never been to and knew next to nothing about.

A short Jewish girl from suburban Saint Louis prone to wearing hippie peasant dresses, Abrams stood out in her new rural mountain surroundings, but she quickly made friends due to her open personality and happy demeanor. The dramatic landscape attracted her at first sight. “West Virginia is like a woman scorned for her wild appearance and independent ways,” she writes in her book. It’s not a stretch to think that she saw some of her own personality reflected in this landscape.

She writes of her youthful lust and hunger for adventure and experience often and with obvious relish.

After the internship ended, Abrams returned to Missouri to complete her senior year, but she kept thinking about her time in West Virginia. Rather than try for more conventionally exotic National Geographic-type assignments like her photojournalism classmates, she decided to return to Preston County. She eventually assumed the managing editor post at the newspaper, fell in love, got married, had kids, and built a life in that wild, mountainous terrain.

Her photographs from the 70s and 80s superficially resemble the Depression-era WPA pictures of Dorothea Lange or Walker Evans in their depiction of economic want in a remote rural region. But her love for the land-

16 CHICAGO READER - MAY 17, 2018

VISUAL ART

Straight shooter

Photojournalist Nancy Abrams looks back on her life in West Virginia.

By DMITRY SAMAROV

It was Preston County News publisher Bob Teets’s idea to do a story about a town “living on memories.” These boys pose in the Newburg Teen Center. é NANCY L. ABRAMS

scape and obvious affection for her subjects set her shots apart. While Abrams is obviously concerned with capturing the trying conditions of life in coal country, her images don’t come off as loaded or didactic in the way that this kind of work can sometimes be. As she tells me via e-mail, “I’m a straight shooter.”

She means that her photographs aren’t enhanced or altered, but I think it also applies to her approach to her subject matter. She seems to take the people she writes about and photographs at their word, and makes every effort to give them the benefit of the doubt.

She takes a direct approach in marrying text and image as well. “I’ve been a writer for as long as I can remember. As soon as I was able to read, I wanted to write. Photography came much later. But it’s not an either/or. ‘Words and pictures working together’ (to reference [Life photojournalist] Wilson Hicks) was a mantra at the University of Missouri.”

Abrams’s attachment to the land started early. “From age ten to 17 I lived in Wild Horse Creek Valley on the west side of Babler State Park [in Saint Louis’s far-western suburbs].

It was very rural then, with wooded hills and trails on the bluffs of the Missouri River. My mother knew the names of birds and wildflowers, all plentiful in Wild Horse Creek Valley, and that naming made me value them.”

Her lifelong affinity for nature made me wonder whether she employs photography primarily to capture beauty. “I do think of my photos as stand-alone art,” she says. “Some of my photos are scenes I came across and photographed independent of any assignment.

In the biz, these are often called ‘enterprise’ photos. There was a huge division between art photography and photojournalism when I was at Mizzou. I still feel that tension.”

One of the most moving chapters in the memoir tells of a photo opportunity not taken.

On a winter morning after a snowstorm, Abrams looked out the window of her cabin and saw shapes scattered in the field outside.

They looked like termite mounds, but were made entirely of snow and ice. She went outside and wandered around these natural sculptures. Her husband, Wilford, called them snow rollers. By late in the day the sun had melted them down and, because she hadn’t brought her camera along, all she had was her memory of that morning. When she told her coworkers at the newspaper, they told her snow rollers were very rare and that seeing more than a couple together was unheard of.

Abrams had about 30 in her backyard.

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ARTS & CULTURE Ryan Reynolds in Deadpool 2

Left: Miners Below: The Rutherfords pose for a picture with their new supply of coal. é NANCY L. ABRAMS

Vignettes like this one pepper her book and make for an engaging read. She addresses the class and cultural differences between her and her adopted home with a light touch and an open heart, but the difficulties of making a new life in a rugged, sometimes unforgiving landscape are palpable throughout. She describes how her left-wing politics and middle-class suburban upbringing made her stand out from her working-class, conservative neighbors, but takes pains to stress their common struggles over issues that made them clash, such as Nixon and the Vietnam war, the consolidation of school districts, and the impact of the coal industry on the region’s health and economy.

Abrams’s book ends with the dissolution of her first marriage in early 1988. She’s no longer a journalist, though she still subscribes to four newspapers; in 1990, she took a job as the manager of publications at West

Virginia University’s health sciences center.

“Not quite as fulfilling,” she says, “but I was a single mom then, and the money and hours were way better. I think the newspaper business in West Virginia is as bleak as it is elsewhere. It’s tragic.”

Between The Climb From Salt Lick and the show of her photographs at Rare Nest—gallery director Keith Bringe tells me there will be 34 22-by-36-inch inkjet prints and ten eight-by-ten darkroom prints on display— Chicago has a unique opportunity to meet a writer and photographer who chose to make a life in a part of the country that few outsiders know much about. Abrams’s work is a great corrective to ugly caricatures of Appalachia such as J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. She shows that a newcomer can flourish even in the most unforgiving terrain, and that curiosity can trump narrow-mindedness even in the most remote climes. v “NANCY ABRAMS: THE CLIMB FROM SALT LICK” Opening reception Fri 5/18, 5-9 PM; reading Sat 5/19, 1-3 PM, Rare Nest Gallery, 3433 N. Kedvale, 708-616-8671, rarenestgallery.com. F

MOVIES

Deadpool 2: Not enough orgies

Marvel’s wisecracking antihero returns in a sequel that lacks the original’s agreeable excess.

By J.R. JONES

W

hen the Marvel Comics movie Deadpool stormed the box office in February 2016, reviews focused on its subversive, self-conscious humor. But the true appeal of this R-rated kid flick lies in its orgiastic zeal. There’s an orgy of gun violence, as the crimson-clad Deadpool uses a dozen pistol shots to waste an assortment of thugs with machine guns; after his last bullet travels through three skulls, he sniffs the barrel and confesses into the camera, “I’m touching myself tonight.” There’s an orgy of sex, set to Neil Sedaka’s “Calendar Girl,” that shows Deadpool’s alter ego, Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds), coupling with his beloved Vanessa (Morena Baccarin) every which way: her on top, him on top, him from behind, her from behind (wishing him a happy International Women’s Day and entering him with a strapon). There’s an orgy of torture, sardonically scored with the Chordettes hit “Mister Sandman,” in which Wilson is hung from the ceiling and beaten, locked in a cage and sprayed with a fire hose, and submerged in a tank of ice water. With a comic book movie, you can never have too much of too much.

Unfortunately the new sequel, Deadpool 2, doesn’t have enough of too much; less charitable viewers might even argue that it has too much of not enough. Once again screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick (abetted this time by star Reynolds) drop viewers into a chaotic opening scene and then bring them up ssss EXCELLENT

sss GOOD

to speed with flashbacks, but this time they introduce a tragic element distinctly out of sync with the movie’s wiseacre design. D2 opens with an overhead shot of Deadpool lying on a bed of industrial barrels that contain 12,000 gallons of fuel, flicking a match into the mouth of an open barrel, and getting blown sky-high; flashbacks reveal that he’s been driven to suicide by the death of Vanessa, who was killed by an assassin’s bullet meant for him. Deadpool, you see, is really just an old softie, despite his filthy mouth and his smug contempt for the DC Comics universe.

Only at one point does D2 approach having too much of too much. Hoping to rescue the young mutant Russell (Julian Dennison) from the time-traveling villain Cable (Josh Brolin), Deadpool recruits a new team of superheroes called the X-Force, which includes Bedlam (Terry Crews), Shatterstar (Lewis Tan), Zeitgeist (Bill Skarsgård), and the hapless Peter (Rob Delaney). Led by Deadpool, these four make a daring helicopter jump together, but you won’t be seeing them in the forthcoming X-Force spin-off because the raid descends into chaos and the apprentices all suffer gruesome slapstick deaths. This is truly the best a superhero movie can offer, when the road of excess leads to the palace of absurdity. v DEADPOOL 2 ss Directed by David Leitch. R, 119 min. For listings visit chicagoreader.com/movies.

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ARTS & CULTURE

Irm Hermann (center) and Hanna Schygulla (right) in Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day

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18 CHICAGO READER - MAY 17, 2018

The German master’s 1972 miniseries Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day shows ordinary people improving their lives.

By BEN SACHS

B

roadcast on German TV in the early 70s but never before released in the U.S., Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s five-part miniseries Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day arrives like a gift from the movie gods. Not only is it a major work from the trailblazing German filmmaker—indeed, his most ambitious project prior to Berlin Alexanderplatz in 1980—it also showcases a side of Fassbinder revealed only fleetingly in his films. Generous and humane, the series may be the only Fassbinder work whose characters are, for the most part, well-adjusted and happy. That’s not to say that Eight Hours is sentimental; rather, it presents Fassbinder’s usual themes (sex, love, longing, and class relations) in a different light, illuminating hidden corners of his oeuvre.

Fassbinder, who died in 1982, wrote and directed dozens of movies and plays that explored the interconnectedness between social structures and personal relationships.

He believed, to quote the title of his first feature, that love is colder than death—meaning that people’s desire to be loved drives them to conform to social expectations, and that, more often than not, this results in unhappiness. He developed this theme across 11 features before turning 26; this first phase of his career is marked by its deadpan style and unrelenting pessimism, with form and content complementing each other in classical fashion. In 1972, when he was 27, Fassbinder released two films, The Merchant of Four Seasons and The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, with a more naturalistic and sympathetic approach. Drawing inspiration from the Hollywood melodramas of Douglas Sirk, Fassbinder imbued his work with greater emotion and found a new balance between his cynical worldview and his sensitivity to individuals.

Even viewers familiar with those films will be astonished by the optimism of Eight Hours.

The characters are capable of loving without

sacrificing their individuality; moreover, they possess a social awareness that leads them to change their surroundings and work for better lives. Fassbinder clearly wants viewers to root for his subjects as they improve their situations at home and at work, and the series exhibits a winning charm that wouldn’t crop up again until one of his last features, Lola (1981). Developing his characters over nearly eight hours, he creates more than a dozen fully realized individuals whose foibles are as lovable as their strengths. He also creates a rich and remarkably lively working-class milieu in which the characters can love each other freely. The social structure seems less rigid than in Fassbinder’s other works; happiness may not come easily, but for perhaps the only time in his career, it does seem attainable.

The series opens with a scene of collective happiness, as Fassbinder introduces most of the major characters at a 60th birthday party for the grandmother (Luise Ullrich) of an extended working-class family in Cologne. The guests drink, dance, and generally enjoy each other’s company. Before each character comes into focus, Fassbinder conveys the spirit of the family as a whole; they seem content with their lot, though no one has much money. (One character notes that the champagne they’re drinking is a rare luxury.) Soon Eight Hours lands upon its central protagonist, Jochen (Gottfried John), a skilled laborer in his early 20s who lives with the grandmother and his middle-aged parents. Jochen borrows his brother-in-law’s car to pick up more snacks for the party, and while he’s out, he meets a young woman named Marion (Hanna Schygulla, Fassbinder’s frequent muse). The two hit it off, he invites her back to the party, and at the end of the evening, after he drives her home, they make plans to meet again. The scene is as sweet as anything Fassbinder ever imagined— one senses right away that the two will fall madly in love.

The remainder of this first episode details the couple’s blossoming romance, which Fass-

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164 North State Street

ARTS & CULTURE binder parallels with scenes of the couple at their respective jobs and of Jochen’s noncomformist grandmother finding companionship with a kindly widower named Gregor (Werner Finck). Yet the couple’s happiness is complicated by two factors. First, Jochen learns that the boss wants his close-knit laborers to complete a big project in less time than they’re usually given; second, the hero discovers that Marion must care for her younger brother, which means Jochen will have to take on some of the responsibility if he gets serious with her. Jochen manages to resolve both issues: he invents a new process that allows the laborers to finish their project on time, and he accepts Marion’s terms for the romance. Adulthood, it seems, requires compromise and innovation, but Fassbinder’s characters are up to the task.

In the second episode, two other characters use their imaginations to deal with the challenges life throws at them. Jochen’s grandmother decides to move out of her daughter’s place and find an apartment with Gregor. Fassbinder devotes much of the episode to their search for a home, detailing the costs and tribulations associated with each potential domicile. During their search, the grandmother gets the idea to open a nursery, and soon her struggle to find a home is compounded by the even greater challenge of getting a license for the business. Whereas the first episode of Eight Hours evokes the Depression-era romances of Hollywood director Frank Borzage (Man’s Castle; Little Man, What Now?), the second resembles the realistic comedies of working-class life that Mike Leigh was starting to make for British TV around the same time as Eight Hours was broadcast.

Working life is the focus of the third episode, in which Franz (Wolfgang Schenck), one of Jochen’s coworkers, aspires to succeed the group’s foreman, who has died. Franz struggles to better himself, taking correspondence classes to get certified as a foreman, but his dream of climbing the social ladder is thwarted when management hires an outsider to fill the position. Fassbinder dramatizes Franz’s frustration sensitively, anticipating his later working-class drama I Only Want You to Love Me (1976), yet the episode is nowhere near as despairing as that film: the hero of Love Me must deal with his problems alone, but Franz finds moral support in Jochen and his other

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coworkers. In fact the group tries to intervene on his behalf and get him promoted. This solidarity among the workers provides the heart of Eight Hours, which shows how the relationships people create at work can better their personal lives.

The theme of personal fulfillment is central to the fourth episode, which concerns Jochen and Marion’s marriage and the separation of Jochen’s sister from her abusive husband.

The most satisfying episode of the series, it climaxes with a lengthy sequence showing the wedding party in full swing. Fassbinder juggles almost two dozen characters here, and the social portraiture equals anything else in his oeuvre. As in the first episode, the thematic emphasis is on beginnings and endings, with the promise of the former shaded by the finality of the latter. Yet even endings can be sweet, as Fassbinder reminds us with the sister’s triumphant escape from her unhappy home life. Characters from Fassbinder’s other works might have resigned themselves to such a plight, but Jochen’s sister shows greater resolve, and her drive to lead a better life enhances the joy of the wedding party.

The final episode of the series is even sweeter, as Fassbinder ties up the various subplots with a symphonic sense of harmony. Rolf (Rudolf Waldemar Brem) and Irmgard (Irm Hermann), friends of Marion and Jochen, are beginning a romance of their own, and at one point Irmgard tells Marion that she wishes Rolf would ditch his blue-collar job and get an administrative position. Marion argues that people can live fulfilling lives regardless of their social position, and her monologue, one of the longest in the series, summarizes Fassbinder’s perspective and provides a stirring climax. “I think we can be happy [even if] the person we love isn’t great,” Marion says.

“You’re something great together, because you love each other.” The director may have specialized in characters trapped by their social roles, but Eight Hours shows that he also believed people were capable of transcending them. v EIGHT HOURS DON’T MAKE A DAY ssss Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

472 min. Fri 5/18-Thu 5/24. Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-846-2800, siskelfilmcenter.org, first part $11, remaining parts $7 each.

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EIGHT HOURS DON’T MAKE A DAY

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ARTS & CULTURE Elvira Arellano

MOVIES

é CHARLES REX ARBOGAST

NEW REVIEWS

Always at the Carlyle

Directed by Matthew Miele, this shallow documentary about Manhattan’s famed Carlyle Hotel fattens an ever-growing genre I call the Cinema of the One Percent—documentaries about chefs, sommeliers, jewelers, etc—that art house theaters program for their wealthier patrons. Opened in 1930, the Carlyle is known for its art deco elegance and the fanatical discretion of its staff, who are shown over and over again refusing to dish about their rich, famous, and in some cases royal guests. Among the celebs sitting for interviews are George Clooney, Naomi Campbell, Condoleeza Rice, Wes Anderson, Sofia Coppola, Lenny Kravitz, Alan Cumming, Vera Wang, Jeff Goldblum, and the repulsive Fran Lebowitz, who is really annoyed that her favorite museums are always full of people from Kansas. Miele is the previous director of Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf’s (2013) and Crazy About Tiffany’s (2016); I must remember not to see them. —J.R. JONES PG-13, 91 min. Fri 5/18, 2 and 6 PM; Sat 5/19, 6:15 PM; Sun 5/20, 3 PM; Mon 5/21, 6 PM; Tue 5/22, 8:15 PM; Wed 5/23, 6 PM; and Thu 5/24, 8:15 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center. Also: Wilmette.

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20 CHICAGO READER - MAY 17, 2018

In this British character study, a lonely 27-year-old woman (Jessie Buckley) still living with her parents falls in love with a mysterious young man (Johnny Flynn) who’s suspected of having murdered several children on the small island where they live. The film covers thematic territory similar to that of Claude Chabrol’s Le Boucher (1970), though writer-director Michael Pearce isn’t interested in developing suspense as Chabrol was.

For the most part, Pearce considers the emotional life of the fragile heroine, gradually revealing details about her past and bringing her risky behavior into focus. The leads deliver affecting, nuanced performances, which gives heft to the psychological insights; Flynn is particularly good, creating a character at once charismatic and opaque. Less compelling is the subplot concerning the heroine’s relationship with her overbearing mother, —BEN SACHS R, 107 min. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Landmark’s Century Centre.

Book Club

Stale jokes and cringe-inducing sight gags punctuate this creaky romantic comedy about long-time gal pals (Diane Keaton, Jane Fonda, Candice Bergen, Mary Steenburgen) jolted out of their respective ruts by reading the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy and downing copious amounts of wine. As the friends’ inhibitions wane, Keaton’s character blunders through a meet-cute with a wealthy pilot (Andy Garcia), Fonda’s reconnects with an old flame (Don Johnson), and Bergen’s hooks up with a guy on a dating site (Richard Dreyfuss). In the

most embarrassing plot thread, Steenburgen’s character slips Viagra to her distracted retiree husband (Craig T. Nelson), upping the smarmy innuendo and tanking the movie. Director Bill Holderman cowrote the screenplay with Erin Simms. —ANDREA GRONVALL PG-13, 104 min.

ArcLight, Century 12 and CineArts 6, Chatham 14, City North 14, Crown Village 18, Ford City, River East 21, Showplace ICON.

Life of the Party

Melissa McCarthy and husband Ben Falcone cowrote this unofficial remake of the old Rodney Dangerfield vehicle Back to School (1986), with Falcone directing and McCarthy starring as the square parent who enrolls in the same college as her child. The modern academic landscape of safe spaces and microaggression measurement might have given the old premise a good jolt, but Falcone and McCarthy take the easier route of throwing her character into the epic partying of the Greek system. Like a network sitcom, this requires a heavy suspension of disbelief in human nature: the protagonist’s daughter and her sorority sisters couldn’t be more delighted to have a corny middle-aged mom following them around. Most of the laughs come not from McCarthy but from the mugging Gillian Jacobs, given a good, demented role as an older student who’s spent eight years in a coma. —J.R. JONES PG-13, 105 min.

Century 12 and CineArts 6, Chatham 14, City North 14, Davis, Logan, Showplace ICON.

Pope Francis—A Man of His Word If Patti Smith likes the Pope, can he really be doing his job? That’s the question ultimately raised by this documentary about Pope Francis, which combines footage of his public appearances with an exclusive interview in which, speaking directly to the camera, he summarizes his spiritual views on poverty, unemployment, and environmental collapse. Director Wim Wenders (Buena Vista Social Club) was raised Catholic but comes at his subject from a secular perspective, celebrating the pontiff’s progressive politics; the only tough questions, about homosexuality and pedophile priests, come from reporters at the back of an airplane as Francis visits the U.S. This packaging of the Pope for liberal consumption is harmless enough, though viewers deserve something a little more thoughtful at a time when some Catholics are beginning to wonder if this pontificate will amount to more than a series of lovely gestures. A quick note:

I was expecting numerous scenes of Francis washing people’s feet, but there aren’t any, so go ahead and buy that popcorn. —J.R. JONES PG, 92 min. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Landmark’s Century Centre.

The Seagull

The Chekhov play, about a bourgeois Russian family after the turn of the 20th century, gets a distinctly cinematic treatment, designed to support big, splashy performances from Annette Bening, Saoirse Ronan, and Elisabeth Moss. Screenwriter Stephen Karam and director Michael Mayer work overtime to vary the scenery, moving the various encounters out of the family’s country home and onto the grounds, and sound editor Benjamin Cheah uses all the latest tricks (noise levels jumping between scenes, dialogue fading out mid-sentence) to give the action a modern feel. Combine all this with the translation into English and you may wonder how much of Chekhov remains, but the outlines of the story are still in place and Bening, who has developed into an acting bird of Streep-like plumage, enjoys herself enormously as Arkadina, the vain but fading theater star. With Brian Dennehy, Corey Stoll, and Mare Winningham. —J.R. JONES PG-13, 98 min. Landmark’s Century Centre.

EVENTS

Ciné-tracts and Soulèvement de la Jeunesse This shorts program commemorates the 50th anniversary of the political uprising that brought nine million students and workers into the streets of France in May 1968.

Screening are Romain Goupil’s documentary Mourir à 30 Ans, Maurice Lemaître’s documentary Soulèvement de la Jeunesse, and short “cine-tracts” by Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and Jean-Luc Godard. 85 min. Jennifer Wild of the University of Chicago introduces the screening. Fri 5/18, 7 PM. Logan Center for the Arts. F

Elvira

Javier Solórzano Casarin directed this 2009 Mexican documentary about Elvira Arellano, a Mexican woman working at O’Hare International Airport who was arrested for Social Security fraud and took refuge in a Humboldt Park church for a year before she was deported. 70 min. Arellano attends the screening. Visit chicagoreader.com/movies for Ben Sachs’s profile of Arellano, posting May 18. Sat 5/19, 7 PM. Logan Center for the Arts. F v

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

PHILIP MONTORO

verge of recovering its rights. If the depths of our minds conceal strange forces capable of augmenting or conquering those on the surface, it is in our greatest interest to capture them.”

Reader music editor

Anna von Hausswolff, Dead Magic On her fourth studio album, Dead Magic, this Swedish singer does what Swans haven’t managed in decades. With her heavy postrock band, a massive pipe organ, and her wild, piercing, ragged voice, she simultaneously evokes thundering vastness and terrifying intimacy, implacable truths and unknowable secrets.

Lakshmi Ramgopal, A Half-Light Chorus This sound installation by the artist also known as Lykanthea runs through July 22 in the Fern Room of Lincoln Park Conservatory, as part of ESS’s Florasonic series. Inconspicuous speakers play a looped four-channel recording of nine vocalists imitating 22 different birds from India and from Sanskrit literature, among them the puff-throated babbler, the Indian peafowl, and the blue-bearded bee eater (their names appear on signs similar to the conservatory’s plant markers). The vocalists include Ramgopal, her mother, and her infant niece, to whom A Half-Light Chorus is dedicated. Being surrounded by their calls feels eerily like wandering into a forest where the birds have suddenly developed human intelligence.

Demilich When I previewed the first Chicago show by these veteran Finnish death-metal weirdos, I didn’t get into their dry sense of humor. So here’s my best recollection of my favorite stage banter by front man and guitarist Antti Boman: “We were afraid to play in Chicago because of all the Mafia movies. Children shouldn’t be exposed to such films, don’t you think? But you all seem very nice. Even though you’re all in the Mafia.”

Lakshmi Ramgopal at the May 6 opening concert for A Half-Light Chorus é PHILIP MONTORO

IN ROTATION

RYAN BECK Producer, programmer, and artist, aka Scim

Asmahan in the 1944 film Gharam wa Intiqam (“Passion and Revenge”)

ZEYNAB GHANDOUR

Artist and performer as Thoom Asmahan, “Once I Entered a Garden” Asmahan is a famous Syrian-born singer from the 1930s. Her voice is heavy and somber, which I prefer to the light and birdy tone of a singer like Fairuz. She had a rough life navigating multiple wars, three marriages, and prejudices against women in music. My grandmother, Allah yerhama, used to sing this song so much that it’s sometimes hard to listen to now. It isn’t my preferred song that Asmahan has sung, but it holds another weight for me.

Sote Iranian musician Ata Ebtekar, aka Sote, is actively developing the scene in Tehran. He started SET, an experimental electronic-music and arts festival in the city. My friend showed me his 2016 album, Hardcore Sounds From Tehran, and it’s one of my favorites. It’s an overwhelming wrath of relentlessly pounding machine rhythms and disintegration. It’s also very dynamic composition. Sote is very inspiring to me.

Halcyon Veil UK artist Rabit started the Halcyon Veil label in 2015, and their catalog is one of my favorite curations right now. Their releases are diverse in sound and approach, which I appreciate because honest experimentation comes in many different forms that are often divided by the history of the conventions they utilize. They have an André Breton quote on their website: “Perhaps the imagination is on the

SPF420 In 2013, before the meme-ification of vaporwave, SPF420 was a group organized around the live broadcasting of niche microgenres and experimental electronic music. It featured acts such as Foodman, Luxury Elite, and Giant Claw. There is a need for a new digital space that combines elements of existing music and social media platforms with a focus on original content created by artists. I think visiting a website should be as exciting as going to a club, especially when VR becomes widely adopted.

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Vaporwave community SPF420 loved retrofuturistic beach-party imagery.

Max The advent of the digital audio workstation and affordable, reliable computers has democratized music creation. I hope for a future in which all of my friends have the tools and time to create and share their art.

Max takes this to the next level. It’s a visual programming language that allows artists to make their own instruments and audio effects. It’s also a great tool for experienced software developers to quickly prototype their programs.

Obe, Har Whenever someone asks me for a music recommendation, I’m increasingly inclined to suggest one of my friends from Chicago, since there are so many talented artists living here. As Obe, Oliver Beltran has been putting out some of my favorite tracks in the past few months. He’s fairly new to producing—he doesn’t have much more than a Soundcloud now—but he already has a refined sound.

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THE VIXEN REVISITS THE STARTING LINE OF HER PERSONAL DRAG RACE

SHE DIDN’T WIN OVER RUPAUL, BUT SHE’S CARRYING ON THE FIGHT FOR INCLUSIVITY THAT SHE BEGAN AT THE SOUTH SIDE’S VENERABLE JEFFERY PUB. The BLOCK BEAT BY

Words BY TIFFANY WALDEN Photos BY OLIVIA OBINEME 22 CHICAGO READER - MAY 17, 2018

B

“

eing here today after being on Drag Race is, like, full circle,” the Vixen says. It’s a sunny April morning, and the 27-year-old drag queen is sitting pretty with a curly pink wig and beat face inside the Jeffery Pub, where she first performed professionally. Located at 7041 S. Jeffery, the pub is not just Chicago’s only black-owned gay club but also one of the

oldest LGBTQ+ spots in the country, operating since 1965, according to owner Jamal Junior.

At the time, fiercely popular VH1 reality show RuPaul’s Drag Race was only about four episodes into season ten and already seething with controversy. A blowup between the Vixen and fellow contestant Aquaria left the former battling the “angry black woman” stereotype while the latter cried white tears—a display

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The Vixen was born onstage at the Jeffery Pub in April 2013.

that cast the Vixen as the irrational aggressor and Aquaria as the fragile victim.

In the real world, though, the season had completed filming before the Vixen’s shoot with the Block Beat, so she already knew she’d be eliminated. Her final appearance was in episode eight, “The Unauthorized Rusical,” which aired on Thursday, May 10—her Cher impersonation left RuPaul Charles and his judges unimpressed.

The Vixen’s “full circle” musing carried emotional weight for her that we couldn’t feel during our interview, because she wasn’t yet free to reveal her fate.

“It feels like I’ve come all the way from Calvary back to Bethlehem,” she says—an apt analogy, considering everything she’s already endured as a black drag queen. The Vixen was born at Jeffery Pub in April 2013. “My drag started as live performances, because I love to rap,” she explains. “I was rapping and doing my own thing, but I had never been to a drag show. So a drag queen happened to stumble upon my show and invited me to the Jeffery Pub to perform—and it changed my life.” Underneath a disco ball that hovered above the stage, she left behind her boy alias, Tony, and assumed her queenhood. She performed a medley of her favorite Beyoncé jams, including “If I Were a Boy” and “End of Time.”

“I was nervous as all hell,” the Vixen says. “But the crowd was really there for it. Thankfully my drag mother, Savannah Westbrooke, was there to egg me on from the microphone, and she was very supportive. It just pumped me up.”

Walking around the pub takes her back in time.

“As far as the girls working the bars in “It’s very strange to be looking at the curtain, literally the birth canal that Vixen walked through Boystown, they’re more likely to get on Drag on the first time she ever came out to the stage,” Race,” she explains. “Those bars are more mainstream. When you audition, she says. “It’s very exciting to be they’re more likely to say, ‘Oh, I’ve here, and I feel just so blessed to BLACK GIRL MAGIC heard of Roscoe’s. I haven’t heard look back at how far I’ve come.”

WITH ASIA O’HARA, of Jeffery Pub.’” The Vixen’s progress came in MONÉT X CHANGE, MONIQUE HEART, THE spite of Chicago’s unyielding racial Once in Boystown, the Vixen VIXEN, SHEA COULEÉ, found a new set of challenges. As segregation, which makes it diffiDIDA RITZ, BAMBI far as she could tell, bars and vencult for black queens to advance BANKS, EVA STYLES, their careers while performing in ues would book one token black LUCY STOOLE, AND SASHA LOVE drag queen per show and stop their neighborhoods. In 2013, she there. “No one would say it,” she says, folks who came to Chicago in Tue 6/26, 8:30 PM, says, “but you would look at the search of queens for big opportuMetro, 3730 N. Clark, $30, all-ages posters and you’d never see more nities like TV shows rarely looked beyond Boystown. The Vixen soon than one [black] queen per night.”

Junior, who used to party in shifted her professional efforts from the south side to the north-side queer scene Boystown in his younger years, agrees that the north-side neighborhood struggles with incluso she could be seen too.

sivity. “We have a lot of black promoters in the city of Chicago, and the venues they have these events at is white owned, and you don’t really see us behind the bars we support,” he says.

“Sometimes you go to these spaces and you can tell they’re not happy about you being in there.

They just there to collect their money.”

This antiblack attitude became even more painfully obvious to the Vixen during the 2016 Pride festivities, when a bartender commented on Facebook that “south side trash” was ruining Pride. The Vixen launched into activist mode.

“When someone’s referencing the south side, they talking about black people,” she says.

“So I was not here for the casual racism, and I really pushed. I got loud and I got angry, and it made a lot of difference and it made people realize and face what their real issues were with J south-siders.”

MAY 17, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 23

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The Jeffery Pub is Chicago’s only black-owned gay club and one of the oldest LGBTQ+ spots in the country.

continued from 23 To support her fight for equality in Boystown, in fall 2016 the Vixen cofounded her own curated drag show, Black Girl Magic, which has run every month or so at Berlin ever

since. Then, after three unsuccessful auditions for RuPaul’s Drag Race, she got a callback to be on the tenth season. Another black Chicago queen, her close friend Shea Couleé, had competed on the ninth season, which surely helped—the two have performed together, and the Vixen appears on her 2017 track “Cocky.” When Shea was away working on the show, the Vixen picked up many of her gigs.

Drag Race became a larger platform for the Vixen’s activist message—not least because season ten included five black queens, not the usual one or two.

“When I say things like ‘Don’t call me southside trash’ or ‘Don’t call me a savage,’ now it’s not just landing on deaf ears,” she says. “It’s not just the people at the club hearing me.

The whole world gets to hear what I think and what I feel.”

The Vixen didn’t take home the Drag Race crown, but she’s using her newfound stardom to create a more inclusive queer Chicago. In

June, Black Girl Magic will move from Berlin to a much bigger room at Metro, featuring an all-star cast of black queens from RuPaul’s Drag Race and beyond.

“Right now in Chicago, and especially Boystown, I’m proud to say that black drag queens are respected and viewed as viable entertainers,” she says. “Hopefully that becomes black-owned businesses in Boystown.”

In the meantime, the Vixen remains thankful for the Jeffery Pub and its five-decade legacy as a black-owned safe space for queers in Chicago. For her, the Jeffery Pub will forever be home.

“Being here at the Jeffery Pub, I’ve learned so much from the black queens who came before me—Savannah Westbrooke, Ebony Delite, Terry D’Mor,” the Vixen says. “So many black queens taught me what it was to carry myself with dignity, respect, and class.” v

m @TheTRiiBE

The Block Beat multimedia series is a collaboration with the Triibe (thetriibe.com) that roots Chicago musicians and performers in places that matter to them. Video accompanies this story at chicagoreader.com.

MAY 17, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 25

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Recommended and notable shows and critics’ insights for the week of May 17

MUSIC

b ALL AGES F

PICK OF THE WEEK

On Fever Ray’s Plunge, Karin Dreijer celebrates queer sex and motherhood

Brian Blade (left) and Chris Thomas in Blade’s Fellowship Band é COURTESY THE ARTIST

THURSDAY17 Brian Blade & the Fellowship band 7:30 PM, Logan Center for the Arts, University of Chicago, 915 E. 60th, $38, $30 faculty and staff, $20 people 35 and under, $10 students. b

é NINJA HANNAH

FEVER RAY, BUNNY MICHAEL

Fri 5/18, 6 and 10 PM, Metro 3730 N. Clark, $37. 18+

KARIN DREIJER HAS made a career out of music that might not seem commercially appealing. In the Knife, the electronic-pop group she founded with her brother, Olof, and as a solo artist performing and recording under the name Fever Ray, Dreijer has made a mountain of music that pulses in unfamiliar ways, that disembowels and reconfigures pop music, that is, in a word, “weird.” But her songs always find a way of hitting their mark, and despite the unconventional paths she might take, she always seeks clarity in how she chooses to express herself. “I just want very exact words,” she told Loud & Quiet last year. “To use as little as possible to say something big, to remove what’s not needed.

I’m not into that, I like it when something is very clear, direct.

For me, it’s facts, it’s like reading a map, which I like.” Her second album, last year’s Plunge (Rabid Records), exposes her feelings about motherhood and her queer sexuality. Its chirping melodies, screaming synths, and vocals treated till they sound both sweet and serrated elevate her words. The tiny percussion loops that scoot along through “To the Moon and Back” accentuate the feelings of desire Dreijer sings about. Mainstream society has a long way to go in terms of accepting women expressing their agency, let alone their own sexuality (and that’s not even addressing LGBTQ+ sexuality), but when Dreijer sings about wanting another woman it makes societal conventions weirder than any music she’s produced. —LEOR GALIL

Brian Blade is among the most meticulously reactive drummers at work today in any genre. He tailors his composerly touch to fit any band he’s involved with.

For instance, in the Wayne Shorter Quartet he plays with mercurial explosiveness, while in cornetist Ron Miles’s Circuit Rider he adds melodic grace.

In 2009 Blade made Mama Rosa (Verve), a singersongwriter endeavor, accompanying his own voice with a guitar. That work explores a combination of ethereal melody and humid atmosphere similar to some of the music of Joni Mitchell, Emmylou Harris, and Daniel Lanois—all of whom he’s played behind.

All of Blade’s interests collide in the Fellowship, his long-running jazz band that zeroes in on a kind of spiritual Americana. Last year’s Body and Shadow (Blue Note) features the band at its most concise— the nine tracks clock in at under 32 minutes—with little improvisation apart from that featured on a few tunes by keyboardist Jon Cowherd. The band forges a powerful hybrid of melody and mood, creating a tuneful lattice of sound that often lingers in the air rather than pushing forward. The contemplative opener, “Within Everything,” and the three variants of the title track—revamped for different times of the day, “Noon,” “Morning,” and “Night”— arrive as peaceful meditations where guitarist Dave Devine and Cowherd (who plays harmonium and Mellotron in addition to piano) sculpt sound within arrangements that are sometimes so stripped-down the other band members remain silent. The J

MAY 17, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 27

MUSIC Slow Mass

continued from 27

é MADI ELLIS

Fellowship’s two saxophonists, Melvin Butler and Myron Walden, are frequently relegated to shaping carefully pitched melodic patterns in counterpoint to Cowherd, though they do get to open up on the keyboardist’s gorgeously rippling “Duality.”

Though Blade designed Body and Shadow with a pop sensibility informed by the vocabulary of jazz, when the group performs live, it generates more heat and stretches out with extended improvisation that breaks the spell of the recording and taps into an ecstatic quality lurking beneath its placid veneer.

Blade leads a quintet version of the band with Cowherd, Butler, Walden, and bassist Chris Thomas.

—PETER MARGASAK

FRIDAY18 Fever Ray See Pick of the Week, page 27.

Bunny Michael opens. 6 and 10 PM, Metro, 3730 N. Clark, $37. 18+ Slow Mass Cru and Nnamdi Ogbonnaya open.

9 PM, Schubas, 3159 N. Southport, $10. 18+ Should Chicago posthardcore band Slow Mass be asked to point to the physical place they started, that would be Lincoln Park’s Bourgeois Pig Cafe; bassist-vocalist Mercedes Webb met guitarist Josh Parks there when they worked at the coffee joint in 2014, and Parks later got guitarist-vocalist Dave Collis a gig there as well (the band is rounded out by drummer Josh Sparks, who previously played with Parks in furious punk act Former Thieves). The friends officially launched Slow Mass in 2015, but their new debut full-length, On Watch (Landland), hardly feels moored to a time line. These songs are built on both the complicated, multigenerational history of punk and the tangled web of sounds that have evolved from the genre since the early 80s.

Slow Mass show they’re not only keenly aware of the subtle differences between, say, New York 90s posthardcore and contemporary midwestern emo, they also know how to bend each sound to their will. On Watch is a feat to behold, from the cascading riffs that open “Gray Havens” to the intimate, somber vocal harmonies that blossom on “G’s End” and spanning every pulverizing wall of sound (“Suburban Yellow”) and claustrophobic instrumental shift (“Schemes”) in between. With this sharply conceived, huge-sounding album, Slow Mass have set a high bar for today’s generation of emerging rock bands. —LEOR GALIL

not. It’s hard to miss the biting humor when Walker sings, “Tripped over your coat / Quick exit now ruined” in “Can’t Ask Why,” where he can’t even pull off a smooth departure after a breakup. But as much as Walker’s characters are uncertain and hobbled, he’s more assured and focused as a performer than ever. Though for years he’s found a sweet spot in his performances, blending the jazz-folk splendor of John Martyn with the exploratory vibe of Tim Buckley and Tim Hardin, until Deafman Glance he hadn’t mastered that mix on recordings. Walker’s singing is also at its best here; it’s at once melodically precise and soulfully loose. The multilayered, rich arrangements on the new record effectively cradle his voice, underlining his most blase utterances and countering his most effusive shouts—the serene flute lines of Nate Lepine and the spacey

28 CHICAGO READER - MAY 17, 2018

SATURDAY19 Ryley Walker See Friday. Forest Management opens. 8 PM, Hungry Brain, 2319 W. Belmont, sold out. 21+ Eddy Clearwater Terrell Carter opens.

9:30 PM, Buddy Guy’s Legends, 700 S. Wabash, $20. 21+

Ryley Walker See also Saturday. Eli Winter and Mute Duo open. 8 PM, Hungry Brain, 2319 W. Belmont, sold out. 21+ Ryley Walker closes his new album Deafman Glance (Dead Oceans) with a tune that nails the existential turbulence that ripples through most of his songs: “Whenever I do my best, I will spoil with the rest,” he sings, acknowledging a self-destructive impulse that bleeds into his affairs, romantic and otherwise.

In most of the songs the narrator struggles with his decisions and fucks things up more often than

synth accents contributed by Bitchin Bajas’ Cooper Crain interact beautifully with the probing, sometimes biting leads of Walker and his frequent collaborators, guitarists Bill MacKay and Brian Sulpizio.

No less significant is the growth of Walker’s songwriting, which extends to an almost cosmic openness on the harrowing “Accommodations” and a prog-flavored expansiveness on the breathlessly shifting “Telluride Speed.” The recording features a changing cast of players in the rhythm section, but for these special hometown shows he’ll lead a band with Sulpizio, Lepine, Andrew Scott Young on bass, and Quin Kirchner and Mikel Avery on drums.

—PETER MARGASAK

Ryley Walker é EVAN JENKINS

Eddy Clearwater, also known as “the Chief,” was a pioneer in the fusion of blues and rock ’n’ roll. Born Edward Harrington in Macon, Mississippi, in 1935, he moved to Chicago in 1950. Within a few years, he was gigging around the south-side blues-club circuit and had developed a hybrid sound that had heavy Chuck Berry influences but was steeped in deep blues feeling. By 1960 or so, playing in styles already recognizable as “rock ’n’ roll” instead of just “blues,” he was appearing in predominantly white clubs on the north side and in the suburbs, often in integrated bands—one of the very first AfricanAmerican artists to do so. Though his recordings from those early years are now prized by collectors, he didn’t gain wider recognition until the mid70s, when white aficionados began to pick up on him. Clearwater has remained busy on the international circuit ever since, and his latter-day recordings—most recently, Soul Funky, released on his own Cleartone label in 2014—demonstrate that he’s lost none of his energy or musical acumen. Meanwhile, onstage—where he often wears a Native American

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MUSIC

Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/soundboard.

erful reminder of the timeless power of good writing and heartfelt delivery—she might be using the most timeworn tools, but Tell Me How You Really Feel sounds as electric and exciting as nearly anything I’ve heard this year. —PETER MARGASAK

TUESDAY22 Quintron’s Weather Warlock, Bruce Lamont Che Arthur opens. 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $12, $10 in advance. 21+

Courtney Barnett é POONEH GHANA headdress inspired, he claims, by the culture of his Cherokee grandmother, who raised him—Clearwater remains one of the most flamboyant and celebratory characters in all of blues. —DAVID WHITEIS

Mike Donovan The Funs headine; Mike Donovan and Matchess open. 9 PM, Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, $8. 21+ With his bands Sic Alps and the Peacers, Bay Area oddball Mike Donovan has treated his sprawling, postpsychedelic sensibilities with a modicum of rock-music orthodoxy as his collaborators lend shape and sinew to his delirious, wobbly tunes.

There’s no missing an essence that wants to drift unmoored on last year’s Peacers album Introducing the Crimsmen, but the loose, shaggy grooves keep things more or less centered. Last month Donovan dropped his second solo album, How to Get Your Record Played in Shops (Drag City), which seems to serve as a corrective to the comparatively polished sounds of the Peacers. The recording opens with the unsteady “Great Unknowing,” on which layers of overdubbed guitar, keyboards, and drums move in and out of rhythmic sync, and murky production seems to mimic substance-induced blurred vision. As with his previous work, influences of Syd Barrett and Skip Spence are apparent, but at times the blunt-force crudeness of his songs reminds me of the outsider musician Jandek—if the latter could write a catchy tune. Despite his meanderings, Donovan writes memorable melodies, and sorting through the sonic muck to locate a tuneful core makes listening to his records a bit like a treasure hunt. But sometimes his bleary hooks are unmistakable, such as in the blown-out beauty of the piano ballad “Sadfinger” or the denatured blues-rock flavors of “Spiral Tee Shirt,” where Donovan uses wordless doo-wopstyle vocals as the bass line bubbling underneath his infectious falsetto. —PETER MARGASAK

MONDAY21 Courtney Barnett Lala Lala opens.

8:30 PM, Preston Bradley Hall, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington, sold out. b Australian singer Courtney Barnett crafts a wonderfully lived-in, warm, and hooky melodic world on her second proper album, Tell Me How You Really Feel (Mom + Pop). Her singing has grown from the half-spoken delivery that marked her first EPs, elevating her conversational drawl into something far more memorable and inviting. With the exception of the biting postpunk snarl of “I’m Not Your Mother, I’m Not Your Bitch,” she rarely raises her voice, so most of the time it almost seems as if she’s sitting beside you, nodding along to the scrappy guitardriven jams that her voice glides into with preternatural ease. As appealing as it is to get lost within her nonchalant performance, it would be a silly to ignore the sharp bite of her words, which subtly indict a range of bad behaviors in lovers, friends, and strangers. “Nameless, Faceless” falls into that last category, depicting a strained empathy for an unknown protagonist harboring potentially violent impulses, which are expressed in a chorus that borrows a withering quote from Margaret Atwood, “Men are scared that women will laugh at them” and “Women are scared that men will kill them.” “Walkin’ on Eggshells” is one of numerous tunes with a title that telegraphs its subject, in this case the unnatural, unsatisfying degree of self-restraint she needs to employ when talking to a lover who won’t match her candor. On “Crippling Self-Doubt and General Lack of Confidence” she summons the inner strength to come clean with an emotionally abusive friend or loved one. When she sings “I never feel as stupid / As when I’m with you,” it’s less an admission than a blow to the head. She closes the album with tender words about acceptance and support on “Sunday Roast.” Barnett provides a pow-

A double-wizard bill like this one offers a lot to be excited about. Chicago metal/experimental polymath Bruce Lamont (Yakuza, Bloodiest, Corrections House, Brain Tentacles) has just released his second solo album, Broken Limbs Excite No Pity (War Crime Recordings), and will be celebrating its release tonight. Lamont is such a tireless collaborator— along with his many bands, he frequently appears on albums by others—that his solo output has been somewhat sublimated, but when he stretches out in his own zone he brings a sophistication borne of years among diverse perspectives to his sonic layerings. Rooted in metal, industrial, electronic noise, and drone, the tracks on Broken Limbs range from anguished and oppressive to contemplative and transcendental. In contrast to the emotional force of Lamont’s work or the past giddiness found in some of his own projects (such as his collaborations with musician-puppeteer Miss Pussycat), former Chicagoan and longtime New Orleans sound artist and inventor Quintron takes a more dispassionate, scientific approach with his latest venture, Weather Warlock—a synthesizer system that translates J

Mike Donovan é LAUREL CONNELL

MAY 17, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 29

MUSIC continued from 29

weather conditions into sound. Originally intended as a rooting, grounding project to help him through chemo and cancer recovery years ago, his creation runs as a continuous installation and is accessible from its own website. It’s more than just a cool gadget; Quintron hopes to spread “base stations” throughout the world to capture a variety of different terrains and weather conditions, and hopes that the project can be used to help people suffering from sleep disorders, stress, mental illnesses, and any sort of modern alienation-from-naturerelated maladies. In a live performance setting, the Weather Warlock’s readings are rendered into rippling soundscapes by Quintron and a handful of collaborators—drummer Aaron Hill (also of Eyehategod) and guitarists Gary Wrong and Kunal Prakash.

I expect extraordinary things from this show.

—MONICA KENDRICK

WEDNESDAY23

Charlie Curtis-Beard Taco headlines; Charlie Curtis-Beard, Austin Fillmore, Fraze, Mikey to the P, and Engage open. 6 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 2105 S. State, $10. 17+

Nebraska native Charlie Curtis-Beard attends

30 CHICAGO READER - MAY 17, 2018

Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/soundboard.

Columbia College, where he’s built a budding rap career with a couple ambitious, heartfelt albums that are grounded in Chicago themes but exploratory in their musical and lyrical focus. On November’s Existentialism on Lake Shore Drive, Curtis-Beard broadens his amiable soul- and R&Binfluenced hip-hop into new styles (quite successfully with electropulse of “Can’t See Clear”) while ruminating on what it means to be a young person of color living in the city at this moment in time (the kind of topic that can sustain late-night conversations in university dorm rooms and elsewhere). Curtis-Beard decided to build the album’s loose narrative around a series of fictional voice messages from friends enticing him to join them on a wild night on the town. Each message nudges Curtis-Beard towards a new topic, be it romantic friction (“Late Night Love”) or struggles with the newfound agency and independence of adulthood (“Who We Are”). Curtis-Beard has a little fun satirizing the Chicago college experience too, as is the case when one of his friends attempts to coax him out by saying, “I heard Chance’s cousin’s stepbrother’s twice-removed uncle is coming through.” That brief moment underscores what makes Existentialism on Lake Shore Drive so charming; Curtis-Beard has thought every detail through, and executes everything with an earnestness that could fuel a great career. —LEOR GALIL

continued from TK

Charlie Curtis-Beard é COURTESY THE ARTIST

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3855 n lincoln ave.

MUSIC The Sea and Cake é HEATHER CANTRELL

chicago ANNA SOLTYS

& THE FAMILIAR

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

MAURICE MOBETTA BROWN

DÁlava 8:30 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, 4544 N. Lincoln. F b Few records from 2017 knocked me out like The Book of Transfigurations (Songlines), the second album from husband-and-wife group Dálava. Helmed by singer Julia Ulehla and guitarist Aram Bajakian, the project surveys the traditional Moravian folk songs collected by Ulehla’s greatgrandfather Vladimir Ulehla, a biologist by trade who spent much of his life documenting music in the area around his native Strázince. The couple, who started their duo in New York and currently reside in Vancouver, are joined on the album by a slew of jazz musicians, including cellist Peggy Lee, drummer Dylan van der Schyff, and keyboardist Tyson Naylor, who help them transform the songs in a rich, visceral array of settings that move between art rock, folk, and jazz while honoring the eastern-European essence of the source material. On the furiously galloping “The Rocks Began to Crumble”—about a soldier forced to abandon his plans to wed when he’s sent to war—Bajakian’s drunken melodies recall the splattery work Marc Ribot injected into his collaborations with Tom Waits. By contrast, the song that follows it, “Iron Bars, Iron Lock,” channels the voice of a heartbroken young girl imprisoned in her own home and prohibited from seeing her love. Singing the material in its original Czech, Ulehla so thoroughly embodies the voice of each narrator that taken with the kaleidoscopic, beautifully pitched arrangements, it’s impossible not to grasp the emotional heart of each piece. I love the way the full band sounds, but Dálava’s Chicago debut will be as a the duo.

Last fall I had an opportunity to hear Ulehla sing a couple of songs from the recording a cappella in a stiff meeting room during an ethnographic conference in Katowice, Poland. Not only did her voice command her surroundings, she seemed so utterly possessed by the material that I felt transformed myself, as if I were watching a wizened village woman lamenting by a smoky hearth instead of a young woman strolling beneath fluorescent lighting.

—PETER MARGASAK

The Sea and Cake Jim Elkington opens. 7 and 10 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $20, $18 in advance. 21+ Last week the Sea and Cake released its 11th album, Any Day. The record embodies a simmering cool, which is demonstrated in the elegantly crystalline guitar lattice sketched out by Archer Prewitt and singer Sam Prekop—whose vocal lines have never sounded more sweetly aspirated—and also serves as an impressive assertion of commitment. A year after the band released its previous album, 2012’s Runner, longtime bassist Eric Claridge had to step back from touring due to carpal tunnel syndrome, and he left the group permanently soon after. Then, in 2016, drummer John McEntire (who is also a founding member of Tortoise) moved to Los Angeles. But geographic distance and personnel shifts have exerted little apparent effect on the band’s gorgeous, languid pop. Nick Macri contributed bass on the title track, but otherwise Prewitt doubled on that instrument—Douglas McCombs of Tortoise and Eleventh Dream Day is taking on that role for live shows—and it’s hard to notice any change. Despite the fizzy melodies and jangling, shimmering guitars, McEntire often wields serious heft with his playing, which adds a heavy bottom that beautifully counters the sunny front line. Aside from a wash of wordless singing by Prekop, “Paper Window” is instrumental, and suggests vintage Beach Boys taking a stab at exotica, while “Into Rain” shimmies over a bossa nova groove. Between those tracks is “Day Moon,” which chugs along on motorik beats while Prekop gracefully applies a weightless hook over dampened riffing and Prewitt’s hydroplaning lead guitar.

McEntire’s precise jackhammer pulse on “I Should Care” adds punch to an arrangement and melody that could otherwise drift away. The band saved the best for last: album closer “These Falling Arms” is a summer ballad that features one of the most memorable bridges in the group’s rich history. —PETER MARGASAK v

FRI JUNE 1

w/ brandon ‘taz’ niederauer

for complete listings, tickets, and social updates...

martyrslive.com

facebook.com/martyrslive

@martyrslive

MAY 17, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 31

FOOD & DRINK

Mordecai | $$$ R 3632 N. Clark 773-269-5410

mordecaichicago.com Clockwise from right: gin rickey, porchetta, Moroccan-spiced romanesco, beet tartare é COLIN BECKETT

RESTAURANT REVIEW

Mordecai brings fine dining to Rickettsville

Antique spirits, goat brats, and a chocolate-Fernet sundae are hits at Matthias Merges and Folkart Management’s restaurant across from Wrigley Field.

By MIKE SULA

A

man in a black suit with an earpiece met us at the front door at Mordecai.

“I guess you didn’t see the sign outside.”

Sign?

“It says to enter through the hotel.”

We’d missed the sign, but since he told us this with the cheerful demeanor of a prison guard—and without explaining why—we offered to exit and reenter next door through the Hotel Zachary. We wanted to do the right thing for Mordecai.

That would be Mordecai as in Mordecai “Three-Finger” Brown, the legendary Cubs pitcher of the dead-ball era, whose autograph is scrawled across the dining room wall— though you wouldn’t necessarily be able to identify it as his. He was missing two fingers, after all.

Mordecai, which comes to us via chef Matthias Merges’s Folkart Management, is just one of a passel of new restaurants to open in

32 CHICAGO READER - MAY 17, 2018

the new hotel in the shadow of Wrigley Field, among them Big Star, Smoke Daddy, and Boka Restaurant Group’s forthcoming Dutch and Doc’s. It’s just a small piece of the massive redefinition of the neighborhood being wrought by the Ricketts family, owners of the Cubs.

But I guess some things will never change.

On game day in Wrigleyville you still have to have a bouncer at your door.

It was a warm spring night, the Rockies were

in town, and at the front of the dining room you could watch the game on the immense video screen hung above the new outdoor annex to Wrigley Field called, unforgettably, Gallagher Way. Unfortunately, it’s unforgettable because insurance brokers Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. bought the naming rights and between innings the screen cuts to the company’s name against a blue background bright enough to be seen from space. It’s marvelous to have a meal with

a commanding view of the landmark stadium, but when the sun goes down it’s tortuous to sit under the jumbo death ray next to it.

There are TVs above the bar too. In kindness, they’re mounted behind screens—which oddly doesn’t allow much close scrutiny of the game, calling into question their very purpose.

More interesting are the rows of antique whiskeys and liqueurs behind the bar, sourced by longtime Merges collaborator Alex Bachman of rare-spirit purveyors Sole Agent, many of them costing hundreds of dollars a pour, each finger of bourbon served with a dropper bottle of Kentucky branch water. Bachman also designed the cocktail menu with unsurprising dynamism; among its highlights are a tall, pleasingly bitter cranberry gin rickey, tart, pink, and fresh as your mother; a light manhattanlike Peerless Leader lent some spice from Benedictine; and a tropical-rum-focused Royal Rescuer that swings through the subcontinent with tamarind and green-cardamom notes.

The menu is executed by Jared Wentworth, last seen at Regards to Edith, who faces the challenge of satisfying his own sophisticated fans as well as hotel guests with broad tastes and the ball-park crowd, which presumably can’t be trusted to walk through the front door.

On game days Mordecai opens early for the last group, serving a limited menu with a pair of burgers, fish-and-chips, fries, cheese curds, and a soft pretzel, but also more conspicuously cheffy things like a paté du jour, an asparagus salad with orange-infused hollandaise and a sous vide egg, and a passion-fruit panna cotta.

At dinner this menu expands to include standards such as roast chicken, grilled hanger steak, and steamed mussels, and it also expands in ambition, with things like a lovely royal-purple puck of beet tartare ornamented with dabs of egg-yolk jam and smears of smoked creme fraiche, all given texture with puffed rice. An intensely seasoned and vividly colored salad of fractal green romanesco cauliflower with sweet-and-sour pickled vegetables and curried farro is both evened out and amped up with harissa-whipped aioli. Lengths of grilled octopus appendage take a similar North African

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

FOOD & DRINK BOOZE

State of libations Chicago Craft Beer Week is no more; all hail Illinois Craft Beer Week.

By JULIA THIEL

spin with ras el hanout-spiced chickpeas and smoked-paprika aioli topped with a relish made from the spring’s first ramps.

At the moment the menu is rife with such springlike seasonality—it might already have changed by the time you read this. You can insert your own cliches about the promise of spring baseball, but fresh morels, asparagus, and English peas will never get old. Wentworth dispatches the last in a vivid emerald-colored risotto, a platform for a thick slab of fatty porchetta, itself supporting charred carrot sticks.

Tiny morels and shimeji mushrooms lurk amid tangles of arugula pappardelle tossed with a puree made from charred asparagus. Ramps figure again in a structure of roasted halibut and shrimp-stuffed agnolotti too rigid to match the tender fish.

One item seems destined for permanence.

You didn’t really think there would be no goat on the menu, did you? Here it takes the form of a long, plump, robustly barnyardy bratwurst, smothered in shaved fennel and sauerkraut and dwarfing its buttery brioche bun. Its explosive juiciness warrants the use of safety goggles.

Staying on the subject of baseball, desserts by sous chef Alexander Willis feature a “crackerjack” doughnut studded with popped sorghum and crushed peanut. But it’s the arresting chocolate-Fernet sundae that still

haunts me, a pool of green mint oil atop mint ice cream bedecked with Fernet-infused chocolate ganache and whipped cream.

Dishes like that may establish Mordecai as a destination outside of a trip to the ballpark—I certainly wanted to avoid it on game day. But on the evening I did it was still surprisingly crowded and boisterous, and the giant Gallagher screen was still lighting the room brightly enough to shrink tumors. On the occasion I didn’t, it was peaceful and nearly empty between the first pitch and final out—the bouncer had nothing to do unless you opened the front door. The stadium was gorgeous in the twilight, and the periodic swells of the crowd were hypnotic. There was only a single litter of yawping Cubs bros in matching caps and pinstripes that ambled by the open window and with the stupidity natural to their species felt compelled to heckle, though that was enough to spark anxiety about what would happen when Wrigley Field emptied.

There’s a second-floor patio where you can avoid that kind of hazard, but despite the awesome public spectacle of its environment, Mordecai somehow still feels unnervingly overexposed to the lubricated chaos of postgame Wrigleyville. v

m @MikeSula

é PHOTOGRAPHY BY RJ

Tables at the front of the restaurant overlook Gallagher Way and the landmark stadium. é COLIN BECKETT

A

fter years of focusing its annual May celebration on Chicago and its suburbs, the Illinois Craft Brewer’s Guild now includes events across the state. Accordingly, it’s changed the name of the event to Illinois Craft Beer Week.

According to ICBG executive director Danielle D’Alessandro, “As a statewide organization with over 230 breweries located across the state, it just seemed to make sense to expand to a statewide celebration of all the amazing things our breweries are doing.”

Events are still being added, but Alter Brewing in Downer’s Grove is hosting the first annual Backyard Brew Fest to celebrate the breweries of the western suburbs. “It’s not just about the beer, the liquid, it’s about the community and the social experience,” says D’Alessandro.

“This is a way to get people throughout the state excited and engaged.”

Other changes this year include moving the kickoff event, Beer Under Glass, from Thursday to Friday, and adding a closing festival

called Good Libations (details below). The event has a tropical theme and costumes are encouraged. “Anytime you tell brewers to dress up they’re all in, so I’m pretty excited to see what some of our brewers are going to show up wearing,” D’Alessandro says. And while Craft Beer Week has often stretched to a week and a half, this year it’s shorter, starting Friday and ending a week later. Some of the biggest events are below; for a full list check the website or download the app.

Beer Under Glass The ninth annual BUG is on a Friday for the first time—the better to sleep off the next day’s hangover in bed rather than at your desk. Otherwise, though, the event is unchanged: beer from more than 100 breweries, served both under and next to glass (in the conservatory and the surrounding gardens), with small bites from local restaurants. Fri 5/18, 6-9 PM (5 PM entry for VIP ticket holders), Garfield Park Conservatory, 300 N. Central Park, $60, $80 VIP. J

MAY 17, 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.

TELEFUNDRAISING START ASAP! Call/text 312-256-5035

food & drink BIG APPLE FINER FOODS -

Family owned & operated grocery store looking for punctual, hardworking & energetic individuals for Cashier & Stock Positions, part-time/fulltime available. Come in and apply in person today 2345 N. Clark, Chicago.

General 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, JavaScrip t/HTML5, SQL, C#; some use of encryption/security & video enc oding/programming; some experience learning a new programming language/ protocol/technology).

Email résumé to: info@ideanovatech.com.

ASSOCIATE - CORPORATE

and Securities Practice Group Mayer Brown LLP Chicago, Illinois Responsible for representing the firm’s clients on issues related to domestic and cross-border corporate transactions, including restructurings, divestitures and acquisitions; advising and counseling the firm’s U.S. lawyers regarding matters of French and European Union law related to corporate and securities issues, advising and counseling the firm’s nonU.S. lawyers regarding matters of U.S. law related to corporate and securities issues.

Must have a U.S. Law Degree (J.D. or equivalent foreign degree), a law license from any U.S. state, and a law degree and a law license from France. Must have at least two (2) years of experience as an attorney.

If you are interested in applying for the career opportunity listed above, please e-mail your resume to us at: re cruitingdepartment-chgo@ mayerbrown.com. Please reference Job: ACS0518.

THE NORTHERN TRUST C O M P A N Y is seeking a Senior

Consultant - IT QA in Chicago, IL w/ the following reqts: BS degree in Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field or foreign equiv degree.

6 yrs of related experience. Required skills: Design, develop & execute business test scenarios for OTC Derivatives Asset Class using QTP & VAPI script (1 yr); Query data on various databases like Oracle, SQL Server & PL/SQL for backend financial data validation and verification (5 yrs); Utilize Quality Assurance tools like ALM, Jira & Share point for test scenario creation, functional testing, logging results & test strategy documentation (4 yrs); Produce status reports on System/UAT testing progress for Project Schedule by using HP Application Lifecycle Management and Macro (4 yrs). Please apply online at www.northerntrustcareers. com and search for Req. # 18044.

34 CHICAGO READER | MAY 17, 2018

(Waukegan, IL) Yaskawa America, Inc seeks Project Manager w/ Bach or for deg equiv in EE or ME & 5 yrs exp in job offered or sales, eng or mrktg exp invl servo, motion control or indus prod lines, applic & proj. Send CV to HR, 2121 Norman Drive South, Waukegan, IL 60085

LITTELFUSE, INC. SEEKS Electronic Data Interchance (EDI) Manager in Chicago, IL to dsgn, dev & spprt B2B Intgrtr app btwn LFUS & trdng prtnrs. Reqs BS in Elctrcl/Elctrncs Engnrng, IT or rltd + 3 yrs exp; 3 yrs exp in: Strlng Intgrtr (SI)/B2B Intgrtr mppng exprtse w/ANSI X12 & EDIFACT stndrds & advncd mppng rls; SAP Sls & Dstrbtn rltd to EDI IDoc trnsctnl prcesng, tbls, prmtrs & otpt typs; EDI trnsctns incldng, 850, 855, 856, 810, 830, 862, ORDERS, ORDRSP, INVOIC, DELFOR, DELJIT, DESADV; EDI coms (VAN, FTP, SFTP, AS2, SSH) & PGP encryptn; SI/B2B Intgrtr biz prcss dvlpmnt & trblshtng; EDI systms w/in Auto Tier 1 envrnmnt. 1 yr exp in IT Proj Mgmt, dcmtn, flw chrts & chnge mgmt prcdres. Dom/intrnl trvl req as nd. Snd cvd ltr & CV to imr@littelfuse.com, ref#1000C. 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

THE NORTHERN TRUST CO . is

seeking a Consultant, Investment Compliance in Chicago IL, with the following requirements: BS in Business Admin. or Finance and 3 years of related experience. Prior exp. must include the following: implement guideline coding solutions utilizing Charles River and Aladdin technology (3 yrs); perform daily monitoring and investigation of compliance exceptions via Charles River and Aladdin technology (3 yrs); build data reconciliation solutions utilizing portfolio management and compliance systems (2 yrs); document procedures related to the implementation and monitoring of client, regulatory and internal firm investment guidelines (3 yrs). Please apply online at www.northerntrustcareers. com and search for Req. # 18048.

ACCOUNTING ASSURANCE MANAGER, TRANSACTION SERVICES CAPITAL MARKETS ACCOUNTING & ADVISORY SERVICES (MULTI. POS.), PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, Chicago, IL. Advise on financial reporting, valuation & tax issues.

Req. Bach’s deg or foreign equiv. in Acctng, Fin, Bus Admin or rel. + 4 yrs rel. work exp.; OR a Master’s deg or foreign equiv. in Acctng, Fin, Bus Admin or rel. + 2 yrs rel. work exp. Must have US CPA or foreign equiv. Travel up to 60% req. Apply by mail, referencing Job Code IL1737, Attn: HR SSC/Talent Management, 4040 W. Boy Scout Blvd, Tampa, FL 33607.

TECHNOLOGY ADVISORY MANAGER, GUIDEWIRE TECHNOLOGY (MULT. POS.),

PricewaterhouseCoopers Advisory Services LLC, Chicago, IL. Oversee the implementation of Guidewire solutions to insurance & fin’l services industry clients. Req. Bach’s deg or foreign equiv. in Comp Sci, Engg, MIS or rel. + 5 yrs post-bach’s progressive rel. work exp.; OR a Master’s deg or foreign equiv. in Comp Sci, Engg, MIS or rel. + 3 yrs rel. work exp. Travel req. up to 80%. Apply by mail, referencing Job Code IL1773, Attn: HR SSC/Talent Management, 4040 W. Boy Scout Boulevard, Tampa, FL 33607.

ASSOCIATE ATTORNEY, CHICAGO, IL: JD & undergraduate de-

gree in elec eng, mech eng, comp eng or computer sci. Must have 6 mos prior exp as an Intellectual Property Litigation Intern and/or Legal Advisor and/or law Clerk. Prior exp must conducting legal research and drafting memoranda in support of intellectual property litigation. Must be licensed to practice law in IL. Mail resumes to Brinks Gilson & Lione, NBC Tower, Suite 3600, 455 N. Cityfront Plaza Drive, Chicago, IL 60611, Attn: Deborah Johnson, Chief Human Resources Officer

LITTELFUSE, INC. SEEKS a Senior Metal Stamping Engineer in Mount Prospect, IL to sprvse dsgn rvw mtngs & spplrs of mtl stmpng prts & tls as wll as stmpng ops in-hse. Reqs BS in M chncl/Elctrncs/ Mnfctrng Engnrng or rltd + 2 yrs exp. 2 yrs exp in: Die dsgn for sngle strke & prgrssve dies; Stmpng prt dsgn; Dvlpmnt of prcss prmtr for stmpng prss; Dvlpmnt of prtype stmpng tlng; Stp of Stmpng prss; Intgrtn of stmpng lne into prdctn lns. 1 yr exp w/trng in die dsgn & prss oprtn. Trvl to cmpny stes thrght US & MX as ndd. Snd cvr ltr & CV to imr@littelfuse.com, ref# 1000D. AVP, MODEL VALIDATION, SYNCHRONY BANK, CHICAGO, IL. Support model validation rel. to

quantitative analytic model. with the Synchrony Model Gov/Validation team. Serve as lead analyst on indep. model valid. of capital plan., stress test models. Req. Mast. deg., or foreign equiv., in Stats., Math.,Econ., Fin. Engg., or rel. quantit. field, & 3 yrs rel. wrk. exp. in stats model/risk analytics. Apply to: HR Manager, Synchrony Bank, 222 W Adams St., Chicago, IL 60613 (ref.: ILVMV).

COMPUTER/IT: SOFTWARE ENGINEER IV – Computer Vision

Algorithm Engineer. Design/develop optical video tracking software appl’ns. U.S. Bach. degree (Software Engineering) or foreign equiv. req’d.

Min. 1 yr. exp. in software eng’r pos’n(s) w/ design & build of optical video tracking software using GigE Vision, CoaXPress (CXP), & GenICam standards req’d. STATS LLC, Chicago, IL. Resumes to: Recruiting, STATS LLC, 203 N. LaSalle St, 22nd Flr, Chicago, IL, 60601.

(Schaumburg, IL) IDOF MGMT INC., (d/b/a IDOF Fresh Mediterranean) seeks General and Operations Manager w/ Bach or for deg equiv in any field & 2 yrs exp job offered or in bus mngmt role incl 2 yrs exp analyzing finan & oper info & report on findings; increasing sales & minim cost & selection & devlop of employees; 3 mnths of acad, res, internshp or wrk exp w/ halal stnds reqs. Mail CV & cover letter to 1701 E. Woodfield Rd., Ste 327, Schaumburg, IL 60173

REAL ESTATE 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

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 Loyola Park. 1329 W. Estes.

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

LARGE STUDIO APARTMENT

near Morse red line. 6824 N. Wayne.

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

STUDIO $900 AND OVER 2650 N. LAKEVIEW

#40 3, roomy studio in high rise, on site: indoor pool, gym, grocery, prkg. $1400/mo. Rich, 773-621-2045 773288-0640

STUDIO OTHER CROSSROADS HOTEL SRO SINGLE RMS Private bath, PHONE,

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

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AREA/63RD

73RD/JEFFERY & 75TH/ EBERHART & 70TH/MAPLEWOOD

REAL ESTATE

KEDZIE Deluxe Studio 1 & 2 BRs. All modern oak floors, appliances, Security system, on site maint. clean & quiet, Nr. transp. From $445. 773582-1985 (espanol)

STUDIO OTHER

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;

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

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

773-637-5957

1 BR $800-$899

RENTALS

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.

LARGE SUNNY ROOM w/fridge & microwave. Near Oak Park, Green Line & Buses. 24 hr Desk, Parking Lot $101/week & Up. (773)378-8888 û NO SEC DEP û 6829 S. Perry.

2.5 room. $475/mo. 1BR. $530/mo HEAT INCL 773-955-5105

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 7022 S. SHORE DRIVE Impecca-

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

Laundry & Security on Premises.

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

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

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

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

1 & 2BR apts, c- fans, appls, hdwd flrs, heated, intercom, near trans, laundry rm. $700/mo & up. 773-881-3573

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

QUIET, 1BR, steps to Lake Front, hdwd flrs & appls incl, nr cultural ctr, golf course, trans & schls. $750/mo. Section 8 Welc. 773-443-3200 PK FOREST LUXURIOUS CONDO 1BR, crpt, designer ceramic BA & kitc,balc, DR, computer rm. $875.

A/C FREE HEAT. 312-305.3362

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

1 BR $900-$1099 ONE BEDROOM near Loyola Park, 1333 W. Estes. Hardwood floors. Cats OK. $925/month. Heat included.

Available 6/1. 773-761-4318.

NO SEC DEP

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

1 BR $1100 AND OVER

1 BR $700-$799

{ { 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

2032 EAST 72ND Pl. 2BR, 1BA, condo, 2nd floor. appliances incl. No Pets. $1,050/month plus security. heat included. 312-497-2819

R U O Y AD E R E H

SPACIOUS LINCOLN PARK 1 BR

REACH OVER

1 MILLION PEOPLE MONTHLY IN PRINT & DIGITAL.

CONTACT US TODAY!

312-222-6920

apartment in great location.

Heat included. Laundry onsite. Freshly painted.Large closets.

(224)5323436

1 BR OTHER

2 BR OTHER ROUND LAKE BEACH, IL Cedar

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*** ROUND LAKE BEACH, IL Cedar Villas is accepting applications for subsidized 1BR apts. for seniors 62 years or older and the disabled.

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

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

IMMAC

3BR/1BA

newly remod, spac, quiet block & bldg, nr trans & shops. Won’t Last.

Sec 8 Welcome. 312-519-9771

CHATHAM 74TH/KING DR.

1 & 2BR. 88th/Dauphin. 2BR. Both bright & spac, great trans, laundry on site, security camera. 312-341-1950

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 86TH & YATES, 5 room Apt, 1st floor, 2BR, stove & fridge, A/C, ceiling fans, heat included. No pets. $850/mo. Call 773-842-3652

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

3 BR OR MORE UNDER $1200

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.

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

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

3 BR OR MORE OTHER

2402 E 77TH St. (77th & Yates)

CHICAGO, 6859 S. EVANS. 3BR Townhouse, 1BA. Hardwood floors. Section 8 Welcome. Call 708-296-5477 for more information.

1st flr, 2 BR, free heat, appls, glistening hrwd flrs, C-fans, mini-blinds, Cameras, $775.00 (312)513-1999

EXCITED ABOUT THE LOVELY 2BR apt located near 83rd & Paulina, new updates, heat incl, Call for appt, $730/mo, no pets.

773-783-7098

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

Section 8 ok. 847-606-1369

CHICAGO 94-3739 S. Bishop.

2BR, 5 Rms, 1st & 2nd flr, appls, parking, storage, near shops/ trans. $950 + sec. No pets. 708335-0786

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

86TH & YATES, 2BR House, stove, fridge, C/A & ceiling fans incl. No Pets. $750/mo. Tenant pays all utils. Call 773-842-3652

N. LAWNDALE 3BR in quiet 2 flat brick building, newly remodeled, hdwd flrs throughout.

Section 8 welcome. 773-406-1676

9112 S. YATES, Great location.

2BR, 1st flr, carpet, ceiling fans & mini blinds. $785/mo + security.

HEAT INCLUDED. 773-374-9747

AUSTIN Laramie/Madison 2, 3 & 4BR apts, nr trans, updated kit & BA, w/d hookup, no pets, $875$1550+ util. & sec. 708-265-3611

East Chicago, IN 2BR $675 heat incl; tenant pays utils. 1 mo. free rent w/lease. Call Malcolm 773577-9361

AUSTIN AREA 5BR, 2BA, newly remod BA & kitchen, hdwd flrs, resp for lawn maint. No pets .

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

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

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

2 BR $1100-$1299 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

$1050/mo. Appls incl, c-fans, LR, DR, beautifully remod. No Sec Dep. Sec 8 OK. Call 312-915-0100.

2 BR $1500 AND OVER

7541 S ESSEX, 3BR, 1Ba. Recently rehabbed, Heat and appls incl. Laundry in unit. $1000 mo plus security.

773-600-9823 CHICAGO 6747 S. PAXTON , newly renovated, 2BR,

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

$1650+ utils & sec. 708-265-3611

GENERAL 6943 S WOODLAWN 4bdrm 8129 S INGLESIDE 1bdrm & 4bdrm

7655 S. PHILLIPS 1BR, 2BR, & 4BR

6155 S. KING 2bdrm & 3bdrm 6150 S. VERNON 4 bdrm

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

Stainless steel appliances, hardwood flrs, granite countertops, laundry on site No sec deposit $500 lease signing bonus Section 8 welcome 312-778-1262

SOUTH SHORE - House for rent, 3

NO SECURITY DEPOSIT CHICAGO HEIGHTS, Studio, 1, 2 & 3BRs, free heat, gas and parking, close to everything, section 8 welcome. $500 and up.

708-300-5020

bdrms, 1 bath, on S. Shore Dr. & CTA bus route $900 mth, $900 security.

Call Ms. Williams 773-627-4474

CHICAGO, PETERSON & DAMON, Kedzie & Lawrence, Studio, 1, 2, 3 & 4BR Apts. $550 & Up. Section 8 Welcome.

Call 847-401-4574 Chicago - Hyde PARK 5401 S. Ellis.

2.5 Room Studio. $475/mo.

Call 773-955-5106

CHICAGO Southside Brand New 3BR & 4BR apartments. Exc. neighborhood, near public transp.

For details call 708-774-2473

New kitchens & new bathrooms.

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

MARKETPLACE

GOODS

SUNDAY MAY 20TH: Every year Ravenswood Manor, a picturesque northwest side neighborhood, organizes its large, community-wide, garage sale. Spend your Sunday exploring the many bargains in the alleys and on the sidewalks of the neighborhood.

130+ households offer 1000s of bargains. Opens at 10:00 am and closes at 4:00 pm, rain or shine.

Ravenswood Manor extends from Lawrence (4800N) on the north, to Montrose (4400N) on the south, from the north branch of the Chicago River on the east to Sacramento (3000W) on the west. It is west of Lincoln Square, east of Albany Park. See directions and map at: http://ravenswoodmanor.com/ manorgaragesale/ 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

SOUTH NAPERVILLE NEIGHBORHOOD Garage Sale!

Clow Creek Subdivision, near RT 59 & 103rd, everything you could imagine with great deals available on all items! May 17- 3 to 9, May 18- 3 to 9, May 19-9 to 1

KILL TEED!

ROACHES-GUARAN-

Buy Harris Roach Tablets or Spray.

Odorless, Long Lasting Available: Hardware Stores, The Home Depot, homedepot.com

ESTATE SALE OAK LAWN 4413 W. 101st St.

Thurs 5/17-Sat 5/19, 9-3. Furn, crystal, collectibles, books, kitch.

WE GOT IT ALL! Cash/CC.

77TH/PHILLIPS. LG 3BR/2BA, formal LR & DR, encl porch, hdwd flrs, heat incl, Sec 8 OK, $1050/mo + move-in fee. 773-719-6864

6812 S. ROCKWELL. 3BR, newly rehabbed, no pets. Heat incl $1100/mo + sec dep. Tenant pays elec & cooking gas. 773-507-8475

ROGERS PARK, 1224 W Lunt,

2br, 1 block form lake & "L", $1600 mo, free heat & laundry, avail June 1s t.Bob 847-899-7758

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

708-288-4510

ADULT SERVICES

ADULT SERVICES

please recycle this paper ADULT SERVICES

ADULT SERVICES

Elm Street Plaza Subsidized Wait List Elm Street Plaza is pleased to announce that the Studio, 1 and 2 Bedroom wait lists for subsidized apartments will soon be open. Waitlist applications will be accepted online Mon, 6/18/18- Wed, 6/27/18 Elm Street Plaza Management Office - 1130 N. Dearborn, Chicago, IL ELIGIBILITY All applicants must meet certain eligibility requirements: • Age 18 and older • U.S. citizenship/legal immigration status • If a full-time student, must meet HUD guidelines for eligibility • Pass tenancy history review • Pass criminal background history review • Applicants are subject to meet HUD Income eligibility requirements HOW TO APPLY Please visit www.elmstreetplaza.com or www.habitat.com/ what-we-do/affordable-housing or call the Affordable Housing Hotline (312) 595-3250 for more info. Waitlist applications will be accepted online between 6/18/18-6/27/18. After you have completed the online application, please print the receipt with your application ID for your records.

No paper applications will be distributed. All waitlist applications received during that time will be entered in a lottery, and will be randomly selected for placement on the waitlist. *An applicant with a disability or with Limited English Proficiency may request info about obtaining assistance with the pre-application process or making Reasonable Accommodations by contacting 312-337-1150 between the office hours of 9:00AM-5:00PM Monday-Friday

MAY 17, 2018 | CHICAGO READER 35

STRAIGHT DOPE

By Cecil Adams

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orthoinfo.org

36 CHICAGO READER - MAY 17, 2018

terms nuts and bananas come to refer to something or someone crazy? —SHANE ADAMS SLUG SIGNORINO

Meet sexy friends who really get your vibe...

VISIT ORTHOINFO.ORG/BACKVETSUP

meaning? It’s not like Noah Webster just announced it in the newsletter one week. No, someone tried using an existing word in some novel way, and it stuck. That’s how language evolves, much as it may bug those weirdos who insist that decimate can only mean “kill a tenth of.” In the long centuries of the pre-textmessage era, of course, new slang typically made its debut in speech rather than writing, so some developments surely took some time to turn up in the historical record. But from what we can tell, people have been using nuts to mean “crazy” since the mid-19th century; bananas seems to have shown up maybe 100 years later.

The word nut has been in circulation since the very dawn of the English language—the Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest sighting of it dates back to around the year 875.

And it’s been acquiring meanings other than “shell-encased fruit” all along: the thing a bolt screws into (first spotted in 1611), a question that’s difficult to answer (1545), the part of a musical instrument’s neck that the strings rest on (1698). One can’t know exactly how such shifts went down, but in the case of nuts a relevant stop on the road may have been a bit of late-1700s British slang wherein a person who was enthusiastically fond of something (or someone) was said to be “nuts upon” it, just like we’d say “crazy about.” And in fact at the time Britons were using “crazy for” and (still earlier) “mad for” in roughly this same way, the evident notion being that the subject was so fascinated, infatuated, distracted, etc, that he or she was effectively insane. Meanwhile, in what may have been an unrelated trend, by the 1850s or so another slang meaning for nut was “a person’s head” (no real stretch there), and “off one’s nut” meant “crazy.” With these locutions kicking around the zeitgeist, then, it’s entirely unsurprising that the OED shows its first citation for nuts meaning “out of one’s mind” in 1846, from a volume titled The Swell’s Night Guide Through the Metropolis, a kind of risque handbook to seamy urban life.

The story of bananas is a lot shorter and more mysterious. Here the OED can reliably

get us back only to 1968, when a University of South Dakota publication called Current Slang reported that Kentucky college students (of “both sexes”) were using bananas to mean “excited and upset; ‘wild.’” Dan Koeppel, author of the 2008 book Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World, suggests that “going bananas” might have arisen from the contemporaneous and very collegiate myth that a hallucinogenic effect could be obtained by smoking banana peels (which has, needless to say, been debunked in this column and elsewhere).

Banana’s entry in the OED does include two other citations that might be pertinent: In the 1920s “banana oil” was a slang term meaning “nonsense,” which at least looks to be in the ballpark. And in a 1935 glossary of criminals’ patois called The Underworld Speaks, “He’s bananas” is said to mean “He’s sexually perverted; a degenerate.” Here the connection to “crazy” is all too plausible, considering that at the time homosexuality was still widely understood to be a mental disorder.

To students of historical slang, or many others of a certain age, the use of bananas as a homophobic slur may recall a similar but broader 20th-century term that’s now vanished: fruit. The OED says fruit for “male homosexual” first turned up in the U.S. in the 1930s, possibly as prison slang, but it seems to have then been appropriated by the British gay community via the linguistic phenomenon called Polari—an elaborate and obscure coded language used among gay men in the UK during the decades before homosexuality was finally decriminalized there in 1967.

But the term also took hold in other places: last November Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau issued a formal apology for a government effort over some 40 years to root out homosexuals from the country’s civil serviceusing a ersatz lie-detector-style test known as the “fruit machine.” v Send questions to Cecil via straightdope.com or write him c/o Chicago Reader, 30 N. Racine, suite 300, Chicago 60607.

l

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SAVAGE LOVE

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By Dan Savage

BODY RUBS

‘I keep having sex dreams about Kanye West’

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And other quick hits from a Savage Love Live show in Denver SAVAGE LOVE LIVE a t Denver’s Oriental Theater last week was epic. But we couldn’t get to all the audience questions during the show, so I’m going to race through as many that went unanswered as I can in this week’s column . . .

Q : You’ve famously said,

“Oral comes standard.”

How long before anal comes standard?

A : How does a week from next Tuesday grab you?

Q : How do you introduce your inexperienced-butwilling-to-try partner to BDSM? A : By starting a two-person

book club. Order Playing Well With Others: Your Field Guide to Discovering, Exploring, and Navigating the Kink, Leather, and BDSM Communities by Lee Harington and Mollena Williams; The Ultimate Guide to Kink: BDSM, Role Play, and the Erotic Edge, edited

by Tristan Taormino; and SM 101: A Realistic Introduction

by Jay Wiseman. Read and discuss, and discuss some more—and when you’re ready to start playing, take it slow!

Q : What resources are available—which do you recommend—to share with my male partner so he can improve (learn) oral sex?

(Girl oral sex!)

A : Two more book

recommendations: The Ultimate Guide to Cunnilingus: How to Go Down on a Woman and Give Her Exquisite Pleasure by Violet Blue, and She Comes First: The Thinking Man’s Guide to Pleasuring a Woman by Ian Kerner.

Q : My boyfriend told me

that women orgasm only

60 percent of the time compared to men. I said I want orgasm equity. How do I navigate his pansy-assed male ego to find a solution?

A : The orgasm gap—91

percent of men reported climaxing in their last opposite-sex sexual encounter compared to 64 percent of women (National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior)—doesn’t exist for lesbians and bi women in same-sex relationships. So the problem isn’t women and their elusive orgasms, it’s men and their lazy-ass bullshit. A contributing factor is that women often have a hard time advocating for their own pleasure because they’ve been socialized to defer to men. There’s evidence of that in your question: you want to navigate this problem— the problem being a selfish boyfriend who doesn’t care enough about you to prioritize your pleasure and has taken cover behind the orgasm gap—but you want to spare his ego in the process.

Fuck his precious ego. Tell him what you want and show him what it takes to get you off. If he refuses to do his part to close the orgasm gap in your apartment, show him the door.

Q : How do you prioritize

sex with your partner when life gets so busy and masturbation is so much easier? My fiance is down for quickies sometimes but not always.

A : Forgive my tautology,

but you prioritize sex by prioritizing sex. Scheduled sex can be awesome sex—and when you’re truly pressed for time, you can always masturbate together.

Q : How do I come out to

my family as a stripper? I’ve

been dancing for more than two years and don’t plan to stop. Some of my family members are biased against sex workers, but I’m tired of keeping up the facade (I told them I’m a bartender).

A : It’s a catch-22: people are

afraid to come out to their closed-minded families as queer or poly or sex workers or atheists, but closedminded families typically don’t open their minds until after their queer or poly or sex working or nonbelieving kids come out to them. Tell them your truth and stand your ground.

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Q : I keep having sex dreams about Kanye West. What does that mean?

A : You’re Mike Pence.

Q : Can I want to be

monogamous without any reasoning? My boyfriend would probs be in an open relationship, but I’m not interested for no reason in particular.

A : Speaking with low-

information voters is frustrating because they can’t tell you why they voted for someone; speaking with low-information fuckers— people who don’t or can’t tell you why they’re doing/ screwing what they’re doing/screwing—is just as frustrating. It’s even more frustrating when the lowinformation fucker is the person you’re fucking. It’s fine to want what you want, but unless you’re interested only in solo sex, you need to be able to share your reasons. v Send letters to mail@ savagelove.net. Download the Savage Lovecast every Tuesday at savagelovecast. com. m @fakedansavage

Never miss a show again.

EARLY WARNINGS

chicagoreader.com/early

MAY 17, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 37

b Jesse Colin Young 9/13, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 5/17, noon b Neil Young 6/30-7/1, 8 PM, Auditorium Theatre, on sale Sat 5/19, 10 AM b Jeremy Zucker 9/28, 6 PM, Beat Kitchen, on sale Fri 5/18, 10 AM b

UPCOMING

Greg Fox é EBRU YILDIZ

NEW

Christina Aguilera 10/16-17, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre, on sale Fri 5/18, 10 AM Matt Alber 8/15, 8 PM, Schubas Ballyhoo!, Bumpin Uglies, Tropidelic 7/7, 8:30 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Rayland Baxter 7/28, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Bodeans 11/24, 7 and 10 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 5/17, noon b Bronze Radio Return 9/9, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 5/18, 10 AM b The Church 10/17, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, on sale Fri 5/18, 10 AM, 18+ Delhi 2 Dublin 8/22, 8:30 PM, Beat Kitchen Delta Sleep 8/23, 9 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Donkeys 7/27, 9 PM, Hideout Drake, Migos 8/17-18, 7 PM, United Center, on sale Fri 5/18, 10 AM English Beat 7/6, 8 PM, Metro, 18+ Famous Dex 6/14, 6:30 PM, Portage Park Flat Five 9/1, 8:30 PM, FitzGerald’s, Berwyn, on sale Fri 5/18, 11 AM Forth Wanderers 7/17, 7 PM, Beat Kitchen Greg Fox 7/28, 9 PM, Hideout Kinky Friedman 8/5, 7:30 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 5/18, 10 AM b Hawktail 10/27, 8 PM, Szold Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, on sale Fri 5/18, 8 AM b Mason Jennings 8/17, 7 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 5/18, 10 AM b Matthew Perryman Jones 9/23, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 5/17, noon b

Joy Formidable, Tancred 11/3, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, on sale Fri 5/18, 10 AM, 18+ Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio 8/31, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 5/18, 10 AM b Stu Larsen 8/13, 7 PM, Schubas, on sale Fri 5/18, 10 AM b Maze with Frankie Beverly 6/15-16, 8 PM, the Venue at Horseshoe Casino, Hammond Shawn Mendes 6/27, 7:30 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont, on sale Sat 5/19, 10 AM Milk Carton Kids, Barr Brothers 10/23, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 5/18, 10 AM, 17+ Mount Eerie 6/26, 9 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 5/18, 10 AM, 17+ Mourn, Chastity 8/7, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle, on sale Fri 5/18, 10 AM Murder by Death 10/6, 8 PM, Metro, on sale Fri 5/18, 10 AM, 18+ Mystic Braves 9/8, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle Molly Nilsson 10/27, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle Nine Inch Nails, Jesus and Mary Chain 10/25-26, 7 PM, Aragon Ballroom, on sale Sat 5/19, 10 AM North Coast Music Festival with Miguel, DJ Snake, Jamiroquai, Vulfpeck, Snails, Revivalists, Strumbellas, Yellow Claw, Gramatik, Mura Masa, and more 8/31-9/2, Union Park b Nothing but Thieves 9/13, 7:30 PM, Metro, on sale Fri 5/18, 10 AM b Parkway Drive, August Burns Red, the Devil Wears Prada 9/5, 6 PM, Riviera Theatre, on sale Fri 5/18, 10 AM b Madeleine Peyroux 9/30, 7:30 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 5/18, 10 AM b

38 CHICAGO READER - MAY 17, 2018

Poi Dog Pondering 10/5-6, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 5/18, 10 AM b Poolside, Neil Frances 9/6, 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, on sale Fri 5/18, noon, 18+ Poster Children 6/29, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall Quintron & Miss Pussycast 9/12, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle, on sale Fri 5/18, 10 AM Red City Radio 6/1, 9 PM, Subterranean, 17+ The Revolution 10/5, 7:30 PM, Park West, on sale Fri 5/18, 11 AM Gruff Rhys 10/14, 8 PM, Chop Shop, 18+ Paul Sanchez 6/27, 8 PM, FitzGerald’s, Berwyn, on sale Fri 5/18, 11 AM Summer Salt 8/5, 8 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Syml 9/29, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, on sale Fri 5/18, 10 AM b Tenacious D 11/13, 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre, on sale Fri 5/18, 10 AM, 18+ Virtual Riot 6/15, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Waco Brothers 8/25, 9 PM, FitzGerald’s, Berwyn, on sale Fri 5/18, 11 AM Wailin’ Jennys 10/26, 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, on sale Fri 5/18, 8 AM b West Fest with Kevin Morby, Joey Purp, the Make-Up, Shame, Bush Tetras, Oddcouple, Ohmme, Varsity, Campdogzz, and more 7/6-8, Chicago between Damen and Wood b Wiz Khalifa, Rae Sremmurd 7/29, 6 PM, Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, Tinley Park, on sale Fri 5/18, noon Sebastian Yatra, Manuel Turizo 10/27, 8 PM, Rosemont Theater, Rosemont, on sale Fri 5/18, 10 AM

Anderson, Rabin, and Wakeman 9/7, 8 PM, Ravinia Festival, Highland Park Nicole Atkins 8/10, 7 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Lee Bains III & the Glory Fires 6/5, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle Black Moth Super Rainbow 6/16, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ Blackbird Blackbird 6/17, 8 PM, Schubas, 18+ Canned Heat 9/17, 8 PM, City Winery b Car Seat Headrest, Naked Giants 9/7, 7:30 PM, the Vic b 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+ Deep Purple, Judas Priest 8/22, 7 PM, Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, Tinley Park Deerhoof 6/3, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle Diplomats 7/28, 9 PM, Portage Theater Jeremy Enigk 6/30, 8:30 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Roky Erickson 11/9, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall Family Crest 8/7, 8 PM, Schubas, 18+ Faust 7/11, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle Eleanor Friedberger 10/5, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Gallant 11/3, 6:30 PM, Concord Music Hall b GBH, Fireburn 6/10, 7 PM, Cobra Lounge, 17+ Glassjaw, Quicksand 7/8, 6:30 PM, Concord Music Hall, 17+ A Hawk and a Hacksaw 5/30, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Iceage 6/21, 8 PM, House of Vans J. Cole 9/22, 7:30 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont 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+ Mark Kozelek 9/11, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ La Luz, Gymshorts 5/31, 8 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Lawrence 5/26, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+

ALL AGES

WOLF BY KEITH HERZIK

EARLY WARNINGS

CHICAGO SHOWS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT IN THE WEEKS TO COME

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Jeff Lynne’s ELO 8/15, 8 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont The Make-Up 7/6, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks 6/3, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ The Men 8/25, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle New Pornographers 6/21, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Ozzy Osbourne, Stone Sour 9/21, 7:30 PM, Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, Tinley Park Pedro the Lion 8/24, 9 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Pelican, Cloakroom 7/26, 9 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Martin Rev, Wolf Eyes 6/1, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Ty Segall, William Tyler 11/2, 7:30 PM, Thalia Hall b Self Defense Family, Sannhet 6/16, 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Sleep 8/1, 7 PM, Riviera Theatre b Suuns 5/30, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle Tinariwen 8/13, 7:30 PM, Thalia Hall b Wax Idols, Shadow Age 9/9, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle Yob, Bell Witch 7/8-9, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Young Fathers 11/19, 9 PM, Bottom Lounge, 18+ Young Widows, Emma Ruth Rundle 6/8, 9 PM, Subterranean, 17+

SOLD OUT Animal Collective, Lonnie Holley 7/27, 7:30 PM, the Vic b Bon Iver 6/3, 7 PM, Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park b David Byrne 6/1-3, 8 PM, Auditorium Theatre Dinosaur Jr. 7/19, 7:30 PM, Temperance Beer Company Sylvan Esso 7/23-24, 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre b Gaslight Anthem 8/11, 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre b Grouplove 6/1, 7:30 PM, Metro b Kooks 5/30, 8 PM, the Vic, 18+ Meg Myers 6/12, 8 PM, Subterranean, 17+ New Pornographers 6/22, 7:30 PM, Temperance Beer Company Radiohead 7/6-7, 7:30 PM, United Center Superfruit 5/30, 8:30 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Voidz 6/15, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Yeah Yeah Yeahs 5/29, 7:30 PM, Aragon Ballroom b v

GOSSIP WOLF A furry ear to the ground of the local music scene THE CHICAGO ZINE FEST has been bringing hordes of self-publishing enthusiasts together for eight years, and its ninth edition arrives this weekend. On Friday, May 18, it hosts a reading and panel discussion at the Institute of Cultural Affairs (4750 N. Sheridan), and on Saturday, May 19, the main event takes over Plumbers Union Hall (1340 W. Washington) with 250 zine exhibitors, food trucks, a bake sale, a GlitterGuts photo booth, and lots more.

That night, the Co-Prosperity Sphere hosts a “punk rock karaoke” afterparty benefiting literary and visual-arts nonprofit the Chicago Publishers Resource Center. If you’ve ever wanted to see a bunch of zine makers joyfully massacring tunes by the Ramones, the Misfits, and Rancid, here’s your chance. Dibs on “Time Bomb”!

Rainbo doesn’t book shows often, but on Wednesday, May 23, the bar throws a rare concert—and it benefits a good cause.

All proceeds go to the Clinic Vest Project, a nonprofit that trains and provides special clothing for clinic defense escorts, who accompany women to reproductive health-care facilities. (The assholes who make such escorts necessary will try to tell you these facilities only perform abortions, but they’re lying.) Local postpunks Luggage (with the Reader’s Luca Cimarusti on drums) and gothy postmetal cadre Bloodiest perform beginning at 7 PM; a $5 donation is requested.

Gossip Wolf has been keeping an eye on Chicago four-piece Hitter—they played their first show at a DIY venue a few weeks back, and they’ve been posting entire rehearsals as live Instagram stories! Their lineup is a rogues’ gallery of local dirt-rock luminaries: Hannah Hazard and Madalyn Garcia of Lil Tits, Adam Luksetich of Foul Tip, and Ryan Wizniak of Meat Wave. Last week they released “Born to Rock,” which blends strutting AC/DC licks and glorious Kiss-esque stupidity, and they’ll drop a full demo shortly.

Hitter play Quenchers on Sunday, May 20.

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

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JUNE 13 VIC THEATRE

THURSDAY, JUNE 7 • VIC THEATRE

FRIDAY & SATURDAY, JUNE 15-16 • VIC THEATRE

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 5 • PARK WEST ON SALE THIS FRIDAY AT 11AM!

JUNE 13 • PARK WEST

SEPTEMBER 5 • RIVIERA THEATRE ON SALE THIS FRIDAY AT 10AM!

OCT. 17 LINCOLN HALL ON SALE THIS FRIDAY AT 10AM!

NOVEMBER 13 RIVIERA THEATRE ON SALE THIS FRIDAY AT 10AM!

BUY TICKETS AT MAY 17, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 39

“THE CAST DELIVERS ON ONE NUMBER AFTER ANOTHER” - CHICAGO READER

“SPECTACULAR” - CHICAGO TRIBUNE

“SHEER PERFECTION” - AROUND THE TOWN CHICAGO

312.827.5600 JCSUPERSTAR.ORG DIRECTOR TIMOTHY SHEADER PRODUCTION SPONSORS

LEAD SPONSOR

THE NEGAUNEE FOUNDATION

CHOREOGRAPHER DREW McONIE COSPONSORS

ANONYMOUS DONOR

FINAL WEEKEND

MUSIC DIRECTOR TOM DEERING

MR. AND MRS. J. CHRISTOPHER REYES

LIGHTING DESIGNER LEE CURRAN

SET & COSTUME DESIGNER TOM SCUTT

JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR

IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE REALLY USEFUL GROUP LIMITED

MUSIC BY ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER LYRICS BY TIM RICE PRODUCTION BY THE REGENT’S PARK THEATRE LONDON PHOTO: TODD ROSENBERG

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