Print Issue of May 25, 2017 (Volume 46, Number 33) by Chicago Reader

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

Sex, drugs, and Barack: a new Obama bio digs into the dirt. 9

The poop scoop on festival season Service Sanitation portapotties have become a ubiquitous sight at Chicago’s outdoor concerts. And even if you don’t think you want to, you’re about to learn about the business that put them there. By LEOR GALIL 26

Top chefs pay edible tribute to their culinary mentors. 12

The American Writers Museum doesn’t do justice to Americans, writers, or museums. 20

INVITE YOU TO CELEBRATE THE 50 TH ANNIVERSARY OF SGT PEPPER’S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND

HEAR THE ICONIC ALBUM IN ITS ENTIRETY NOW MIXED IN BY GILES MARTIN DOLBY ATMOS TRANSPORTS YOU INTO THE STORY WITH BREATHTAKING, MOVING AUDIO ®

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THIS IS YOUR ONLY CHANCE TO HEAR THIS INCREDIBLE NEW MIX. TICKETS ARE FREE BUT YOU MUST RSVP TO ATTEND. TICKET DOES NOT GUARANTEE ENTRY.

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THIS WEEK

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EDITOR JAKE MALOOLEY DEPUTY EDITOR, NEWS ROBIN AMER CULTURE EDITOR TAL ROSENBERG DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY DANIELLE A. SCRUGGS FILM EDITOR J.R. JONES MUSIC EDITOR PHILIP MONTORO ASSOCIATE EDITORS KATE SCHMIDT, KEVIN WARWICK, BRIANNA WELLEN SENIOR WRITERS MIKE SULA SENIOR THEATER CRITIC TONY ADLER STAFF WRITERS MAYA DUKMASOVA, LEOR GALIL, DEANNA ISAACS, BEN JORAVSKY, AIMEE LEVITT, PETER MARGASAK, JULIA THIEL SOCIAL MEDIA EDITOR RYAN SMITH GRAPHIC DESIGNER SUE KWONG MUSIC LISTINGS COORDINATOR LUCA CIMARUSTI CONTRIBUTING WRITERS NOAH BERLATSKY, MATT DE LA PEÑA, ANNE FORD, ISA GIALLORENZO, JOHN GREENFIELD, JUSTIN HAYFORD, JACK HELBIG, DAN JAKES, BILL MEYER, MICHAEL MINER, J.R. NELSON, MARISSA OBERLANDER, LEAH PICKETT, DMITRY SAMAROV, DAVID WHITEIS, ALBERT WILLIAMS INTERNS PORTER MCLEOD, EMILY WASIELEWSKI ---------------------------------------------------------------VICE PRESIDENT OF BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT NICKI STANULA VICE PRESIDENT OF NEW MEDIA GUADALUPE CARRANZA SENIOR ACCOUNT MANAGER EVANGELINE MILLER ACCOUNT EXECUTIVES FABIO CAVALIERI, ARIANA DIAZ, BRIDGET KANE MARKETING AND EVENTS MANAGER BRYAN BURDA DIRECTOR OF DIGITAL JOHN DUNLEVY ADVERTISING COORDINATOR HERMINIA BATTAGLIA CLASSIFIEDS REPRESENTATIVE KRIS DODD

FEATURES

IN THIS ISSUE 23 Visual Art At Triumph Gallery, more than 150 artists counteract a right-wing watch list.

4 Agenda The dark comedy Ideation, the A.V. Club’s Fourth Annual 26th Annual Comedy Festival, local artist Cauleen Smith’s Art Institute exhibit, Mel Brooks, and more goings-on about town

CITY LIFE

FOOD & DRINK

Chicago chefs pay edible tribute to their culinary mentors

8 Street View Admire this octogenarian in a Canadian tuxedo. 8 Chicagoans A movie title designer describes working in “Marvel mode.”

We asked some of the city’s top chefs to create a dish to honor a person who inﬂuenced their cooking. The exercise stirred many kitchen memories, about everyone from Rick Bayless to dear ol’ mom. AS TOLD TO JULIA THIEL PHOTOS BY CHRIS HURD 12

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9 Joravsky | Politics In the massive new biography Rising Star, David Garrow paints a complicated portrait of a young Barack Obama. 11 Transportation Chicago should make its Divvy bike-share program disability friendly.

DISTRIBUTION CONCERNS distributionissues@chicagoreader.com

ARTS & CULTURE

---------------------------------------------------------------READER (ISSN 1096-6919) IS PUBLISHED WEEKLY BY STM READER, LLC, 350 N. ORLEANS, CHICAGO, IL 60654. COPYRIGHT © 2017 CHICAGO READER. PERIODICAL POSTAGE PAID AT CHICAGO, IL. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. CHICAGO READER, READER, AND REVERSED R: REGISTERED TRADEMARKS ®.

MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE

The poop scoop on festival season

ON THE COVER: PHOTO BY MATTHEW AVIGNONE. FOR MORE OF HIS WORK, GO TO MATTHEWAVIGNONE.COM.

Service Sanitation porta-potties have become a ubiquitous sight at Chicago’s outdoor concerts. And even if you don’t think you want to, you’re about to learn about the business that put them there. BY LEOR GALIL 26

22 Theater The message of Court Theatre’s Harvey? Don’t worry—be happy.

MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE

30 Shows of note Femdot, Trip Metal Fest, Dr. Octagon, and more recommendations 35 The Secret History of Chicago Music Vibist Paris Smith is an undiscovered treasure of Chicago underground jazz.

FOOD & DRINK

20 Museums The new American Writers Museum presents a touchscreen literary history. 21 Theater Silk Road Rising and Remy Bumppo’s Great Expectations is less a morality tale than a tale of easy moralizing.

CHICAGO READER 350 N. ORLEANS, CHICAGO, IL 60654 312-222-6920, CHICAGOREADER.COM

24 Movies Five days’ worth of features and short subjects screen in the Chicago Underground Film Festival’s 24th edition.

36 Restaurant review: Selam Ethiopian Kitchen An Uptown butcher shop and market has evolved into a forum for East African feasting.

CLASSIFIEDS

38 Jobs 38 Apartments & Spaces 39 Marketplace

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40 Straight Dope Why are presidential orders, especially as used by the current president, so powerful? 41 Savage Love Can consenting adults be protected in the event of death during breath play? 42 Early Warnings Diplo, Tiger & Woods, Wire, and more upcoming shows you should know about 42 Gossip Wolf Nasim Williams throws a free 12-hour party at Madison Public House, and more music news.

MAY 25, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 3

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Get Out Sunday, May 28 @ 6:00pm Fri, Mon-Thr, May 26, 29-June 1 @ 9pm

Logan Sunday, May 28 @ 3:30pm

Beauty & the Beast

4 CHICAGO READER - MAY 25, 2017

might’ve been. —DMITRY SAMAROV Through 5/28: Wed-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 2:30 and 7:30 PM, Sun 2:30 PM, Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln, 773-4047336, greenhousetheater.org, $30-$40.

R Ideation We’re in a meeting room at a consulting ﬁrm (whiteboard, R ergonomic chairs). Four consultants (MBAs, engineers) and an intern (Scooter) have been tasked with conceptualizing a system for the liquidation and disposal (killing and hiding) of a million or more victims in the (as yet) theoretical event of an extinction-level viral outbreak. The consultants focus all their brainpower and arrogance on ideating (brainstorming) the problem. But as they draw arrows and circles on the whiteboard (“LF” = “liquidation facility”) it occurs to them that things may not be what they seem. The rest of Aaron Loeb’s erudite dark comedy presents the spectacle of smart people going nuts, weighing a possible genocide against keeping their jobs. Gus Menary’s Jackalope Theatre staging is hilarious and disquieting, its darkest joke being the ﬁrst one: that these savants are gung ho as long as they think the job is just killing sick people. —TONY ADLER Through 6/17: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM, Broadway Armory Park, 5917 N. Broadway, 312-742-7502, chicagoparkdistrict.com, $25.

Italian Bred Candice Guardino’s one-woman show about growing up Italian-American on Staten Island leans so hard on caricature that it sometimes hides the heartfelt family tribute at its core. With over-the-top New Yawk-accented parodies of her relatives, video cameos by the likes of Sopranos actor Steven Schirripa, and treacly musical interludes, Guardino works hard to make her life story feel like a cliche played for easy laughs. The truest parts of the show reveal her very real aﬀection for her grandmother, Fran, who taught her to never take grief from anybody and to follow her dreams. Her stories about Fran’s no-nonsense lessons could’ve made for a compelling evening in their own right. In fact, if Guardino had cut most of the people-pleasing schmaltz, there’s no telling how proud grandma

Johnny 10 Beer’s Daughter Dana Lynn Formby’s tight, intense drama, being given its world premiere by Something Marvelous, isn’t an easy play to watch—or to turn away from. From the moment the lights come up onstage, we’re drawn in, and with each passing scene we care more and more about the two main characters: a needy daughter seeking validation and her psychologically wounded ex-marine father. Arti Ishak and Randy Steinmeyer play the pair with sometimes terrifying full-throttle intensity, heightened by Emmi Hilger’s simple, unobtrusive direction. Formby tells her story well; hours after the play ended I found myself still brooding over the fates of these two lost souls. —JACK HELBIG Through 6/18: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, Chicago Dramatists, 1105 W. Chicago, 312-633-0630, somethingmarvelous.org, $15-$28.

A Prayer for the Sandinistas When the first Polish pope, John Paul II, made Chicago an early stop on his American tour of 1979, reports were circulating nationally that a popular uprising had made strides against the Somoza client regime in Nicaragua. Leigh Johnson’s intricate and impressive play encapsulates this historical moment inside the Blaczks’ living room on the northwest side, where a family of staidly conservative Polish-Catholic parishioners, having invited a pair of Nicaraguan orphans into the home to experience the papal visit, encounter instead two revolutionary fighters in camouflage and berets. Jonathan Hagloch’s staging for Subtext Theater Company is straightforward, with natural dialogue and well-rounded characters that appear to be drawn from Johnson’s own past. Kate Robison is stunning in her minor role as Maria, a shy friend of the family. —MAX MALLER Through 6/11; Fri-Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, Prop Thtr, 3502 N. Elston, 773-5397838, subtextnfp.org, $25.

Relativity To look at Mike Nussbaum—the full head of white hair, the

eyes poised between melancholy and delight—you might think he was born to play Albert Einstein. And you’d be right. Nussbaum does a great job here, embodying the genius at age 70. If only he had a better occasion for it. Set in 1949 at Einstein’s home near Princeton University, Mark St. Germain’s new play takes an unlikely but intriguing premise, drains out every bit of interest, and leaves us with nothing but mawkish banalities. Never mind the ﬁrst unlikelihood: that, in BJ Jones’s 70-minute staging, Einstein tolerates obvious hostility from a reporter (Katherine Keberlein) he’s only just met. The real trouble comes when St. Germain embarks on an earnest exploration of the alleged great man/good man paradox. What grown-up is shocked to learn that talented people aren’t necessarily nice? —TONY ADLER Through 6/18: Wed 1 and 7:30 PM, Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 2:30 and 8 PM, Sun 2:30 PM, Northlight Theatre, North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, 9501 Skokie, Skokie, 847-673-6300, northlight.org, $30-$76, $15 students. The River Bride There’s an R eye-catching prop by Ellie Terrell that sums up the layered, enchanting

aura of Marisela Treviño Orta’s 2014 one-act: in a Brazilian village along the Amazon River, as a father muses aloud about the mysteries of love, he slices a knife into a giant iridescent cloth ﬁsh, revealing a skeleton of wooden blinds and soft, plush bloodied guts. It’s at once childlike and grotesque, qualities that speak to the best of Orta’s fable and this all-Latinx Halcyon Theatre production directed by Rinska Carrasco-Prestinary. Two sisters (Soﬁa Tew and Flavia Pallozzi) reevaluate their romantic paths when a seemingly perfect suitor (Nate Santana) disrupts a wedding. I found myself engrossed in the playfulness of Orta’s poetry, and Santana radiates magic with a performance that carefully balances empathetic realism with heightened, surreal expression. —DAN JAKES Through 6/18: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 6 PM, Christ Evangelical Lutheran Church, 3253 W. Wilson, 773-478-7941, halcyontheatre.org, free-$20. The Rogue Aviator The recurring theme in Otherworld Theatre’s new

steampunk, glam droogie-styled adventure-fantasy: big. Big cast, big performances, big cinematic soundtrack, and a sprawling mythology of political and military factions built around a big ol’ retrofuturistic metropolis hovering above 1930s America. An all-female squadron of bounty hunters navigates the skies, literal and diplomatic, after a rogue flyer declares war on a corrupt caste-system-based government. Does it all fit onstage? Sort of. Nick Izzo’s story and dialogue nod to classic sci-fi novels and comic books, and Tiffany Keane-Schaefer’s two-and-a-half-hour production often feels blocked and edited for a summer blockbuster movie. But there’s an indisputable LARP enthusiasm to The Rogue Aviator, along with plenty of creative world building for genre fans to sink their teeth into. —DAN JAKES Through 6/10: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 5 PM, Strawdog Theatre, 1802 W. Berenice, 773-347-1350, otherworldtheatre.org, $20 suggested donation. St. Jude Life isn’t a linear proR gression. If you need evidence, look no further than this smart, moving

one-man show from Luis Alfaro. The story centers on a journey back to Alfaro’s southern-California hometown, where he’s met with a ﬂood of memories while tending to his sickly father. Much of this hour-long saga is powered by raw emotion, informed by self-inﬂicted wounds and a troubled past. But a clever gimmick helps elevate it: the program doubles as a hymnal, and the audience/ congregation is prompted to sing. By playing preacher, Alfaro seems intent on soliciting a bit of redemption, even if it’s done with a healthy dose of irony. —MATT DE LA PEÑA Through 6/4: Thu 5/25 and Sat 5/27, 7:30 PM; Sun 5/28 and 6/4, 3 PM; Thu 6/1-Sat 6/3, 7:30 PM, Victory Gardens Theater, 2433 N. Lincoln, 773-871-3000, victorygardens.org, $20.

Three Days of Rain Mercurial, R carefully crafted performances by Kyle Curry and Kate Black-Spence drive

Derek Van Barham’s intimate staging of Richard Greenberg’s 1997 drama, whose theme is the complex legacy—emotional and material—passed down from parents to children. Curry and Black-Spence play two characters each in this BoHo

Luis Alfaro in St. Jude o LIZ LAUREN

Best bets, recommendations, and notable arts and culture events for the week of May 25

Halsted, 3656 N. Halsted, 773-472-6469, luckyplush.com, $100.

COMEDY

BYOD Bring Your Own Diary R is an improvised show based on guests’ real-life diary entries. This

Kaye Winks in Token o JOEL MAISONET Theatre production. In act one, they are Walker and Nan Janeway, estranged siblings who reunite after the death of their father, Ned, a famous New York architect, to collect their inheritance, which they expect will be one of his celebrated houses. In the second half, set 37 years earlier, the actors portray Ned and Lina—the girlfriend of Ned’s business partner, Theo (Niko Kourtis, who also plays Theo’s son, Pip)—at the moment when Lina and Ned fall in love during a three-day rainstorm. Greenberg’s dialogue is witty and literate, as beﬁts his privileged, urbane characters, but the humor serves an achingly painful narrative that haunted me long after the show ended. Curry is riveting as the quirky, narcissistic Walker and the shy, sensitive Ned, and Black-Spence is equally compelling as the nurturing Nan and especially the ﬂamboyant, mentally unstable Lina, whose eccentricity—so alluring to Ned—will, we know, lead to a madness that will wreck her marriage and traumatize her children. —ALBERT WILLIAMS Through 6/25: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 2 PM, Heartland Studio Theatre, 7016 N. Glenwood, 773-791-2393, bohotheatre.com, $25.

Token Kaye Winks goes for the jugular in her saucy new solo show about growing up black in a mostly white world. And who could blame her? Helped by great direction from Schoen Smith, Winks has a knack for uncomfortable, often hilarious jokes that speak to the greater ills of race in America. But it’s arguable that her talent isn’t evident so much in nailing unseemly stereotypes as in the subtle, self-deprecating humor that puts her squarely at the center of a thoughtful and reﬂective coming-of-age story. Bits about white friends from the suburbs, black cousins from the south side, and an exceptionally awkward holiday trip to the southern states are relatable, even humbling at times. —MATT DE LA PEÑA Through 6/9: Fri 7:30 PM, Second City Training Center, Judy’s Beat Lounge, 230 W. North, second ﬂoor, 312-337-3992, $13, $11 students.

DANCE R

Plucky Lush This fund-raiser for the dance theater Lucky Plush includes appetizers, drinks, and a performance of excerpts from company’s repertoire. Thu 5/25, 6-9 PM, Center on

month’s featured readers are Anastasia Fluck and the Reader’s Brianna Wellen, with improv from Family Friends. Thu 5/25, 8 PM, Playground Theater, 3209 N. Halsted, 773-871-3793, facebook.com/ BYODChi. F Fourth Annual 26th Annual R Comedy Festival The A.V. Club welcomes headliners Patton Oswalt,

LIT & LECTURES R

Activism This edition of the monthly series showcases the Courage Campaign, an organization that helps ﬁght sexual assault on public transit, and includes a Q&A with Annie Clark and Andrea Pino, authors of We Believe You: Survivors of Campus Sexual Assault Speak Out. Wed 5/31, 7 PM, Women & Children First, 5233 N. Clark, 773-769-9299, womenandchildrenﬁrst. com.

Christopher Guest, and Mike Judge to town for its fourth annual comedy festival. Other performers include Aparna Nancherla, Jena Friedman, and Bobcat Goldthwait & Caitlin Gill. 5/31-6/4, various locations, 26comedy.com, $10-$34.50.

Trixie Mattel: Ages 3 and Up R Chicago The RuPaul’s Drag Race star’s one-woman comedy show. Wed 5/31, 7:30 PM, Laugh Factory, 3175 N. Broadway, 773-327-3175, laughfactory. com, $30-$45.

VISUAL ARTS Art Institute of Chicago “Cauleen Smith: Human_3.0 Reading List,” Chicago-based artist Smith’s collection of 57 reimagined, hand-drawn book covers. 5/27-10/29. Sun–Wed and Fri-Sat 10:30 AM–5 PM, Thu 10:30 AM–8 PM. 111 S. Michigan, 312-443-3600, artinstituteofchicago.org, $25, $19 students, seniors ($5 discount for Chicago residents), free kids under 14; free for Illinois residents Thursdays 5-8 PM.

Tue 5/30, 7 PM, Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th, 773-7022787, arts.uchicago.edu/brooks100. China Miéville The author R discusses his book October: The Story of the Russian Revolution. Sun

7 PM, Poetry Foundation, 61 W. Superior, 312-787-7070, poetryfoundation.org.

MOVIES

More at chicagoreader.com/movies Mel Brooks o JOHN PHILLIPS/GETTY IMAGES

Mel Brooks The legendary ﬁlmmaker talks about his career and tells behind-the-scenes stories about the making of Young Frankenstein. A screening of the ﬁlm follows. Sat 5/27, 3 PM, Chicago Theatre, 175 N. State, 312-462-6300, thechicagotheatre.com, $78.50-$98.50. House Music Conference MusiR cians, DJs, and industry professionals lead panels like “House Preser-

vation: Cultivating the Next Generation of Practitioners” and “Gender/Sexuality/ Generation: Evolving Attitudes and Making Safe Spaces in House Culture.” The conference precedes the Chicago House Party at Millennium Park on Sat

Galerie F “Movie Poster Remakes,” a group exhibition featuring local artists— including Chema Skandal!, Jonathan Carradine, Lisa Gray, and Penny Pinch— reinterpreting classic movie posters. Opening reception Fri 5/26, 6-10 PM. 5/26-6/11. Tue-Sun 11 AM-6 PM. 2415 N. Milwaukee, 773-819-9200, galerief.com. LetherB+B “Hot Dog Architecture,” a display of prints by Ryan Duggan with drinks from Land and Sea Dept. and Old Style. Fri 5/26, 6-10 PM. 3656 W. Wrightwood, letherbee.com/blog/2017/2/10/ introducing-letherbb.

Angela Jackson The author leads R a discussion and retrospective of the work of poet Gwendolyn Brooks.

Poetry Oﬀ the Shelf Elise PasR chen and Laura Kasischke read from their poetry collections. Thu 5/25,

followed by a community social. 5/256/15: Thu 8 PM, MCL Chicago, 3110 N. Sheﬃeld, mclchicago.com, $12.

5/27, 2-9 PM. 5/25-5/26: Thu 11 AM-9 PM, Fri 6-7:30 PM, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington, 312-744-6630, chicagoculturalcenter.org.

5/28, 3 PM, Seminary Co-op Bookstore, 5751 S. Woodlawn, 773-752-4381, semcoop.com.

Emily Galati The comic returns to Chicago to perform stand-up as part of the Welcome Home series. 5/30-6/4: Tue-Thu and Sun 8:30 PM; Fri 8:30 and 10:30 PM; Sat 7, 9, 11:15 PM, Zanies, 1548 N. Wells, 312-337-4027, zanies.com/chicago, $25 plus two-drink minimum. Loud and Proud A weekly showR case featuring LGBTQ musicians, comedians, dancers, poets, and more,

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

NEW REVIEWS Afterimage Andrzej Wajda, one R of Poland’s greatest ﬁlmmakers, closed out his long career with this

unusually personal and despairing biopic of the avant-garde painter Władysław Strzemiński. Missing his left arm and right leg, Strzemiński (Bogusław Linda) is adored by his young students at the State Higher School of Visual Arts in Lodz, but his life and career begin to fall apart in 1950 after the communist ministry of culture announces a campaign in favor of pro-Soviet social realism and against “formalistic and cynical art.” Wajda spent the ﬁrst four decades of his career trying to make art under communist rule, which gives this story an emotional edge lacking in some of his more recent outings. One striking W

Never miss a show again.

EARLY WARNINGS chicagoreader.com/early Afterimage

MAY 25, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 5

AGENDA B scene shows Strzemiński wrestling to get his ideas onto a canvas when the entire room goes red: outside his window, party oﬃcials have dropped a giant banner for a patriotic demonstration. The painter’s last two years were a slow, merciless degradation, and Wajda, to his credit, follows Strzemiński all the way down. In Polish with subtitles. —J.R. JONES 98 min. Fri 5/26, 6 PM; Sat 5/27, 3:15 PM; Sun 5/28, 8 PM; Mon 5/29, 5:15 PM; Tue 5/30, 8 PM; Wed 5/31, 6 PM; and Thu 6/1, 8:15 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center The Animation Show of R Shows Curated by Ron Diamond, the annual Animation Show

of Shows anthology collects short works from around the world; this year’s entries range from narrative to abstraction but all demonstrate the highest dedication to craft. Much on this program is captivating, but I’ll limit myself to the gems most easily described: Mirror is an animated version of a New Yorker cover by Chris Ware, incorporating audio from This American Life in which a woman recalls an artless remark she once made that might have wounded her teenage daughter’s feelings.

The hero of Seoro Oh’s hilarious Afternoon Class can’t stay awake in algebra, and his head turns into an assortment of weights—a bowling ball, a hammerhead, a safe—as he tries not to nod off; before long he drifts off into a nightmare, rendered in colored outlines on a black background. And Marc Héricher’s Corpus follows the progress of a macabre Rube Goldberg contraption, its zany convolutions given a fierce specificity by the hyperrealist digital animation. —J.R. JONES 106 min. Fri 5/26, 8 PM, and Sat 5/27, 5:15 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center

Truman

Baywatch Who’d have thought a ﬂimsy, witless TV series like Baywatch (1989-’01) could have spawned this boisterous, cheeky comedy? Dwayne Johnson stars as head lifeguard of a Los Angeles County beach patrol, and Zac Efron is the disgraced Olympic swimmer forced to join his team. Their nonstop insults trigger the biggest laughs amid a sea of jokes about penises and cleavage; gay and racial jokes that might have tanked mostly succeed because the multiethnic cast gets the tone right, and the pop culture

references are on the money. The crime story, involving drugs and extortion, is boilerplate but gives Priyanka Chopra a chance to shine as a scheming villain. Seth Gordon (Identity Thief, Horrible Bosses) directed. —ANDREA GRONVALL R, 116 min. Block 37, ArcLight, Century 12 and CineArts 6, Chatham 14, Cicero Showplace 14, City North 14, Crown Village 18, Ford City, River East 21, Showplace 14 Galewood Crossings, Showplace ICON, 600 N. Michigan, Webster Place

6 CHICAGO READER - MAY 25, 2017

lived. Like many of Wertmüller’s films, this depicts most interpersonal relationships as struggles for sex and emotional control. Her Ferdinando is a horny, pampered brat who abuses his privilege to get what he wants, and Wertmüller presents this smug caricature as if she were revealing some shocking truth about monarchical power. As in many of her films, the saving grace is Enrico Job’s exquisite production design, which conveys a sense of nuance and a historical curiosity lacking in the script and direction. In Italian with subtitles. —BEN SACHS 108 min. Sat 5/27, 5:15 PM, and Tue 5/30, 6 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center Ferdinando and Carolina Lina Wertmüller’s comic biopic (1999) about King Ferdinando I of Naples is characteristically overstylized, with plenty of effects (zooms, colored lighting, circular camera movements) that catch the eye but add little to one’s understanding of the story. The movie is also characteristically vulgar, focusing on the king’s naughty pranks, sexual escapades, and gastrointestinal problems at the expense of the political and historical contexts in which he

Much Loved Banned in Morocco because of its “serious contempt for moral values and the Moroccan woman,” this 2015 drama about sex workers in Marrakesh is less lurid than the charge implies. Writer-director Nabil Ayouch indulges in long scenes of bacchanalia and some explicit sex, but they’re hardly out of line with the story; if anything, they’re too light and fun to be completely believable. Overall the women’s problems spring from less likely places than

the bedrooms they share with dangerously patriarchal men: a den mother to the new recruits (Loubna Abidaar) struggles to connect with her teenage son, while a rookie who prefers women sexually (Asmaa Lazrak) chafes at having to entertain men. Without being overly political, Ayouch touches on the hypocrisy of gender norms in the Middle East—the Saudi men are appreciative of the scantily clad sex workers but dismissive toward the wives they cover up back home. In Moroccan with subtitles. —LEAH PICKETT 104 min. Fri 5/26, 8:15 PM, and Mon 5/29, 5:15 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center Truman Truman is a slobR bering mastiﬀ owned by an earnest movie star with terminal

cancer (Ricardo Darín of The Secret in Their Eyes), and parting with the dog is one of the tasks the man must complete now that he’s decided to discontinue his treatment and die with dignity. You’re probably gagging already, but this Spanish-Argentine drama (2015), set in Madrid and framed by a four-day visit from the actor’s witty old friend (Javier Cámara), is pitch-perfect, its comic drollery

AGENDA rooted in character and its awkward, poignant good-byes credibly staged. Director Cesc Gay, who cowrote the screenplay with Tomàs Aragay, understands what each of his characters needs from those good-byes and takes careful note of the pas de deux we all perform out of respect when someone is not long for this world. In Spanish with subtitles. —J.R. JONES 108 min. Fri 5/26, 6 PM; Sat 5/27, 8 PM; Sun 5/28, 5:45 PM; Mon 5/29, 3 PM; Tue 5/30, 8 PM; Wed 5/31, 8 PM; and Thu 6/1, 6 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center A Young Poet In this 2014 French drama, writer-director Damien Manivel draws an analogy between the writer’s block of a callow young man and his feeling of being stuck between childhood and adulthood. Rémi Taﬀanel plays the aspiring poet of the title, and he closely resembles Manivel (who is also a former dancer and circus performer). Navel-gazing about the artist’s struggle abounds, culminating in the protagonist sitting on a cemetery bench and wondering aloud, “What’s the point?” The poet traipses through the seaside town of Sète, looking for seeds of creativity in strangers, the ocean, and alcohol; his exchanges with the townspeople can be cute and even touching, but you may roll your eyes at some of the dialogue. In French with subtitles. —LEAH PICKETT 71 min. Sun 5/28, 4 PM, and Wed 5/31, 8 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center

REVIVALS Idiocracy Luke Wilson stars as a Pentagon guinea pig who’s put in suspended animation for 500 years

and wakes to a United States so dumbed down the president is a former wrestler and porn star, the citizens get their news from Hot Naked Chicks & World Report, and the most popular TV show is aptly titled Ow! My Balls. Written and directed by Mike Judge—whose Oﬃce Space was one of the sharpest comedies of the 90s—this 2006 feature inverts the premise of Mark Twain’s similarly misanthropic A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, making its hero the smartest man on earth by casting him into the future rather than the past. Yet Judge races through some of his most provocative ideas in the opening minutes and ignores his story’s many logical inconsistencies; the movie is bracing for its bile but ultimately more frustrating than funny. With Maya Rudolph and Dax Shepard. —J.R. JONES R, 84 min. 35mm. Judge attends the screening. Thu 6/1, 7 PM. Music Box Solaris Although Andrei Tarkovsky regarded this 1972 SF R spectacle in ’Scope as the weakest

of his ﬁlms, it holds up remarkably well as a soulful Soviet “response” to 2001: A Space Odyssey, concentrating on the limits of man’s imagination in relation to memory and conscience. Sent to a remote space station poised over the mysterious planet Solaris in order to investigate the puzzling data sent back by an earlier mission, a psychologist (Donatas Banionis) discovers that, drawing on the troubled memories of the space explorers, the planet materializes human forms—including the psychologist’s own wife (Natalya Bondarchuk), who killed herself many years before but is repeatedly resurrected before his eyes. More an exploration of inner

than of outer space, Tarkovsky’s eerie mystic parable is given substance by the ﬁlmmaker’s boldly original grasp of ﬁlm language and the remarkable performances by all the principals. In Russian with subtitles. —JONATHAN ROSENBAUM 165 min. Fri 5/26-Sat 5/27, 4:45 PM, and Mon 5/29, 1:30 and 8 PM. Music Box Stalker Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 masterpiece, like his R earlier Solaris, is a free and alle-

gorical adaptation of an SF novel, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic. After a meteorite hits the earth, the region where it’s fallen is believed to grant the wishes of those who enter and, sealed off by the authorities, can be penetrated only illegally and with special guides. One of them (Aleksandr Kaidanovsky), the stalker of the title, leads a writer and a professor through the grimiest industrial wasteland you’ve ever seen. What they find is pretty harsh and has none of the usual satisfactions of SF quests, but Tarkovsky regards their journey as a contemporary spiritual quest. His mise en scene is mesmerizing, and the final scene is breathtaking. Not an easy film, but almost certainly a great one. In Russian with subtitles. —JONATHAN ROSENBAUM 161 min. Fri 5/26, 8 PM; Sat 5/27, 1:30 and 8 PM; and Sun 5/28, 4:45 PM. Music Box

SPECIAL EVENTS The Modern School of Film With Christopher Guest The noted satirist (Waiting for Guﬀman, Best in Show) and British peer (that’s Lord Haden-Guest to you) screens clips from three of his favorite ﬁlms and takes audience questions. Wed 5/31, 7 PM. Music Box v

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MAY 25, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 7

CITY LIFE

Chicagoans

The movie title designer Erin Sarofsky, 39, production company owner

Street View

o ISA GIALLORENZO

Blue-jean queen

“I THINK WHAT you should know about me is that I’m 83 years old, and I think that’s important. We’re the Gloria Steinem group!” Mary Borysewicz says while en route to the grocery store in a Canadian tuxedo. She describes her style as “medium conservative,” which she’s quick to clarify “is very diﬀerent from my politics.” Her senior pride is evident in her denim brand of choice: Not Your Daughter’s Jeans. “They ﬁt well,” the retired medical editor says matter-of-factly, “and that’s hard to find.” —ISA GIALLORENZO See more Chicago street style on Giallorenzo’s blog chicagolooks.blogspot.com.

“When you’re sitting on an airplane and half the plane is watching your movie, it’s so crazy,” Sarofsky says. o GILLIAN FRY

RIGHT AFTER I GOT out of school, I sent my portfolio to a digital agency in Chicago that had just finished the title sequence for Six Feet Under, which . . . that was it for me. That sequence is the essence of beautiful live action and beautiful typography and animation. I was like, “Sign me up.” They said sure, and I got in my car and drove here from Rochester, New York. Never been to Chicago before. Now I own Sarofsky Corp., and I’m pretty well-known for making main title sequences for TV shows and films. Like for Shameless, where you see the family filmed in a bathroom. We concepted it, we built the bathroom, we directed the sequence, we edited it, and we did the typography on top of it. The first big movie we did the title sequence for was Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Then we went into Ant-Man, and from there we went into Captain America: Civil War and Dr. Strange. And then we just worked on Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. It’s funny, I tend to work on the movies I want to see in the theater. I’ve always liked

big blockbusters. There are a couple other studios in Chicago that dabble in title sequences, but as far as a Chicagofocused company with no other offices, we’re it. We’re firmly rooted in Chicago, and that is the plan forever. When I started, being here was a disadvantage. But now our work is so well-known that people don’t even think about it. We take security very seriously. The Marvel movies are incredibly secure, because their content is so coveted. So anybody in our company who’s working on it is connected to a server that has the content on it, and neither that server nor the person’s work station is connected to the Internet, and the work station has no USB port. Those files have to be physically taken on a secure drive to a secure fiber connection and sent that way. Plus Marvel movies have code names. Like there was nothing on our server called Guardians of the Galaxy 2; the code name was Level Up. And the way our studio is arranged, the artists are in a little

U-shaped alcove, and along the edge of that we have curtains, so the monitors are blocked when they need to be. It’s like all the artists are together in solitary confinement. We call it Marvel mode. I get to see the movie literally one time before the pitch. I have to fly to LA, go to the studio, and watch it in the screening room at their facility, with the executive producer and maybe one other person. After the pitch, sometimes I’ll not see the movie again before the premiere. But with Ant-Man, I watched it several times because it changed before the premiere. It was like, “Oh shit, I have to fly to LA to go see Ant-Man again.” When you take a step back and think about how Captain America: Civil War made a billion dollars, something crazy like that—if you extrapolate it into how many people saw our work, it’s incredibly overwhelming. And when you’re sitting on an airplane and half the plane is watching your movie, it’s so crazy. I always have the temptation to tap people on the shoulder, but I never ever do. —AS TOLD TO ANNE FORD

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

SURE THINGS THURSDAY 25

FRIDAY 26

SATURDAY 27

SUNDAY 28

MONDAY 29

TUESDAY 30

WEDNESDAY 31

· Pu blic News ro om # 1 9: Clos ing De Facto film screening A presentation of Scrappers Film Group’s documentary about the crisis at Chicago State University. A discussion with Chicago State professor Philip Beverly follows. 5:30 PM, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington, scrappersﬁlmgroup.com. F

× Baderbraw l Freelance Wrestling and UnderGround Wrestling join forces for a pro wrestling extravaganza complete with lots of beer. 8:30 PM, Baderbräu, 2515 S. Wabash, baderbrau.com, $20 suggested donation, $30 VIP.

& Greek Me diterranean Wi ne Fest A Hellenic-themed tasting featuring wines from Greek Wine Cellars, Kourtaki, Parparoussis, and more. Sat 5/27-Sun 5/28: noon-9 PM, Halsted between Jackson and Van Buren, chicagoevents. com/events/greek-mediterranean-wine-festival, free entry, $40 tasting pass.

Ö B ike the Drive Dust oﬀ your bike for the 16th annual bike ride down Lake Shore Drive. Check out bikethedrive.org for starting locations along the route. 5:30-10 AM, Lake Shore Drive, bikethedrive.org, $49-$88.

[ Turn Back the Clock An exhibit about the Doomsday Clock and the nuclear age, featuring personal stories, interactive media, artifacts, and models. Through 1/2018, Mon-Sat 9:30 AM-4 PM, Sun 11 AM-4 PM, Museum of Science and Industry, 5700 S. Lake Shore, 773-684-1414, msichicago.org, $15, $14 seniors, $10 kids 3-11; add $8, $2 kids.

# Vo ices Against Violence The Chicago Reporter, Young Chicago Authors, and Public Narrative host a night of stories about the eﬀects of Chicago violence. Registration required. 7 PM, Kennedy-King College Theatre, 740 W. 63rd, bit.ly/ VoicesAgainstViolence. F

& Culinar y Fight Cl ub This edition of the live cooking competition is all about burgers. Chefs have 60 minutes to create a patty with a twist—all dishes must also include mushrooms. Guests vote on their favorite. 6-9 PM, Concord 55, 1355 W. Concord, culinaryﬁghtclub.com, $50.

8 CHICAGO READER - MAY 25, 2017

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

CITY LIFE

DONATE SHOP SUPPORT big-medicine.org

“One of the best resale shops in Chicago” Barack Obama as a student at Harvard University Law School in 1990

-Time Out Chicago

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

o JOE WRINN / AP PHOTO / HARVARD UNIVERSITY

POLITICS

A Rising Star who’s only too human

A new biography paints a complicated portrait of a young Barack Obama.

By BEN JORAVSKY

s President Donald Trump came before the White House press corps last week to swear up and down that he hadn’t colluded with the Russians to sway the U.S. presidential election, I finished plowing through Rising Star, David Garrow’s massive new biography of Barack Obama. What a dangerous, dishonest doofus— Trump, that is, not Obama or Garrow. Here’s an idea: How about flip-flopping things? Put Obama back in charge, and make Trump the subject of a massive biography. I’m not kidding when I say Garrow’s book is voluminous, by the way—it’s more than 1,400 pages if you include the notes and index, which are treasure troves of information in

and of themselves. The book’s heft has made it an object of scorn. Garrow, a historian and law professor, won a 1987 Pulitzer Prize for his biography Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. But Michiko Kakutani, the lead book reviewer for the New York Times, called Rising Star a “dreary slog of a read.” I have a different perspective. Yes, I know the book could have used a tighter edit, and chunks of it—especially the final chapter about the Obama White House years—could have been left out altogether. But this is an invaluable source of information about recent Chicago history. Much of the book has to do with the 20 or so years J

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(from 1985 to 2004) Obama lived here. During that time he crossed paths with dozens of people I knew, worked with, wrote about, or even went to junior high school with. For me, reading the Chicago sections of Rising Star is like paging through my high school yearbook. In writing a history of Obama’s rise to power, Garrow’s also telling the story of how this working-class city—the birthplace of Saul Alinsky-style community organizers—allowed itself to be led by a Democratic corporatist whose policies favored downtown over the outlying neighborhoods. And how elected officials—like a certain state senator named Barack Obama—mastered the art of talking like progressives while making sure they didn’t do anything that might piss off the boss. A juggling game that continues to this day under Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Another reason Garrow’s book has been criticized is that it delves into Obama’s past to tell tales about reported cocaine use and his apparently rather proliﬁc sex life. “Y’all, they trying to tear Barry down,” reads the headline from one post on the Root. Please, people, the man’s not a saint—he’s a ﬂesh-and-blood human being. As Garrow tells it, Obama adopted the persona that would best help him achieve his goal of becoming president. Much of Obama’s story is pretty familiar—the myth of Obama as the young community organizer in Roseland is almost the stuff of George Washington and the cherry tree. But Garrow digs deeper to describe in exhausting detail how Obama transformed himself from a secular, biracial law school student from Hawaii into a churchgoing, Bible-quoting black man from the south side. Some of my favorite passages describe Obama’s days in the late 1980s when he was hanging with a crowd of feverishly intellectual U. of C. grad school students, including Sheila Miyoshi Jager, his then girlfriend. Obama doesn’t mention Jager in Dreams From My Father, his 1995 autobiography (which Garrow describes as “historical fiction”). Instead, he creates a composite character from Jager and two other girlfriends. It’s like she didn’t exist at all—even as he quotes many of the letters she wrote to him. Jager and Obama lived together for three years in an apartment at 5429 S. Harper. They had, to put it mildly, a tempestuous relationship. He reportedly proposed to her twice, and both times she rebuffed him. But Garrow also

tells one story about a trip Obama and Jager took to a summer house in Wisconsin. It was hot and the windows were open, and everyone could hear what everyone else was doing—if you get my drift. OK, so it’s not Lady Chatterley’s Lover. But my guess is this will wind up as the most widely read page in Garrow’s book. Garrow also recounts many scenes from Obama’s days as a state senator, including the relatively well-known tale about the time Obama and fellow lawmaker Rickey Hendon almost came to blows on the senate floor. A west-sider, Hendon used to relentlessly tease Obama, calling him “Yo Mama.” During one senate debate, “Obama completely fucking lost it,” Garrow writes. “He walked to Hendon’s seat, placed a hand on Hendon’s shoulder and as Hendon remembered it, ‘leaned over’ and said, ‘You embarrassed me on the senate floor, and if you ever do it again, I will kick your ass!’ ” Hendon recalls, “I stacked my few papers quietly on my desk in front of me and said, ‘Okay, motherfucker, let’s go!’ ” Ah, the good old days of Illinois politics. Maybe this is how Governor Rauner and house speaker Michael Madigan should settle their differences. Garrow didn’t formally interview Obama for the book. But after it was written, the president read the first few chapters and sat with Garrow for several off-the-record interviews. According to Garrow, the only part that Obama really took issue with was, of all things, Hendon’s contention that he would’ve whupped Obama’s ass. “Obama pointed out that he was taller than Hendon, so he’d have an advantage in a fight,” Garrow says. This reminds me of the time in the 1960s when Muhammad Ali almost had a boxing match with Wilt Chamberlain, the towering basketball player. When told about Chamberlain’s longer reach, Ali said he’d hit the basketball player with a flurry of punches and then jump back and say, “Timber!” I have a feeling it would have been much the same if Hendon and Obama had gone at it. No matter. Obama will have a chance to settle old scores in the book he’ll likely soon be writing. In the meantime, I hope the city landmarks, like that old apartment on Harper that Obama and Jager once shared, will be protected. Like a national health-care plan, they’re a part of Obama’s legacy that needs to be preserved so they don’t get lost forever. v

ß @joravben

CITY LIFE Riders on an adaptive bike at a 2011 Portland carfree streets event o JONATHAN MAUS / BIKEPORTLAND.ORG

TRANSPORTATION

Make Divvy disability friendly

Chicago should expand its bike-share program to include adaptive cycles. By JOHN GREENFIELD

lthough Rudy Winfrey says he’s “blind as a bat,” he regularly experiences the joy of cycling. Winfrey, a 72-year-old clerk with the Chicago Department of Streets & Sanitation, lost his sight in the 90s to retinitis pigmentosa. Andy Slater, the visually impaired musician proﬁled last month in this column, has the same condition. Like Slater, Winfrey frequently navigates the CTA, but he also often takes pleasure rides on the back of a tandem bicycle as the “stoker,” with a sighted “captain” steering in front—usually his friend Jerome Hughes. Together the pair have completed ﬁve of the annual RAGBRAI bicycle tours across Iowa. “Bicycling feels so exhilarating,” Winfrey says. “I can do it without opening my eyes and seeing what I can’t see. To feel that surge and that type of authority—‘Look what I can do!’—it makes you feel like a superstar.”

People with other disabilities can also enjoy the physical and mental health benefits of cycling by using adaptive bikes. For example, handcycles allow paraplegics and amputees to pedal with their arms instead of their legs, and adult tricycles are great for people with balance issues, such as those with multiple sclerosis. The late Sheldon Brown, the patron saint of DIY bike mechanics, got around on a trike near the end of his life as he battled MS. However, while the national bike-share revolution has made cycling accessible and affordable to a wider swath of the population, municipal rental networks have been geared almost exclusively toward able-bodied riders. That’s about to change in June, when Portland, Oregon, will launch an adaptive bike rental program as an extension of its Biketown bike-share system. Detroit is currently planning a similar approach. Local disability and bike advocates say Chicago should also get with the program and add an

accessibility component to the Divvy network. Most U.S. bike-share networks are heavily subsidized by taxpayer dollars, so advocates, citing the Americans with Disabilities Act, argue that there should be an accessibility component from the get-go. “When the city gets involved in any type of public service, they have an obligation to make sure it’s accessible to people with disabilities,” Disability Rights Oregon director Bob Joondeph told BikePortland last year. As recently reported by Streetsblog USA, this became a political issue in Portland in a campaign where city council candidate Chloe Eudaly, whose son has cerebral palsy, defeated incumbent Steve Novick, who was born with no left hand or ﬁbula bones in his legs. Before Novick lost last November, he lobbied the local transportation department to make adaptive bikes available through the Biketown system. The city of Portland partnered with advocates and local bike shops to host an adaptive bikes clinic where people with disabilities could take test rides. Based on input from disabled residents, who said they were interested in taking longer recreational rides on trails rather than the short trips and errands on city streets associated with traditional bike sharing, the transportation department came up with a new approach. Biketown-branded tandems, handcycles, and trikes will be made available for rent at shops near bike paths, at affordable prices. The budget for the pilot project is $30,000, which is coming from the department’s discretionary funds. Inspired by Portland, Detroit plans to launch an adaptive bike rental program after its MoGo traditional bike-share system debuts later this month. The city has already held a focus group and conducted a survey to ﬁnd out what the local disability community wants from the accessibility program. So how about making adaptive cycles available for low-cost rental from Chicago bike shops via a Divvy-sponsored program? “That would be excellent,” Winfrey responded when I floated the idea, adding that it would be great if the city could help set up a network of volunteers to captain the tandems for blind stokers like himself. (He added that he’s always looking for sighted people to ride with. Hit me up on Twitter if you want to get in touch with him.) Adam Ballard, manager of organizing and policy for the Chicago disability rights group

Access Living of Metro Chicago, says Portland’s strategy seems to be a good one. “Our first rule is, if you’re not listening to the disability community, you’re not doing it right, but it sounds like Portland did it right,” Ballard says. “We’d definitely support this.” Likewise, Active Transportation Alliance director Ron Burke says his organization would get behind a plan to make Divvy more accessible. “A publicly supported system should be available for people living with disabilities,” he says. “We’re eager to learn from the experiences of Portland and other cities that are piloting similar programs to help determine the best approach, and then work with Chicago Department of Transportation to make that happen.” Paul Kozy, owner of the eponymous local bike shop chain, with locations spread across the city from Avondale to Bronzeville, says he’d welcome an opportunity to partner with the city on offering low-cost rentals as part of the Divvy program. “It’s an admirable idea,” he says, adding that his stores currently rent tandems and trikes at market rates. So far, so good. Everyone I spoke to says adaptive cycles would be a worthy addition to the Divvy fleet. The fly in the ointment, however, is that CDOT seems a little wary of the idea. “It would be a challenge to incorporate the variety of highly specialized adaptive cycles into our automated bike-share system,” spokesman Mike Claffey says via e-mail. “But we are going to continue tracking Portland’s efforts as they move forward this year to see if there’s lessons to be learned for our program.” Fortunately, a heavy hitter in Illinois politics just so happens to be an avid handcycle rider. Freshman U.S. senator Tammy Duckworth, a military veteran who lost both legs while copiloting a helicopter in Iraq, has used an assistive bike to compete in four marathons. Just last week she pedaled a handcycle in the ACLI Capital Challenge, a charity race in the Washington, D.C., area. “I’m sure Chicagoans living with disabilities would appreciate the opportunity to use their city’s bike-sharing program,” Duckworth said in a statement. “I hope the Divvy program looks into the possibility.” Since a Wounded Warrior who helps make decisions about federal funding—including the grants that have financed Divvy—thinks making the network accessible is a good idea, maybe it won’t be long until CDOT gets rolling on this. v

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

MAY 25, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 11

{ Dávila’s dish was the Key Ingredient Cook-Oﬀ critics’ pick.

or each installment of the Reader’s regular Key Ingredient column, a local chef chooses an ingredient and challenges a fellow chef to create a dish with it. (The ingredient doesn’t have to be difficult to procure or unusual or gross, but that’s the direction most chefs go, testing their colleagues with everything from marshmallow creme to ant eggs.) Our annual Key Ingredient Cook-Off usually follows a similar format, except that we’re the ones who decide what ingredients the chefs have to cook with—until this year’s event, which was held May 18 at the Ivy Room at Tree Studios. Instead, we asked each chef to prepare something inspired by his or her culinary mentor and to tell us a little bit about that person. Most chose a chef they worked under when starting their careers, but not everyone: Blackbird’s Ryan Pfeiffer credits his ﬁrst instructor at culinary school, while Kimski’s Won Kim said his cooking is most inﬂuenced by his mother.

Diana Dávila Mi Tocaya Antojería

DISH: Fried oyster taco on a squid ink tortilla with salsa borracha MENTOR: Giuseppe Tentori, chef at Boka, GT Fish & Oyster, and GT Prime “I REALLY LIKED BOKA, and when I heard [Tentori] took over, I was like, ‘I have to go over there.’ I knocked on the door. He said, ‘All right, we’ll set up a stage.’ They were grooming me to be the sous chef, and my husband got a promotion and we moved to D.C. I was so sad. One thing I really liked is the marrying between the front and back of the house. He’s just like, ‘Listen, motherfuckers, this is hospitality. Food is the expression, but the whole thing is hospitality.’ I really love the way he interacts with not only the guests but also the front of the house. Bring your friends, bring your family, you guys are welcome here. They know how to build a family. I have a story where [Tentori] threw a fucking scallop at my face. Three times. It was my fault—I overcooked them. So my husband was like, ‘You should do something with a scallop [for the cook-off].’ I was like, ‘I don’t know, it might be too much.’ [Tentori] makes a mean fucking fish taco. My two favorite fish tacos in the city are his and my friend Ricky [Ortiz] from Antique [Taco]. I thought I’d do a fried oyster taco on a squid ink tortilla with lime mayonesa and spring garlic. It has salsa borracha, drunken salsa—had to keep some Mi Tocaya in there.”

Chicago chefs pay edible tribute to their culinary mentors

12 CHICAGO READER - MAY 25, 2017

○ Watch interviews with all the chefs at chicagoreader.com/food.

{ Tsaknis’s dish was the crowd favorite at the Key Ingredient Cook-Oﬀ.

Dino Tsaknis Primehouse

DISH: Duck, pheasant, quail, and foie gras pativier MENTOR: Michael Lachowicz, chef and owner of Restaurant Michael and George Trois

Benjamin Lustbader Giant

DISH: Black-and-white bread with asparagus salad MENTOR: Michel Richard, who was the chef and owner of Citronelle in Washington, D.C. (Richard passed away last year at the age of 68) “I’D BEEN WORKING for a couple years [when I started at Citronelle], but I didn’t know anything. It was a really unique kitchen because it was French, high intensity, you ran from the moment you clocked in to the moment you ﬁnished. In retrospect, I realize how much was going on there that went way over my head. [Richard was] legitimately a genius. His food is clever and interesting and whimsical and beautiful. I took a couple of things I remembered from my time there. There was a lot of playing with squid ink for the aesthetic, the blackness of it. They made a squid ink brioche

“ME AND MY BUDDIES opened up a pizza place when we were young, and [Lachowicz] had a restaurant down the block. It came to a point where I needed more money. He used to come in for pizza every once in a while, so I asked if he had any openings, and I started working over there with him. Then we went to Le Francais from there. Eventually me and my buddies sold the pizza place, decided to grow up a little bit, I guess. He’s a big guy, and he doesn’t seem like he would have ﬁnesse or be delicate. But I remember coming in one day, it was early morning and I wanted to get ahead on my prep for the day, and he was there. At this point I was working for him for at least a year and a half or so, and he was decorating the most beautiful cake I’d ever seen— it was at the level of any pastry chef. The previous generation of chefs, you learned everything. He was telling me how he used to work for [celebrated French chef Alain] Ducasse and he did the cakes for Ducasse for a long time. Pativier is a classic French meat pie. We used to do them at Le Francais, it was one of those bane-of-your-existence dishes that

you had to make the sausage fresh every day, make the puﬀ pastry. It always reminds me of training and discipline—this is what it takes to do what you do. That dish always stuck with me.”

when I was there, so I made a black-and-white bread: two breads, one of which has been dyed black with squid ink. I turned that into a crouton. We used to make a green bean salad; it’s asparagus season here, so I made a version of that with asparagus, and a Calabrian chile gelee—perfectly cubed gelees were really big when I was at Citronelle. My chef de cuisine and sous chef—they’d be over your shoulder, pointing out how shitty your dice was. And even yesterday, as I’m dicing this gelee, I’m like, that’s not very good. As a young cook, you take those things to heart.

MAY 25, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 13

Dan Salls Quiote

DISH: Crab salpicon MENTOR: Rick Bayless, chef and owner of restaurants including Frontera Grill, Topolobampo, and Xoco, and host of the TV series Mexico: One Plate at a Time

Ryan Pfeiffer Blackbird

DISH: Asparagus puree with puffed grains and chamomile MENTOR: Tim Bucci, culinary instructor and gold medalist in the World Culinary Olympics “CHEF TIMOTHY WAS my first instructor at Joliet Junior College—that’s where I went to culinary school. He was pretty much the first person that was able to lasso me into focusing on anything in my life, and I just kind of latched on to him like a parasite and sucked up everything I could get out of him. He was always very accepting of me being so nosy. Pretty much every single thing I do I think, ‘Would he be OK with it?’ And that’s what I instill into my cooks. The dish I’m making is very simple, just asparagus prepared a couple of different ways with some puffed grains for texture and chamomile for bitterness and floralness. The first epiphany I ever had tasting something was a sauce that [Bucci] made, a puree

14 CHICAGO READER - MAY 25, 2017

“THE FIRST KITCHEN I ever worked in was my own, at the Salsa Truck. I spent almost a year after I left my white-collar job formulating the Salsa Truck and teaching myself how to cook. I spent a lot of time watching Mexico: One Plate at Time and cruising through that awesome encyclopedia of Mexican food on [Rick Bayless’s] website. I never worked for him, but he had a strong impact on the way I fell in love with Mexican food.

I wanted to be a professional chef, but I feel like Bayless is what helped guide me. I’m pretty proud of my breadth of knowledge of Mexican food and cuisine, and I think I owe it to someone like Rick Bayless, who opened up those doors and allowed for chefs outside of Mexico to cook with these ingredients. In some strange shape or form I feel a mentorship even though he probably doesn’t know who I am.”

of tomatoes that he emulsified brown butter into. When I tasted the sauce, I was like, ‘Holy shit.’ I just couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that it gave it so much body, this flavor that didn’t come from the tomato, and the fact that it stayed as one homogenous mixture. I still think about it all the time. So I made a puree from a different vegetable that’s also emulsified with brown butter.”

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MAY 25, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 15

Ben Ruiz

Won Fun Chinese DISH: Braised octopus with chile bean paste and ramps MENTOR: Erick Williams, executive chef at MK “I ALWAYS WANTED to be a chef. I came from a family that always cooked at home, but I didn’t appreciate it that much until I went to college and learned what really bad food was. It forced me to cook a lot of my own meals. [Williams] taught me how to not bullshit and actually do real cooking. There’s a lot of tech-

nological advances in cooking—sous vide, chemical stabilizers, emulsiﬁers. My approach doesn’t use any of that. I work in an old-school way that was fundamental [at MK]. Erick wanted us to learn to cook food before using technology to make it easier. No matter how hard Erick was on us in the kitchen, he was always there for us when we needed him. After I left MK he would call me for a beer, or pick me up from my new job. He’s kind of like a father ﬁgure in the industry. He’s always checking in on us, making sure we’re making the right decisions, that the people we’re working for are taking care of us.”

Won Kim Kimski

DISH: Brisket sliders braised in Soﬁe beer MENTOR: Sun Hee Kang, Kim’s mother “MY COOKING MENTOR is my mother. I’m her youngest and most special kid—special in the sense that I would eat anything she put in front of us. We grew up pretty poor. I used to be her prep cook. Every time we made kimchi, I was the one that would mash all the ginger, garlic. I was also responsible for making the rice, which was terrifying, because if I fucked up the rice we didn’t eat dinner. I would be her taste tester too. I was so fascinated with what she was doing. I loved mushrooms growing up, and I would always say, ‘You should add mushrooms to it,’ and she always would. My older brother was a picky-ass eater, [but] I would eat anything and everything—even if it looked gross I would at least try it. I was a little more adventurous, and I think she always appreciated that. The one thing I take into my own kitchen is cooking by feel, touch, and taste. She never used measurements. She’d take the fucking jug of soy and just put it in. It would be perfect.”

16 CHICAGO READER - MAY 25, 2017

Sarah Rinkavage Marisol

DISH: Smoked red shrimp with rhubarb and radish MENTOR: Jason Hammel, chef and owner of Lula Cafe and chef at the yet-to-open Marisol in the MCA “EVERYTHING ABOUT [LULA] was diﬀerent from anything I knew and learned in the past in cooking. Most chefs, what I took away from them was, this is how you roast a piece of meat, or this is how you blanch a vegetable. What I learned from [Hammel] was creativity. The technique was there, but it went beyond that: it was pairing ingredients, looking for the outside ingredient that changes the dish completely. He has great analogies for things. No other chef will walk up to you on your station and be like, ‘I need this dish to look more like plastic bags on trees.’ And then you get it, like, ‘Oh, that’s what you were going for.’ Since I’m still working with Jason, we create dishes together all the time. It’s still such a ﬂuid thing that it was hard to be like, ‘What do I make today that was inspired by him?’ One of the things Jason taught me is using an ingredient throughout the dish. I’m doing sweet shrimp with rhubarb and radish, and the rhubarb plays a role a few times. The other thing is color, playing with color. That’s been a big inspiration for us. For me it was red shrimp, red rhubarb, red radish, and sumac: the color brings it together. And Jason has a special infatuation with radishes.”

Evan Sumrell The Ogden

DISH: Prawns and “tater tots” MENTOR: Ryan McCaskey, chef and owner of Acadia

“[ACADIA] WAS THE FIRST place I worked when I moved to Chicago. I didn’t know anything about fine dining, what it took, what it was about. I learned a lot of discipline. [McCaskey] made me understand what it takes to be successful in this business, how much work you need to do, what you need to put into it. It’s just something you have to be in love with. We used to do a dish at Acadia—scallops or prawns with spoonbreads, made out of cornmeal, which always made me think of tater tots. I’m from Atlanta, Georgia, and my background is southern food, so I love shrimp and grits. What I’m doing is a spoonbread that I fry up like a tater tot, so it’s prawns and tater tots, or shrimp and grits, with an egg sauce with green garlic ash and pickled radish. Very simple.”

MAY 25, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 17

18 CHICAGO READER - MAY 25, 2017

Sarah Mispagel Proxi

DISH: White miso pot de creme with banana cake and macadamia nut crumble MENTOR: Tony Galzin, former pastry chef at MK

“I MET TONY when I started working at MK, which was my first job in a restaurant kitchen. The rest of my culinary career had all been in bakeries. Tony was the first person who looked at my resumé and thought I’d be worth talking to. When I started there, I was embarrassed that there were certain things I didn’t know, that are more pastry-in-a-restaurant driven than pastry-in-a-bakery. He just said, ‘Don’t be embarrassed if you don’t know what something is. You’re here to learn.’ I try to treat all my people that way now, because it made me feel like that was a safe place to learn and to grow. The dish I’m making is inspired by one that was on the menu when I was working at MK called Two Bananas Walk Into a Bar. I believe it was one of the first desserts that Tony put on the menu when he got there, and up until probably two years after he left, it was still on the menu, like an MK fan favorite. It was a banana souffle cake with a dark chocolate foam, macadamia nut crumble, and a malted banana ice cream. I’m doing an Asian-inspired take on that: a white miso pot de creme with a steamed Vietnamese banana cake, dehydrated caramelized white chocolate mousse, and the macadamia nut crumble.”

Rodolfo Cuadros Carnivale

DISH: Shrimp ceviche with watermelon and gochujang MENTOR: Douglas Rodriguez, chef and owner of Alma de Cuba in Philadelphia (previously of Patria, Chicama, and Pipa in New York City) “I STARTED WORKING for [Rodriguez] when I was very young, around 17, at a restaurant in New York called Chicama. He was the first chef I worked for that cooked Latin food. It was the first time I could connect to what I was doing on a personal level, that I would recognize ingredients that were being used from my upbringing. I was already dead set on what I was going to do. It just so happened that I fell in love with it when I discovered Latin American cooking through him. On and off, I worked for him for about ten years. He became a father figure, not just a chef. Every time you cooked something and had him try it, he’d say, ‘Did you taste it? Do you think it’s great?’ If you

weren’t sure, he’d say, ‘Work on it and let me taste it when you’re ready.’ It taught me to not just be OK—make sure that you’re proud of something before you move on to the next step.” v

MAY 25, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 19

ARTS & CULTURE M RUN FRO 1 S P M A C mber K LONG

WEE

pte

to Se 5 e n u J

Cook County Board president Toni Preckwinkle checks out the exhibits at the American Writers Museum with the museum’s director of operations, Christopher Burrow. o RICH HEIN/SUN-TIMES

MUSEUMS

Dead writers society

By DEANNA ISAACS

iends. Make Fr . emories M e k a M t. Make Ar

Lillstreet offers week-long summer camps for kids ages 3 ½ years to teen. Young artists can explore a variety of programs, including:

Ceramics Digital Arts & Fabrication Photography Drawing & Painting Metalsmithing & Glass Printmaking & Book Arts Textiles

| 4401 N. Ravenswood | Chicago IL 60640 | 773.769.4226

20 CHICAGO READER - MAY 25, 2017

he first exhibit you’re likely to encounter at the new American Writers Museum is a temporary installation. That’s a good thing, because it means that Palm: All Awake in the Darkness—a commissioned artwork meant to evoke poet W.S. Merwin’s garden in Maui and consisting mostly of potted plants on wire shelves—will eventually be removed. Until then, visitors can be forgiven if (in spite of a heavy-duty exhibit brochure) their first impression of the museum falls somewhere between middle-school science project and Botanic Garden reject. Once past Palm, however, the museum, which opened last week on the second floor of a vintage office building at 180 N. Michigan, reveals itself as a friendly little place, a sort of populist literary arcade comfortably in tune with the era of Trump and Twitter. Longer on gadgetry than on literature, AWM is all about the breezy quote and the glitzy busywork toys that are now the curren-

cy of the exhibit industry: push a button, spin a wheel, drag an icon, and the gadgets spit out a thimbleful of data. It’s American Lit 101 (and more), the nutshell version. The books? Look up when you first walk in: a lot of them are stapled to a framework hanging just below the ceiling. There’s a small children’s gallery, furnished with cozy couches, hung with banners that are blowups of beloved illustrations, and featuring a narrow-path program of closely directed, often reductive visitor participation that runs through the adult exhibits as well. Kids can decide which of the Little Women is most like themselves, or tap a screen to start a reading by Langston Hughes before they move along to the wall-mounted and tabletop screens that dominate the rest of the galleries. The long Nation of Writers hall displays, on one side, the museum’s most substantive exhibit: a time line of American history that includes writers from each period. On the opposite wall, its most gimmicky: a series of lighted, hinged boxes that can be ﬂipped to reveal, on their backside, minuscule quotes from famous scribes in a variety of genres, or blurbs about them, sometimes backed by little videos. The museum includes only dead writers, but the categories are wide open: Emily Post is here; so is Prince. The Readers Hall features brief wall-text histories of writing-related entities (bookstores, magazines, comics) and a screen that permits visitors to vote for their favorite au-

READER RECOMMENDED

b ALL AGES

THEATER thors and books. The top three writers when I was there? Emily Dickinson, Benjamin Franklin, and Rafi Zabor. A second temporary exhibit, on loan and under glass, is the only significant original artifact in the museum: the long roll of tissuethin paper, brown with age, on which Jack Kerouac typed his 1957 beatnik stream-ofconsciousness novel On the Road. There’s also a projected “waterfall of words,” an invitation to sit down at a typewriter and add your own lines to an ongoing story, and a Mind of a Writer gallery with more touch-and-drag screens—you can find out which author fired up with a brownie or with alcohol, tap on a word and see its origin pop up, and win points by filling in the blanks in a poem. The final exhibit, a gallery of banners honoring Chicago authors, brings you back to where you started, at an entry area that doubles as a gift shop, stocked with T-shirts and free bookmarks, each featuring one of the many writers’ home museums affiliated with the AWM, and flanked by kiosks with interactive maps showing where each home is located. This positioning of the AWM as a hub for the scattered authors’ home museums is its most focused function; the rest of it suffers from a superficiality born of overreach. And its dependence on technological sizzle means it’s going to have to continuously (and expensively) update. With everyone carrying a touch screen in his or her pocket, the novelty of AWM’s current gizmos is already pretty thin. Museum founder Malcolm O’Hagan has told interviewers that he brought the museum to Chicago in part because of the “generous philanthropic community” here. That’s not good news. This slimly endowed, barely visible institution, charging $8 to $12 for admission and optimistically projecting up to 120,000 annual visitors, will need national donors and amazing programming to keep it going. Otherwise, it’ll be attempting to suck at the funding pool that feeds local nonprofits (some of which overlap its mission) while it limps along like the perennially challenged Museum of Broadcast Communications a few blocks away. Or maybe, like the ecological musings visitors are invited to write on pieces of paper that’ll be shipped back to the Merwin property in Hawaii, it’ll be mulch. v

ß @DeannaIsaacs

The Bengali Pip

Anish Jethmalani, Anand Bhatt, and Rasika Ranganathan in Silk Road Rising and Remy Bumppo’s Great Expectations o JOHNNY KNIGHT

By JUSTIN HAYFORD

harles Dickens wrote only two of his 15 novels in the first person: David Copperfield and Great Expectations. Both are semiautobiographical and centrally concerned with class mobility. But in key ways they’re mirror images of each other. David Copperfield, published in 1850, charts the title character’s fulﬁlling progress from poverty to fortune, his talent and determination bringing him success and happiness. Great Expectations, published a decade later, focuses on young, impoverished Pip—equally talented and determined—whose efforts to better his station bring him mostly anguish, doubt, and a crushing loss of self. Not only that, in Dickens’s original version of the story, he doesn’t even get the girl. Perhaps by the time Dickens began plotting Great Expectations, shortly after destroying his own marriage, he’d developed a less rosy view of socially privileged life than he’d had writing David Copperfield. Little in the later novel suggests that wealth and status brings happiness or pleasure. Miss Havisham, the

rich recluse who takes Pip temporarily under her wing, spends her spite-filled days in a darkened manse picking at the wounds of a decades-old betrayal, instilling in her adopted daughter, Estella, the virtue of cold-heartedness. And throughout the novel Pip never lets the reader forget how much emotional and moral damage comes from trying to reach an upper echelon. So in many ways British playwright Tanika Gupta’s transplanting of Dickens’s story to 1860s India couldn’t be more potent. Pip is now a young Bengali villager living under the Raj, and his ambition to become an English gentleman leads him away from both his social class and his cultural identity. He can achieve success only by siding with his colonizers, becoming a tool to enhance his nation’s subjugation. As Jaggers, an attorney hired to watch over Pip’s education, explains, the British are eager to educate Indians so they can persuasively translate the Crown’s dictates to the native population. In Dickens’s original, Pip sells his soul. Here, he makes a deal with the devil.

It all makes for a particularly thorny, highstakes rendering of Dickens’s tale, and directors Lavina Jadhwani and Nick Sandys for the most part tell the tale convincingly in this coproduction from Silk Road Rising and Remy Bumppo. They’ve got a stalwart cast at their disposal, led by an artfully naive Anand Bhatt as Pip, a delightfully grotesque Linda Gillum as Miss Havisham, a drearily upright Roderick Peeples as Jaggers, and a charismatically frigid Netta Walker as Estella. Once the indiscriminately histrionic opening scenes are out of the way, the show is full of carefully etched performances and well-shaped dramatic arcs. Yeaji Kim’s minimalist set and beguiling projections allow the play’s multiple locales to appear and disappear efficiently. While narrative logic grows porous toward the end (somehow Pip becomes deathly ill and wracked with debt overnight), the story is compelling across its three-hour span. But it might have been more compelling if Gupta had allowed some ambivalence into the show’s politics. While in the original novel Pip’s ambition to rise above his station is to some degree laudable, here it’s unequivocally condemned. From the stern reprimand of his sister’s wise husband, Joe, to the subtle admonishments of his sole close friend, Biddy, it’s always clear that Pip is betraying his family and his heritage by pursuing an English education. There’s little cause to root for him, to wonder if he’ll ﬁnd a successful way to navigate an ethical mineﬁeld. Instead we’re left to merely witness his misguided folly and congratulate ourselves on knowing better. Thus, rather than a morality tale, we get a tale with fair amount of easy moralizing. It doesn’t help that the Indian villagers are all portrayed as unimpeachable, salt-of-theearth folks for whom we’re asked to feel nothing but admiration (in the novel, for example, Pip’s older sister, who acts as his surrogate mother, is borderline abusive, while here she’s overflowing with tough love). Gupta makes it clear that Pip’s only correct choice is to remain true to his cultural identity, but she ignores the fact that cultural identities can be mighty complicated constructions. v R GREAT EXPECTATIONS Through 7/2: Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 3 and 8 PM, Sun 4 PM, Silk Road Rising, 77 W. Washington, 312-857-1234, silkroadrising.org, $35, $15 students.

MAY 25, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 21

Jennifer Latimore, A.C. Smith, and Erik Hellman

ARTS & CULTURE

o MICHAEL BROSILOW

THEATER

Don’t worry—be happy

By TONY ADLER

t’s telling that Mary Chase’s Harvey won the Pulitzer Prize in 1945, the ﬁnal year of World War II. The previous winner had been a metatheatrical chronicle of apocalypse, Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth. But as Allied forces advanced on Berlin, the gentlemen of the Pulitzer committee chose to honor a light comedy centered on one Elwood P. Dowd, a wealthy small-town tippler whose best drinking buddy happens to be an invisible six-foot-tall rabbit. When the award was announced, Lewis Nichols of the New York Times wrote, not unkindly, that Harvey “holds up the mirror to

22 CHICAGO READER - MAY 25, 2017

no part of present day life, and it will advance the state of the theatre not one inch.” He was right, of course, but missing the point. Harvey’s structure may be conventional and its plot frivolous, yet as Devon de Mayo’s new staging for Court Theatre demonstrates, the message is seductive. In so many words: Don’t worry. Be happy. Elwood’s sister, Veta, and his niece, Myrtle Mae, are in no way happy when we ﬁrst meet them. Elwood’s habit of introducing Harvey to everyone he encounters has had the effect of drying up their social life, along with Myrtle’s prospects for marriage. In this production,

Karen Jane Woditsch’s Veta is beyond frazzled while Sarah Price’s Myrtle is straight-out hostile. They reach the last straw when Elwood ruins a tea. That’s it, they say, into Chumley’s Rest sanatorium he goes. Except things seldom work out as planned when there’s an invisible rabbit involved. Timothy Edward Kane is probably best known for his tour de force as the tortured, tunnel-dwelling poet in Court’s 2011 An Iliad. Here he’s all courtly civility and amiable smirks, with a dancerly knack for physical comedy. Two small, silent things he does— scooting over to make room for Harvey on

a couch and dropping a pen into his breast pocket—are hilariously eloquent. Going in, I thought I’d have trouble forgetting Jimmy Stewart’s Elwoodian turn in the 1950 movie adaptation. I didn’t. De Mayo’s production has its problems, mostly having to do with the contradictory ways in which she approaches the play’s period conventions. On the one hand, she accepts sexist tropes from the 40s (“dollpuss,” “beautiful and dumb”), not to mention a backward characterization of alcoholism. On the other, she asserts progressive values by casting black actors in roles for which they would never have been considered back then. The result is an occasionally jarring time warp. Still, given the overall command of everyone involved, and the deep sweetness of Chase’s comedy, it’s easy not to worry and just be happy. v R HARVEY Through 6/11: Wed-Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 3 and 8 PM, Sun 2:30 and 7:30 PM, Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis, 773-753-4472, courttheatre. org, $48-$68.

ß @taadler

ARTS & CULTURE

VISUAL ART

On ‘Dangerous’ ground By KATE SIERZPUTOWSKI

ate last fall, right-wing nonprofit Turning Point USA started a website called the Professor Watchlist, which singles out college professors who “discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda,” according to a mission statement on its home page. Curator Ruslana Lichtzier was appalled by the site, so she decided to organize an exhibition in response. She personally asked more than 300 friends and acquaintances to submit works as a counteraction to Professor Watchlist’s directives. “The Dangerous Professors,” hosted at Triumph gallery in Pilsen (where Lichtzier is codirector), features 154 pieces created by solo and collaborative artists, educators, and writers. Through a variety of visual mediums, the participants advance forms of education increasingly deemed “dangerous” since the presidential election. Although Professor Watchlist is now mostly inactive, Lichtzier still found it important to assemble “The Dangerous Professors” as a statement against such Web-hosted fearmongering. “The way I see it is the site is a symptom of a larger thing,” Lichtzier recently explained. “The moment that you start intimidating freedom of thought, freedom of creativity, and radical education strategies, I see intimidation. It might shift its form, but it is there. When you say a website like Professor Watchlist isn’t important, you are undermining a large fact.” Some educators used the exhibition’s platform as a chance to highlight teacher-student relationships by presenting student work instead of their own. Alex Chitty, a lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, submitted seven sculptures produced by her Intro to Sculpture class at SAIC, collectively titled Doing Everything Possible With Possibly Nothing. Other participants display collaborations with students: Ryan Coffey (codirector of Triumph) and his student R. Treshawn Williamson contributed a text piece called Spellcheck Anomaly, which reﬂects on the constructs of institutionalized and “professional” language in opposition to Ebonics with two versions of the same letter side by side, one handwritten and the other edited and typed.

Various selections from “The Dangerous Professors” o COURTESY TRIUMPH GALLERY

The credentials of “The Dangerous Professors” participants were less important to Lichtzier than the ways that each one identified as an educator, whether as a parent, a leader of an after-school program, or simply an artist who educates through his or her personal practice. Several contributors chose not to make something speciﬁcally designed for the exhibit. Artists like Cole Pierce, Allison Wade, Leslie Baum, Lise Haller Baggesen, Cathy Hsiao, and others provided drawings, paintings, and sculptures that don’t differ from the aesthetics of their other work. A political perspective is difficult to distill from the tessellated surface of Pierce’s painting #144 or Hsiao’s collected purple concrete sculptures Us + Mary Miss Material, yet these pieces are as exciting as the more activist selections— they demand visitors read the associated bios, which articulate how each artist operates or educates “dangerously.” Submitting seemingly nonpolitical work is a more covert gesture, a subtle self-labeling that can have just as much impact. “By reversing the power structure and calling yourself or your own practice dangerous, it breaks down the power structure and opens up and reveals the mechanism behind it,” Lichtzier says. One of the reasons Lichtzier, who was born in Russia and raised in Israel, chose to come to the U.S. was her wish to more closely J

MAY 25, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 23

ARTS & CULTURE Xenoi

CHICAGO UNDERGROUND FILM FESTIVAL Wed 5/31-Sun 6/4, Logan, 2646 N. Milwaukee, 773-252-0628, cuff.org, $10 unless otherwise noted below, $90 for a festival pass.

MOVIES

Shorts, sharp and shocking, at the Chicago Underground Film Festival

By J.R. JONES

sually our coverage of the Chicago Underground Film Festival ends with a roundup of notable short works playing on various bills—but this year, the last shall be first. Some of the most inventive and exciting stuff at CUFF comes in small packages, so why not give them the attention they deserve? In a way, shorts are even more underground than features because they cost so much less to produce. The only way to be more underground would be not to make a film at all. Deborah Stratman’s head-spinning XENOI (Sat 6/3, 2 PM) literally tries to spin your head: ominous music accompanies slow 360-degree pans that capture the beautiful Cyclades Islands in the Aegean Sea, and in the center of the frame, rotating with the pan but much faster, float various chrome-plated polyhedrons, each a cold rebuke to the landscape, with its deep blue sea and textured white cliffs. Stratman maintains this formal motif for the entire 15-minute running time, though she spices things up in the second half with an assortment of camera tricks, color play, and flicker effects. With EXODUS: SOUNDS OF THE GREAT MIGRATION (Sat 6/3, 3 PM), Lonnie Edwards presents

24 CHICAGO READER - MAY 25, 2017

a series of vignettes exploring the sweeping artistic impact of the Great Migration. Captions explain the history of black hooﬁng as a modern-day dancer clicks through a tapdance routine in the echoing stairwell of a vintage office building; a reading of Langston Hughes’s poem “One Way Ticket”—whose speaker will move anywhere to get away from Dixie—gives way to a rap on the same theme; and jazz players groove as an archival TV clip shows Martin Luther King Jr. defining the “new negro” as “a person with a new sense of dignity and destiny.” Kent Lambert’s supercool RECKONING 4 (Fri 6/2, 8:30 PM) combines live action and video-game footage for a strange journey into the world of commercial gaming, described by one critic on the soundtrack as the locus of “a lot of money, a lot of power fantasy, a lot of violence, and a lot of privilege.” Also, apparently, a lot of paranoia: Lambert opens with a guy thumbing his game controller and staring at animated role-playing characters on a TV, but on the other side of the looking glass, the role-playing characters coldly appraise the live-action ones on screens of their own. That simple shift in perspective, to a fantasy world that manipulates us, is more unsettling than any amount of video violence.

Back in 1999, Mark Borchardt became an unlikely hero to no-budget filmmakers everywhere when American Movie documented his quest to shoot a backwoods horror flick called Coven. Borchardt returns with THE DUNDEE PROJECT (Sat 6/3, 7 PM), reporting on the “UFO Daze” event in Dundee, Wisconsin. Now he’s the one poking fun at lovable rubes, introducing UFO Bob, a well-oiled local and a fixture at the event, as “not just a stargazer but a star seeker, guiding the innocent to a greater transcendence.” According to Bob, alien visitors have educated themselves about our culture by monitoring broadcasts of Packers games. Jodie Mack’s dazzling handmade animation CURSES (Sun 6/4, 7 PM) uses cutouts from marbled paper, placed atop solid colors, to create a kaleidoscopic weave while a soft-pop tune by Roommate plays on the soundtrack. This kinetic imagery is arresting enough in the abstract, but around the midpoint Mack introduces two rotoscoped human silhouettes, cut from the same paper, that perform a ballroom dance number, the marble patterning a visual reminder of their infinite complexity as people. By the time the solid backgrounds give way to throbbing marble patterns as well, you may wonder if you’re watching a movie or a flower bursting into bloom.

All the Rage Michael Galinsky abandoned this documentary about Dr. John Sarno in 2004 but revived it years later after debilitating back pain prompted him to reconnect with the acclaimed but controversial physician. As head of outpatient rehabilitation for New York University’s Rusk Institute, Sarno practiced inside the mainstream for almost five decades, though his ideas were anything but conventional: he pioneered the diagnosis of TMS (tension myoneural syndrome), attributing some chronic muscle pain to repressed anger. The film serves as an introduction to Sarno’s mind-body approach to wellness but underplays the importance of cognitive behavioral therapy and meditation. Galinsky, Suki Hawley, and David Beilinson directed; with testimonials from Howard Stern, Larry David, Jonathan Ames, and John Stossel, all of whom know something about rage. —ANDREA GRONVALL Sat 6/3, 6 PM. Dim the Fluorescents In this Canadian comedy, an actress desperate for a break (Claire Armstrong) and a playwright (Naomi Skwarna) living off checks from her dad funnel all their untapped creative passion into writing and performing instructional skits for corporate seminars. As in Wes Anderson’s Rushmore, there’s something funny and charming about amateur artists investing a modest theatrical exercise with immodest creative ambitions, and director Daniel Warth, who cowrote the script with Miles Barstead, manages to score laughs off his hapless protagonists without ever sullying their dreams. Warth edited the movie too, though apparently he’s unfamiliar with the concept of editing stuff out; the second half slows appreciably as the heroines gear up for a make-or-break gig, and a tense countdown to the performance is staged not once but twice, from different perspectives. —J.R. JONES 126 min. Fri 6/2, 9 PM. Drifting Towards the Crescent Documentary maker Laura Stewart delivers a pleasant, occasionally lyrical travelogue about two towns along the Mississippi River: Keokuk, Iowa, and Hannibal, Missouri. Both flourished

Get showtimes at chicagoreader.com/movies.

ARTS & CULTURE during the 19th century, but today they’re underpopulated and largely dilapidated; the local economies have dried up and the architecture has fallen into disrepair. Despite this sad state of affairs, Stewart offers affectionate portraits of the townspeople, among them an exotic dancer, a hunting enthusiast, and an underemployed man who likes to pick morels along the river. They seem to carry on the old-time spirit of the river towns, and historical vignettes reveal how rowdy and fascinating such towns were during the era of Hannibal’s most famous son, Mark Twain. —BEN SACHS 84 min. Screens as part of the opening-night program; tickets are $20. Wed 5/31, 8 PM. Kuro A Japanese woman in Paris, who nurses her paraplegic white boyfriend by day and works in a karaoke bar by night, is the unreliable narrator of this unnerving drama. Directors Tujiko Noriko and Joji Koyama tell their story largely through the woman’s voice-over, whose frequent incongruity with the action onscreen creates an atmosphere of dreamlike uncertainty and suggests a kaleidoscopic state of mind: the woman (played by Noriko) speaks in first and third person, in Japanese and French, as she tells stories from her past, particularly her happier years with the man when he was able-bodied. Conversely, his interior life is left blank; he appears to be mute, and neither his physical nor his seeming mental paralysis is ever explained. The result is a creepy experiment in nonlinear storytelling that successfully blurs reality, memory, and fantasy. In Japanese and French with subtitles. —LEAH PICKETT 84 min. Thu 6/1, 9 PM.

Manlife: The Last of the Lawsonians If you haven’t heard of Lawsonomy, a “philosophy of life” created by aircraft pioneer and professional baseball player Alfred Lawson in the late 1920s, that’s because the government doesn’t want you to know—according to Merle Hayden, the winsome 90-year-old subject of this documentary. A dedicated Lawsonian, Hayden recounts how his family latched on to the physical, moral, and economic ideas Lawson laid out in his many books (especially Direct Credits for Everybody, which proposes that the U.S. government abolish interest and eliminate taxes). One can easily see why Lawson gained a following during the Depression and why Hayden remained loyal to his populist message even after a series of IRS investigations and Lawson’s death in 1954 began to drive members from the group. Director Ryan Sarnowski shows a similar respect for Hayden through the detailed documentation of Lawsonomy’s history, merits, and ﬂaws, as well as the little onscreen moments Hayden shares with the women who was his high school sweetheart. —LEAH PICKETT 94 min. Sun 6/4, 8 PM. Neighborhood Food Drive Scalded by a negative review, the owners of a finedining restaurant in gentrifying Humboldt Park (Bruce Bundy, Lyra Hill) organize a series of food-drive parties to score points with the media. I came to this local production hoping for social satire, but any laughs inherent in the premise are smothered by the defensively smug tone, a natural reaction of inexperienced players wrestling with pallid dialogue and groping for their char-

acters. “A group of awful idiots fail at throwing a party over and over,” reads the movie’s tagline, so perhaps writer-director Jerzy Rose was aiming for an off-wack ensemble comedy a la Christopher Guest; the movie throws its sharpest elbow when one character announces, “I believe Santa is love.” More representative is the laborious running gag in which people keep choking on their meals. —J.R. JONES 85 min. Sat 6/3, 8 PM. The Pink Egg Animator Jim Trainor makes his live-action feature debut with this macabre disquisition on insect hunting and mating rituals. Actors in unitards portray various arthropods, from honeybees to spiders and wasps, but there’s no dialogue or narration, so it’s hard to differentiate the bugs and harder still to figure out what they’re doing. Props give some clues: mimosas and Sugar Pops stand in for nectar and pollen, while jars of white moisturizer represent sperm deposits. The title refers to one species placing its eggs in the nest of another so the guest larvae can munch on their bedfellows. Trainor conveyed animal freakishness more effectively in his short animation The Bats (1999), a hilariously graphic parody of nature documentaries; here he casts himself as a dung-eating beetle. —ANDREA GRONVALL 71 min. Fri 6/2, 7 PM. Weather House This English-language German art movie is an absurdist drama in the Samuel Beckett tradition, featuring sparse dialogue and settings and a tone at once wry and apocalyptic. It takes place in a secluded woodland home where a group of scientists monitors the weather during a period of extreme climate change, the temperature fluctuating dramatically every few minutes. Somewhere far away, civilization is breaking down, and in this context the scientists’ devotion to their work seems ridiculous but strangely noble. Directors Frauke Havemann and Eric Schefter create a visual style befitting Mark Johnson’s minimalist script, employing slow zooms, somber line readings, and barren widescreen compositions. The atmosphere feels grave even when the onscreen behavior looks silly, which is much of the time. —BEN SACHS 81 min. Sun 6/4, 4 PM. v

The Pink Egg

Visual Art continued from page 23 and critically examine the mechanism behind America’s “capitalist machine,” she says. Lichtzier was able to secure a green card in the U.S. in 2015 (it’s up for renewal at the end of this year); however, she’s experienced the extremely difficult process of applying for an O-1 visa, which requires that individuals possess extraordinary ability or have a record of extraordinary achievement. She was eager to invite other artists who are still working toward their own legal place in the U.S. In some cases, even though they were educators in their home country, they’re unable to teach here. Several participants created works that reference the limitations placed on their presence in the United States as foreigners. Indian artist Udita Upadhyaya’s Uncertain States, for example, is a multicolored inkon-paper composition that was inspired by her immigration status. By putting ink down on paper to pool and dry without signiﬁcant intervention, Upadhyaya captures her feelings of uncertainty. Azadeh Gholizadeh, an Iranian artist, also addresses this unease in Other Chaos, a print on paper of sectioned-off rooms, a reference and reaction to her own geographical and physical boundaries after the passage of Executive Order 13769, Trump’s travel ban, aka the “Muslim ban.” One of the most successful pieces is University of Washington assistant professor Dan Paz’s Professor Is Watching, a website built for the “The Dangerous Professors” that publishes responses from professors targeted by Professor Watchlist; it’s an attempt to overshadow, subvert, and dispel the original site. This online work will outlast the exhibit, as will a collection of writings from participants in “The Dangerous Professors.” Lichtzier prompted contributors to explain three major concerns they face as artist-educators and the strategies they’re implementing to overcome these challenges. The 80-page result will be released in its ﬁrst draft at Triumph on May 25, at a reception from 6 to 10 PM. Lichtzier hopes to one day publish it as a book, but in the meantime the text will exist as a publicly accessible PDF, a catalyst to build solutions for the many problems facing citizen and noncitizen educators and artists in Trump’s America. v R “THE DANGEROUS PROFESSORS” Through 7/1: Sat-Sun 1-4 PM or by appointment, 2055 W. Cermak, triumphchicago.com. F

ß @KateSierz MAY 25, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 25

Service Sanitation senior account manager Keith Kay (center) with colleagues Jeﬀery Matthews and Jon Mosley at Garﬁeld Park Conservatory for Beer Under Glass o MATTHEW AVIGNONE

in Lincoln Square, Do Division Street Fest, Printers Row Lit Fest, Remix Chicago in Logan Square, and the Pilsen Food Truck Social. Chicagoans love throwing concerts outdoors in the summer, but with the notable exception of Pritzker Pavilion (which has permanent restrooms underground), pretty much every venue that hosts them has to hire a porta-potty company to take care of the dirty work. Service Sanitation doesn’t handle every single summertime event—National Portable Toilets, for example, worked last year’s Fiesta del Sol in Pilsen. But much of the outdoor music market is its turf.

T The poop scoop on festival season

ours after Muse ﬁnish their headlining set on the opening day of Lollapalooza, Keith Kay will return to Grant Park. He’ll arrive at around 2 AM, like a housekeeper entering a just-vacated hotel room, to help make sure that the festival grounds are just as ready for the next 100,000 fans as they were for the ﬁrst 100,000. Kay sees what most of us never will: the vendors prepping mountains of food and oceans of beer, the grounds crews picking up every crushed plastic cup and scrap of litter, the delivery trucks refueling the generators that power the refrigerators and stages. He’s here because it’s his job to supervise the clean-

26 CHICAGO READER - MAY 25, 2017

up of the only thing at Lollapalooza more disgusting than Borgore’s facial hair—the piss, shit, vomit, and whatever else that end up in the fest’s hundreds of porta-potties. “One of our guys found a six-foot-tall stuffed giraffe inside of a portable restroom—caught him by surprise,” he says. “I hope that found its way to a Dumpster.” Kay is a senior account manager for Service Sanitation, a Chicagoland porta-potty rental company headquartered in Gary, Indiana. If you’ve seen a construction site, you’ve probably seen Service Sanitation’s distinctive azure porta-potties—though their ubiquity can make them seem just as brandless as the

ultrageneric packaged food in Repo Man. (The six-pack whose cans just say beer, for instance.) Insofar as it’s possible for a big blue polyurethane box to blend into the background, they do. I go to a lot of music festivals—not just the behemoths that take over our parks but also the street fests in neighborhoods around the city—and a couple years ago I starting noticing that all the porta-potties seemed to come from Service Sanitation. Wherever I went, sooner or later I’d ﬁnd myself swinging open one of those blue doors. Last year I decided to keep an informal tally, and in just a few weeks I saw the company’s porta-potties at Maifest

he U.S. portable-restroom industry is just a little older than the music-festival industry. According to Jim Kneiszel, who edits the business-to-business magazine Portable Restroom Operator, the modern porta-potty was born on the west coast in the 1950s, when DIY entrepreneurs began building restrooms out of plywood and steel barrels for longshoremen and dockside building crews. (An industry nonprofit called the Portable Sanitation Association International, aka the PSAI, pushes the porta-potty’s origin back to World War II.) Massena “Andy” Gump, one of the legends of the industry, got into the game in the 1950s, after a Los Angeles ordinance required all construction sites to have portapotties. Gump built his multimillion-dollar company by assembling porta-potties in his Mission Hills garage, and many other business owners took similar paths. “For ten or 15 years [people] were just making these things by hand out of wood,” Kneiszel says. “Then the industry just developed around providing equipment that was lighter and more sanitary and made more sense.” A brief scene in the 1970 documentary Woodstock provides a snapshot of the portapotty at an earlier stage in this development: Port-O-San employee Thomas Taggart cleans out a stall, armed with a pair of black rubber gloves, a bucket of soapy water, and a bulky suction hose attached to his truck. Woodstock supplied a mere 600 toilets for what turned out to be nearly 500,000 people, according to a 2009 article published by the nonprofit

MUSIC

Service Sanitation porta-potties on the grounds of Riot Fest in 2016 o ALISON GREEN

magazine Consumer Reports—to put that in perspective, Service Sanitation currently recommends one toilet per 100 people as a rule of thumb. It was more than crowds that ﬂooded Max Yasgur’s farm in 1969. After Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency in late 1970, a group of porta-potty business owners launched the PSAI to provide independent guidance to their peers and potential customers. Karleen Kos, executive director of the PSAI, says almost 99 percent of U.S. residents have access to indoor plumbing, which means they mostly use porta-potties in one of three scenarios: on a worksite, in the aftermath of a natural disaster, or at a special event like a concert. Kneiszel has noticed that the proliferation of large outdoor events has caused some companies to change their strategy. “A lot of these companies have turned around—they will tell me that 20 years ago it was 80 percent construction sites, where they’d just drop off one at a house,” he says. “Now some of them are the opposite: 80 percent event work and 20 percent construction work.” The growth in event work isn’t exclusively from concerts— outdoor weddings have created new demand for fancier portable restrooms—but for Service Sanitation, live music is the biggest piece of that pie. Kay oversees special events for the company, and he’s noticed more and more of it over the past ﬁve years. “Of the special-event market that we handle in Chicago, I would say approximately 50 percent of that is music related,” he says.

Service Sanitation is a regional business, but it’s so dominant here that its reputation extends beyond the midwest. “They’re one of the biggest in the U.S.,” Kneiszel says. According to Steve Dykstra, who left his job as the company’s marketing manager while I was researching this article, the early history of Service Sanitation is a bit hazy. Kay says the company was founded in 1967, but that’s as speciﬁc as anybody can get. To explain Service Sanitation’s dominance, it’s more helpful to begin with its acquisition by waste and recycling company Homewood Disposal in 2001. At that point Service Sanitation began to grow quickly, in part by buying its competitors. Service Sanitation’s site lists more than a dozen businesses it’s purchased, many with dad-joke names such as Nature Calls and LepreCan. Today the company has branches in Indianapolis, Milwaukee, and (as of last month) Lafayette, Indiana. “To handle that larger service area, you need to have more of a corporate presence,” Dykstra says. “We offer a little bit better service to our customers, really trying to stress that—trying to provide cleaner toilets, faster efficiencies, GPS tracking.” Empty Bottle Presents talent buyer Brent Heyl has been using Service Sanitation for the past couple years at two EBP events: the single-day festival Music Frozen Dancing and the Beyond the Gate series in Bohemian National Cemetery. (EBP also books Do Division, West Fest, and the Pilsen Food Truck Social, but Criterion Productions handles the

porta-potties at those.) Heyl likes working with Service Sanitation because it’s such a low-maintentance relationship. “If the event is looking to be larger than what I initially anticipated, I’ve never had an issue increasing an order—they’ve been fast on response time,” he says. “It’s more expensive than I realized before I started doing it,” he says. “But it’s a necessary service.” The fact that this necessary service costs more than most people expect is probably indirectly responsible for the knee-jerk revulsion the public feels toward porta-potties. “You will have contracting customers trying to ‘save money’ by making decisions that result in very unpleasant user conditions,” Kos says. “This is all too frequent, because the people who made the decision to ‘economize’ don’t ever personally use the portable restrooms, so they don’t experience ﬁrsthand the conditions that result from their choices.”

Responsibility for the toilets’ cleanliness remains in the hands of customers—if they don’t spend enough on upkeep, sooner or later somebody’s gonna end up sitting in pee.

Part of Kos’s job with the PSAI is to help potential customers think clearly about something they’d rather not consider at all. “For most people who’ve ever had to use a portable toilet, it’s not their favorite thing in the world,” she says. “The units have a reputation as being gross and disgusting—and true, there are limitations to portable restrooms. But a lot of times it would not be a negative experience if the restroom units were supplied in adequate quantity, pumped with greater frequency, and the quality of cleaning ensured tidy, well-stocked cabins.”

The rule of thumb Kay follows—one portapotty for every hundred attendees—is intended to help forestall emotionally scarring conditions like those on the second day of last year’s Pitchfork festival. (Waste Management was working that job, though the problem wasn’t necessarily its fault.) Service Sanitation posts signs on all its porta-potties with a 24-hour hotline number, but the responsibility for the toilets’ cleanliness remains in the hands of customers—if they don’t call that hotline, or if they don’t spend enough on upkeep, sooner or later somebody’s gonna end up sitting in pee. A cautionary tale emerged in February of this year, when Amalgamated Transit Union Local 241 (which represents CTA employees) called a press conference to demand better restroom facilities. The CTA has a contract with Service Sanitation to provide portapotties for its employees on routes with limited access to public restrooms, but the union says the CTA maintains those toilets so poorly that some drivers have resorted to wearing adult diapers. The CTA is one of several city departments that have active contracts with Service Sanitation, and Kay has helped foster those connections since he joined the company in 2008. Because Service Sanitation is a private company, and because some of its partnerships require it to sign nondisclosure agreements, it’s difficult to know, say, the exact number of summer events it supplies with porta-potties. When it comes to its contracts with the city, though, much of that information remains on the record. In July 2011, Service Sanitation signed a City of Chicago vendor contract that covers multiple awards for rental and maintenance of porta-potties; as of May 12, 2017, the city had paid Service Sanitation $3,212,943 in a little less than six years. Not every event the company works is listed individually on the contract—Taste of Chicago is missing, oddly—but you can ﬁnd the Air & Water Show, Blues Fest, Jazz Fest, and several parades. Kay says Service Sanitation’s peak events season begins Saint Patrick’s Day and ends just after Halloween. “December, January, I get to plug back into the wall and charge up the batteries,” he says. Of course, Service Sanitation does plenty of business with private companies—Live Nation has a contract for bathroom trailers with running water at Huntington Bank Pavilion at Northerly Island, for instance. And Service Sanitation has earned enough goodwill J

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MUSIC Service Sanitation employee Corey Summa on the job

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continued from 27 that people will call it in a pinch. The day of the Cubs’ World Series championship parade, Kay wound up on a 1 AM conference call with representatives from the city and the Cubs (among others). They wanted hundreds of porta-potties for Grant Park and the parade route, so Kay got 25 drivers to pull ten-hour shifts on short notice. Fortunately, he had a few weeks’ notice to prepare the portapotties at McCormick Place for Obama’s farewell speech. Like the porta-potty industry, the modern music-festival industry is slowly but surely adapting to the needs of the people who are willing to spend all day watching music outdoors. Sometimes that means leaning into porta-potties’ bad reputation to sell something else. This year the Pitchfork Music Festival introduced the +Plus three-day pass, which costs more than twice as much as a general-admission pass and promises access to special amenities—including airconditioned bathrooms. Service Sanitation and its peers aren’t the only ones who’ve ﬁgured out that many people dread being at a music festival and realizing they need a bathroom. Companies that aren’t

already in the business have devised branding opportunities by attempting to transform a necessary evil into an attraction in its own right. At the Life Is Beautiful fest last year in Las Vegas, Zappos debuted its “Porta Party,” a bathroom trailer tricked out with doodads and gimmicks that include a 40-inch TV, a selfie station, a photosensitive trigger that changes the lights in the room when you pee, and a machine that dispenses trinkets when you ﬂush. Service Sanitation doesn’t offer those kinds of perks—at least not yet—but it dominates the local market without them. When your business provides a necessity that most people wouldn’t want to deal with themselves even if they could, all you’ve usually got to do to keep a customer is avoid screwing up. In 2016, Kay says, Service Sanitation pumped 9,816,000 gallons of waste—enough to fill almost 15 Olympic-size pools—and used 1,598,176 rolls of toilet paper. “As soon as you have the event locked, you get the porta-potties and you get the stage—they’re kind of one and the same,” Heyl says. “You can’t have a band without a stage, and you can’t have people without porta-potties.” v

ß @imLeor MAY 25, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 29

Recommended and notable shows and critics’ insights for the week of May 25

MUSIC

PICK OF THE WEEK

Chicago rapper Femdot is prolific with purpose

THURSDAY25 Brandon Lopez 9 PM, Elastic, 3429 W. Diversey, $10 suggested donation. b Young bassist Brandon Lopez has become a force on New York’s improvised-music scene these past few years, in large part due to his formidable power. The recent self-released solo album Smoked Sunshine Vitriol Spits is a testament to his strength— his oversize instrument can sound like a toy in his hands, and the way he wields and manhandles it in a live setting (e.g., his performance here last fall as a member of Amirtha Kidambi’s Elder Ones) makes it look like one too. Still, it’s what Lopez does with his power that matters. On opener “Cerveza Stallone” his plucked notes blur the line between harmony and percussion; he shadows the serene melody—as well as the frequent explosive eruptions he drops with sudden tangles of thwacked notes—with a wordless chant that lingers in the distant background, telegraphing the lines in his head as his fingers sculpt them. The proceedings are no less visceral when Lopez picks up his bow. On “America dis-Splenda” he abrades the strings with furious scrapes to produce both floor-rumbling low tones and cranium-piercing high notes, all marbled with a virtual spectrum of timbral variety. There’s no question that the bulldozer energy of William Parker is a major influence on Lopez, but he’s intent on marking out his own turf by bringing a bruising physicality and biting tactility to his playing. The rapid-fire harmonic effects he generates on “Kevin Reilly Films,” for example, suggest a durable fabric getting lashed by intense wind gusts as opposed to a double bass getting a workout. He’ll perform solo and then play a trio set with guitarist Andrew Clinkman and drummer Ryan Packard. —PETER MARGASAK

Perfume Genius Serpentwithfeet open. 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln, sold out.

o CHOLLETTE

FEMDOT, JOSEPH CHILLIAMS, MELO MAKES MUSIC

Since emerging at the start of the decade, Seattle singer-songwriter Mike Hadreas (who performs as Perfume Genius) has displayed steady growth and a

ALL AGES

dramatic expansion of sound, morphing from a soulful albeit tortured piano balladeer into a full-blown art-pop experimenter. His new album No Shape (Matador) was produced by Blake Mills, and it situates Hadreas’s rich, androgynous singing in the widest array of contexts yet, all of them far more explicitly pop than his previous efforts. There’s a kind of 60s Brill Building sophistication to many of the tracks, though the string-laden “Just Like Love” updates its old-fashioned inspiration with billowing New Agey accents, while “Go Ahead” feels decidedly more modern—it’s a stuttering R&B ballad with kaleidoscopic interludes colliding into off-kilter grooves. The music is slicker than ever, but the lyrics are more veiled and mysterious while still using a poetic lens to view sensitive issues like sexual harassment, existentialism, and submission (in “Run Me Through” the narrator even suggests wearing his skin like leather). —PETER MARGASAK

Trip Metal Fest with Wolf Eyes, Pharmakon, and Aaron Dilloway Container, Twig Harper, the duo of Carlos Chavarria and Ben Baker Billington, and Hogg also perform. 8:30 PM, Metro, 3730 N. Clark, $23, $21 in advance. 18+ This bum-out extravaganza organized by Nate Young of Wolf Eyes suggests that if you stay focused within the underground long enough there’s a good chance you’ll ascend—at least enough to headline Metro. The Trip Metal Fest features a crew of like-minded outsiders who’ve achieved a modicum of success without doing anything to curry favors; the work of each artist has gotten better over time, but certainly not any friendlier—it’s been carried out with uncompromising purity. Wolf Eyes have been traﬃcking in queasy low-grade electronics and noise for more than two decades now, laying down a model that’s followed by an ever-expanding network of weirdos—though few can touch their murky genius. The trio’s new album Undertow (Lower Floor Music) brings further refinement to their peculiar brand of sonic dread, building on the creepy dreariness of Throbbing Gristle with a slowly slithering electronic bottom layered with heavily

Sun 5/28, 8 PM, Schubas, 3159 N. Southport, $13, $10 in advance. 18+ Arbouretum o COURTESY THE ARTISTS

CHICAGO RAPPER FEMI ADIGUN, aka Femdot, is fully prepared to indulge the endless desire for new music content. Last year he began rolling out a series of well-honed EPs that whetted appetites and built his profile rather fast—and by December he was opening for the Cool Kids at Thalia Hall. But I balk at calling Femdot’s work “content,” a word I equate with thoughtless filler. On the four songs he dropped as part of February’s (U) no, the final EP included in his 20/20 Hour compilation, Femdot gets as much out of the language and music at his fingertips as a kid squeezing a lemon to ensure his lemonade is the best on the block. Motored by a breezy, jaunty piano sample, “Goodcops” is packed with acerbic vivisections of police brutality and systemic racism, and these quick jabs jive with the song’s upbeat movement. Femdot has a reservoir of thoughts about oppression. On his recent Soundcloud loosie “Duckdown,” which samples and slows Smino’s “Raw,” Femdot raps, “Cops think that I’m arrogant / Their guns think I’m un-American.” The moment is brief—Femdot drops the line and moves on with the same speed—but it bruises. —LEOR GALIL

30 CHICAGO READER - MAY 25, 2017

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treated electric guitar, hollowed-out clarinet incantations, and undulating slabs of warped synthesizer groans. Occasionally Young intones lyrics with the passion of a propped-up corpse—during “Thirteen” he wearily recites, “I never had a lot / I never lost a lot / I just lied in this room”—but his content and detachment are simpatico with the tone of the music, which in spite of all of the torpor delivers a thrilling jolt stunning in its precision. The sounds Margaret Chardiet generates as Pharmakon, her solo project, are significantly harsher and less measured than the controlled attack of Wolf Eyes. And on the latest Pharmakon album, Contact (Sacred Bones), her sinister synthesizer tones and occasional blown-out beats have increased still further, creeping up on the lacerating waves of power electronics and Chardiet’s ferocious screams, guttural chants, and primal screams. This shift gives her work more fullness, a high-low balance that allows her intensity to seep into the body more insidiously, as the previous bludgeoning is replaced by hints of subtlety. Live, however, all bets are off—her unhinged presence and pure investment almost trump the brutality of the music she grinds out. An early member of Wolf Eyes, Aaron Dilloway left the group in 2005 to pursue a complementary practice built around fucked-up tape manipulation and nauseous synth tones. His new album The Gag File (Dais) sometimes shares a similar strain of seasick spasming with the new Wolf Eyes album, but Dilloway alters the pitch, tempo, and stability of found sounds more often, whether he’s warping a prerecorded song on “Karaoke With Cal” or dropping in unsettling, droning party banter on “No Eye Sockets (For Otto & Sindy).” —PETER MARGASAK

SATURDAY27 Arbouretum Brokeback open. 9 PM, Schubas, 3159 N. Southport, $12. Dave Heumann, front man for Baltimore’s long-running Arbouretum, isn’t shy about reaching toward

the profound while addressing transformation on the recent Song of the Rose (Thrill Jockey). The elegantly lumbering opening track, “Call Upon the Fire,” announces a need to break free of atrophy and wipe the slate clean, burning something down in order to start over: “Unfolding in the black of night / What’s ruined is restored,” Heumann sings, melding melodic shapes redolent of British folk tradition with a biting hard-rock attack a la Steeleye Span. The idea of renewal comes into relief on “Absolution Song,” revealing a consistent theme that’s continued on “Dirt Trails” (“Let the water run / Until it comes out clear”). Rather than conjuring biblical imagery, Heumann taps into the medieval, using a ﬂinty, hard-nosed attack to add muscle, grit, and desperation. His resourceful band occasionally veer into more ethereal terrain, but the leader’s voice always grounds their performances. Arbouretum’s sound and approach may seem out of step with current tastes, but they’ve remained one of the best, most overlooked rock bands in this country for nearly a decade. —PETER MARGASAK

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Fitness Rad Payoﬀ and Butchered open. 8 PM, Subterranean, 2011 W. North, $5. 17+

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Part of the undercovered and frankly underappreciated Ian’s Party scene of snot-nosed melodic-punk bands that can sweat out sing-along hooks just as well as they can shotgun tallboys of Old Style behind a Dumpster, Fitness put their faith in the power of the triumphant dual-guitar battle between riﬀ boys Mike Hayes and Ian Lee. Their new six-song EP Puppet Show (Don’t Panic)—the release of which, look at that, is being celebrated tonight—features a little bit of cock-rock glitz and glam spewed into the foursome’s abrasive, grimy brand of pop punk. With a trio of vocalists contributing subtle variants of gruﬀ screaming (often a la Chicago native son Brendan Kelly), Fitness jaunt between sweeping two-minute epics of disdain (“Sin Bad”) and full-bore, volatile punk defiance (“Pauly’s Shore”). The album is rife with the kind of reckless energy that would easily have upstaged a Fireside headliner during the scene’s mid-to-late-90s heyday, J

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MAY 25, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 31

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FRIDAY, JUNE 2 8PM

Anaïs Mitchell / Grant-Lee Phillips SATURDAY, JUNE 3 7:30PM

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Joan Shelley

with special guest Jake Xerxes Fussell In Szold Hall

SUNDAY, JUNE 4 7PM

Ottmar Liebert & Luna Negra WEDNESDAY, JUNE 7 10PM

Kate Simko & London Electronic Orchestra In Szold Hall

FRIDAY, JUNE 9 7PM In Szold Hall

THURSDAY, JUNE 15 8PM

A Conversation with Robben Ford In Szold Hall SATURDAY, JUNE 17 8PM

Robyn Hitchcock

with special guest Kacy & Clayton

SUNDAY, JUNE 25 8PM

Django Festival All Stars ACROSS THE STREET IN SZOLD HALL 4545 N LINCOLN AVENUE, CHICAGO IL

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when life was simple and focused on chain-smoking Camel Lights indoors and drinking whatever swill was within arm’s reach. Local punk pros Rad Payoﬀ, who just in late April dropped the very solid (and ambitious) LP Slow & Weird, will warm up the stage with their musk. —KEVIN WARWICK

Smokepurpp Sonny Digital, Stupid Genius, Isaiah G, and Duﬄe Bag Buru open. 6 PM, Portage Theater, 4050 N. Milwaukee, $17-$60. b

National Tap Day Celebration

House of Waters

continued from 31

Global Dance Party: Son de Madera with special guest Patricio Hidalgo Global Dance Party: Milonga Cumparsita with DJ Charrua and special guests Global Dance Party: Los Vicios de Papá with DJ Bashert

WORLD MUSIC WEDNESDAY SERIES FREE WEEKLY CONCERTS, LINCOLN SQUARE

5/31 Kaiju Daiko & Chikoto Taiko 6/7 Ensemble Español • Duende Flamenco

32 CHICAGO READER - MAY 25, 2017

Smokepurpp is part of a class of young Florida rappers who’ve dragged hip-hop into the blistering sun to bake without sunscreen. Born in Chicago and raised in the Miami area, Smokepurpp has absorbed one of Chief Keef’s greatest lessons: there’s nothing wrong with ignoring hip-hop’s strict verse structure if it means you’re making music that feels alive. Smokepurpp skimps on bars, often half-forming his words as though he’s just woken up from a nap and is hazy about what’s coming out of his mouth. As keen as he is to ﬂy in the face of convention by emphasizing melody—he mostly sings his way through the dreamlike “Glock in my Benz”— he flaunts his rap skills too. On the 2016 single “6 Ringz” Smokepurpp spits out his lines like they’ve got a bad aftertaste, feeding off the energy of a nasty, blown-out bass that threatens to leave a burn. Interscope imprint Alamo Records, which has taken a shine to Florida’s young rising rappers, signed Smokepurpp earlier this year; his Deadstar mixtape is due to drop any day now. —LEOR GALIL

Michael Kiwanuka Cloves open. 8 PM, Park West, 322 W. Armitage, sold out. b On his stirring second album, Love & Hate (Interscope), British singer Michael Kiwanuka writes in broad strokes, allowing listeners to adapt themes to their own lives in ways that sting. Given a patient, spacious sound by coproducer Brian Burton (aka Danger Mouse), the record opens with a string-laden track that builds in intensity for some ﬁve somber minutes before Kiwanuka—a Brit born to Ugandan parents—utters his first words, questioning his faith and commitment but pledging to power through. At times it can be hard to tell if he’s singing about a troubled relationship or a world gone mad (I’ve recently been gravitating toward the latter reading), but it doesn’t matter; while the singer has explained that the elegant, simmering funk song “Black Man in a White World” was written as a result of playing a loose version of “black” music for largely white audiences, the race-based implications cut much deeper. Love & Hate pulls away from the folk-soul environments of Kiwanuku’s 2012 debut for a feel less speciﬁc yet more retro, with many songs evoking a 60s noir closer to the ambient thrust of Portishead than to Stax Records. He delivers searing, psychedelic guitar solos that summon the spirit of Eddie Hazel, but the essence comes down to his seductive voice, which rarely breaks from its sweet yet wounded conversational tone. Few recent albums have translated a feeling of emotional vulnerability with more beauty. —PETER MARGASAK

Kool Keith of Dr. Octagon o COURTESY THE ARTIST

SUNDAY28 Femdot See Pick of the Week (page 30). Joseph Chilliams and Melo Makes Music open. 8 PM, Schubas, 3159 N. Southport, $13, $10 in advance. 18+

MONDAY29 Survival Unit III 7:30 PM, Experimental Sound Studio, 5925 N. Ravenswood, $10, $8 students and members. b The description of tonight’s performance on Experimental Sound Studio’s website claims that the astringent free-jazz trio Survival Unit III will play a “re-imagining” of its 2015 album Barrow Street Blues (Holiday), which documents an improvised concert the group gave at the Chicago Cultural Center in 2004. There’s some puckish wit in claiming that multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee, cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm, and percussionist Michael Zerang will actually glom on to a specific performance from 13 years ago—especially when it was totally spontaneous—but as Lonberg-Holm told me, “Joe likes confusions,” noting that the long-running unit’s last two albums are both called Straylight though they’re different improvised sets made a year apart. (The ﬁrst is a cassette released by superb Austin imprint Astral Spirits that was recorded in Copenhagen in 2013, while the second is a CD taped live in Champaign in 2014 and released by Zerang’s own Pink Palace label.) The titles and claims of reimaginings are likely humorous tweaks, but there’s nothing silly about the J

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CORKY SIEGEL’S CHAMBER BLUES FEATURING MARCELLA DETROIT

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STAMPY, LOW SPARK, TENDERBROS SAT, 6/3

MOON, MOLEHILL, MODEL STRANGER, SAYERS 34 CHICAGO READER - MAY 25, 2017

continued from 32

group’s relentless commitment to three-way interactions in which McPhee and Lonberg-Holm generate grainy, sometimes piercing lines that meld sorrowful melody and biting tonal sharpness. The tape release captures the trio in a more contemplative, lyric mode, while the CD is ferocious in its assault, with all three musicians frequently exploring harsh upper-register terrain, sometimes with the aid of electronic eﬀects—Zerang will often push aside his kit in favor of bowed objects. It’s impossible to say what SUIII will serve up this time, but it’s certain they’ll go all-in, producing an uncompromising attack that slaloms between raw tenderness and harrowing, seat-of-the-pants exploration. —PETER MARGASAK

TUESDAY30 Dr. Octagon 9 PM, Metro, 3730 N. Clark, $31, $26 in advance. 18+ When CMH Records released The Return of Dr. Octagon in 2006, hip-hop DJ and producer Dan the Automator said, “That wasn’t a Dr. Octagon record. . . . Dr. Octagon is me, Kool Keith, and Q-Bert. The label didn’t have the legal right to use the name, but I didn’t want to get involved in a legal battle.” I mean, yes, word. Dr. Octagonecologyst, the 1996 debut of Dr. Octagon (and technically the solo debut of Ultramagnetic MCs member Keith), is brilliant because of the equally valuable contributions of all three of its principals: Keith’s avant-weirdo, thesaurus-scouring rapping; Dan the Automator’s spooky, dusty, and trip-hop-heavy beats; and Q-Bert’s scratching, which is to spinning records what Eddie Van Halen is to electric

guitar. Let’s take “Halfsharkalligatorhalfman” as an example. Keith describes himself as the title character, who lives in a world where “monkeys sniﬃn’ ice” and “people watch space parasites,” while the lyrics are backed by Raymond Scott-style electronic eﬀects and funky drum breaks. Fortunately, this tour features all the original members, so what you see is authentically half sharkalligator, half man. —TAL ROSENBERG

TALSounds Mukqs, Sam Prekop, and Matchess open. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $7. Over the last few years Chicagoan Natalie Chami’s output has been prolific, both as a member of improvisational noise trio Goodwill Smith and as her solo project TALsounds. It was just in October that Hausu Mountain released Lifter + Lighter— the latter’s most focused, cohesive eﬀort to date— but its follow-up, Love Sick (Ba Da Bing Records), is already primed to enter the world as a massive leap forward. Chami takes the synthy bliss-drone of Lifter + Lighter and piles on layers of organs and electronic ambience, building otherworldly and overwhelming cascades of sonic warmth. For as heavy and abstract as Chami’s sound design and lofty vocals can be on Love Sick, there’s a distinct influence of 80s-90s dream-pop and postpunk from artists like Cranes and Cocteau Twins that evokes genuine feelings of sadness, joy, and nostalgia. The way Love Sick toes the line between beauty and weirdness is a further stroke of greatness from the already excellent local artist. This record release show doubles as one for Mukqs, the solo project of Chami’s Good Willsmith cohort Max Allison, who’ll be dropping the succintly titled 11,666,666,666,666,666,666 through local label Midwitch. —LUCA CIMARUSTI

RIDERS AREN’T ALWAYS IN THE RIGHT. BUT THEY ARE ALWAYS FRAGILE.

WEDNESDAY31 ZZ Ward Cat Clyde opens. 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln, $25. ZZ Ward has dedicated her career to merging blues with contemporary pop R&B, achieving fair aesthetic results and mixed commercial success. Her single “The Deep,” off her sophomore album The Storm (out at the end of June on Hollywood), is a fine example of that approach. A meaty riff with chopped-up blues-slide notes dripping around the edges and an honest-to-god classic-rock guitar solo are arranged around a solid radio-ready beat.

It’s tough and sexy—and not too far removed from Beyoncé’s similar mashup of rock, roots, and pop on Lemonade. “Help Me Mama” is a step closer to retro, with a strutting roll and Ward declaring in her gritty twang, “My daddy raised me, tried to keep me his sweet baby.” In an alternate universe Ward would be a megastar on country radio, and her collaborations with Kendrick Lamar would be the standard for forward-looking innovation in the genre rather than Florida Georgia Line’s experiments with Auto-Tune. Even while she’s trying to crash the big time, though, Ward still loves her roots. In concert she does the occasional full-on blues cover, complete with her own impressive harmonica playing. —NOAH BERLATSKY v

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MAY 25, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 35

FOOD & DRINK

Clockwise from left: the raw beef dish tire siga, the honey wine t’ej, the grilled short ribs known as goden tibs, the ground raw beef dish kitfo, the meatless “fasting platter” yetsom beyeaynetu o BRITTANY SOWACKE

RESTAURANT REVIEW

Selam Ethiopian Kitchen brings it raw An Uptown butcher shop and market has evolved into a forum for East African feasting. By MIKE SULA

et’s say you’ve gone to war in the mountains. You and your men have a chance for a breather. You’ve found a secluded spot, easily defensible, near water and not far from a few cowherds, from whom you’ve liberated one of their fattest animals. Everybody’s hungry and it’s time to make camp. The enemy’s not far, but you don’t know exactly where he is. He doesn’t know where you are either, but you definitely don’t want to attract his attention—so no fires, guys, sorry. We’ll just have to eat this cow raw. Something like that might have happened sometime back in Ethiopia’s epic history, an originating event that became the foundation of the nation’s love for raw beef. Ethiopians are said to have been the first people to learn to drink coffee. It’s not impossible that they were the people to invent steak tartare. You might recognize this particular innovation as kitfo if you’re acquainted with the singular pleasures of Ethiopian food—and you certainly will if you were familiar with Uptown’s erstwhile Selam Market, a one-stop butcher shop for everything Ethiopian and edible. Starting in 2009, husband and wife Solomon and Selamawit Abebe offered a handful of fleshy treats at a few tables in their shop, among them said kitfo: freshly ground raw beef massaged with the spiced clarified

36 CHICAGO READER - MAY 25, 2017

SELAM ETHIOPIAN KITCHEN | $$ R 4543 N. Broadway 773-271-4300 selamkitchen.com

butter known as niter kibbeh and a brickorange spice blend called mitmita, loaded with chile, clove, cardamom, garlic, ginger, and more. It’s served with a mixture of the ricottalike cheese ayib and pureed collards on the side, and to eat it you scoop up gobs of each with the tangy, spongy flatbread injera, then pop them into your greedy mouth. If you’re among family and friends—and everybody’s getting along—you might deliver a morsel directly into the mouth of someone you love, an act, intimate as a kiss, called a gursha. In response to years of encouragement from customers, the Abebes closed their butcher shop, then reopened it along with a restaurant and bar earlier this year. Selam Ethiopian Kitchen (originally Selam Market and Kitchen) certainly doesn’t call attention to itself. When I first encountered it, just before it opened, I saw bags of teff flour stacked in the brightly lit window and assumed it was just a dedicated injera bakery—but it’s much more than that. There’s a glass display case in the front room from which bags of green coffee beans and the spicy jerky known as quanta are sold. The meat grinder is positioned here, and you can pick up your kitfo to go if you haven’t realized that just beyond this spare retail area there’s a full dining room and bar with roomy booths and flat-screen TVs broadcasting sports along with the horrors of the day. I simultaneously learned that James Comey had been fired and watched an MMA fight while carving morsels of raw beef from a fist-size chunk of bottom round, then swirling them through a mixture of mitmita, berbere-spiked awaze sauce, and a sinus-scouring mustard called senafitch. With the present perilous state of global affairs, now might be the time we all learn to appreciate this preparation, known as tire siga, which happened to be another specialty of the Abebes’ old market. You can order lean bottom round, top round, loin, or, if you like it a little fatty, brisket. There’s a deft technique for enjoying this dish, involving a sharp steak knife deployed against the beef frighteningly close to the webbing between the fingers. But if you don’t feel you can master this trick, called q’wirt, you can dissect your tire siga on the plate safely, if less gracefully—and less bravely. Whichever way, tire siga seems to me the perfect drinking food, something to keep your strength up while you’re sipping beer and watching the fights. A third signature of the butcher shop, not frequently encountered at the city’s other Ethiopian restaurants, has made the move as well. Goden tibs are short ribs grilled with J

argentine atmosphere while you dine

FOOD & DRINK rosemary, garlic, and jalapeño to an enticing char. Equally meaty, they offer the kind of mandibular exercise raw beef can’t. It turns out there actually is a bakery at Selam as well, and customers come in and out picking up bags of Selamawit’s injera to go. The chef grew up cooking in her parents’ Addis Ababa restaurant, and since arriving in the U.S. she’s made it her business to perfect an injera recipe that maximizes use of the traditional teff flour and avoids unhealthier self-rising flours. That’s not such an easy feat in the States—injera batter made purely of teff doesn’t react well with the steel griddles typically used here as opposed to the traditional earthenware mitad. Selamawit’s injera previously incorporated 15 percent buckwheat flour, and it was tangy and resilient. But now, with the acquisition of a new mitad, the restaurant has gone full teff. The pancake serves as the bed for the remainder of Selam’s menu—the usual assortment of meaty stews, pulses, and vegetables common to the Ethiopian repertoire. These can be easily sampled on a meatless yetsom beyeaynetu, or “fasting platter,” if like the Abebes, you’re a Coptic Christian and don’t eat meat on Wednesdays and Fridays. But there’s really no feast quite like sitting around a platter laden with a greater assortment of what the kitchen is capable of—animal and vegetable alike—from beg wot, a cubed lamb stew, to doro wot, a chicken-andegg braise fueled by niter kibbeh and berbere sauce, to atkilt wot, a dish of turmeric-tinged cabbage and potatoes. Gomen, mild cookeddown collard greens, provides just the intestinal scrubbing such a spread requires. Selam has a full bar featuring conventional cocktails, wine, and beer, but a small carafe of the mildly funky honey wine t’ej is the most appropriate accompaniment. And there’s no more fitting finish than the Ethiopian coffee ceremony, the beans roasted over charcoal at the table—accompanied by the burning of incense—then ground, steeped, strained, and poured in the order of the participants’ seniority. Selam’s signature dishes may have been born of war, but today they, along with the rest of the menu, provide an opportunity for the best kind of eating, one imitated in restaurants the world over. They’re the true form of the shared plate—and no one’s going to fight over that. v

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Memorial Weekend

All you can eat specials: restaurant & bar 210 0 we st division st . 7 7 3 . 2 9 2 .1 6 0 0

Snow crab legs $38.95 per person Tempura shrimp $24.95 per person Includes soup or salad

Oyster Bar specials at bar only with two drink minimum per person

Not valid with any other specials, discount or promotions

1816 N. Halsted St. Chicago, IL 60614 312-280-8990 Mon, Tues, Wed and Thur 3:30PM-11PM Fri and Sat 11:30AM-12AM Sun 11:30AM-10PM

Never miss a show again.

EARLY WARNINGS chicagoreader.com/early

ß @MikeSula MAY 25, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 37

JOBS ADMINISTRATIVE SALES & MARKETING FOOD & DRINK SPAS & SALONS BIKE JOBS GENERAL REAL ESTATE RENTALS FOR SALE NON-RESIDENTIAL ROOMMATES MARKETPLACE GOODS SERVICES HEALTH & WELLNESS INSTRUCTION MUSIC & ARTS NOTICES MESSAGES LEGAL NOTICES ADULT SERVICES

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. TELE-FUNDRAISING SUMMER CASH!

American Veterans helping Veterans. Felons need not apply per Illinois Attorney General regulations. Start ASAP, Call 312-256-5035

food & drink

BARTENDER

AND

SERVER

needed. Full-time. 2 years experience. King Crab House, 1816 N Halsted. 312-280-8990. Apply in person any day after 3pm. Bring resume.

General

(Chicago, IL) Littelfuse, Inc. seeks Sharepoint Team Lead w/ Bach or for equiv deg in CS, Eng or rel fld & 5 yrs progressive exp in job offered or in devp & support Sharepoint environ incl exp w/ handling various versions of Sharepoint 2007/2010/2013; migration proj incl Lotus Notes to Sharepoint & Asp.net to Sharepoint; Sharepoint workflows & other wrkflow tools like Nintex 2 010/2013; leading Sharepoint devp & mainten team; handling new acquisitions & Sharepoint integr w/ newly acquired companies; using various 3rd part migration & auditing tools like Sharegate & Metalogix; ADFS integr, One Drive for Business & Mobility features in Sharepoint; & HTML, JavaScript, JQuery, CSS, XML & XSD. Occais trvl reqd. Apply to N. Castillo, 8755 W. Higgins Rd., Suite 500, Chicago, IL 60631

THE

Quality Control Manager sought by MAPEI Corporation. in West Chicago, IL 40 hrs/wk. Duties: Manage all aspects of Quality Control in the Plant, including safety in the laboratory, control and calibration of the laboratory equipment, updating of the working instructions, forms and specifications. Control correctness of application and repeatability of these methods. Cooperate with Technical Service in the investigation and verification of complaints due to finished products. Analyze results of Quality Control test results in order to propose optimization of the testing plans, formulas, testing methods and also specifications for production processes, products and tests, including temporary modifications to the frequency of testing, if necessary. Measure/analyze testing error and implement training and other activities to minimize error. Monitor results of qualification trials, running tests parallel with R&D, to verify statistical process capability for all required variables and attributes. Min. Requirements: Master’s degree or foreign equivalent or related in applied chemistry together with 2 years of Quality Management experience, and 1 year of experience in adhesives, grout and polymers. Please reply with resume to: Zaharoula Nativi. 1144 E. Newport Center Drive, Deerfield Beach, FL 33442. (Chicago, IL) Littelfuse, Inc. seeks IT Senior SD Analyst w/ Bach or for equiv deg in CS, Eng, Tech, Tech Mngmt or rel fld & 5 yrs progressive exp in job offered or in SAP Sales & Distrib incl exp w/ SD-EDI interface; Idocs & config wrk reqd to support EDI; Std Orders, Consignment, Sched Agrmnt, 3rd party drop-ship, etc; SD user-exits, funct modules & thorough understanding std. delivered SW proc logic; proc flows, reqs doc, play back reqs to users & make necessary adjustments to be able to start on design specific & estimate effort; & project wrk mngnt to support wrk requests activity planning & establish time sched. Occas dom & intl trvl reqd. Apply to N. Castillo, 8755 W. Higgins Rd., Ste 500, Chicago, IL 60631

Retail

ENERGY

RESOURCES

CENTER at the University of Illinois at Chicago, located in a large metropolitan area, is seeking a full-time Senior Research Engineer to lead project teams to conduct applied research and technology transfer in the fields of energy and the environment, providing industry, utilities and government agencies, and the public with education proven ideas and concepts, information and technical assistance. Initiate and direct the development of energy and environmental research ideas, leading these ideas into new fundable projects and programs in the areas of: energy efficiency, energy use, energy conversion, energy storage and emission reduction. Apply energy engineering principles, technologies and concepts to specific energy and/or environmental research projects and tasks, and establish direction and budgets for existing and new program areas. Utilize knowledge of energy engineering to perform energy audits, energy studies and analyses to identify practical answers through research to energy problems in the industrial, commercial, institutional and/or residential markets. Manage energy efficiency projects, including the approval of project plans, timelines and cost structures. Review and approve final project deliverables to ensure accuracy and supervise ten Research Engineers. Requirements are a Bachelor’s degree or its foreign equivalent in Energy Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or related field of study, plus five years of energy related research experience, including three years of experience related to energy efficiency. Some travel is required. For fullest consideration, please submit a CV, cover letter, and 3 references to the attention of the Search Coordinator via email at jfarme1@uic. edu, or via mail at University of Illinois at Chicago, Energy Resources Center, 1309 S Halsted Street, Chicago, IL 60607. The University of Illinois is an Equal Opportunity, Affirmative Action employer. Minorities, women, veterans and individuals with disabilities are encouraged to apply. The University of Illinois may conduct background checks on all job candidates upon acceptance of a contingent offer. Background checks will be performed in compliance with the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

BINNY’S IS HIRING!

NEW STORE OPENING SOON IN PORTAGE PARK ADDITIONAL OPPORTUNITIES IN LINCOLN PARK AND LAKEVIEW Binny’s Beverage Depot is the Midwest’s largest upscale retailer of ﬁne wines, spirits, beers and cigars, and due to our continued growth, we are now looking for dedicated individuals to join our team at multiple Chicago locations.

STORE ASSOCIATES

Portage Park: Full Time and Part Time Lincoln Park and Lakeview: Part Time We are seeking energetic, customer-oriented individuals to perform a variety of store functions. Qualiﬁed persons must be over 21 years of age, able to lift 40-50 lbs. and available to work ﬂexible hours. Previous retail experience a plus, with cashier or stock experience preferred. Candidates must be able to work nights & weekends.

ACCOUNTING ADVISORY MANAGER, CIPS (MULT. POS.),

PricewaterhouseCoopers Advisory Services LLC, Chicago, IL. Assist clients with improving business performance, responding quickly & effectively to crisis situations, & extracting value from transactions. Req. Bach’s deg. or foreign equiv. in Fin, Acct, Bus Admin or rel. + 5 yrs post-bach’s progress. rel. work exp.; OR a Master’s deg. or foreign equiv. in Fin, Acct, Bus Admin or rel. + 3 yrs rel. work exp. Travel up to 80% req. Apply by mail, referencing Job Code IL1263, Attn: HR SSC/Talent Management, 4040 W. Boy Scout Blvd, Tampa, FL 33607.

LOOKING FOR ENERGETIC, dedicated, and loyal workers. Several positions available including drivers, messengers, and general laborers. Full-time positions. Visit 2100 South Sawyer Ave. from 9:00 AM to 12:00AM Monday-Friday to apply. EN BUSCA DE personas dedicadas, enérgicas y leales. Varias posiciones disponibles incluyendo conductores, mensajeros y trabajadores en general. Posiciones de tiempo completo. Visitar el 2100 S. Sawyer Ave. en Chicago, de 9:00 a 12:00 pm de lunes a viernes para aplicar. NATIONAL MATERIAL L.P.

seeks Sr. Dynamics AX Developers for Elk Grove Village, IL to dev Microsoft Dynamics AX ERP sw. Masters in Comp Sci or Comp/ Electronics/ Instrumentation Eng +2yrs exp OR Bachelors in Comp Sci or Comp/Electronics/ Instrumentation Eng +5yrs exp req’d. Skills req’d: 2yrs w/ Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012, SQL Server, SSRS, SSMS, SSIS, .NET Framework, X++, C#, BIDS, DMF, HTML, XML. Bkgd check & drug test req’d. Send resume to: careers@nmlp.com

FOOD TECHNOLOGIST: ANALYZE food to determine levels of

vitamins, fat, sugar, protein; research. Ensure compliance with government regs/standards for sanitation, safety, quality. Plan the manufacture of food. Generate new product ideas/ recipes. Improve safety/ quality control, reducing waste by improving efficiency; packaging innovation, technology. Prep product calculations to ensure profitability. Bachelor in Food Technology. 2 yrs exp. Res: Mistica Foods LLC, 50 West Commercial Avenue, Addison IL 60101

FULL-TIME DIRECTOR OF

Please apply online at www.binnys.com/careers

38 CHICAGO READER | MAY 25, 2017

Project Management Consultants for Integrated Project Management Company, Inc to report to our Burr Ridge, IL HQ but work at multiple unanticipated locations. Plan, sched & control pharma, biotech, or medical device activities to meet goals & project reqs applying tech, theoretical & mgmt skills. Coord & integ team & indiv efforts, & build positive prof relationships. Estim resource reqs & dev & apply project plans & schedules. Research technologies and apply tech knowledge to ensure effec delivery of project reqs. Dev & define strategies to achieve objectives, reqs, & assumptions to structure project/activity. Research & prep proj metric info incl value statements or measures to promote/ justify IPM’s involvement. Address risk mgmt issues. Lead mtgs. Manage change/conflict. Dev resource planning estimates to mng personal workload & max productivity & revenue. Do communications & presentations for broad spectrum of audiences incl contract trade laborers to sr execs. May require some weekend hrs. Little domestic & int’l travel may be involved. May undergo background checks and drug testing. Must have Bachelors in rel sci field, and 3 yrs rel exp to incl project mgmt exp related to at least 1 of these areas: product dvlpmnt and launch, bus process optimization, tech transfer, reg su bmission/reg compliance, QA, or alliance mgmt. Rel exp must also incl (3 years) industry exp in pharma, biotech, or medical devices. Apply to resumes@ipmcinc. com

EOE

Soccer & Futsal Operations sought by CFA. 6122 N. Clark St. Chicago, IL 60660. Duties: recruit/train/evaluate coach staff; oversee programs; liaise with personnel; travel 40% to local/regional/ national events. Required: BA Degree in related field; proficiency in Futsal/Soccer rules; pla ying/coaching experience at college/ premier/national level; USSF/FIFA license. Resumes to hr@chicagofutsalacademy.com

MULTIPLE OPEN POSITIONS at Network Objects, Inc.: Master’s + 1 yr exp. / Bachelor’s + 5 yrs. e xp./equiv.: BI Developer (NOBID16): QlikView/QlikSense, Tableau, DB2, SQL Server, Cognos, Adobe Flex. SAP SD Functional Analyst (NSSF16): SAP SD, CS, GTS, SAP-EDI, SD-MM, ABAP. Mail resume with job ID to HR: 2300 Barrington Rd, Suite 400, Hoffman Estates, IL 60169. Travel to unanticipated worksites throughout U.S. Foreign equivalency accepted.

Wishbone Restaurant seeks Accounting Assistant & Catering Director in Chicago, IL to perform the following: Vrfy accnts pybl trnsctns fr accrcy; Ovrsght of Ctrng fnctn fr Wishbone. Req BS in Accntng or rltd + 3 yrs rltd exp. Emplyr will accept pre & post BS degree exp. Req exp w/: QuickBooks; Total Party Planner Catering Sftwr; Paycom Payroll sftwr; POSitouch food indstry POS systm; MS Office & cloud based sftwr systms. Mail resumes to Julie Nickson @ 1001 W. Washington Blvd., Chicago, IL, 60607.

JOIN OUR RESTORATION

TEAM - RESTORING, REFINISHING MARBLE, TERRAZZO, GRANITE.... DAYS AND/OR NIGHTS...$ 20 + /hour and Benefits....for the right person...Well established team of Company successful for 20 years....It is satisfying to see your own restoration work in front of you....

HUMAN RESOURCES PLS FINANCIAL SERVICES, INC. seeks: Manager of HRIS: Req BS in Comp. Eng., EE, ME, CS, or IT & 7 yrs of progressively

responsible exp. as a Programmer/ Analyst on IT projects involving HR, ERP and Web App. Position is in Chicago, IL. Mail CV to: Attn: Art Sanders One South Wacker Drive, Floor 36 Chicago IL 60606. EOE.

EAST AURORA SCHOOL DISTRICT 131,located in Aurora, IL, is seeking Data Support Technician and Online Registration Support Technician. Applications should be completed online at www.d131.org.

PART-TIME COUNTER HELP

at quality dry cleaners. Morning and afternoon hours available. Some customer service experience preferred. Apply in person at Barry-Regent Cleaners, 3000 N Broadway, Chicago IL 60657 NUTS ON CLARK POPCORN

STORES- Paid training, lots of hours & opportunity available. Apply in person between 9 A.M. & 11 A.M. 3830 N Clark St. Must bring state ID & Social Security Card.

Corporate Accountant, master’s in accounting and 1 yr exp. req. Apply: Sierra Auto Group, Inc. 4207 N. Western Avenue, Chicago, IL 60618, Attn: HR

REAL ESTATE RENTALS

STUDIO $500-$599 73RD AND JEFFERY BLVD. Studio, 1BR & 2BR, heated, hardwood flrs, laundry room, appls, near trans. $565 and up. 773-881-3573

Chicago, Beverly/Cal Park/Blue Island Studio $575 & up, 1BR $665 & up, 2BR $885 & up. Heat, Appls, Balcony, Carpet, Laundry, Prkg. 708-388-0170 SOUTH SHORE AREA Newly remod Studios. Near Metra & CTA, appls incl. $500-$525/mo. Ray 312-375-2630

STUDIO $600-$699 CHICAGO, HYDE PARK Arms

Hotel, 5316 S. Harper, maid, phone, cable ready, fridge, private facilities, laundry avail. Switchboard. Start at $ 160/wk Call 773-493-3500

STUDIO OTHER Ashland Hotel nice clean rms. 24 hr desk/maid/TV/laundry/air. Low rates daily/weekly/monthly. South Side. Call 773-376-5200

LARGE SUNNY ROOM w/fridge & microwave. Near Oak Park, Green Line & Buses. 24 hr Desk, Parking Lot $101/week & Up. (773)378-8888 CROSSROADS HOTEL SRO SINGLE RMS Private bath, PHONE,

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

NICE ROOM w/stove, fridge & bath Near Aldi, Walgreens, Beach, Red Line & Buses. Elevator & Laundry. $130/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 BR UNDER $700

6930 S. SOUTH SHORE DRIVE Studios & 1BR, INCL. Heat, Elec, Cking gas & PARKING, $585-$925, Country Club Apts 773-752-2200

SPRINGTIME SAVINGS! NEWLY Remod. 1 BR Apts $650 w/

EXCHANGE EAST APTS 1 Brdm

gas incl. 2-5BR start at $650 & up. Sec 8 Welc. Rental Assistance Prog. for Qualified Applicants offer up to $ 400/month for 1 yr. (773)412-1153 Wesley Realty

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 SPECIAL: STUDIOS starting at $499 incls utilities. 1BR $550, 2BR $599, 3BR $699. With approved credit. No Security Deposit for Sec 8 Tenants. South Shore & Southside. Call 312-446-3333 SECTION 8 WELCOME Newly Decorated 74th/East End. 1BR. $625. 77th/Drexel. 2BR. $700. 87th/Dante. Heat not incl. 2BR. 5rms. $750. 773-874-9637 or 773-493-5359

MIDWAY AREA/63RD 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)

CHICAGO: 67TH & Clyde 2BR apt, sunrm, LR/DR, hdwd flrs, $900. 77th & Bishop, 2BR apt, hdwd flrs, $900. Sec 8 Welc. (773) 429-0988 CLEAN ROOM W/FRIDGE & micro, Near Oak Park, Food -4Less, Walmart, Walgreens, Buses & Metra, Laundry. $115/wk & up. 773-637-5957 WEST PULLMAN (INDIANA

$575 w/Free Parking,Appl, AC,Free heat. Near trans. laundry rm. Elec.not incl. Kalabich Mgmt (708) 424-4216

VIC OF 77TH & Blackstone, Quiet 1BR Bsmt apt. $650/mo + sec. Gas, electric & appls incl. Credit check req’d. 646-202-3294 MOVE

NOW!!! Studios-3

Beds. Hyde Park & Washington Park Call Megan 773-285-3310

1 BR $700-$799 7100 SOUTH JEFFERY Large 1 BEDROOM, $725 Near Metra & shops, Section 8 OK. Newly decorated, dining room, carpeted, appls, FREE heat & cooking gas. Elevator & laundry room, free credit check, no application fee, 1-773-919-7102 or 1-312802-7301 8322 S INGLESIDE & 8001 S Colfax, 1BR $650, newly remodel, hrdwd flrs, cable. Sec 8 welcome (Laundry Ingleside only) 708-3081509 or 773-493-3500 CRESTWOOD SPACIOUS 1BR Wood floors, ALL appls, Heat Incl & convenient loc. $740/mo; 708422-8801 AUBURN GRESHAM 80TH &

Paulina, 2 bedroom from $825, Heat included. Call 312.208.1771

1 BR $900-$1099 WEST RIDGE, 6200N/ 2200W. Spacious updated one

APTS. FOR RENT PARK MGMT & INV. Ltd. IT’S MOVING TIME!!! OUR UNITS INCLUDE HEAT, HW & CG Plenty of parking 1Bdr From $795.00 2Bdr From $925.00 3 Bdr/2 Full Bath From $1200 **1-(773)-476-6000*** APTS. FOR RENT PARK MGMT & INV. LTD. SPRING HAS SPRUNG!! 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** 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 ∫

CHICAGO - Beverly, large 2 room Studio & 1BR Apts. Carpet, A/ C, laundry, near transportation, $660-$785/mo. Call 773-2334939 MOST BEAUTIFUL APARTMENTS! 6748 Crandon, 2BR, $875. 7727 Colfax, 1 & 2BR, $625-$875. 6220 Eberhart, 2 & 3BR, $850-$1150. 773-947-8572 or 312-613-4424 CALUMET CITY 158TH & PAXTON SANDRIDGE APTS 1 & 2 BEDROOM UNITS MODELS OPEN M-F, 9AM-5:30PM *** 708-841-5450 *** SOUTHSIDE, FURN. R m s , $350 & $425/mo, utils incl. Nr good trans. $200 clean up fee req’d. Fixed income invited. Call 312-758-6931

Ave) RENT SPECIAL 1/2 Off 1 month rent + Sec dep. Nice,lrg 1BR $575; 2BR $699 & 1 3BR $850, balcony, Sec 8 Welc. 773-995-6950

bedroom garden apartment. Near transportation, shopping, parks. Heat, appliances, electricity, blinds included. 773-274-8792. $900.

SUNNY & LARGE 2 & 3BR, hd wd/ceramic flrs, appls, heat incld, Sect 8 OK. $850 plus 70th & Sangamon. 773-4566900

WINTER SPECIAL $500 To-

Ravenswood DLX 3/rm studio: new kit, SS appl, granite, French windows, oak flrs, close to Brown L; $1050/heated 773-743-4141 w ww.urbanequities.com

SUBURBS, RENT TO OW N! Buy with No closing costs and get help with your credit. Call 708868-2422 or visit www.nhba.com

FREE HEAT! NO SEC Dep. No Move-in Fee! 1, 2, 3 & 4 BRs, laundry rm. Sec 8 OK. Tiffany 773.285.3310 www.livenovo.com

HOMEWOOD- 2BR new kitchen, new appls, oak flrs, ac, lndry/ stor., $1195/mo incls ht/prkg, near Metra. 773.743.4141 Urban Equities.com

NEWLY REMOD 1BR & Studios starting at $580. No sec dep, move in fee or app fee. Free heat/ hot water. 1155 W. 83rd St., 773619-0204

W RGS PK spac. studio: full kit. New appl, carpet & windows, AC $ 825/incls heat. 774-743-4141 www.urbanequities.com

ward Rent Beautiful Studios 1, 2, 3 & 4 BR Sect. 8 Welc. Westside Loc, Must qualify. 773-287-4500 www.wjmngmt.com

SOUTH SHORE NEAR 72nd

Place, 3BR unit on 2nd flr, newly remodeled w/lndry facilities in bsmt, $ 900/mo Avail June 1. 312-683-5284 Newly updated, clean furnished rooms, located near buses & Metra, elevator, utilities included, $91/wk. $ 395/mo. 815-722-1212

û NO SEC DEP û

1431 W. 78th St 1BR. $500/MO HEAT INCL 773-955-5106

APPROVED, SECTION 8! 2BR,

4 RM, Modern, Hardwood’s, Sue773-467-8200, 773-405-9361, 69th/ May

5 ROOM, 2BEDRM, SECTION 8

APPROVED! Total new REHAB! Big, clean, 70th Elizabeth. Call 773-4059361. $920

MARQUETTE PARK: 6315-19 S . California, 1 Bedrooms from $675, 2 Bedrooms from $825. Heat included. Call 312.208.1771

1 BR $1100 AND OVER LINCOLN SQUARE, 2629 W.

Winnemac beautiful 2BR apartment. New bath and remodeled kitchen, hardwood floor, big apartment. Wate r/gas + heat included. Close to Brown Line. No pets. $1350 + deposit. 773-710-5100

1 BR OTHER IMMEDIATE AVAILABILITY Affordable housing-section 8 preferences for Senior 62+. Near elderly with disabilities 50-61 & near elderly 50-61. Beautiful Park like setting near University Commons. Pay 30% of income for rent (Sec. 8) Appliances, A/C & Heating. Indoor hallways, laundry facilities and rec. rooms. Cable ready, gated parking, Wheelchair accessible units. Congressman George Collins Apartments, 312-243-5048 EHO/H

CHICAGO, RENT TO OWN! Buy with no closing costs and get help with your credit. Call 708868-2422 or visit www.nhba.com 1BRS, 1ST & 2nd flrs, Newly rehab, hdwd flrs, spac, appls, lndry facility, Quiet bldg. Gated backyard. Sec 8 ok. 773-344-4050 CHICAGO SOUTH SIDE Beauti-

ful Studios, 1,2,3 & 4 BR’s, Sec 8 ok. $500 gift certificate for Sec 8 tenants. 773-287-9999/312-446-3333

NO SECURITY DEPOSIT NO MOVE IN FEE 1, 2, 3 BEDROOM APTS (773) 874-1122 ACACIA SRO HOTEL Men Preferred! Rooms for Rent. Weekly & Monthly Rates. 312-421-4597

2 BR UNDER $900 7701 S. South Shore Dr. 2 BDs with 1.5 Baths, Large Combo Living-Dining Rm, FREE Heat & cking gas. Prkng extra. $785-$850, Kalabich Mgmt (708)424-4216

LOGAN SQUARE 2 Bedroom

Apartment. Modern kitchen & bath, balcony, washer & dryer in unit. $850/MO. 773-235-1066

73RD/INDIANA, 2BR,

88TH/DAUPHIN, 2BR. $800$1000.Spac, good trans, laundry on site, sec camera. 312-341-1950

2BR W/ NEW CARPET, cherry kit cabinets & Kolher prod., tenant pays heat, 8632 Escanaba, $650/mo + security. Call 773-415-4970 SOUTH SUBURBAN HARVEY East near 159th/Halsted, newly remodeled, 2BR, appl. off St. prk. $775 + 1 mo. sec. 708-289-5168

14141 SOUTH SCHOOL ST, Riverdale, IL. All new remodeled 2BR, 1BA apartment. $825/month. Call 312-217-6556 CHICAGO

7600 S Essex 2BR

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

CHATHAM - CLEAN, XL, very

nice, 2BR, 3rd FL, Penthouse, quiet bldg, new H/W flrs, new appls, heat incl. $879. 312-857-8480. Avail Now.

AUBURN GRESHAM, 1401-11 West 80th, 2beds from $775, Free heat – no deposit. Call 312.208.1771

2 BR $900-$1099 BEVERLY, Modern 1BR, newly decor, carpet, stove & fridge, intercom & lndry room. $770 + sec. Vicinity of 111th & Western. 773-238-7203 SEC 8 WELC 86th/Exchange

Beautiful, Newly remod. in 2 flat bldg, 2BR, LR/DR combo, nr metra. $1021. Jewel 773-419-5935

CHICAGO, 8419 S. Maryland, modern 2BR beauty, formal dining room, $950/mo. Section 8 Welcome. Call 773-485-7154 AUSTIN AREA PINE & Huron,

lrg 4BR. Remod, carpet, appls, tenant pays utils, parking incl, good trans. $1,075 + 1 mo. sec. 773-278-3805

2 BR $1100-$1299 EAST ROGERS PARK, steps to

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

ADULT SERVICES

ELMHURST: Dlx 1BR, new appl, new carpet, AC, balc. overlook pool, $925/mo. incl heat, prkg, OS Laundry. 773-743-4141 www. urbanequities.com BRONZVILLE, 32XX S Prarie,

2br, no formal dinning rm, tenant pays util, $1100 mo plus move in fee, 773-203-6594

SOUTH SHORE - 2BR, 1.5BA,

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

LYNWOOD, 2BR, 1BA, c-fans,

heat, appls, A/C, pkng, cer flrs, new crpt, balc. $1200. Credit check, sec dep, no pets. 773-721-6086

2 BR $1300-$1499 5828 S MICHIGAN. 2BR $1300, 3BR $1400 w/2BA, LR, DR, kitchen, sun and back porches. 773-370-1952

2 BR OTHER ROUND LAKE BEACH, IL Cedar

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

AFFORDABLE 2 & 3BRS FROM $625-$745. Newly decorated,

2BR APT: LR/DR, carpet, stove / refrigerator furnished. Section 8 & Seniors Welcome. Call 773-287-7512 or 773-430-0089

7651 S. DREXEL, 1st floor, 3BR, liv rm, kitch., newly remod, ceramic tiles, heat not incl, $950/mo + 1 mo sec. Sec 8 OK. 708-474-6520

FURNISHED ROOM for rent, cable and laundry room included. Private bath. Call for more information. 708-253-9593

GENERAL

CHICAGO - FURNISHED ROOM FOR RENT, 52nd/Marshfield,

3 BR OR MORE $1200-$1499

WRIGLEYVILLE 2BR 1100sqft new appls, FDR, oak floors, cac. OS lndry, $1495 + utils. Prkg avail. 773-743-4141 urbanequities.com

3 BR OR MORE UNDER $1200

MUST SEE S. SUBURBS Newly Renovated. 3BR, 2BA, fin bsmt, 2 car gar, Seniors Welcome. $1250 /mo + 1.5 mo sec. No pets. 773-941-8254

3 BR OR MORE $1800-$2499

NR CERMAK/PULASKI, updated 3BR, hdwd flrs, lrg kit & BA, laundry hookup, 2nd flr, tenant pays utils, nr pink line $950 + dep. 708-249-6661

CALUMET CITY, 3BR, 2 full BA, fully rehabbed w/ gorgeous finishes, CAC & appliances incl., porch, Section 8 OK. $1100/mo. 510-735-7171 80TH & PHILLIPS, Beautiful 1st flr, 3 lrg BR, 1.5BA, new renov, hdwd flrs & appls incl. Off street prkng. $1150/mo & up. 312-8180236 CHATHAM-3BR 1.5BA, STOVE /HEAT incl, laundry in bsmt, 7900 block of Langley, Sec 8 Ok. $1129/mo. Mr. Johnson, 630-424-1403 54TH & INDIANA. large 4br 1.

5ba, newly decorated, hardwood floors, sect 8 ok. $1150/mo + 1 mo security. 773-238-9770

PHOENIX near 153rd and 5th Ave. 4BR, 2BA, excellent condition. Pets OK.$1250/mo + sec. 773-615-5698 ROSELAND, SINGLE FAMILY Home, 3BR, 1.5BA, C/A, newly renov. 9600 Blk Wentworth, $1325. Sect 8 ok. Call Mr. Johnson, 630-424-1403 SECT 8 OK, 2 story, 4br/2ba w/ bsmt. New decor, crpt & hdwds, ceiling fans, stove/fridge, $1465. 11243 S. Eggleston, 773-443-5397

3 BR OR MORE $1500-$1799

SOUTH SUBURBS, 4BR, modern kitchen & bath, dining room. Sect 8 OK, 2 car garage. $1250/mo & up + sec. 847-909-1538.

JACKSON/CICERO 5BR, updated kit, 2BA, hdwd flrs, cer tile, W/D

ENGLEWOOD 2-4BR unit apts in 2 unit gated bldgs, hdwd flrs, pets OK, no sec dep, W/D & appls incl, tenant pays own utils

90TH/LAFLIN 3BR heated, decorated. $1075; 84TH PL in Chatham. 5.5 rooms, 2BR, $975. heated, decorated. 312-946-0130

ALB PK DLX 3BR + den, new kit, SS appl, granite, oak flrs, on-site lndy, $1495/+ util. 773-743-4141 w ww.urbanequities.com

ADULT SERVICES

CHICAGO SOUTH - YOU’VE tried the rest, we are the best. Apartments & Homes for rent, city hardwood floors, washer/dryer, cen- & suburb. No credit checks. tral air, fireplace, outside porch and 773-221-7490, 773-221-7493 patio with grill, garage available. 3 BED ROOM house attached $2150/mo. 773-274-4775. garage housing choice voucher welcome just rehabbed 708-960-2157 BR OR MORE 4BR 1BA REMODELED home for rent nr 104th/Wabash. Util not OTHER included. Large Kitchen/Encl Back 10234 S. CRANDON, small Porch. Sec 8 OK. 773-750-3749 home, 3BR, 1BA, kit & util room, 2122 W. 68TH PL. Remodeled totally ren a/c, all appls incl, nice 5BR House, 2BA, Central Air, Tenfncd yd, CHA welcome. 773-317- ant pays utilities, security system. 4357 Sec 8 ok. Call Roy 312-405-2178

HARRISON/CICERO Updated 5BR, upper duplex, 2 Kitchens, 2BA, W/D, no pets, tenant pays utils. $1550+dep. 708-249-6661

hkup, nr blue line, tenant pays utils. No Pets $1650+dep. 708-249-6661

ADULT SERVICES

SECTION 8 WELCOME West

103rd Street, small 2 bedroom. No security deposit. Heat and appls included. 773-719-2695

88TH & HARPER St., Newly remod 3BR, 2BA, ten pays utils. 1 months rent & sec req’d. $1400. Also, 1BR avail, $1000 + utils. Avail July 1st. Section 8 Welcome. 310-529-1531

LUXURIOUS, SPLENDID CHARACTER designed with stain ed glass, 1st floor, 3BR, 2BA,

SECTION 8 WELC. 8457 S Brandon, 4BR, 1st flr, 2 & 3BR voucher ok. 2707 E 93rd St., 2nd flr, 5BR, 3BR voucher ok. 847-3125643.

CHICAGO Renovated 3 bedroom house. Located 66th & Hoyne. $900 a month excluding utilities. 312-218-0027

773-715-1591

CHICAGO HOUSES FOR rent. Section 8 Ok, w/app credit $500 gift certificate 3, 4 & 5 BR houses avail. 312-446-3333 or 708-752-3812

NEWLY REHABBED 1BR Apt. $750. 3 & 5BR single family homes w / 2BA. $1200-$1500. Sect 8 Welc. 773-431-2968

heated/unheated. 1 Month Free for qualified tenants. CRS (312) 782-4041

GLENWOOD, Updated lrg 2BR Condo, H/F High School. Balc, C/ A, appls, heat/water incl. 2 prkng, lndry. $975/mo. 708-268-3762.

ALB PK DLX 3BR + den, new kit, SS appl, granite, oak flrs, on-site lndy, $1495/+ util. 773-743-4141 w ww.urbanequities.com

CHICAGO-

LARGE

3BR apt,

hardwood floors, fans, stove, fridge and heat incl. Section 8 Welcome. Call 773-581-8348 or 773-350-0788

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

units fully heated and humidity controlled with ac available. North: Knox Avenue. 773-685-6868. South: Pershing Avenue. 773-523-6868.

roommates SOUTH SHORE, Senior

$100 - $125/week. All utilities included. 773-616-7673

MARKETPLACE

GOODS

23RD EDGEWATER NEIGHBORHOOD YARD SALE Saturday June 3rd 9am-to-4pm Over 200 sellers+business sidewalk sales. Foster(5200N) to Devon(6400N), Clark(1600W) to Sheridan(900W). Online map: tinyurl.com/Edgewater2017. Seven Edgewater block clubs, Edgewater Beach Apts, (5555NSheridan) & Malibu East Condominiums (6033NSheridan). Free parking St. Andrews Church, Hollywood/Sheridan(5700N/900W) & Chicago Fire Station 6030N Clark(1600W)

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 EVANSTON LAKEFRONT MULTI-FAMILY YARD SALE May 27 & 28, 9-4. Household items, antiques, many sized ladies clothing, mens shoes 9.5. Sheridan to Lee, right to Edgemere. MASSAGE TABLES, NEW and

HEALTH & WELLNESS FULL BODY MASSAGE. hotel, house calls welcome $90

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

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

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

MUSIC & ARTS

TRACY GUNS AND Britney Beach rocks GunsNRoses, Aerosmith, Britney S, with summertime Slash fun. Metallica, Lady Ga, AC/DC. Live & Love, Hollywood Axl Rose, 773481-7429.

NOTICES JUSTIN,

Happy 1st Anniversary! Hidden deep in the ads of all of our favorite cities, you should find a message from me. Happy hunting, Dreamboat! -Linett

MESSAGES SPIRITUAL PSYCHIC READER TELLS you past, present and future,

helps with all problems, could do where others have failed. Call now for FREE consultation 630-408-4789

Discount. Male preferred. Furnished rooms, shared kitchen & bath, $550/ mo. & up. Utilities included. 773-710-5431

used. Large selection of professional high quality massage equipment at a very low price. Visit us at www. bestmassage.com or call us, 773764-6542.

SOUTHSIDE, Newly Remod 3BR /2BA with appls & washer/dryer. Also, newly remod 2BR with appls & WD hk up 773-908-8791

SHARED APT, PRIVATE bedroom, male preferred. No drugs or alcohol, 7300 block of S. Vernon, Chicago, IL, 60619. Call 773-580-4141

SUGAR GROVE - Church Sale, Rt

47 & Bliss Rd. Fri 5/26 & Sat 5/27, 9a-7p. Shop away at one of the largest church sales! Email garagesale@ villagebible.org

TER / Mailbox/forwarding Service. Profitable for 40 years with 800 clients on Michigan Ave. Plenty of potential, turnkey operation. Will train with free consulting. $150,000. Write MCOC10@aol.com

ADULT SERVICES

MORGAN PARK - $1600/mo.

115th & S. Throop. Remodeled 5BR, 2BA, Hdwd flrs, fenced yard, near trans, Sect. 8 welc. 773-766-2640

BUSINESS OPS OWNER RETIRING / MAIL CEN-

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

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MAY 25, 2017 | CHICAGO READER 39

GOOD WOMAN

MARRY BETWEEN AGE OF 47 T0 70! TO

STRAIGHT DOPE By Cecil Adams Q : Please shed some light on

presidential executive orders. It would seem that they can’t create laws, approve funding, or interpret existing laws. So what can they do? And why, especially as used by the current president, are they so powerful?

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A : If you’re looking for a silver lining to this storm cloud of a presidency, well, at least we’re getting an intensive refresher course in civics. As scary as it may seem in the wrong hands, an executive order is nothing more than a U.S. president’s directive to the departments he oversees, instructing his subordinates in how to go about their business. Every president’s issued at least one of them, except poor old William Henry Harrison, who never got a chance. The most famous of them all, probably, came from the pen of Abe Lincoln: a little number called the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln, in fact, also issued executive order number one, though putting it that way is a bit misleading. The State Department didn’t start officially numbering the orders till 1907, beginning retroactively in 1862 with the oldest they then had on file, one granting parole to wartime political prisoners—some of whom had been taken into custody following the most controversial act of Lincoln’s presidency, the executive order suspending habeas corpus that allowed the military to imprison suspected traitors without review. An executive order is how Roosevelt ordered the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII, how Truman integrated the armed forces afterward, and how Eisenhower sent troops to Little Rock to integrate the schools. As direct and functional as an executive order can be, its legal nature is surprisingly fuzzy. There’s no explicit constitutional authorization for an EO, though it’s hard to imagine presidents acting without something like it at their disposal. An EO isn’t a law, because only Congress can pass those, but it has the force of law—at least unless and until Congress decides to pass a law to counteract it, or the courts say it’s not kosher. Eﬀectively, the president’s executive power is reciprocal to congressional initiative: where Congress has said nothing about an issue, executive power is at its height; where it’s given pretty clear instructions, a president’s hands are largely tied. Because presidential power is so poorly defined, it’s easy for opponents to paint the issuing of high-profile orders as undemocratic power grabs. And certain orders do seem

to skirt the limits of presidential power, especially, these days, in the arena of immigration. Obama’s big immigration initiatives were instituted by executive order, but courts hobbled their implementation; of course, Trump’s two attempts thus far at so-called “extreme vetting” measures have been even more severely curtailed. Here, at least, there seem to be effective judicial checks on any overreach. Sometimes critics will simply accuse a president of issuing too many executive orders, period. It’s hard, though, to imagine any president beating the record 3,721 orders signed by FDR, which haven’t seemed to mar his reputation too badly. Trump, meanwhile, signed 33 in his ﬁrst 100 days—more than anyone since Truman, who had a war to wrap up. You’d ﬁgure he can’t maintain a pace like that, though with this guy, who knows? Self-promotion being his bread and butter, Trump has naturally played up the theatricality of his executive-order signings, making them seem more momentous than they are. As you point out, the president can’t allocate the funds necessary for his initiatives on his own, though he can direct a federal agency to use its existing budget toward a certain end—a border wall, let’s say. Certain of Trump’s executive orders may be intended to torpedo Obama-era policies, but there are bureaucratic procedures in place that slow down changes of course. Once a federal agency has issued a rule, for instance, it can’t then just reverse itself without first undertaking a lengthy review process, no matter how ardently a new president may long to undo his predecessor’s work. Ultimately, the number of executive orders a president signs doesn’t really tell us a lot about what the president is getting done. Much of the power of the presidency has historically been exercised through less attention-getting means, in the everyday maintenance of the government. This is the sort of subtlety, one suspects, that President Donald J. Trump may not be destined to grasp. v Send questions to Cecil via straightdope.com or write him c/o Chicago Reader, 350 N. Orleans, Chicago 60654.

SAVAGE LOVE

By Dan Savage

Can consenting adults be protected in the event of death? A dom considering breath play wants to know. Plus: solvable problems Q : I have two female sex

partners who want to be breath-play dominated. I know the practice is dangerous, and I employ the rules of consent and communication a pro dom escort friend taught me. But is there a legal release document we could sign that protects consenting adults in the event of an accident or death? —RUMINATING ABOUT CONSENSUAL KINKS

A : Restricting someone’s air

intake is always dangerous, RACK, and while we all too often hear about people dying during solo breath play, aka autoerotic asphyxiation (an activity no one should engage in ever), we rarely hear about someone dying during partnered breath play. That said, RACK, someone can’t consent to being strangled to death by accident. “The lawyers in my office discussed this, and we agree that there is no way to ‘waive’ or ‘consent to’ criminal negligence resulting in substantial bodily harm or death,” said Brad Meryhew, a criminal defense attorney who practices in Seattle. “I don’t think you’ll find any lawyer who would draft such an agreement. Even if an agreement were executed, it is not going to constitute a complete defense if something goes wrong. There are principles of criminal liability for the consequences of our decisions, as well as public-policy concerns about people engaging in extremely dangerous behaviors, that make it impossible to just walk away if something goes wrong.” Another concern: Signing such a document could make breath play more dangerous, not less. “A person who had such a waiver might be tempted to push

the boundaries even further,” said Meryhew. And now the pro dom perspective . . . “As consenting adults, we assume the risks involved in this type of kink,” said Mistress A Elena. “But if you harm your partner or they become scared, shamed, shocked, or, even worse, gravely injured, it’s the dom’s problem. At any time, the submissive can change their mind. Some cases have been classified as ‘rape’ or ‘torture’ afterward, even though consent was initially given. It’s our job as dominants/ tops/leads to make sure everyone is safe, consenting, and capable.”

Q : I’m a 32-year-old guy, my

gal is 34, and we’ve been together for two years. Every time we get it on or she goes down on me (though not when I eat her out), my mind wanders to fantasies involving porno chicks, exes, or local baristas. A certain amount of this is normal, but I’m concerned that this now happens every time. When I’m about to come, I shift my mind back to my partner and we have a hot climax, but I feel guilty. Advice? —GUILTY OVER NEBULOUS ECSTASY

A : Your letter, GONE,

is a good example of the solvable problem. And, as is often the case, the solution to your problem is right there in your letter. You’re able to “shift [your] mind” back to your partner when you’re about to come, and when you eat her out, your mind doesn’t wander at all. My advice: make the shift earlier/often and engage in more activities that force you to focus (like eating her out). Problem solved. P.S. A lot of people allow their mind to wander a bit during sex—supplementing

the present sensations with memories, fantasies, local baristas, etc. If it keeps you hard/wet/game and isn’t perceptible (if you don’t start mumbling coffee orders), your partner benefits from your wanderings.

Q : My college girlfriend

and I were together for four years. The relationship ended ten years ago when she cheated on me. She did eventually marry the guy, so, hey, good for them. She recently gave birth to a boy. She gave her son my name as his middle name. Nobody in either family has this name, and it isn’t an especially common name. I’ve asked dozens of people with kids, and nobody can think of a reason why a person would give their child a name anywhere close to an ex’s name. Thoughts?

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A : Maybe your college girlfriend remembers you a little too fondly. Maybe a family friend had the same name. Maybe she met someone else with your name in the last ten years, and she and her husband had a few threesomes with that guy, and she remembers those fondly. Maybe you’ll run into her someday and she’ll tell you the real reason. Now here are a few definitelys to balance out all those maybes, NAMES. This is definitely none of your business, and you definitely can’t do anything about it—people can definitely give their children whatever names they want— and there’s definitely no use in stressing out about it. v Send letters to mail@ savagelove.net. Download the Savage Lovecast every Tuesday at savagelovecast. com. ß @fakedansavage

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MAY 25, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 41

b Katy Perry 10/24-25, 7 PM, United Center, second show added

UPCOMING

Passion Pit o COURTESY THE ARTIST

NEW

Actress, Elysia Crampton 8/24, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Afrojack 6/9, 10 PM, Prysm Nightclub Peter Asher, Albert Lee 7/22, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 5/26, 10 AM b Nicole Atkins 8/8, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 5/26, 10 AM b Axwell & Ingrosso 6/10, 10 PM, Prysm Nightclub Bingo Players 6/9, 10 PM, Sound-Bar Bondax 7/14-15, 10 PM, the Mid Cafe Tacvba 7/6, 5:30 PM, Petrillo Music Shell, Grant Park, part of Taste of Chicago b Alessia Cara, Eryn Allen Kane 7/5, 5:30 PM, Petrillo Music Shell, Grant Park, part of Taste of Chicago b Coathangers 7/27, 9 PM, Beat Kitchen Datsik 6/8, 10 PM, the Mid D.D. Dumbo 9/20, 9 PM, Schubas, 18+ Diplo 6/10, 10 PM, the Mid Dopamines 6/27, 9 PM, Beat Kitchen Doro 9/14, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ D.R.I. 10/15, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Richard Edwards 9/9, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, on sale Fri 5/26, 10 AM, 18+ Elder, King Buffalo 10/17, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Enuff Z’nuff 10/14, 8 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint Alejandro Escovedo & Joe Ely 8/24-25, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 5/25, noon b Ex-Cult 8/14, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Excision 6/10, 10 PM, House of Blues, 18+

Rachelle Ferrell 8/4, 7 and 10 PM and 8/5, 7 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 5/25, noon b Martin Garrix 6/11, 10 PM, Prysm Nightclub Griz 6/10, 10 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Ben Harper & the Innocent Criminals, Twin Peaks 7/7, 5:30 PM, Petrillo Music Shell, Grant Park, part of Taste of Chicago b Headhunterz 6/11, 10 PM, Sound-Bar High Kings 8/10, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 5/25, noon b Jauz 6/11, 10 PM, the Mid Keys N Krates 6/9, 10 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Valentino Khan 7/7, 10 PM, the Mid Sonny Landreth 8/18, 9 PM, FitzGerald’s, Berwyn, on sale Fri 5/26, 11 AM Jesse Malin 8/6, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Mandolin Orange 9/20, 7:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Marshmello 6/9, 10 PM, the Mid Miguel Migs 6/16, 10 PM, Smart Bar Million Tongues Festival with Heron Oblivion, Narita of High Rise, Charalambides, Mark Fosson, Spires That in the Sunset Rise, and more 8/11-12, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Moon Boots 6/9, 10 PM, Smart Bar New Mastersounds 8/8, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ O’Jays, Maurice Jackson’s Independents 7/9, 4:30 PM, Petrillo Music Shell, Grant Park, part of Taste of Chicago b Joan Osborne 9/5-6, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 5/25, noon b

42 CHICAGO READER - MAY 25, 2017

Passion Pit 7/8, 4:30 PM, Petrillo Music Shell, Grant Park, part of Taste of Chicago b Penny & Sparrow 9/21, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall Polish Ambassador 6/30, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Pretty Lights 8/18-19, 7 PM, Huntington Bank Pavilion Ribfest Chicago with Diane Coﬀee, Grizfolk, Norah Struthers, and more 6/9-11, Lincoln between Irving Park and Berteau b Scarface 6/17, 10 PM, the Promontory Sun Kil Moon 10/3, 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, on sale Fri 5/26, 8 AM b Tiger & Woods 6/23, 10 PM, Smart Bar Toasters 9/14, 8:30 PM, Beat Kitchen, on sale Fri 5/26, 10 AM Tonstartssbandht 6/30, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Undead 8/26, 7:30 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint Urbano Black Pride Party with Serayah 7/1, 11 PM, Metro Waka Flocka Flame 7/15, 7 PM, Metro b What So Not 6/11, 10 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Wild Reeds 8/13, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 5/26, 10 AM b Wire 9/16, 8 PM, Metro, 18+ Zomboy 7/21, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, 17+

UPDATED Afghan Whigs, Har Mar Superstar 9/22-23, 9 PM, Metro, second show added, 18+ Between the Buried & Me, Contortionist 9/30-10/1, 6:30 PM, Bottom Lounge, 9/30 sold out, 10/1 added b

A Giant Dog 7/6, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Appleseed Cast 6/9, 9 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Bobby Bare Jr. 6/14, 9 PM, Hideout Big Business 6/23, 9 PM, Subterranean Body/Head, Diamond Terriﬁer Cipher 6/24, 7 PM, Bohemian National Cemetery Cap’n Jazz, Hop Along 7/29, 7 PM, House of Vans, 18+ F Chameleons Vox 9/14, 8:30 PM, 1st Ward, 18+ Neil Cowley Trio 6/26, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall Evan Dando 6/20, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall Descendents 10/7, 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre b Beth Ditto 7/17, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Earth, Wind & Fire; Chic 7/26, 8 PM, United Center Elf Power 7/18, 8:30 PM, Beat Kitchen Alejandro Escovedo Band 6/11, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Fleet Foxes 10/3-4, 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre Future, Migos 6/2, 7 PM, Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, Tinley Park Future Generations, Private Island 7/26, 8:30 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Alex G 6/28, 6:45 PM, Bottom Lounge b Freddie Gibbs 6/22, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ Hail the Sun 6/14, 6:30 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Halsey, Partynextdoor, Charli XCX 11/19, 7 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont Horse Lords 6/10, 9 PM, Hideout In the Valley Below 7/18, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Iron Maiden, Ghost 6/15, 7:30 PM, Hollywood Casino Ampitheatre, Tinley Park b J. Cole 7/24, 8 PM, United Center Japandroids, Cloud Nothings 11/2, 8 PM, the Vic, 18+ King Crimson 6/28, 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre Lake Street Dive 7/20-22, 8 PM, Thalia Hall Mark Lanegan Band 8/22, 9 PM, Thalia Hall, 18+ Meg Mac 6/20, 8 PM, Schubas Matt the Electrician, Antje Duvekot 8/3, 7:30 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Imelda May 6/30, 8 PM, Park West, 18+ Melvins 7/25, 8 PM, Metro, 18+ Morbid Angel, Suﬀocation, Revocation 6/3, 8 PM, Metro, 18+

ALL AGES

WOLF BY KEITH HERZIK

EARLY WARNINGS

CHICAGO SHOWS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT IN THE WEEKS TO COME

Never miss a show again. Sign up for the newsletter at chicagoreader. com/early

The National 12/12-13, 7:30 PM, Civic Opera House b Nite Jewel 7/19, 7 PM, 1st Ward, 18+ OK Go 6/29, 7:30 PM, the Vic b Okkervil River 7/21, 7 and 10 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b Piebald 7/29, 9 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Pinback 10/11-12, 9 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Pixies, Mitski 10/8, 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre Queen & Adam Lambert 7/13, 8 PM, United Center Chuck Ragan 6/3, 10 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Rasputina 8/10, 7 PM, Subterranean Royal Headache 7/9, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Sigur Ros 6/3, 8 PM, Auditorium Theatre Thou 7/3, 5 PM, Subterranean b Undergang 7/21, 8 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Uniform 6/24, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Verite 8/28, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ War on Drugs 10/19, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ Xasthur 6/1, 8:30 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Young the Giant, Cold War Kids 9/9, 7 PM, Huntington Bank Pavilion Hans Zimmer 8/4, 8 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont

SOLD OUT Chon 6/11, 6:15 PM, Cobra Lounge b Florida Georgia Line, Backstreet Boys 8/12, 7 PM, Wrigley Field Future Islands 6/6, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ Hot Stove Cool Music with Twin Peaks 6/2, 8 PM, Metro, 18+ Lady Gaga 8/25, 7 PM, Wrigley Field Lollapalooza with Muse, Lorde, Killers, Chance the Rapper, Arcade Fire, Cage the Elephant, and more 8/36, Grant Park LP 6/9, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall b Tool 6/8, 8 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont Walk Oﬀ the Earth 7/7, 8 PM, House of Blues b Zakk Sabbath, Beastmaker 6/2, 9 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ v

GOSSIP WOLF A furry ear to the ground of the local music scene HAVING SURVIVED 20 CHICAGO winters since moving here from Florida in the late 90s, writer and musician Brian Costello is decamping for Los Angeles over Memorial Day weekend. Not only has he been a valued contributor to the Reader for more than a decade, he’s also drummed in garage-rock bands such as Outer Minds and the Functional Blackouts, hosted the reliably awesome live game show Shame That Tune (as well as a few live talk shows), and published two hilarious and ribald novels, Losing in Gainesville and The Enchanters vs. Sprawlburg Springs. Costello’s farcical history “The Fall and Rise of ‘The Worst Commercial Ever Made’” (which ran in the Reader’s 2012 fiction issue) remains among the best critiques of local latenight TV and backward celebrations of homerism this wolf has ever seen! Costello says he’s “moving for the same reason I moved to Chicago from Florida—to shake things up. I’ve been writing screenplays and would like to move in that direction. That said, LA feels like the next logical step.” Good luck, Brian! We’ll miss you! On Sunday, May 28, Chicago producer and Treated Crew member Nasim Williams celebrates Memorial Day weekend with a free 12-hour party that kicks oﬀ at 2 PM at Madison Public House (2200 N. Milwaukee). Williams has corralled a bunch of talented buddies to perform with him, including Vic Spencer, the Boy Illinois, White Gzus, Henny B, Camay, Sisi Dior, and the DJs behind monthly juke and footwork night Mucho Culo. Lincoln Park venue the Elbo Room hosts a doozy of a show on Sunday, May 28, headlined by acclaimed Brooklyn rapper Gregory Skyler Taylor, better known as Skyzoo. He’ll be supported by three ace local MCs: Nicholas May, Jon Content, and Navarro, who recently appeared on a single called “Respect It” by a fellow Moleman, producer Panik. The show starts at 8 PM; tickets are $15 in advance, $18 at the door. —J.R. NELSON AND LEOR GALIL Got a tip? Tweet @Gossip_Wolf or e-mail gossipwolf@chicagoreader.com.

WINTER

SURFER BLOOD

JUN 17

EVAN DANDO

JUN 20

RUN RIVER NORTH + TWINSMITH

ROONEY

JUN 22

NEIL COWLEY TRIO

JUN 26

WHY DON’T WE

JUL 21

BOB SCHNEIDER

JUL 28

NEW

OF MARGOT & THE NUCLEAR SO AND SO’S

RICHARD EDWARDS

SEP 09

NEW

PENNY & SPARROW

SEP 21

TRAVIS LINVILLE

TICKETS AT WWW.LH-ST.COM

THE SEA THE SEA

JUN 08

JIMMY LUMPKIN

SEAN ROWE

JUN 09

HUNNY

JUN 10

ARCLIGHT

BENT KNEE

JUN 12

THOMAS WYNN & THE BELIEVERS

JUN 13

BJ BARHAM OF AMERICAN AQUARIUM

JUN 17

JAKÜBI

JUN 17

SPIRAL STAIRS

JUN 19

NEW

KING WASHINGTON + BITTERSWEET DRIVE

LAIK

POOL HOLOGRAPH + THE DRAFTS

MAY 25, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 43