Print Issue of June 7, 2018 (Volume 47, Number 35)

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

2018 Chicago Blues Festival

Remembering Uncle Fun 6 The Chicago Underground Film Festival at 25 12

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INTERIM EXECUTIVE EDITOR DAVE NEWBART CREATIVE DIRECTOR VINCE CERASANI DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY JAMIE RAMSAY CULTURE EDITOR AIMEE LEVITT FILM EDITOR J.R. JONES MUSIC EDITOR PHILIP MONTORO ASSOCIATE EDITORS STEVE HEISLER, JAMIE LUDWIG, KATE SCHMIDT SENIOR WRITER MIKE SULA SENIOR THEATER CRITIC TONY ADLER STAFF WRITERS MAYA DUKMASOVA, LEOR GALIL, DEANNA ISAACS, BEN JORAVSKY, PETER MARGASAK, JULIA THIEL SOCIAL MEDIA EDITOR RYAN SMITH GRAPHIC DESIGNER SUE KWONG MUSIC LISTINGS COORDINATOR LUCA CIMARUSTI FILM LISTINGS COORDINATOR PATRICK FRIEL CONTRIBUTORS NOAH BERLATSKY, ALLISON DUNCAN, JORDANNAH ELIZABETH, ANNE FORD, ISA GIALLORENZO, JOHN GREENFIELD, ANDREA GRONVALL, KT HAWBAKER, JUSTIN HAYFORD, JACK HELBIG, TANNER HOWARD, IRENE HSIAO, DAN JAKES, MONICA KENDRICK, H. MELT, BILL MEYER, MICHAEL MINER, J.R. NELSON, MARISSA OBERLANDER, MARK PETERS, LEAH PICKETT, JANET POTTER, BEN SACHS, DMITRY SAMAROV, KATE SIERZPUTOWSKI, OLIVER SAVA, TIFFANY WALDEN, KEVIN WARWICK, BRIANNA WELLEN, DAVID WHITEIS, ALBERT WILLIAMS INTERN MATTHEW HARVEY, KATIE POWERS ---------------------------------------------------------------ADVERTISING DIRECTOR CHRISTOPHER BEST SENIOR ACCOUNT MANAGER EVANGELINE MILLER DIRECTOR OF DIGITAL JOHN DUNLEVY ADVERTISING COORDINATOR HERMINIA BATTAGLIA ---------------------------------------------------------------DISTRIBUTION CONCERNS distributionissues@chicagoreader.com CHICAGO READER 30 N. RACINE, SUITE 300 CHICAGO, IL 60607 312-222-6920 CHICAGOREADER.COM ---------------------------------------------------------------READER (ISSN 1096-6919) IS PUBLISHED WEEKLY

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FEATURES

The Reader’s guide to the 2018 Chicago Blues Festival

The 82-year-old pianist may be Chicago’s last living link to a tradition that arose more than a century ago.

The fest expands its footprint in Millennium Park with a diverse lineup that includes boogiewoogie pianist Erwin Helfer, southern soul-blues star Ms. Jody, and the Rising Stars Fife & Drum Band with Shardé Thomas.

BY DAVID WHITEIS 20

Shardé Thomas propels the Rising Stars Fife & Drum Band into a new century

The granddaughter of fife master Otha Turner flavors a Mississippi hill country tradition with modern hip-hop and R&B.

BY BILL DAHL AND DAVID WHITEIS 16

BY DAVID WHITEIS 22

Gene Barge blew his sax on some of the wildest R&B hits of the 60s

The Blues Festival pays tribute to the 91-year-old “Daddy G” with a set with by his longest-running band, the Chicago Rhythm & Blues Kings.

BY BILL DAHL 17

Willie Clayton still has his sterling voice as his career nears its golden anniversary

For his fourth appearance on the Blues Festival’s main stage, the southern soul king will be cooking with a full band— backup singers, horn players, and all.

Ms. Jody always respects herself in the morning

The southern soul-blues star can get pretty raunchy, but never at the expense of her self-worth or good sense.

BY DAVID WHITEIS 24

BY BILL DAHL 18

IN THIS ISSUE

CITY LIFE

COPYRIGHT © 2018 CHICAGO READER. PERIODICAL POSTAGE PAID AT CHICAGO, IL.

5 Chicagoans After 190 columns, the Reader’s Studs Terkel, Anne Ford, calls it a day. Plus: six of Ford’s favorite Chicagoans.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. CHICAGO READER, READER, AND REVERSED R: REGISTERED TRADEMARKS ®.

ARTS & CULTURE

ON THE COVER: PHOTO BY CHICAGO SUN TIMES.

Boogie-woogie torchbearer Erwin Helfer upholds the dignity, joy, and humor of an antique style

6 Movies Uncle Fun, the beloved Lakeview novelty shop, gets its own documentary.

7 Theater The new South Africa in Victory Gardens’ Mies Julie has yet to recover from the toxic colonialism and apartheid of the old South Africa.

8 Theater Lookingglass’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas and six more new stage shows, reviewed by our critics

9 Dance The Stomping Grounds festival finale caps off two months of dancing for peace.

10 Movies A student film of Roseland in the 1970s turns out to be a time capsule of a changing neighborhood.

12 Movies Gold and copper miners tough it out in Good Luck, a portrait of global labor, screening at the Chicago Underground Film Festival.

14 Movies Hotel Artemis and seven more films, reviewed by our critics

MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE

27 Shows of note Lillie Mae, Tink, Hop Along, and more of the week’s best 29 Secret History Seventies bluesrockers Iron Lung prove the suburbs can outweird the city.

FOOD & DRINK

33 Restaurant Review: Frunchroom The new Portage Park spot is the Jewish-Italian deli you didn’t know you needed in your life.

34 Cocktail Challenge Carly Gaskin of Celeste pairs gas station pork rinds with scotch.

CLASSIFIEDS

35 Jobs 35 Apartments & Spaces 36 Marketplace 36 Straight Dope “Why aren’t there flea collars for people?”

37 Savage Love A wife discovers her husband is secretly acting on his diaper fetish.

38 Early Warnings A Giant Dog, FIDLAR, Lily Allen, and more shows to look for in the weeks to come 38 Gossip Wolf Goth doesn’t age, but DJ Scary Lady Sarah’s Nocturne party turns 30 this weekend, and more music news.

JUNE 7, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 3

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CITY LIFE Chicagoans

The Chicagoan behind Chicagoans

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I WA S G O I N G TO WRITE a profile of this guy whose name I can’t remember who was and possibly still is a private tutor. He was a very colorful guy. For some reason, I got really stuck. He was a great talker. But I couldn’t get myself to write this profile. In desperation, I thought, what if I edited all together his wonderful quotes, would my editor be interested in a Studs Terkel approach? From there, I floated the idea of it being a regular thing.

Sometimes I think of a person I’ve always wanted to talk to. Then I cold-call them. I run into people at parties and they happen to mention what they do.

And I go, rrrooww. Like the firefighter. I was sitting next to him at a dinner party. I started asking very dumb questions, like do you slide down a pole? He said, no, that is a good way for people to fall through and hurt themselves.

Every so often, I would get pitched by PR people.

They mostly—I’m sorry, I don’t want to sound like a jerk—didn’t have an idea of what the series was about and just wanted to promote their clients, like there’s a new president of a nonprofit. I’m sure this is a great person, but not the kind of weird, offbeat, interesting good talker I’m looking for. It’s really difficult to explain the kind of person I’m looking for.

People have a hard time getting it. My friends would be like, I know a person who owns a jewelry boutique.

And I’d be like, what’s there, what’s interesting?

I look for someone who does interesting stuff that is also very everyday stuff. A good example is this guy, we ended up calling him the metal detectorist.

Everyone’s had the experience of losing a piece of jewelry, but what’s it like to be the person who’s always finding it? I look for someone who can tell you something interesting and new about ordinary life.

There was a really early one with this woman who was a burned-out matchmaker. Her name is April Abbott. I knew her because when I was in graduate school, she taught German to grad students. I knew she had a side gig, but I hadn’t talked to her in ten

IC HA S PH ; HA IA IR A PO RT N D ER

After 190 columns, the Reader’s Studs Terkel, Anne Ford, calls it a day.

years. I called her up. She said, “I can’t talk to you, I’m burned out.” At first I thought, bummer, but then I thought, this is way better. She was really jaded and bitter. I still remember, she had this line, “Women would come in and say, ‘Oh, I’m so attractive, I spend so much time on myself, I’m so well-read, and I work out every day,’ and I would want to say, ‘Go fuck yourself.’” She didn’t have a single shit to give. It was amazing. This may have been the peak of Chicagoans.

I never got to that point. Ending the column had nothing to do with listening to people. It was having to come up with something so regularly, feeding the beast.

I continue to be amazed at how much people will tell you if you ask. Terry Gross, who one day I will murder and replace, has a fantastic book. The title is All I Did Was Ask. It’s my life motto. I don’t think I have any special interviewing skills. It’s all being curious. If I had a really sensitive question for someone, I would save it till later in the interview, till I felt like we had a rapport. I would say, “If it’s OK to ask . . . , ” I would couch it in such a way that if it was a sensitive thing, they didn’t have to talk about it if they didn’t want to. But they usually did. I wish there was some magic way for people to speak without repercussions for their jobs or relationships. That’s another reason people referred by PR people were guarded. They had a lot to lose. I like talking to people who don’t have that much to lose.

I had a guy turn me down to be interviewed in a really interesting way. He draws gay comics,

explicit gay porn in comic form. I thought he’d be really interesting. He wrote back and he was like—I can’t remember how he phrased it, but he felt my approach was condescending, looking for people who were different and othering them. He disagreed with my entire approach. It stuck with me, because I don’t want be that way. I want to empathize with people and find out what their lives are like. I don’t want to be, “look at this freak.” But I disagreed with him that I was doing that in the first place. It was a good caution.

I’m pretty proud that I’ve never had anyone come back to me and be upset. Usually they like how it comes together. They like how it sounds, like them but better, or more concentrated. I’ve never had anyone say, ‘I didn’t say that,’ or ‘You portrayed me wrong.’ I’m not Mike Wallace. If I don’t like someone, I don’t want to write about them. I’m never out to make someone look bad or expose them. It’s an empathy-driven project.

But there was this one poor guy, he’s a rigger, the person, who, at concerts, hangs all the big lights. He mentioned he’d worked for Barry Manilow at one point, and he said Barry Manilow was an asshole.

There are hard-core Barry Manilow fans with Google alerts. One called him up pretending to be Barry Manilow’s lawyer, and he called me all freaked out. I felt really bad for him.

And there was this guy, Roger Billhardt, he’s a nude model. It turned out afterward his father’s name is also Roger Billhardt and I think he’s a lawyer.

So if people were searching for his father, they found nude pictures of his son. So I think we did something with the Google algorithm.

One of my favorite ones is this guy, Gary Arnold, I interviewed with him about his experiences living with dwarfism. He likes to ride his bike around the city, but now that everyone has a camera, some total asshole will take his picture and put it on the Internet. He told me this freaking fantastic story that happened one time. The car stopped at a red light, and he pulled his bike out in front of it and started yelling, “Give me the camera!” It turned into a standoff. He said, “I never got the camera, but I wanted that person to be as pissed off as I was.”

When I look back over the columns, my big regret is that I did not do a better job of conveying the racial and economic diversity of Chicago. There is an appalling slant towards the kind of demographic you might refer to as NPR listeners. That’s not just my problem, it’s a media problem, a radio problem, an alternative newspaper problem. But that’s the only regret I have. It was really fun. I will miss talking to people and adding to my internal database of ways to experience the world. Also, I think someone should make me a book offer. But I will not miss that feeling of, oh my god, I gotta find somebody. —AS TOLD TO AIMEE LEVITT

ANNE’S TOP SIX

Nora O’Sullivan, freelance effects artist

April Abott, ex-matchmaker

Gary Arnold, person with dwarfism

Linda Cassady, wheelchair user

Michelet Boursiquot, veteran elementary school custodian

Othman Al Ani, former refugee Go to chicagoreader.com to see more of her favorites.

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MOVIES

Just for Fun

A new documentary remembers the beloved Lakeview novelty shop Uncle Fun.

By STEVE HEISLER

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rom 1990 to 2014, Ted Frankel owned and operated Uncle Fun, a Lakeview shop that sold novelty items and gag gifts. The mild-mannered Frankel could often be seen casually sporting a jester’s cap or a wig composed of glow sticks, and his stock included such staples as bacon-flavored lip balm, glasses with googly eyes, hordes of rubber cockroaches, unicorn snow globes, and enough fake poop and vomit to fake a yearlong stomach bug. The shop’s interior, roughly the size of a Starbucks, was crammed with shelves and drawers carrying miniature high-heeled shoes, rubber finger puppets, and other knick-knacks to pad out goody bags.

Laura Scruggs, 42, began shooting the documentary Uncle Fun: You’re the One a few weeks before the shop, located on Belmont near Southport, closed in January 2014, and for the last four years she’s been interviewing former employees, regular customers, and local artists who frequented it alongside her.

You’re the One memorializes Uncle Fun and applauds Frankel for nurturing what he calls “the safe space on the Monopoly board.” Chicago Filmmakers will screen the documentary three times on Sunday, with Scruggs and her husband and producer, Jake Scruggs, taking questions at each show and Frankel appearing at the last two This is Scruggs’s first film, and she’s chosen a topic close to her heart. “I am in love with Ted,” she explains. “I’ve spent almost half my life at Uncle Fun.” As depicted in You’re the One, that love takes many forms. In one scene Scruggs, clad in a rainbow crop top and fairy wings, professes, “Ted Frankel is my spirit animal. When I told my husband about this, he said, ‘He’s not an animal.’ And when I told Ted all of this, he said, ‘I’m a whoopee cushion.’”

She flashes a smile and hugs herself.

Scruggs’s passion manifests itself in the documentary’s excess: counting her and Fran-

kel, You’re the One includes 50 talking heads.

(Her original list contained 70 names, but the roster was whittled down by Frankel.) Scruggs snooped around the Internet for more video of the store and includes those scenes alongside her own. Most of the documentary was shot with an iPad, and the interview subjects are poorly lit, the video’s production values secondary to the reminiscences. Scruggs can often be heard gasping and giggling off-camera, and she appears onscreen frequently, draped in more fairy garb and wielding an illuminated wand. When asked how much objectivity she tried to maintain, she replies, “None whatsoever.”

Frankel, 67, now lives in Baltimore with his husband, operating the gift shop at the American Visionary Art Museum. He began his fun run in 1976 with the opening of Goodies, another novelty store in Lakeview that he ran with his two sisters. According to Frankel, family conflicts drove him out of the business in 1990, and he rebounded into Uncle Fun. “He created his world out of that—a safe place for himself and everyone else,” says Scruggs.

Her infatuation with the shop began during a day trip to Chicago from Normal, Illinois.

She and a friend were killing time before a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Bailiwick Repertory Theatre (now Theater Wit) and stumbled upon the shop. “What I remember most is that I bought a green, sparkly star ring, threw it off a bridge, made a wish, and the wish came true,” she says breathlessly, as if witnessing this miracle all over again.

Scruggs’s day-to-day life is laced with such whimsy. She earned her masters in communication, media, and theater, and trained as a professional caregiver. Through Kinder Odyssey and the Maine-Niles Association of Special Recreation, she serves as a companion to young special-needs children, guiding them through school days and extracurricular programs. On weekends, she attends to a

Uncle Fun’s storefront; Ted Frankel é SETH ANDERSON; PETER HOLDERNESS/ PROVIDED

23-year-old with autism; the pair go shopping, learn piano, and see plays. She’s occasionally contracted for what she calls “freelance fairy work,” including camp programs where kids learn movement exercises, pen fairy-themed poetry, and craft custom fairy dust. She has been consulted on a few stage shows and trained the fairies for a production of Thumbelina at Lifeline Theatre. Interviewed by phone, she speaks slowly and deliberately in a high register, as if addressing a classroom of kindergarteners. “In my normal life, I can be too much for people,” she says. “But I was never too much for anybody at that store. I felt valued, appreciated.”

Scruggs has faced her share of personal difficulties. A year after Uncle Fun closed, she suffered a miscarriage. When she finally revealed this to Frankel via e-mail a few weeks ago, he wrote back, “We are blessed in many ways and these blessings are often hidden by a dense fog waiting for real life fairy wings to whisk the confusion away.”

For her next film, Scruggs is documenting fairy festivals across the country. After attending one at Spoutwood Farm in Glen Rock, Pennsylvania, she drove an hour out of her way to Baltimore. She still visits Frankel once a year. v UNCLE FUN: YOU’RE THE ONE Sun 6/10, 11:30 AM and 2 and 7 PM. Chicago Filmmakers, 5720 N. Ridge, 773-293-1447, chicagofilmmakers.org, $8.

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ARTS & CULTURE

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Celeste Williams, Heather Chrisler, and Jalen Gilbert in Mies Julie é LIZ LAUREN

THEATER

Welcome to the new South Africa

Which, as Victory Gardens’ Mies Julie shows, has yet to recover from the toxic colonialism and apartheid of the old South Africa.

By JUSTIN HAYFORD

I

t would seem that August Strindberg’s daring 1888 psychological drama Miss Julie, about an illicit, destructive, doomed love between a male servant and his master’s daughter—in a social world built around knowing one’s place—would transpose perfectly to apartheid-era South Africa.

Injecting a particularly brutal expression of state-sanctioned antiblack animus into Strindberg’s cutting tale of class, gender, and psychological trauma would surely bring the venerated but to contemporary tastes melodramatic chestnut screaming to life.

So you may be surprised to learn South African playwright Yaël Farber sets her Mies Julie, which closely parallels Strindberg’s work, nearly two decades after apartheid was dismantled—specifically on April 27, 2012, the 18th Freedom Day commemorating the nation’s first democratic elections. Setting the story well after black South Africans gained a degree of freedom is perhaps the most insightful choice the playwright makes in constructing her only partially successful play.

On a narrative level, Freedom Day is an astute equivalent to Midsummer Eve in Strindberg’s original, the annual night of pagan revelry that threatens to overturn, if only for an evening, the dominant social order on Miss Julie’s estate.

Similarly, Freedom Day inspires the hands on

Mies Julie’s isolated Karoo farm to carouse late into the night, but in a manner that seems singularly ominous. As Christine, Mies Julie’s black cook and former nanny, laments numerous times, a massive storm is brewing, one this farm may not be able to fully withstand (it’s one of several overworked metaphors Farber deploys ham-handedly across the play’s 70 minutes).

And on a political level, this particular Freedom Day stirs up a volatile mixture of pride and debasement, hope and exasperation for black South Africans indentured on the farm.

Nearly two decades after apartheid has ended, they remain crushed under the intractable extralegal remnants of that very system. As John, the servant locked in a suicidal love battle with Mies Julie, declares, “Welcome to the new South Africa, where miracles leave us exactly where we began.”

A moment like this reveals the real power of Farber’s setting the play when she does.

Had the story unfolded when apartheid was in place, she’d have given her audience an easy out: Mies Julie’s careless, entitled condescension toward John, and John’s simultaneous contempt and adoration of Mies Julie, are symptoms of a now-outlawed system, and the play becomes a historical diorama. But Farber illustrates a far more disturbing reality: the legacy of colonialism extends its toxic tendrils

so deeply into every social structure that it can’t be excised by legislative decree. When it comes to restoring humanity to people dehumanized for centuries, 20 years is hardly enough time for even a first step.

The scope of Farber’s piece is daunting, and perhaps too ambitious for this relatively brief and occasionally formulaic work. While Mies Julie and John begin as unique characters laden with troubled, intertwined personal and social histories, by the time they’re bent on mutually assured erotic destruction toward the end of the play, they’ve devolved into emblems of white South Africa and black South Africa, a miscalculation that robs the play’s tragic finale of pathos. It doesn’t help that John’s mother, Christine, serves little purpose in the play except to remind everyone that terrible things are just around the corner or to lament that the kitchen in which she toils was built atop her ancestor’s graves (a horrifying image that loses its power with multiple iterations). Despite an exhilarating performance from Celeste Williams, Christine remains more historical outlook than person.

In stark contrast to Strindberg, famously fascinated with sublimated emotions, Farber lays everything on the table from start to finish. Her characters wear their vulnerabilities, hatreds, and desires on their sleeves (in an emblematic departure from Strindberg, John and Mies Julie consummate their love center stage atop the kitchen table, rather than in John’s offstage bedroom). The frankness of Farber’s script makes for explosive drama as well as overzealous schmaltz more melodramatic than Strindberg’s original.

MIES JULIE Through 6/24: Wed-Fri 7:30

PM, Sat 3 and 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM, Tue 7:30 PM, Victory Gardens Theater, 2433 N. Lincoln, 773-871-3000, victorygardens. org, $27-$60.

It’s the explosive parts that director Dexter Bullard captures particularly well, as he has done since bursting onto the scene 28 years ago with his hypersweaty Bouncers at Evanston’s Next Theatre. This Victory Gardens production pulls no punches; a trigger-warning list for this show would span several pages.

The ferocious cast, which includes Heather Chrisler as Mies Julie and Jalen Gilbert as John, meet Bullard’s and Farber’s every demand. The patches of melodrama are perhaps the unavoidable price for taking the playwright’s words so earnestly to heart. v

THEATER

R Women in love

Two badass early 20th-century feminists shatter convention like a Bull in a China Shop.

About Face Theatre’s midwest premiere of this empowering Bryna Turner-penned comedy explores the connection between academics and feminists Mary Emma Woolley and Jeannette Marks during their time at Mount Holyoke College in the early 20th century. The women never publicly acknowledged a romantic relationship, but Turner pulls from the historical record (and takes some liberties with modern language) to paint an intimate picture of a couple struggling to find common ground while playing active roles in the growing women’s suffrage movement.

Kelli Simpkins shines as take-no-prisoners college president Woolley, exuding both confidence in her ideas and touching vulnerability as Woolley’s revolutionary acts, such as shutting down the “domestic services” department, continue to be questioned by the conservative college community and politicians in the outside world.

As Marks, Emjoy Gavino gracefully acts her way through remarkable character growth in the show’s 80 minutes. While Marks begins the play as a childish and petulant young professor who fears she’s “becoming regional” at Holyoke, she ends as a passionate educator hell-bent on blurring the lines between students and faculty. In the case of one student, Pearl, played by Aurora Adachi-Winter, the line blurs itself into a sexual relationship we’re told is reminiscent of Woolley and Marks’s backstory. It’s a moving commentary on the cyclical nature of human connections and the emotional toll of living with a secret, and Adachi-Winter plays Pearl’s first-broken-heart, nervous-breakdown-style monologue with relatable rage and crumpled charisma.

Given the show’s rapid pace and decades-long time line, make sure to explore additional information on the women posted around the theater for added context.

—MARISSA OBERLANDER BULL IN A CHINA SHOP

Through 6/30: Wed-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM; also Sat 6/30, 3 PM, Theater Wit, 1229 W. Belmont, 773-9758150, aboutfacetheatre.com, $20-$38.

London underground

There’s too much story for one play in Neverwhere, but it’s a hell of a visual trip.

By definition, all theater is some sort of cosplay, and by golly does this stage adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s 1996 BBC Two series and subsequent novelization lean into the LARP-iest version of it. Ilesa Duncan’s adventurous revival of Robert Kauzlaric’s play (originally directed for Lifeline by Paul S. Holmquist in 2010) showcases both the merits and drawbacks of fantasy onstage—but it’s inarguably one hell of a visual trip.

A moderately successful and majorly bored office drone (Jose Nateras) upends his whole universe when he crosses paths with a magical being (Samantha Newcomb) on the run from a pair of wisecracking interdimensional bogeymen (John Henry Roberts, LaQuin Groves). Teaming up with a warrior (Aneisa Hicks), a hustler (Matthew Singleton), and a rat whisperer (Michaela Petro), they set out on a subterranean Wizard of Oz-style journey beneath London’s streets where finding a path home involves battles with giant bores and alliances with pigeons.

The timing of the remount seems apropos «

JUNE 7, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 7

ARTS & CULTURE bB enough—thanks to the advent of streaming services, Gaiman’s once-niche brand of heady, allegorical sci-fi fantasy British Invasion noir is the stuff of many different popular series, including Gaiman’s own American Gods.

I wonder, though, if all of the video game-ish chasing down of keys and jewelry boxes and magical whatsits works better in serialized form than crammed into two and a half hours.

The material itself likely resonates better with younger audiences, but even grown-ups will appreciate Alan Donahue’s scenic and properties design—an elaborate labyrinth of kaleidoscoping, whooshing doors and architectural fragments—and Mike Oleon’s personality-rich menagerie of puppets. —DAN JAKES NEVER-

WHERE Through 7/15: Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 4 and 8

PM, Sun 4 PM, Lifeline Theatre, 6912 N. Glenwood, 773-761-4477, lifelinetheatre.com, $40, $30 seniors, $20 students.

Liberté, egalité, sororité

The Revolutionists undermines its own powerful message with too much cutesiness.

You probably know about Charlotte Corday. She assassinated the bloodthirsty French revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat. You certainly know about Marie Antoinette, the Vienna-born French queen famously separated from her head during the Reign of Terror. All you can possibly know about Marianne Angelle is what playwright Lauren Gunderson tells you in The Revolutionists, running now at the Greenhouse in a supple, often amusing Organic Theater Company production.

Gunderson invented Angelle to represent Caribbean women who fought French colonial rule even as the French themselves were massacring one another in the name of liberté, egalité, and fraternité.

In the play, all three women connect through Olympe de Gouges, whom you almost certainly don’t know, though she was real and easily as interesting as the others. A playwright and activist, de Gouges wrote the “Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen,” which (ugly irony) made her suspect to the leaders of the French Revolution. She ended up on the guillotine.

De Gouges’s last words were a demand addressed to her fellow citizens: “You will avenge my death!” In a way, that’s what Gunderson’s done here, by reviving her story, at once humanizing and ennobling her struggle.

There’s a lot I don’t like about The Revolutionists, starting with a cutesy, sub-Sarah Ruhlian use of anachronism that tests our patience and threatens to subvert Gunderson’s insights. But Bryan Wakefield’s cast is strong, the subject is more than worthy, and a major subtheme concerning the cruel piety of would-be revolutionaries speaks volumes about the current political moment— even, just for instance, the Chicago theater community.

—TONY ADLER THE REVOLUTIONISTS Through 7/8:

Never miss a show again.

EARLY WARNINGS

chicagoreader.com/early 8 CHICAGO READER - JUNE 7, 2018

Wed-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 2:30 and 7:30 PM, Sun 2:30 PM, Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln, 773-404-7336, organictheater.org, $25, $18 students, seniors, and industry.

R Opera buffoons

The improv games at iO’s Riff turn into a goofy, full-fledged sing-along.

Riff, iO’s new late-night musical improv show, plays in the theater’s private-event space. It’s the only room configured to accommodate a live band, but nevertheless

this choice gives off the impression Riff is a redheaded stepchild. The space has no raised stage, and this configuration shatters any physical or mental barrier between performers and audience and invites interaction and provides glimpses of the cast’s camaraderie.

Like Whose Line Is It Anyway?, Riff is a short-form improv show where host Michael Jordan (no, not that one) beckons cast members to jump into games. Each game morphs into a musical: “Soap Opera,” a format for three actors to enact in overly dramatic performances, emphasizes the “opera” portion of its title by inviting its performers to show off their vibratos. Other games use hip-hop, blues, hard rock, and other musical forms.

It’s worth noting the cast is composed of great singers, rappers, and warblers.

Offstage, the actors drop their facades and playfully chide castmates for odd improv choices. At the top of one scene, Keenan Camp steps out and identifies his scene partners. Dave Lyzenga receives an elaborate name, while Gary Fields’s character is christened “Gary.”

Fields explodes in frustration, and the actors offstage burst into laughter and flash thumbs-up to Camp for encouraging this reaction. Shots are poured by the onstage bartender Stephanie Seweryn, and the cast drinks along with the audience. The room no longer feels like a toss-away space, but rather a nook where the cast of Riff welcomes and includes everyone who walks through the door. —STEVE HEISLER RIFF Fri-Sat 10:30

PM, iO Theater, 1501 N. Kingsbury, 312-929-2401, ioimprov.com, $20.

R Greek kinda-sorta tragedy

Tiresias Was a Weatherman is an Antigone for our age of extreme weather and constant medication.

In Greek mythology Tiresias was a blind seer who was turned into a woman for seven years as punishment for hitting some sacred snakes. That doesn’t happen in Jaime Mire’s “kinda-sorta adaptation” of Antigone— receiving its world premiere at the Organic Theater Company—but many, many other portentous events do.

This is a play with a lot on its mind and not quite enough time or lung capacity to tell it all.

In a parallel, possibly contemporaneous universe to ours, weather events are inextricably linked to human moods and feelings. Annabelle likes to smoke weed but otherwise stays away from meds. This makes her an outlier in a society that has a pill for every suspicion of a malady. After her brother is killed in a hurricane, she wants to give him a proper burial, while her stepfather wants to use the body for research on implants that will “fix” everyone’s moods. It doesn’t end well for her.

Rain, Wind, Sun, and Thunder are represented by four men in brightly colored, not overly flattering Lycra bodysuits. They function as a kind of Greek chorus, reciting nonsense rhymes one minute, voicing characters’ deepest fears the next. They’re the comic relief in a play that breathlessly tries to tackle climate change, Big Pharma, family dysfunction, the evils of the media machine, and a half dozen other heavy-duty themes all at once. It hits as often as it misses, and its ambition can’t be faulted, but a little less would’ve gone a lot further. Josh Anderson directed. —DMITRY SAMAROV TIRESIAS WAS A WEATHERMAN Through 7/6:

Wed-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 2:30 and 7:30 PM, Sun 2:30 PM, Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln, 773-404-7336, organictheater.org, $25, $18 students, seniors, and industry.

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ARTS & CULTURE This Boat Called My Body é ALYSSA VERA RAMOS

R Paddling her own canoe

Ahoy!

The central image of this allegorical performance, written collectively by Quenna Lené Barrett, Christabel Donkor, Danielle Littman, Jessamyn Fitzpatrick, Clair Fuller, and Nik Zaleski and directed by Barrett and Zaleski, is a 16-year-old woman named Jane Doe. She sits on a dock, emptying the water out of a red aluminum canoe in preparation for a launch. As the title makes clear, the canoe is her body, and her journey consists of the many discoveries she makes and the changes she goes through when she finds she is pregnant and has to decide between single teen motherhood or terminating the pregnancy.

Yes, this is agitprop theatre. Remarkably, though, the creative team at For Youth Inquiry, part of the Illinois Caucus for Adolescent Health, does a terrific job of making this admittedly didactic work—which charts all the obstacles a teen faces, both legal and psychological, when trying to get an abortion on her own—engaging, and even entertaining.

Staging the piece in and around the abandoned Stearns Quarry in Palmisano Park in Bridgeport, Barrett and Zaleski fill their show with eye-pleasing spectacles— not the least of which is the sight of the protagonist canoeing across the water—and moments of no-pressure audience participation (which feel more than a little like mini breakout sessions at a workshop). Elena Victoria Feliz makes a very likable and relatable Jane Doe; she’s equally believable whether she’s paralyzed by doubt or standing her ground against those who don’t agree with her choices. —JACK HELBIG THIS BOAT CALLED MY

Late in the action, when a missile hits the hull of Captain Nemo’s submarine, the Nautilus, the lights turn red, dramatic music kicks up in the background, and the actors onstage respond to the impact in slow motion.

It’s one of a handful or more of moments that seem off about this Lookingglass production. The sheer scale of the story undermines its ambitions as a work of theater. Playwrights David Kersnar and Althos Low, who adapted the script from Jules Verne’s novel, steer the action through Victorian drawing rooms, the ocean floor, and a deserted island, transitioning so abruptly from one locale to the next that the prerecorded voice of Professor Aronnax (Kasey Foster) has to keep piping in to remind us where we are. Foster, who lavishes aplomb onto a cardboard role, does more narrating than speaking, but if these dull passages from the diary of her underwater voyage are so compelling, why not make actual scenes out of them? Cutting corners saves room for tricks. It’s not that puppets of sharks and a giant squid are doomed to be tacky by default, but the clash is palpable: the play’s hefty, universalizing scope can’t sustain itself on sleights of hand.

Todd Rosenthal’s set is a joy to behold, as are Sully Ratke’s seafaring costumes. Kareem Bandealy’s Nemo, a megarich evildoer with a hidden identity waging personal war against the imperial powers of the earth, constantly runs the risk of being Batman. But for one gorgeous interlude, as he plays the harmonium wordlessly on a platform, his pain comes across. —MAX MALLER 20,000

A pregnant teen tries to decide what to do with This Boat Called My Body.

BODY Through 7/17: Thu-Sat 5:30 PM, Sun 2 PM, Palmisano Park, 2700 S. Halsted, 312-427-4460, icah.org, $15-$50, 22 and under free.

STOMPING GROUNDS GRAND FINALE Thu 6/7, 7 PM, Pritzker Pavilion, 201 E. Randolph, 312542-2477, chicagotap. org. F

There are too many puppets in 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas and not enough action.

LEAGUES UNDER THE SEAS Through 8/18: Wed-Fri

7:30 PM, Sat-Sun 2 and 7:30 PM, alternate Tue 7:30 PM, alternate Thu 2 PM, Lookingglass Theatre Company, Water Tower Water Works, 821 N. Michigan, 312-337-0665, lookingglasstheatre.org, $40-$75. v

Stomping Grounds at the Irish American Heritage Center é PHILAMONJARO

DANCE

Rhythm nation The Stomping Grounds festival finale caps off two months of dancing for peace.

“DANCING FOR PEACE” may sound like a 1980s charity single, but it’s the fundamental idea behind Chicago Human Rhythm Project’s Stomping Grounds festival, which has been bringing percussive dance to communities around the city for four years to put on free or low-price performances. Organizing dance companies representing a variety of international cultures demands a level of collaboration that inspires and excites CHRP founder and director Lane Alexander.

“Getting people to say ‘we’re for peace’ isn’t that difficult,” says Alexander. “But then there’s getting everybody to go to meetings and plan schedules 18 months in advance.

Working with seven different venues and Chicago public and private schools for our lec-

ture demonstrations. There’s a bunch of moving parts, and everyone is stretching their capacity to make this happen.”

Stomping Grounds began in early April at the Chicago Cultural Center and continued through the next two months at various venues around town. The grand finale will be June 7; the city has donated the Pritzker Pavilion stage for the occasion. This free public event spotlights the full festival lineup, which includes new additions like Chicago Dance Crash and Natya Dance Theatre. Cultural diversity is key to the festival’s success, and Alexander believes that the universal language of rhythm connects people on a spiritual level.

“The most ancient practices of percussive dance were always sacred rituals,” says Alexander. “We’re divorced from communities gathering daily or weekly to dance together, but it can’t be separated from the practice.

When people go to see percussive dance and they come away feeling energized, it’s because it’s rooted in spirituality, and nearly every first community shared that practice.

That unifies us in a way that makes the message really resonate.” —OLIVER SAVA v

JUNE 7, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 9

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“The Ave”: Michigan Avenue between 111th and 115th Streets é COURTESY JOHN MCNAUGHTON

A student film of Roseland in the 1970s turns out to be a time capsule of a changing neighborhood.

By DMITRY SAMAROV

T

here’s fastback Mustangs, there’s tight pants, there’s Afros, there’s ancient Dutch farmers walking along with palsy . . . it’s the human comedy,” says Paul Petraitis. He’s describing the 45 minutes of film he and John McNaughton shot in 1970 in their south-side neighborhood of Roseland and have recently started digitizing. “Fifty years in production and we just started last Thursday,” their editor, Bob Brandel, jokes. These 45 minutes will be the centerpiece of a documentary the three old friends hope will explore Chicago’s history and culture and the way race and economics have affected the city.

“You knew that if you went out into the streets of Roseland with a camera, you were gonna see something,” McNaughton says.

It was summer when they shot the film, and Roseland’s commercial strip on Michigan Avenue between 111th and 115th Streets was festooned for Old Fashioned Days, an annual celebration of commerce—and a staple of McNaughton’s and Petraitis’s childhoods. Little did they know what they were capturing was

10 CHICAGO READER - JUNE 7, 2018

the end of an era. Petraitis calls it “the last cruise down the Ave.” Today, perhaps the only positive association outsiders have with Roseland is Old Fashioned Donuts, a beloved staple of the African-American community and a destination for foodies nationwide. But in 1970 that shop was yet to open; the neighborhood institutions were places like Gately’s Peoples Store, which called itself “the biggest store on Michigan Avenue,” and the area was populated by the last of the progeny of the Dutch, Polish, Irish, and other European immigrants who’d settled there more than 100 years before and hadn’t yet fled to suburbia.

Petraitis traces Old Fashioned Days back to 1949, when local Dutch merchants staged a centennial celebration of the founding of Roseland. It proved popular enough to become an annual event for the next 20-plus years.

Merchants would dress in old-timey garb and flog their wares on the sidewalks, and there was music and food. It was a chance for the neighborhood to toast its prosperity. People who had jobs in the nearby steel mills had

some extra spending cash, and they wanted to flaunt it.

“It wasn’t just a neighborhood like all the others,” Brandel recalls. “It was like a small, cohesive, self-sustaining town, but still Chicago. It had everything needed, everybody knew everybody, most everybody grew up there, and all identified with Roseland—unified in a way, even though the assortment of different nationalities would rival Queens, New York, today. In fact, I can’t remember street gangs of one nationality because everybody you turned to was from somewhere else. I guess that’s America. Or was.”

“You could get the shit beat out of you in those days,” McNaughton muses, “but you wouldn’t get shot.”

McNaughton and Petraitis met in the mid60s in the art program at Fenger Academy High School. Both were chosen to study in the summer arts programs at IIT and the Art Institute in 1965 and 1966. McNaughton remembers trips to the museum and having his mind blown by the work of Ivan Albright and Rene Magritte. Petraitis recalls being overwhelmed by all the beautiful girls downtown.

Through those arts programs they got to meet kids from all over the city—African-American, Latino, Jewish kids they might not have readily made friends with in Roseland—and their world expanded.

Meanwhile, their own neighborhood was changing. Sixty thousand residents left between 1966 and 1976, Petraitis says. He calls the families who moved away “Roseland refugees.” “[White flight] is a mappable phenomenon. Fenger High School went from 5 percent black to 5 percent white in four years.”

McNaughton believes he grew up during a golden age in America, a narrow window in which working-class families had “small prosperity.” When the factories started to close and African-American families moved in, McNaughton’s kin and that of most of his friends moved away. The reasons for these migrations are not simple, but Petraitis lays a fair share of the blame at the feet of businesspeople who profited from poor people’s fears. “There’s gotta be a special place in hell for a realestater who does panic peddling and scares little old ladies into selling.”

They didn’t realize any of that, though, when they shot the footage of Old Fashioned Days in 1970. McNaughton was studying TV production and still photography at Columbia, while Petraitis was studying photography at IIT. Their

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ARTS & CULTURE Stills from the original footage é 16MM B&W PHOTOGRAPHY

BY PAUL PETRAITIS, JOHN MCNAUGHTON AND BRUCE QUIST, JULY 1970

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weeklong shoot was done as a final project for Charles Sharpe’s IIT film class. Their crew also included a third cameraman, Bruce Quist.

They shot on the 16mm Bolex that Petraitis’s father had given him as a high school graduation present, along with a variety of 35mm still cameras. They also added a few scenes on a Super 8. Petraitis and McNaughton had no larger purpose or narrative in mind at the time.

They just knew that the streets were teeming with life and characters of all kinds and that they were bound to capture something of the flavor of where they grew up. Perhaps that’s why they’ve sat on the footage all these many years. It’s taken them most of a lifetime to begin to see the beginnings of a story emerge from this document of their youth.

Unlike the vast majority of the people he grew up with, Petraitis has stayed close to his old neighborhood, settling in Pullman, just east of Roseland. He has worked at the Chicago Historical Society and as a photographer and historian for various concerns. “I was lucky,” he says. “Found the right girl, found the right street, found the right block; my neighbors are cool . . . my, uh, intellectual turf is my zip code, you know, in terms of history.”

Neither Brandel nor McNaughton has lived

anywhere near Roseland for many years.

Brandel recently retired from a career in TV production and lives in New York. McNaughton has had a long career directing film and TV and lives in Bucktown. He often drives through their old neighborhood, though, after visiting his parents’ graves in the South Holland area. He wonders whether the economic and racial shift of the neighborhood could have been averted. After rereading James Farrell’s Studs Lonigan trilogy recently, McNaughton was struck by how history keeps recurring.

Though it’s set in the run-up to the Great Depression, he sees that book as mirroring his own family’s story. There has to be a better way for people of different backgrounds to live together, he says, thinking out loud.

Nearly 50 years after Petraitis and pals shot Old Fashioned Days, they finally have the inklings of a story. In the late 60s, they fully believed that by 2018, racism, war, and poverty would all be in the past. The film they’re making, while having that 1970 footage as its centerpiece, won’t just be a nostalgic look back to a fabled yesteryear. Instead, it’s a chance to grapple with history and an attempt to look ahead. After Brandel became involved in the project, they decided to interview their old friends who cruised the Ave along with them and also talk to current Roseland residents.

They know that the time they look back on so fondly wasn’t as rosy for every Chicagoan who lived through it.

The original footage, which has gained legendary status amongst their old friends, will soon finally see the light of day. Petraitis has done some preliminary editing over the years but says he’s not the editor Brandel is or the director that McNaughton is. “It’s a project,” he says, “whose time has come.” v

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JUNE 7, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 11

CHICAGO UNDERGROUND FILM FESTIVAL, WED 6/6-SUN 6/10. LOGAN, 2646 N. Milwaukee, 773-342-5555, cuff.org, $10, all-screening passes $100.

ARTS & CULTURE

More CUFF coverage at chicagoreader.com/movies.

Good Luck

• J.R. Jones waxes nostalgic on INDUSTRI-

• MOVIE FESTIVAL

Notes from the real underground

Gold and copper miners tough it out in Good Luck, a portrait of global labor, screening at the Chicago Underground Film Festival.

O

ne of the highlights of the 25th Chicago Underground Film Festival, which runs through Sunday at the Logan, is the local premiere of Good Luck, the latest documentary feature by noted avant-garde filmmaker (and former Chicagoan) Ben Russell (Let Each One Go Where He May, A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness). Russell has carved out an interesting niche for himself over the past decade or so, blending elements of ethnographic and experimental cinema, and Good Luck falls squarely into this idiosyncratic subgenre.

The film transpires in two parts, each running approximately 70 minutes. The first concerns a state-run copper mine in the Serbian community of Bor; the second looks at an illegal gold-mining operation in the Brokopondo district of Suriname. Russell explains in his director’s notes that his aim with this structure was “to better understand the bonds that men share,” and he emphasizes the similarities between the two groups of miners by developing similar motifs across both halves of the film. Each section of Good Luck features a musical performance, conversations about fear, and long takes of men operating specialized machinery. In fact the two sections are so

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similar in form that you may experience deja vu in the second half. But this is precisely the point of Good Luck—the two parts don’t just complement each other but combine to form an epic portrait of labor in the globalized era.

Russell definitely has a perverse streak. Devoid of narration or talking-head interviews, Good Luck provides no explanation of how the mining operations came to be, nor does it address the economic histories of the communities under consideration. Russell doesn’t even identify the functions of the machines to which he devotes so much screen time. As a result of these elisions, the film feels less like a documentary than like a work of abstract expressionism, yet much beauty can be found in Russell’s approach. The scenes of work are mesmerizing, in part, because Russell doesn’t reveal its purpose. Presented without context, these passages encourage viewers to invent their own explanations for the work or simply go with the flow and appreciate the imagery as the stuff of found science fiction.

The settings of Good Luck invite such comparisons. The Serbian copper mine, located 400 meters below the earth’s surface and illuminated by minimal lighting sources, evokes a lunar landscape. In contrast, the Surinamese

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operation sometimes resembles a fictitious planet. The men here often add liquid mercury to dirt in their search for gold, and the silver water and earth suggest the resources of an alien world. Russell’s long takes heighten this alienating effect; whereas other filmmakers might employ such takes to bring strange environments into focus, Russell makes objects seem stranger the longer he observes them.

This strategy recalls the films of Andy Warhol, whom Russell also invokes in the silent, extended close-ups of workers that punctuate the action.

These close-ups serve as reminders of the workers’ humanity, which one tends to forget about when considering labor on a grand scale. Though Russell renders the men’s work abstract, he brings a certain lucidity to his portraits of the men themselves. The most cogent passages of Good Luck show the miners during their downtime, relaxing, smoking, and shooting the shit. These human portraits take on an almost political dimension during the first half, when one of the Serbian miners, asked what he fears most, says he’s afraid that the current prime minister will get reelected. The miner quickly backpedals, saying he doesn’t want to discuss politics on camera, yet Russell

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AL ACCIDENT—THE STORY OF WAX TRAX! RECORDS, Julia Nash’s documentary about the beloved local record shop and label, which screened Wednesday as the opening-night program.

Ben Sachs looks at THE STORY OF A SATELLITE, a drama about “death, freak accidents, and deadbeat parents” by the Spanish filmmakers who call themselves the Also Sisters (Sun 6/10, 4:45 PM).

Jones explores the conspiracy-minded films of San Francisco experimentalist Craig Baldwin, who appears in person for two retrospective screenings of his work (Thu 6/7, 8:45 PM, and Sun 6/10, 4:15 PM).

To honor the festival’s 25th anniversary, Patrick Friel rounds up ten notable films from earlier editions.

succeeds in documenting his anxiety about the future of his job, which one might encounter among laborers anywhere in the world.

In contrast, Russell emphasizes the optimism of his Surinamese subjects. Good Luck concludes with a long, celebratory song performed by some of the gold miners about the abundance of gold in their region. Even though one of these miners has complained earlier in the film that he can go entire days without finding gold, the song conveys an enduring hope for success. The number also speaks to the spirit of bonhomie that animates these workers, which Russell spotlights earlier when groups of men work together to start a giant, gas-powered water pump. Most importantly, the men’s song parallels the funeral dirge that a Serbian marching band performs at the beginning of Good Luck, introducing the theme of despair that runs through the first half of the film. Russell’s conclusion suggests that despair and optimism are opposite sides of the same coin in the world of labor, where the forces that impel people to work can lie beyond their understanding. v GOOD LUCK sss Directed by Ben Russell. 143 min. Fri 6/8, 8:45 PM. Logan, 2646 N. Milwaukee, 773-3425555, cuff.org, $10.

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ARTS & CULTURE

Amarillo Ramp

many lines that exemplify the filmmaker’s gift for breezy black comedy. —LP . . . Subtitled “An Infrared Ode to Menopause,” Marne Lucas’s HAUTE FLASH (Thu 6/7, 7 PM) is a strange yet hopeful depiction of a woman’s relationship with her aging body. Marne shot this along the Hawaiian coastline on a military-grade thermographic camera, using its hazy black-andwhite video, heat sensitivity, and crosshairs to great effect: the coast resembles the moon’s surface and the woman a space alien under surveillance. Her poses, from washing herself in dark water to cradling a mannequin head, suggest rebirth. —LP . . . “I post, therefore I

am” is the apparent ethos of the Generation Z kids documented in SRY! (Thu 6/7, 7 PM), a tightly edited collection of YouTube videos in which each poster, a child or a teenager, apologizes for not uploading a new video in a while. Though the kids have different accents and ethnicities, Fullmer’s experimental collage serves to highlight the eeriness of their similarities. Mostly they record from their bedrooms, on iPhones or webcams, offering excuses that range from schoolwork to anxiety about what to post—a sad comment on the current obsession with Internet presence as performance. —LP

MOVIES

That was quick

MIGUEL ÁNGEL SOLÁ

Critical takes on eight short works screening this year at CUFF.

BY ANDREA GRONVALL AND LEAH PICKETT Nearly 100 shorts screen in this year’s Chicago Undergound Film Festival, some accompanying feature presentations but most appearing in one of eight shorts programs. Following are reviews of eight short works; for more program information visit cuff.org.

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riter-director Jennifer Reeder (Signature Move) tackles the Brothers Grimm with ALL SMALL BODIES (Sat 6/9, 6:30 PM), a grisly update of “Hansel and Gretel” set in a postapocalyptic but still verdant forest. Two orphaned girls fight hunger, only to fall in with a pervy kidnapper (Tim Plester from Game of Thrones) who reckons the younger one will make a fine snack. He reckons wrong. —ANDREA GRONVALL . . . Bill Brown and Sabine Gruffat open their documentary AMARILLO RAMP (Fri 6/8, 8:45 PM) with snapshots of cowboys, cattle, and old Route 66 artifacts, but they ditch the Texas iconography for high culture when they reach Mack Dick Ranch, site of the last earthwork by sculptor and photographer Robert Smithson. Resembling an ancient berm but evoking the sinuous curve of Smithson’s earlier Spiral Jetty, the ramp—only yards from where Smithson died in a plane crash—serves as a meditation on entropy and infinity. —AG . . . CLOUDS OF PETALS (Sat 6/9, 2 PM), an installation video from artist Sarah Meyohas, examines notions of beauty and creativity within a gridded, regimented environment. In the atrium of Bell Works, the giant R&D facility that architect Eero Saarinen designed for Bell Telephone, 19

office temps process bushels of roses to find and digitally photograph 100,000 “perfect” petals; computers convert the images into an algorithm for regeneration in which, as with snowflakes, no two are the same. The floral close-ups carry an erotic charge, as do images of pythons slithering by. —AG . . . The subject of Haley McCormick’s D A N C E R (Thu 6/7, 7 PM) is whatever the viewer wants her to be.

Obscured by static in cotton-candy hues, she appears in parts—tap-dancing legs, lips, cleavage—that add up to something primal.

With an ambient soundtrack and a scratchy VHS aesthetic, the film evokes nostalgia as well, positioning the dancer as a spark of humanity in an increasingly technological world. —LEAH PICKETT . . . The computer-animated DREAM JOURNAL (Sat 6/9, 9:15 PM) reflects many of the self-confessed obsessions of Canadian filmmaker Jon Rafman—gaming, fantasy, science fiction, virtual reality—but also reveals his affinity for fine art. Two female avatars traverse a constantly shifting environment, where they fend off a rapid sequence of monstrous threats. Like the surrealists, Rafman finds nightmarish symbolism in eyes, trains, and empty corridors, but the gorging and impaling (sexual and otherwise) recall Hieronymus Bosch. —AG . . . Annelise Ogaard’s mockumentary GIRL POWDER (Thu 6/7, 9:15 PM), which follows the twentysomething CEO of a modish drug cartel, satirizes both millennial start-ups and the Vice-style shorts that profile them. “I like to say we’re farm-to-glass-table” says the pink-skirted entrepreneur, in one of

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American Animals

Bart Layton came to national attention with his eerie documentary The Imposter, whose talking-head interviews and staged re-creations tell the true story of a French-Algerian man who managed to enter the U.S. by posing as a missing teenager from San Antonio, Texas.

This second feature recounts another true crime story but unfolds mainly as a standard docudrama, with occasional onscreen commentary from the real-life subjects.

Two sharp young actors, Barry Keoghan (Dunkirk) and Evan Peters (FX’s American Horror Story), play Warren Lipka and Spencer Reinhard, college-age friends in Lexington, Kentucky, who masterminded a heist of rare books from the special collections library at local Transylvania University in 2004. Their meticulous preparations begin with typing “how to plan a heist” into Google and continue with watching every heist film ever made, though they manage to overlook the primary lesson of all such films—that something always goes wrong. —J.R. JONES R, 116 min. At Music Box: Fri 6/8-Sat 6/9, 1:45, 4:30, 7, 9:30, and 11:30 PM; and Sun 6/10-Thu 6/14, 1:45, 4:30, 7, and 9:30 PM. Also: Century 12 and CineArts 6, River East 21

Hereditary

Ari Aster wrote and directed this glossy horror film, which is so well crafted that for its first three quarters it manages not to insult the viewer’s intelligence. An artist, distraught over her mother’s death, joins a grievers’ self-help group, to which she reveals her mom’s and brother’s histories of mental illness; another mourner invites her to a seance, and soon the heroine’s son and husband are threatened by a malignant, unseen force.

Excellent sound design, atmospheric art direction, and crisp editing heighten the tension, and the CGI is mainly reserved for the grand finale. Toni Collette is flawless in the lead role, and there’s fine support from Gabriel Byrne, Alex Wolff, and Ann Dowd. Unfortunately the denouement is a stunning disappointment. —ANDREA GRONVALL R, 127 min. ArcLight, Century 12 and CineArts 6, Chatham 14, City North 14, Crown Village 18, Ford City, Landmark’s Century Centre, New 400, River East 21, Showplace ICON, 600 N. Michigan.

R Hotel Artemis

I would have sworn this futuristic crime thriller was adapted from a graphic novel—there’s the same fatalistic humor, the same sense of greasy dystopia—but it was penned for the screen by Drew Pearce, a British writer who makes his directing debut after laboring on the Iron Man and Mission: Impossible franchises. In the year 2028, as Los Angeles is consumed by rioting, three wounded criminals (Sterling K. Brown, Brian Tyree Henry, Charlie Day) arrive at the Hotel Artemis, a former art deco hotel now used as a secret, exclusive underground hospital, where members can get medical treatment from the alcoholic nurse who runs the place (Jodie Foster in a crabbed, jittery performance that holds the film together). The tension builds with the arrival of a wounded police officer (Jenny Slate), whom the nurse admits for personal reasons against her better judgment, and the also-wounded criminal kingpin who set up the operation (Jeff Goldblum), attended by his antsy, brown-nosing son (Zachary Quinto in the film’s funniest performance). —J.R. JONES R, 94 min. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Chatham 14, Ford City, River East 21.

The Last Suit

In this touching drama from writer-director Pablo Solarz, an 88-year-old Jewish tailor and Holocaust survivor, having lived in Buenos Aires since 1945, foils his adult daughters’ plan to dump him in a nursing home, taking a one-way trip to his native Poland to find an old friend.

Passing through Spain and Germany, the sharply dressed senior encounters several people who challenge his cantankerousness and help him come to terms with his painful past, which resurfaces in a handful of well-placed and evocative flashbacks. The wonderful Spanish actress Ángela Molina doesn’t get nearly enough screen time as a saucy hotelier in Madrid whom the man befriends on his journey, but Argentine actor Miguel Ángel Solá is convincing as the haunted protagonist, based in part on Solarz’s grandfather. In Spanish, Yiddish, German, and Polish with subtitles. —LEAH PICKETT 92 min. Fri 6/8, 2 and 8 PM; Sat 6/9, 7:45 PM; Sun 6/10, 2 PM; Mon 6/11, 6 PM; Tue 6/12, 8:15 PM; Wed 6/13, 6 PM; and Thu 6/14, 8:15 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center.

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Get showtimes at chicagoreader.com/movies.

Ocean’s 8

Despite the large ensemble casts, Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven franchise rested on the rascally comedic interplay of George Clooney and Brad Pitt as the heist ringleaders. Sandra Bullock keeps up her end of the bargain in this gender-inverted reboot, but icy Cate Blanchett seems lost as her criminal sidekick. Among their crew, who aim to steal a $150 million necklace during the Met Ball, are Sarah Paulson, Rihanna, Awkafina, Mindy Kaling, and Helena Bonham Carter. Director Gary Ross (Seabiscuit, The Hunger Games), who wrote the story and collaborated with Olivia Milch on the screenplay, closely follows the Soderbergh formula of wry humor, nimble plotting, and wall-to-wall bass riffs.

With Anne Hathaway and Dakota Fanning; a cameo from Matt Damon, the perennial chump in the Eleven movies, wound up on the cutting room floor, which is a pretty good gag if you think about it. —J.R. JONES PG-13, 110 min. ArcLight, Century 12 and CineArts 6, Chatham 14, Cicero Showplace 14, City North 14, Crown Village 18, Ford City, Landmark’s Century Centre, New 400, River East 21, Showplace 14 Galewood Crossings, Showplace ICON, 600 N. Michigan, Webster Place.

Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

Morgan Neville’s crowd-pleasing documentary celebrates the work of Fred Rogers, whose long-running PBS series Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood (1968-2001) demonstrated an uncanny understanding of children’s emotional lives. A Presbyterian minister, Rogers was apparently as wholesome offscreen as on, and though Neville collects some intriguing anecdotes from colleagues and family members (Rogers could be gruff on the job as he got older; he once prevailed on a cast member to conceal his homosexuality), the star’s private life is carefully protected. Nobody wants to hate on Mr. Rogers, so Neville quickly brushes aside the conservative criticism that Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, which exploded in popularity during the “Me Decade” of the 1970s, may have helped foster our modern American culture of self-involvement and hypersensitivity. This gentle, positive treatment of Rogers coincides with the show’s values but devalues his enormous social importance.

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Not long before embarking on his comedy Irma Vep, Olivier Assayas directed this powerful 1994 feature about doomed teenage love as part of the excellent French TV series All the Boys and Girls in Their Time, in which various filmmakers (including Andre Techine, Chantal Akerman, and Claire Denis) dramatized stories set during their teenage years, scoring them with the pop music of the period. Assayas’s contribution, perhaps the most affecting in the whole series, takes place on the outskirts of Paris in 1972. (Having lived in France during that period, I can report that his grasp of its countercultural lifestyles is uncanny.) Virginie Ledoyen and Cyprien Fouquet are letter-perfect as two 16-year-old delinquents from broken homes—the former periodically sent to an asylum by her Scientologist mother and boyfriend, the latter raised by a single father (New Wave regular Laszlo Szabo)—and when they run away together, one can’t imagine that they have anywhere else to go. The beautiful and heartbreaking plot culminates in a party at and around a country house, and Assayas’s sustained treatment of this event—the raging bonfire, the dope, the music and dancing—truly catches you by the throat.

The drifting, circling handheld camera of Irma Vep is equally in evidence here, moving among characters with the nervous energy of a moth, showing us their isolation as well as their moments of union. One of the key French films of the 90s. In French with subtitles. —JONATHAN ROSENBAUM 92 min. New 4K restoration. Fri 6/8, 2 and 7:15 PM; Sat 6/9-Sun 6/10, 11:20 AM and 7:15 PM; and Mon 6/11-Thu 6/14, 2 and 7:15 PM. Music Box. SPECIAL EVENTS

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JUNE 7, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 15

2 0 1 8 C H I C A G O B L U E S F E S T I VA L

The Reader’s guide to the 2018 Chicago Blues Festival The fest expands its footprint in Millennium Park with a diverse lineup that includes boogie-woogie pianist Erwin Helfer, southern soul-blues star Ms. Jody, and the Rising Stars Fife & Drum Band with Shardé Thomas.

é COURTESY OF THE CITY OF CHICAGO

By BILL DAHL AND DAVID WHITEIS

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or its second year in Millennium artists: Willie Clayton, Ms. Jody, LJ Echols, Park, the Chicago Blues Festival and Chicago’s own Nellie “Tiger” Travis.

The Reader’s coverage focuses on five sterhas expanded, adding a new stage and extending the hours of an ex- ling artists whose music speaks to the past and isting one. Whether more quantity future of the blues: Helfer, Clayton, Ms. Jody, translates into more quality, though, remains 91-year-old R&B saxophonist and singer Gene “Daddy G” Barge, to be seen. A few of the bookings and the Rising Stars CHICAGO BLUES FESTIVAL Fife & Drum Band adopt a refreshingly Fri 6/8 through Sun 6/10, 11 AM-9:30 PM, with Shardé Thomas, creative definition Millennium Park, Michigan and Randolph, granddaughter of the of the blues—Vieux free, all-ages group’s founder, Otha Farka Touré brings his Mali-to-MemTurner. The rest of phis roots-blues fusion to the Crossroads the lineup, while it includes many musicians Stage on Saturday, for instance, and the flam- of merit, also seems padded with more B-level boyant and impossible-to-categorize Fantas- acts than usual. This year’s festival also offers tic Negrito plays Pritzker Pavilion on Sunday. little thematic consistency, aside from FriBoogie-woogie pianist Erwin Helfer makes day’s daylong tribute to Chicago’s pioneering a long-overdue and very welcome return to Delmark Records on the occasion of its 65th the festival, and thankfully the schedule also anniversary (and the preponderance of Delincludes several major southern soul-blues mark artists throughout the weekend). Earlier

16 CHICAGO READER - JUNE 7, 2018

again on the south promthis spring, founder Bob Find the complete Blues enade, southeast of the Koester sold the venerFestival schedule—and Cloud Gate sculpture able label, leaving its a roundup of notable (aka “the Bean”). Likefuture as a major blues shows outside the park—at wise the Mississippi Juke outlet in doubt. chicagoreader.com.

Joint stage, primarily On Saturday night the fest honors harmonica oriented toward southern artists, remains on the master Little Walter, and north promenade, northeast though this salute is just a single set, it’s nonetheless a valuable of the Bean. The eclectic Front Porch Stage, with extended hours for acknowledgment of the blues’ roots 2018, has moved from the roof of the Harris and heritage. If you’re willing to look, you can Theater to Wrigley Square, at the park’s find plenty of other gems on the bill, rough cut northwest corner near Randolph and Michand otherwise. The culminating Sunday-night set by Mavis Staples, Chicago’s undisputed igan. (It overlooks the area where nonprofit groups set up their tents, but the Blues Village queen of soul and gospel, should provide suffiStage, booked by a couple of those organizacient benediction for even the crankiest critic. tions, isn’t returning this year.) The old Front Certain aspects of the festival’s layout in Millennium Park remain unchanged, despite Porch location now hosts the new Rooftop its reshuffling of venues. The Crossroads Lounge, which feature mostly solo acts. All events are free. —DAVID WHITEIS Stage, featuring local and national acts, is

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2 0 1 8 C H I C A G O B L U E S F E S T I VA L

Gene Barge blew his sax on some of the wildest R&B hits of the 60s The Blues Festival pays tribute to the 91-year-old “Daddy G” with a set with by his longest-running band, the Chicago Rhythm & Blues Kings.

By BILL DAHL

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mong active Chicago musicians, it’s hard to conceive of anyone more deserving of a Blues Festival tribute set than saxophonist Gene “Daddy G” Barge—though that conclusion apparently wasn’t obvious to the man himself. With characteristic humility, he says he didn’t know Saturday’s show was a tribute till I asked him about it—he’d assumed it was just another gig.

Barge will be honored with a performance by the Chicago Rhythm & Blues Kings, whose tight horn section he’s graced for decades.

In the early 80s, when he first joined forces with saxist Terry Ogolini and trumpeter Don Tenuto, they were supplying the brassy flash for a different Chicago R&B ensemble: “I had just come off the road with the Rolling Stones in 1982. Big Twist & the Mellow Fellows were going pretty strong, but they said they needed some help,” says Barge. “They invited me to come and work with the band and try to produce the band.”

After front man Larry “Big Twist” Nolan died in 1990, the Mellow Fellows soldiered on for a few years, with Barge taking on some of the singing. In 1993 cofounder Pete Special left the group, which prompted Barge, Ogolini, and Tenuto to relaunch it as the Chicago Rhythm & Blues Kings. Barge eventually became their

primary vocalist. “I was the only one around that knew the show,” he says. “Rather than get a new singer, they pushed me out front, because I knew all the music.” He’s been there ever since, though he doesn’t tour as much as he used to.

Born in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1926, Barge didn’t get serious about saxophone until after he returned from his World War II air force service. His dad handed him a waterlogged tenor that a British sailor had given him, and after it was rendered playable by a raft of repairs, Barge learned his way around it. “Jazzwise, Lester Young was my influence,” he says.

But R&B would be his ticket to the big time.

Gene Barge plays with the Electric Mudcats (a partial reunion of the band on Muddy Waters’s 1968 album Electric Mud) at the 2003 Chicago Blues Festival. é SCOTT STEWART/SUN-TIMES MEDIA

fledgling Legrand Records. Just up the street, evangelist Bishop “Daddy” Grace led services in a church full of romping, trombone-stoked gospel music, and Guida wanted to capture that feel on an R&B record. “Guida was on my case about, ‘Well, why don’t we try to do something about that?’” says Barge. They cooked up the rowdy two-part instrumental “A Nite With Daddy ‘G’,” which Legrand issued under the name the Church Street Five, and in early ’61 it became Barge’s first hit.

Singer Gary (U.S.) Bonds, Barge’s young labelmate, heard the workout while touring behind “New Orleans,” his own first hit. “He came back and told me, ‘Man, I put lyrics to your song!’” says Barge. “So we convinced Frank Guida to record us doing it.” That song was Bonds’s “Quarter to Three,” which topped the pop charts in summer 1961. Its lyrics repeatedly mention “Daddy G,” and just CHICAGO RHYTHM & BLUES KINGS: like that, Barge had TRIBUTE TO GENE BARGE Sat 6/9, 1:30 PM, Crossroads Stage himself a nickname.

He blew up a storm on Bonds’s subsequent hits as well as on Jimmy Soul’s 1963 smash “If You Wanna Be Happy,” but soon he decided it was time for a change of scenery. At that point, he was still a schoolteacher by day.

“I called Phil Chess,” Barge says, “and he gave me a job on the phone. The day school closed in June ’64, I jumped on a plane and landed in Chicago and began work on Monday morning.” Chess Records producers featured Barge released his first record as a leader, the Barge’s horn on a slew of classics, including instrumental “Country,” in 1956—Norfolk disc Little Milton’s “We’re Gonna Make It” and jockey Bill Curtis produced it, and Chicago’s Koko Taylor’s “Wang Dang Doodle,” and he did storied Checker Records pressed it. some production for the label himself. After The saxophonist got his big break after Chess folded in the mid-70s, Barge kept going joining the band of blues shouter Chuck Willis. as an independent producer and a session Barge wasn’t supposed to appear on Willis’s musician, though in the 80s he developed a 1957 smash “C.C. Rider,” but after 20-odd sideline in movie acting. (He plays a cop in the takes in Atlantic Records’ New York studio, the 1993 Harrison Ford version of The Fugitive.) song just wasn’t coming together. “Chuck said, And Chicago’s titan of the tenor saxophone ‘Why don’t you just let Gene play a little bit, isn’t done yet. In 2013 he self-released an so we can get the feel?’” Barge recalls. “Two album called Olio with cameos from the likes takes later, we had cut the song.” of Buddy Guy and Otis Clay. Now, at age 91, he’s Back home in Norfolk, Barge hooked up with considering a sequel. “I want to record Olio 2,” record-shop proprietor Frank Guida and his he says. v

JUNE 7, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 17

2 0 1 8 C H I C A G O B L U E S F E S T I VA L

Willie Clayton still has his sterling voice as his career nears its golden anniversary For his fourth appearance on the Blues Festival’s main stage, the southern soul king will be cooking with a full band— backup singers, horn players, and all.

By BILL DAHL

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illie Clayton left Chicago in 1993 for the warmer climes of Atlanta, but he’s a proud product of the Windy City soul circuit. Well before turning 21, Clayton was opening for the greats of the genre at the city’s top venues. He’s long since graduated to headliner status himself: he made his main-stage debut at the Chicago Blues Festival in 1996, and Saturday evening’s set is his fourth appearance there.

“We’re going to really, really mix it up, change it up, and really do something that should have Chicago saying, ‘OK, this old boy’s still got it!’” promises the 63-year-old Clayton.

“I’m very much excited.” He’s bringing his full entourage along. “I roll with backup singers, four- or five-piece rhythm,” he says. “When I play bigger events like the Chicago Blues Fest, you will see live horns.” That tricked-out stage show keeps him in high demand. “If we keep rolling the way we’re rolling now, we could tap out a little over 100 dates this year,” he says.

Clayton has called himself “the King of Southern Soul,” and his claim to that crown

18 CHICAGO READER - JUNE 7, 2018

hardly seems presumptuous, thanks to his steady touring over the decades and his series of popular albums for the Ace, Ichiban, and Malaco labels in the 1990s and 2000s (he now records for Endzone). These days, though, he thinks of his style in somewhat more inclusive terms. “I grew up in Chicago, but I was born in the south. I like to think of mine as more of soul, R&B, and blues,” he says. “The era that I came up around, either you had some good singing pipes or you just weren’t allowed to get on the stage.”

Clayton’s own sterling pipes jump-started his career, and he made his recording debut when he was still in his early teens, at the dawn of the 70s, for Jimmy Liggins’s Duplex label. “I was born singing,” he says. A native of

by Spann, Jones, or both. “I miss those good times, because you just don’t have those type of stand-up artists anymore,” he says.

Spann arranged his protege’s first major recording deal, with Memphis-based Hi Records.

“Pervis was the person who introduced me to Willie Mitchell,” says Clayton. “You had to get your act together, or Willie Mitchell was not going to record WILLIE CLAYTON you.” ClaySat 6/9, 6:45 PM, Jay Pritzker Pavilion ton signed to Hi sister label Pawn and debuted there in 1974 with “It’s Time You Made Up Your Mind.” Through ’76 he made five more singles for the imprint, backed by the vaunted Hi rhythm section.

Clayton’s singles for Pawn included some shoulda-been hits, but they didn’t sell especially well. “Being a younger artist in my teens, some of those songs might have been a little too old for me,” he admits. Of course, that’s not to say he regrets his work for the label: “Being able to go out and to run out there and do some Indianola, Mississippi, he arrived in Chicago touring with Al Green across the country, that in 1971 and locked down high-powered mana- was some great stuff.” gerial representation from WVON on-air perClayton broke through on the soul charts sonality Pervis Spann. “They saw this kid that in 1984 with “Tell Me” and “What a Way to they thought was phenomenal,” says Clayton. Put It,” produced by singer General Crook “If you came to Chicago to play a big show and released by Nashville label Compleat. “I back in the 70s, you were coming for Pervis learned a lot from General,” he says. “That’s Spann or [WVON program director] E. Rodney when I really decided, ‘OK, it’s time for me Jones.” Clayton was soon rubbing shoulders to start producing myself.’” Before long, he with some of the top names in R&B. did—and beginning in 1998, he was a regular “Here I was, this kid, able to be onstage on Billboard’s blues and R&B charts for more and work with all those greats, from Marvin than a decade running.

Gaye to David Ruffin,” says Clayton. He played Clayton always looks forward to returning south-side hot spots including the Burning to the scene of some of his earliest triumphs, Spear, Checkmate, and the High Chaparral, in and this weekend’s visit is no exception. addition to package shows at the International “There’s no place like Chicago,” he says. “I Amphitheatre and the Auditorium promoted don’t miss the cold weather, though!” v

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2 0 1 8 C H I C A G O B L U E S F E S T I VA L

Boogie-woogie torchbearer Erwin Helfer upholds the dignity, joy, and humor of an antique style The 82-year-old pianist may be Chicago’s last living link to a tradition that arose more than a century ago.

By DAVID WHITEIS

Pull up a chair already. Erwin Helfer didn’t bring all that Crown Royal for just himself! é JIM DEJONG

I

t’s been six years since boogie-woogie pianist Erwin Helfer has been able to grace the Chicago Blues Festival with his music, and that’s too long. At age 82, Helfer may be Chicago’s last living representative of a tradition whose roots extend back to the late 1800s—boogie-woogie peaked from the 1920s till the ’40s and survived the subsequent “blues revival” era alongside better-known (and louder) blues subgenres associated with the amplified postwar style.

Despite its rich legacy, in more recent decades it’s too often been reduced to a museum piece.

Born in Chicago in 1936, Helfer was introduced to jazz and blues in his teens by a pianist named Bobby Wright, and he soon began exploring the city in order to meet as many surviving blues artists as he could. He later dug deeper into the music under the tutelage of jazz historian William Russell, and after moving to New Orleans to attend Tulane, he studied Crescent City keyboard masters such as Leon T. “Archibald” Gross, James Booker, Henry Roeland “Roy” Byrd (aka Professor Longhair), and Billie Pierce. (Helfer also got to know her husband, trumpeter De De Pierce.)

20 CHICAGO READER - JUNE 7, 2018

By this time, he’d taken traditional blues and boogie-woogie piano as his life’s calling; in his early 20s he recorded Billie Pierce, Doug Suggs (a fellow Chicagoan), Rufus “Speckled Red” Perryman, and James “Bat the Hummingbird” Robinson for the compilation album Primitive Piano, which he released in 1957 on his own Tone label. It’s since become a classic, and from the moment it came out it was an essential historical document—among other things, it’s the only recording Suggs ever made. Chicago label the Sirens reissued it in 2003.

Helfer made his own first recordings for the Cobra label in 1957, backing Delta guitarist Big Joe Williams, but they weren’t released at the time. That same year, he laid down some tracks with singer Estelle “Mama” Yancey, widow of pianist Jimmy Yancey—an early step in the development of their musical partnership and friendship, which lasted until her death in 1986. In 1983 Helfer made a full-length album with her, Maybe I’ll Cry, and he finally released those ’57 sessions on 2016’s Last Call.

Meanwhile, Helfer continued to work alongside and learn from the living titans of Chicago blues piano, including Little Brother

Montgomery, Sunnyland Slim, Jimmy Walker, The 1986 album Erwin Helfer Plays Chicago and Blind John Davis. His first recording to see Piano includes another Monk reference (a release, a duo LP with Walker titled Rough and sly quote from “Misterioso” in his own “After Ready (Testament), Wo r k I t ’s J u s t arrived in 1964, and Me and a Empty ten years later he Chair Blues”), ERWIN HELFER Sun 6/10, 11 AM, Front Porch Stage dropped another calliope-style leftcollaboration with Walker on the Flying Fish label. By 1975, when Helfer released Boogie Piano Chicago Style (Big Bear), he’d established himself as a worthy inheritor of the tradition as well an imaginative stylist who enriched his work with original ideas as well as influences borrowed from a wide variety of sources—jazz, pop, European classical.

Despite Helfer’s old-school aesthetics (“I have trouble with loud guitars,” he told John Litweiler in 1993), he’s never been a purist of the “moldy fig” variety. Through the years, his recordings have included not just his beloved blues, boogie-woogie, and stride but also the Cajun-flavored country tune “Jambalaya,” the pop chestnut “These Foolish Things,” Horace Silver’s soul-jazz classic “The Preacher,” and Thelonious Monk’s signature “Blue Monk.”

hand oompahing that adds puckish jollity to a ballad version of “C.C. Rider,” and a sacrilegious boogie bass line slipped into the revered jazz standard “Take the ‘A’ Train”—all excellent examples of the ways he can combine his reverence for tradition with a joyful sense of exploration.

Helfer’s music and his onstage personality are of a piece—ebullient yet deepened by autumnal tranquility, rich with unflappable dignity and easygoing humor. (After a gig for an inattentive crowd at a touristy Navy Pier bistro, he remarked, “I don’t know whether it stuck on the wall or fell off.”) He provides an increasingly necessary reminder that the Chicago blues tradition consists of much more than screaming guitars and wailing harmonicas. v

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JUNE 7, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 21

2 0 1 8 C H I C A G O B L U E S F E S T I VA L

Shardé Thomas (right) with the Rising Stars Fife & Drum Band earlier this year at the Blues Rules festival in Crissier, Switzerland é CHRISTOPHE LOSBERGER

Shardé Thomas propels the Rising Stars Fife & Drum Band into a new century

The granddaughter of fife master Otha Turner flavors a Mississippi hill country tradition with modern hip-hop and R&B.

By DAVID WHITEIS

F

ife-and-drum music has a long history in African-American folk culture, though it’s not as widely known as the blues and jazz traditions. Many accounts survive of black fife-and-drum units accompanying soldiers during the Revolutionary War, and during the Civil War such bands marched on both sides (though the Confederacy didn’t allow black combat soldiers till very late in the fighting). Fife-and-drum bands became less common during Reconstruction, but in the relatively isolated hill country of northern Mississippi, they continued to play for civic events, picnics, and other public gatherings.

This tradition remained strong until at least the mid-20th century, and it has yet to entirely die out. Otha Turner, founder of the long-running Rising Star Fife & Drum Band, was born in rural Rankin County, Mississippi, around 1907, and began playing the fife as a boy. He also drummed in local bands, eventually including a well-known group led by Napolean Strickland. He led Rising Star until his death in 2003, at which point his granddaughter Shardé Thomas took it over.

22 CHICAGO READER - JUNE 7, 2018

Thomas had picked up the fife before she turned five—Turner loved telling the story of how the little girl simply strode up to him one day, grabbed a cane, and began blowing into it.

Within a few years, fortified by the pluck and self-confidence she’s demonstrated ever since, Thomas was performing with Rising Star at picnics.

Now 28, Thomas still makes her fifes by hand out of cane, hollowing it out with a heated metal rod—just as Turner did. These days she usually calls the band “Rising Stars” because, she says, that’s what they are. They play functions in and around her native Sardis, Mississippi—including the annual goat roast and music festival at Turner’s old place in nearby Gravel Springs—as well as festivals and workshops all over the country.

If the antiquity and near extinction of the fife-and-drum tradition has you expecting Shardé Thomas to deliver a musty exercise in “folkie” revivalism, though, you’d better think again. Her fife technique transcends the instrument’s limitations—she slurs and bends notes, creating tonal and harmonic complexities that defy its seemingly constricted

range. Her richly textured voice carries an ir- ‘Oh! OK!’ That’s why we try to connect today’s resistible buoyancy, which makes “Little Sally music and today’s traditions in with our songs.

Walker” (an old children’s ring-game song We try to keep up to date with what they’re that she’s been singing virtually all her life) a listening to, and just add it to the style of highlight of her shows. She’s also developed music that we do. It’s kind of hard, but we just into an impressive hand drummer—she plays research the [contemporary] songs and just galvanizing polyrhythms on traditional mate- kind of put our own feel to it, in the way we do rial as well as on rock ’n’ roll numbers such as it onstage. We keep the young crowd, but we “Bo Diddley” (a favorite when she sits in with keep the tradition along with it.” the North Mississippi In that spirit, Allstars).

Thomas spices her RISING STARS FIFE & DRUM BAND Thomas now divides vocals with cadences WITH SHARDÉ THOMAS Sun 6/10, 11:15 AM, Mississippi Juke her time between borrowed from hipJoint touring and teaching hop and melismas with Head Start, but lifted from contemposhe remains dedicated rary R&B—the blend to keeping her grandfather’s name and leg- is especially clear on solo songs such as “We acy alive: as she sings on “Granny,” from her Made It,” from her self-released 2010 CD, self-released 2015 album Shawty Blues, “O-O- What Do I Do? During shows she’ll thrust her Otha dead and gone / And he left me here to fife at the crowd, challenging them to jump lead them on.” She’s convinced that her music, up and respond. “C’mon! Make some noise if presented in the right context with the for Otha Turner, y’all!” she’ll demand. “Now right adaptations, can still speak to younger make some noise for Shardé!” Even when listeners. she and the Rising Stars faithfully follow fife“They’re very interested,” she says. “It’s and-drum tradition, in their hands it lives and kind of fun to see their expressions—it’s like, breathes—which means it can still evolve. v

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2 0 1 8 C H I C A G O B L U E S F E S T I VA L

Ms. Jody always respects herself in the morning The southern soul-blues star can get pretty raunchy, but never at the expense of her self-worth or good sense.

By DAVID WHITEIS

M

s. Jody is one of the leading lights on the southern soulblues circuit, but she’s virtually unknown among mainstream fans in other parts of the country. A large part of the singer’s appeal, at least in the south, is her deft balance of provocativeness and propriety. She’ll tonguebathe the microphone with a lasciviousness that might make Tina Turner blush: “I take that joystick into my hand, y’all—and I like to call it a joystick because it brings me so much joy. . . . Ooh, that thing is so pretty to me!” Or she’ll pick a man from the audience to sit on the “hot seat” for her “Big Daddy” routine: “Would it be all right if I straddle you, and when I’m riding you, my cat accidentally strokes your leg?” she’ll say, standing in front of him now, fondling herself and thrusting her hips at him. “Would that be a problem?”

But there’s an old-fashioned seriousness of purpose behind these high jinks, and it separates the former Vertie Joann Pickens—born

24 CHICAGO READER - JUNE 7, 2018

in Chicago in 1957 and raised in Bay Springs, Mississippi—from many of her booty-shaking contemporaries. For all her carryings-on, Jody makes it clear that she intends her routines to instruct women on how to keep their relationships strong—they’re not about objectification or wantonness. “I’ve had fans come up to me and tell me that their relationship is so much better after they went home and did

I Was Thinking” portrays an abused woman lying in bed and plotting revenge against her tormenter, a scenario Jody knows personally: “My first husband, he hit me so hard . . . and next day when he got in from work, I was halfway to Chicago. I don’t stick around for the second lick.” Even in her odes to lost love, her protagonists are as likely to tell a man to hit the door as they are to bemoan his absence. As provocative as her persona can be, she doesn’t compromise when it comes to her assertiveness and self-worth.

Most important, though, Jody commands a supple and resonant voice, capable of conveying a wide range of emotions without sounding forced, and her theatrical flair ramps up the intensity even further. She delivers “I’ve Got the Strength to Stay Gone” as a full-fledged soap opera, complete with desperate entreaties from a male MS. JODY Sun 6/10, 3 PM, Mississippi Juke Joint vocalist who sings the role of a repentant but unredeemed cad. On the southern-soul circuit, favorite songs are practically evergreen, and she recently made a video for “The First Time,” a ballad from the 2011 Ecko album Ms. Jody’s Keepin’ It Real.

“It’s about me and this guy getting together,” she says, “and every time we get together, it’s just like the first time; the magic is still there.”

She says she’s recently reintroduced “The First Time” in her shows.

Like most southern-soul stars of her generation, though, Jody has had her greatest commercial successes not with ballads but with dance tracks (“Ms. Jody’s Boogie Slide,” “The Bop”) and raunchy party songs (“Booty Strut,” “Just Let Me Ride,” “I Got That Thunder Under some of the things I advised ’em on,” she says. Yonder”). For the most part, her act is a jubi“I tell ’em, ‘Give thanks to God for that.’ And I lant celebration of sexuality. She knows she’ll let ’em know it’s more to it than just jumpin’ in have to self-censor a bit at the Chicago Blues bed; you’ve got to build on your relationship.”

Festival—it’s an all-ages event—but she’s conTo drive the point home, she peppers her fident that won’t cramp her style too much. sets with fare such as “I’m Keeping It Real,” an “Oh, I’m going to tone it down,” she says. “I’ll extended secular sermon: “If you’re in a rela- definitely tone it down. But we’re gonna have a tionship and you ain’t happy,” she tells women, real good time, I promise you. Ms. Jody is still “get the hell out!” The song “If He Knew What going to tell it like it is.” v

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JUNE 7, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 25

26 CHICAGO READER - JUNE 7, 2018

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Recommended and notable shows and critics’ insights for the week of June 7

MUSIC

b ALL AGES F

PICK OF THE WEEK

Star-in-the-making Tink gets back to business on Pain & Pleasure AT THE END of 2014, Calumet rapper-singer Tink positioned herself as Chicago’s next big thing after dropping her high-water-mark Winters

Diary 2 mixtape and inking a deal with Timbaland’s Epic imprint, Mos-

ley Music Group. Hell, XXL magazine cemented that reputation when it listed her among its 2015 “freshman class” of rising stars, which also included Fetty Wap, Goldlink, and Vince Staples. But Tink’s career

stalled under Timbaland’s watch; according to the Fader, Tink’s relationship with Tim started to sour after he delayed her debut album,

Think Tink, which was originally scheduled to drop in July 2015, but

I wonder if some of the downfall was because he wanted her to be someone else. When she headlined Metro in early 2015, Timbaland invoked Aaliyah’s name and compared Tink to the dead R&B star so

frequently it raised the question of how much Timbaland cared for the

person right in front of him. Tink ditched her contract with Mosley in

December 2017, and in March she released an EP called Pain & Pleasure through her own Winter’s Diary label and G Herbo’s Machine Entertainment Group. These airtight tracks display Tink’s mastery of R&B é OLIVIA OBINEME/THE TRIIBE

TINK, SALMA SIMS

Fri 6/8, 8:30 PM, the Promontory, 5311 S. Lake Park, $30, $27 in advance. 18+

THURSDAY7 Lillie Mae Bubbles Brown opens. 8 PM, Szold Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music. 4545 N. Lincoln, $18, $16 members. b Lillie Mae Rische has spent the bulk of her 25 years playing music. She began singing with her father and siblings in the Forrest Carter Family Band at age three, and added fiddle four years later. The group played around Branson, Missouri, and toured RV parks in Texas for donations, and after her parents split up, she and her siblings formed Jypsi, a middle-of-the-road country band that made a failed album for Arista in 2008. By the time Jack White enlisted her as a touring musician and collaborator on his 2014 album Lazaretto, she was a seasoned pro with country music coursing through her blood.

She penned all of the tunes on her 2017 solo album Forever and Then Some (Third Man), cowriting a few with her mandolin-playing sister Scarlett Rische. Produced by White, the record includes contributions from a number of her Jypsi bandmates and friends, including longtime collaborators bassist Brian Zonn and drummer Tanner Jacobson. It embraces an infectiously rustic country-folk sound with lots of hot picking, and is distinguished

as well as her playful inventiveness—on “Signs” she slips snippets of

rapping between debonair and sultry sung verses as easily as the rest of us breathe. —LEOR GALIL

Brandee Younger

by a sharp melodic tang that underlines the influence of Lucinda Williams. Rische applies her crystalline Dolly Parton-ish twang to songs that bring a poetic urgency to blossoming, flourishing, or failing romance. On the ballad “Loaner” she deftly grapples with the difficulty of moving on from a relationship that’s spent while allowing for one last tryst, singing: “Oh it’s a loaner / You can’t take it with you / But you can take me home tonight.” “These Daze” describes the creeping realization that a lover is pulling away, detailing his passive-aggressive gestures, such as declining to take the singer by the arm because “you’re afraid someone might see me there by your side.” —PETER MARGASAK

é JERRIS MADISON

Brandee Younger Quintet 7 PM, Lyon & Healy Harps, 168 N. Ogden, $40. b The harp has always been an oddity in jazz music. Its two most notable practitioners, Alice Coltrane and Dorothy Ashby, were most active decades ago; both musicians had roots in postbop forms and found fascinating ways to translate the cascading sounds associated with the classical instrument into rhythmically elastic settings—though each eventually embraced more contemporary modes rooted in soul, funk, and, for Coltrane, Indian music. Later

recordings by both harpists became primo sample material in hip-hop culture, and it’s partly through those records that Brandee Younger (who studied classical music at the University of Hartford) discovered Ashby, whose work became one of her primary musical influences. Since 2007, when Ravi Coltrane asked Younger to perform at his mother’s memorial service in New York, she’s been slowly but steadily attracting attention, playing and

recording with the likes of Common, Man Forever, John Legend, Jeremy Pelt, and Moses Sumney.

Younger’s self-released 2016 album Wax & Wane, which includes a couple covers of songs from Ashby’s 1968 classic Afro-Harping, was produced

by Casey Benjamin, a reedist and singer who’s often worked with Robert Glasper, a prime mover in the marriage of jazz and hip-hop rhythms. Despite the record’s harder rhythmic feel, it clearly builds J

JUNE 7, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 27

MUSIC

Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/soundboard.

Bill Frisell é DANIEL SHEEHAN

continued from 27

on Ashby’s forward-looking ideas, and its compact production—along with the taut, funky drumming of Dana Hawkins and the tightly coiled lines of electric bassist Dezron Douglas—suggests the feel of music produced by J. Dilla, while the front line of flutist Anne Drummond and saxophonist Chelsea Baratz ground the music in the sound of 70s spiritual jazz.

Younger roams more freely in her improvisations than Ashby without forsaking the jazz great’s plush melodic touch. She leads her working quintet here, with the great E.J. Strickland taking the drum seat.

—PETER MARGASAK

FRIDAY8 Burna Boy 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, 1375 W. Lake, $20. b There’s little overlap in the Venn diagram that connects Drake and Fall Out Boy, but one definitive commonality is that they’ve both worked with Nigerian Afrobeat star Damini Ogulu, better known as Burna Boy; he contributes vocals to Fall Out Boy’s recent Mania and claims he wrote five tracks for Drake’s More Life, of which one was selected and largely reworked for the album (his lone contribution remains uncredited). Both Drake and Fall Out Boy have established track records of partnering with fast-rising acts or superstars—the former has been accused of being a culture vulture too many times to count—and it makes sense that they’d both find roads to Burna Boy, whose sense of pop is so universal it could move the entire world. He calls his sound Afro-fusion, which he told Interview magazine is “basically like a pizza.

With Afrobeat as the base—the dough—and everything else, the pepperoni and all that, that’s the reggae, the dancehall, the R&B and hip-hop.” But where pizza toppings simply coexist on top of the pie, Burna Boy blends global genres so well with Afrobeat that each element becomes even stronger; witness the dancehall pulse of “Sekkle Down.”

That track appears on Burna Boy’s recent Outside

28 CHICAGO READER - JUNE 7, 2018

(Atlantic), which runs like a Now That’s What I Call Music! compilation. Even if you’re unfamiliar with these songs, their placid percussion, effervescent melodies, and easygoing grooves create the kind of atmosphere that makes the album feel familiar on first listen. —LEOR GALIL

Bill Frisell Trio 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, 4544 N. Lincoln, $35, $33 members. b Few musicians have built as distinctive a sound world as guitarist Bill Frisell. Though he’s ostensibly a jazz guitarist, since the early 80s he’s funneled a wide variety of influences and ideas from country, rock, noise, and various international traditions into an aesthetic as American as anything forged

by Sousa, Presley, or Copland. Though specific projects such as film scores or songbooks constantly shift his focus in the short term, a macrosweep

Burna Boy é ALEX DEMORA

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of his oeuvre shows how earthy twang, melodic wanderlust, and humid atmospheres infused with the wide-open spirit of the plains meld in his recordings. Earlier this year he released a spellbinding solo guitar album, Music Is (Okeh), a luxuriant survey of older original tunes along with some new ones. The project was sparked by an air of spontaneity that coursed through the guitarist following a weeklong solo residency at the Stone—the New York not-for-profit avant-garde and experimental space programmed by John Zorn. From piece to piece he deploys his singular mastery of looping and ethereal effects to weave together indelible melodies and haunting moods. There’s no missing the Wes Montgomery flavor in his chords on “Ron Carter,” a composition he’s recorded several times before. The biting distortion on “Think About It,” for which Frisell stuck an amplifier inside an upright

piano, functions as a palate cleanser in reverse— adding funk and grime instead of dissipating it. “In Line” is a dizzying multilinear re-up of the title track of his 1983 ECM debut (much of which was also played solo) with ever-mutating melodic tendrils cascading in multifarious tangles. Taken as a whole the album beautifully encapsulates Frisell’s depth and range in all its meditative glory. This evening he returns to Chicago with two of his strongest collaborators, bassist Thomas Morgan and drummer Rudy Royston. —PETER MARGASAK

Refreshments by

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V.V. Lightbody Rose Hotel opens. 9 PM, Schubas, 3159 N. Southport, $12, $10 in advance. 18+ Vivian McConnell—a veteran of Chicago indie-rock bands including Santah and Grandkids—turns J

bloomingtonboogies.com JUNE 7, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 29

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An Evening with

Alejandro Escovedo and Joe Ely ACROSS THE STREET IN SZOLD HALL 4545 N LINCOLN AVENUE, CHICAGO IL

6/10 Teen Arts Collectives Spring Show at Subterranean 6/15 Global Dance Party: Chicago Reel 6/22 Jug Band Kazoobilee featuring Strictly Jug Nuts, the Deep Fried Pickle Project, and Bones Jugs

WORLD MUSIC WEDNESDAY SERIES FREE WEEKLY CONCERTS, LINCOLN SQUARE

6/20 Elida Almeida 6/27 Son Veteranos

OLDTOWNSCHOOL.ORG 30 CHICAGO READER - JUNE 7, 2018

é VILMA JOVAISA

WITH DJ MR. WIGGLES FEBRUARY 24 .....DARK MEN JUNE 8..................DANNY DRAHER BAND JANUARY 13..................

DJROOM SKID LICIOUS JUNE 9..................FRANK RAVEN WHITEWOLFSONICPRINCESS JANUARY 14..................

TONYBAND DO ROSARIO GROUP JUNE 10................HEISENBERG UNCERTAINTY PLAYERS 7PM MOJO 497 PM JANUARY 17..................

JAMIE WAGNER & FRIENDS JUNE 11................RC BIG BAND

Someone Old Someone New / Congress of Starlings

SUNDAY, JUNE 17 7PM

Cheer-Accident

JUNE 7..................BLUES FEST PARTY HOFFMAN WITH JANUARY 11..................

FLABBY SHOW 8PM FEBRUARY 23 .....MIKE FELTEN SMILIN’ BOBBY AND THE CLEMTONES

SATURDAY, JUNE 9 8PM

Asleep at the Wheel

MUSIC

Come enjoy one of Chicago’s finest beer gardens!

JUST ADDED • ON SALE THIS FRIDAY! 9/30 11/15

Est.1954 Est. 1954 Celebrating over Celebrating over 61 service 65 years of service to Chicago!

Chicago!

TUE

OAK PARK VOICEBOX STORY NIGHT

WED

IAN MOORE SideBar Jazz w/ Peter Lerner / Joe Rendon

12

13

THU

14

Trevor Parker - James Robinson Parrar - Stakehorse SAYERS - MRYT RACR 15 In The SideBar - Ernie Henrickson

FRI

SAT

16

Tex Mex New Orleans Style!

THE IGUANAS plus The Belvederes

6/21 - Judy Roberts / Jeannie Lambert 6/22 - Girls, Guns & Glory 6/23 - Professor Moptop - The Dawn Of The Beatles 6/27- Scott Ligon’s All Star Freakout / Paul Sanchez Nick Lowe w/ Los Straitjackets - Joe Ely Band - James McMurtry Marcia Ball - Kelly Willis - Bob Schneider - Eric Lindell - John Moreland CJ Chenier - Ike Reilly Assassination - Archie Bell - Nikki Hill Robbie Fulks with Linda Gail Lewis and Redd Volkaert - Banditos 60+ Bands on 3 Stages - Cajun / American BBQ Festival Tents For Music Rain Or Shine!

Four-Day Passes Available at ticketweb.com

inward in her solo project V.V. Lightbody (named for her piano-playing grandmother) to create shimmering folk-pop that arrives like a cool breeze of introspection. She’s referred to her music as “nap-rock,” but that tag suggests something sleepy while the sounds she produces are effervescent and light. Much of the material on her forthcoming debut album, Bathing Peach (due June 15 from Midwest Action), conveys the elegant sense of propulsion associated with bossa nova, though only one song, “Fish in Fives,” embraces that genre’s sashaying rhythms. The consistently weightless music proves to be the perfect setting for McConnell’s gently sweet singing, even when a rippling tension arises, such as on “Dead Bee.” Many of the songs employ sea imagery: on opening track “Gaze” she uses fog as a metaphor for the narrator’s yearning vision as she spots the face of her lover on the shore from a ship in a clouded haze. On “Swollen,” romantic infatuation is described partly as the way flesh wrinkles and swells when submersed in the ocean or a stream for an extended period. Her voice is a captivating presence, tenderly cradled by patient, gossamer arrangements with overdubbed flute lines and harmony vocals that hark back to the prerock sound of the Andrews Sisters over lush sounds crafted by some of the city’s most skilled and tasteful jazz musicians, including drummer Matt Carroll, keyboardist Matt Pierson, and bassist Mike Harmon. —PETER MARGASAK

Tink See Pick of the Week, page 27. Salma Sims opens. 8:30 PM, the Promontory, 5311 S. Lake Park, $30, $27 in advance. 18+

SATURDAY9 Cheer-Accident Free Salamander Exhibit headlines; Cheer-Accident and Faun Fables open.

8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 2100 W. Belmont, $15. 21+ Cheer-Accident has been Chicago’s most ambitious and versatile prog-rock band for decades, but within the sprawl of its intricate arrangements and bizarre humor the beauty and tunefulness of much

of its material can get lost. If anything characterizes the band’s new album, Fades (Skin Graft), it’s those melodic gifts: on opening track “Done,” one of numerous cuts with guest vocalists (Elizabeth Breen and Lindsay Weinberg, in this case), the band clings to post-motorik grooves, and on “The Mind-Body Experience,” a flinty art-rock song a la Henry Cow, the plaintive singing of the band’s sole founding member, Thymme Jones, recalls the tender fragility of Robert Wyatt. Cheer-Accident’s revolving cast of musicians and singers rarely indulges in extraneous gestures or overwrought solos; while the lead guitar of Jeff Libersher on the creepy “Monsters” veers toward the processed sound of Robert Fripp, the arrangement is otherwise lean and unfussy, with Todd Rittman of Dead Rider banging out rhythms on the piano in lockstep with Jones’s swinging drums. Dawn McCarthy, whose Faun Fables opens the evening, lends her dark alto to the song and is answered by distant, ghoulish laughter. One of the album’s most sublime moments arrives courtesy of singer Sacha Mullin, whose gorgeous, pitch-precise voice gets an unnecessary Auto-Tune tweak on the quasi-operatic “I’m Just Afraid,” a song that also contains an unexpectedly lyric trombone solo by Mike Hagedorn. I’m not too crazy about the songs that feature the theatrically eccentric singing of Nils Frykdahl (including “House of Dowse,” which is appended by a rhyme for former Chicagoan Bethany Schmitt, aka the Buttress), but even those would be hard to resist with less mannered vocals.

Thirty-seven years into its run, Cheer-Accident is better than ever. —PETER MARGASAK

SUNDAY10 Hop Along Bat Fangs open. 8 PM, Metro, 3730 N. Clark, $21, $18 in advance. 18+ Hop Along have been a foundational force in Philadelphia’s overlapping indie emo and punk scenes, but it’s a little difficult to measure their growth from album to album upon first blush.

That’s partially because front woman Frances Quinlan set a high bar in Hop Along’s early days, when they could still be described as a solo project. With their third album, April’s Bark Your Head Off, Dog

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MUSIC

Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/soundboard.

(Saddle Creek), the band take their adroit, searing indie rock and make it wide-screen—a feat they pulled off by extending their usual recording process to properly tease out their work. Their previous album, 2015’s Painted Shut, came out of a more “plug in and play” type of production, but as Quinlan told online magazine Uproxx, the band had a surplus of time to craft Bark Your Head Off, Dog in part because this time around they recorded at the Headroom, which belongs to guitarist Joe Reinhart.

“Knowing the place we were going into and all the tools that we would have at our disposal, we just wanted to use all of them and see what we could do with a little extra time,” Quinlan said. That attention to detail and their newly adopted unhurried recording process shows every time a warm Rhodes melody calms its bristling guitars. The songwriting is as on-point as ever, and Quinlan’s impressionistic lyrics are as arresting as her weathered rasp—which sounds even better when those piano notes cushion her voice. —LEOR GALIL

Simon Joyner Gia Margaret and Angela James open. 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $10, $7 in advance. 21+ Simon Joyner has been composing nuanced expositions of loss, longing, and hope since at least 1987. That’s the year he wrote the earliest songs that appear on A Rag of Colts (Gertrude Tapes), a compilation of home demos recorded over 25 years that has just been reissued on vinyl. “Daylight,” from his most recent album, 2017’s Step Into the Earthquake (Shrimper), puts the listener in the shoes of someone so deep in denial after losing a loved one that even the sun’s rays yield visions of his dearly departed. Elsewhere on the record he describes the machinations of anxiety in the age of Trump.

The barroom poets on “I’m Feeling It Today” wake up to postelection visions of burgeoning bigotry and authoritarianism that are way worse than the usual hangover. On most of the album his band the Ghosts, a shifting assemblage of Nebraska-based musicians, sets these tales to arrangements reminiscent of early electric Dylan. But Joyner breaks new-to-him ground on the cathartic sidelong closer, “I Dreamed I Saw Lou Reed Last Night,” which opens with field recordings of him trying to coax music out of a piano that was demolished when a tornado wrecked his barn before cutting to the

Drew McDowall é GILLIAN BOWLING

acts and embracing flinty collisions in the generous spaces mapped out between sections of its wideopen scores. Nowhere is this better exemplified than on “Stoppage,” the episodic epic by Ducret that opens the album like a trek through every sort of landscape. —PETER MARGASAK

Drew McDowall Itsi, Lituus, and Beau Wanzer open. 9 PM, Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, $10. 21+

band noisily bearing down on a riff that’s close kin to the Velvet Underground’s “Waiting for My Man.” Joyner begins the latter by relating an imagined conversation with his longtime hero about showbiz ethics, then uses lyrics borrowed from Woody Guthrie and Yoko Ono to steer the song into a howling protest against racially motivated murder and a country willing to tolerate it. Joyner is touring with a five-piece edition of the Ghosts and will play a fair bit of Earthquake as well as songs from throughout his career. —BILL MEYER

WEDNESDAY13 Samuel Blaser Trio 9 PM, Hungry Brain, 2319 W. Belmont, $10. 21+.

spontaneous gestures and utterances, and anticipating what might come next. This week Blaser returns to Chicago leading the shape-shifting trio behind last year’s live album Taktlos Zürich 2017 (Hatology). The trio, which includes electric guitarist Marc Drucet and drummer Peter Brunn, formed in 2013 and had played about 120 concerts by the time of thatperformance; the natural way the musicians toggle responsibilities within each piece— including one tune by each member as well as an interpretation of Igor Stravinsky’s “Fanfare for a New Theatre”—is a product of its experience and rapport. There are moments of hurtling propulsion where postbop fundamentals are turned inside out, but the trio is equally comfortable playing in free time, building tightrope-dangerous balancing

Between his tenure with experimental titans Coil and his stint in the equally important Psychic TV, Scottish musician Drew McDowall helped shape the sound and feel of 90s industrial with his Moogs and modular synths. By 2012, he’d brought his sound designs—conjured from gloomy, fractured beats and pure dark energy—to New York, where he embarked on a solo career. Last year he released the succinct Unnatural Channel, his second full-length for Dais.

Across the record’s seven tracks, McDowall lays out dystopian-flavored moods and soundscapes with layers of busted almost-beats, foggy, unsettling synths, and sharp electronic crackles. Listening to Unnatural Channel gives one a heightened sense of the huge influence McDowall had on the electronic drone records Coil put out in the 90s, and his vision has only become more clear and crisp over time.

McDowall isn’t known to play live very often, so this set is not to be missed. —LUCA CIMARUSTI v

Swiss trombonist Samuel Blaser lets his curiosity and versatility flow from project to project, whether he’s recontextualizing baroque music by Monteverdi and Machaut in an improvisational context or exploring the chamberlike dynamic of reedist Jimmy Giuffre’s early 60s trio with Steve Swallow and Paul Bley. Two dazzling new recordings offer further proof of his agile improvisational acumen. The most recent, Oostum (No Business), is an intimate series of duets with American drummer Gerry Hemingway where his playing moves between richly melodic, garrulous passages that exploit his horn’s extroverted personality to snorting, crab-walking flatulence to intensely muted conversational mutterings where he seems to be channeling human whispers. He and Hemingway are in constant dialogue, reflecting upon each other’s

Hop Along é TONJE THILESEN

JUNE 7, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 31

Anheuser-Busch and the Northcenter Chamber of Commerce present

THE FOOD THE RIBS

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32 CHICAGO READER - JUNE 7, 2018

Austin’s Texas Lightning BBQ King Smokehouse BBQ Supply Co. Blackwood BBQ Chicago BBQ Company Famous Dave’s Fireside Restaurant & Lounge Mrs. Murphy & Sons Irish Bistro Old Crow Smokehouse Porkchop Real Urban Barbecue Ribs1 BBQ & “Bangers” Wrigley BBQ

OTHER TASTY BITES Base Hit Grilling/ River Forest Catering Blackhawk BBQ & Seafood Blowin’ Smoque BBQ Bo’s Concessions Byron’s Hot Dogs Chase Root Beer Davis Theater Dinky Delights Donuts Dos Ricco’s Mexican Fusion El Campeon Fit to Be Fried Lee’s Concessions Poke Burrito Chicago Rancho Mateo Spicy Mexican Grill

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FOOD & DRINK

FRUNCHROOM | $$ R 4042 N. Milwaukee 773-853-2160 frunchroomchicago.com

Clockwise from top: BLT, matzoh ball soup, cured fish board, meatballs, grilled asparagus and strawberries é JAMIE RAMSAY

RESTAURANT REVIEW

Frunchroom is the JewishItalian deli you didn’t know you needed in your life

In tight quarters in Portage Park, chef Matt Saccaro and crew deliver quantities of quality.

By MIKE SULA

A

few weeks ago I called upon a well-known and outspoken chef for some expertise I needed for a story. But this chef wanted to talk about something else. The chef had just come from lunch at one of the celebrated new restaurants launched by a certain large and ever-spawning restaurant group, and before that dinner at a sprawling spinoff from another very prominent local group in town.

“I hate what they’ve done to this industry!” raged the chef, referring to the forces behind the oft-anticipated Chicago restaurant bubble.

“It’s gonna come down, and you know what?

It’s all gonna come back to chefs opening their own little places on their own credit cards.”

I knew what this meant: deeply personal projects certain chefs launch because they’ve got a dream, and even if they’re short on deep-pocketed investors or don’t have the financial leverage of a sprawling multiconcept empire, they’re going to make it happen somehow.

My first thought goes back fondly to the late Bunny, Iliana Regan’s microbakery that didn’t last long thanks to landlord shenanigans. And then there was Snaggletooth, the Lakeview microdeli that barely lasted more than a year. The restaurant world is a place where dreams often go to die.

But it’s also a place where odd little dreams thrive. Snaggletooth’s Jennifer Kim just opened Passerotto, a Korean-Italian mashup

in Andersonville that’s so weird it just might work. And then there’s Tempesta Market, Mi Tocaya, Steingold’s, Baker Miller, Cellar Door Provisions—concepts that dare you not to wish them the very best of luck in the choppy waters of the restaurant industry, concepts that make you realize how lucky we still are to live in Chicago.

Take Frunchroom, a place you’d call a holein-the-wall if it weren’t bright and cheerful

and perched in Portage Park, the antithesis of a hot restaurant neighborhood. It’s a 27seat counter-service cafe that incorporates elements of both Italian and Jewish deli traditions. Nearly everything on its surprisingly deep menu is made in-house by chef Matt Saccaro and his crew of four.

Saccaro is the former chef de cuisine at neighboring steak house Community Tavern, who’s struck out on his own with that restaurant’s former owner, Quay Tao, to open Frunchroom. The name is the uniquely Chicagoese compression of “front room”— meaning the entertaining area just off the entrance of the classic bungalow. Saccaro, who also clocked time at Anteprima and Autre Monde, has incorporated his family’s Italian and Jewish culinary influences on a menu of extraordinary ambition for a place only open for lunch and breakfast.

The latter features doughnuts and pastries and a handful of breakfast sandwiches, plus bagels from the Bagel Chef (one of the few items, along with the bread, made off the premises), with any of the cured fish, such as gravlax, oozing with salmon oil, just salty enough to be like cured sashimi; smoked salmon done pastrami style, with a crust of pepper and herbs; beautiful cured sardine fillets; and a shrimp terrine embedded with huge prawn chunks.

At lunch these transfigured sea creatures appear on boards accompanied by grilled sourdough, smooth quenelles of light cream cheese, and a colorful smattering of vinegar pickles—capers, cukes, radishes, and cauliflower.

The same ornaments dress a selection of cured meats that emerge from the kitchen appropriately at room temperature, making the ribbon of fat on the duck-breast prosciutto quiver between solid and liquid, perfectly lubricated to carry the subtle flavors over the palate. Chicken liver mousse is rich, the liver bass note harmonizing beautifully with fat and acid and flakes of Maldon salt. Andalusian chorizo is spicy and funky, perfect with a pickled apricot and a few grains of stoneground mustard.

A handful of resolutely seasonal plates includes charred asparagus with straw- J

JUNE 7, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 33

○ Watch a video of Carley Gaskin working with pork rinds in the kitchen at chicagoreader.com/food.

FOOD & DRINK Blueberry basket, shortbread with rosemary and pinenuts; (rear) Basque cake é JAMIE RAMSAY

continued from 33

berries and blue cheese in a balsamic reduction, a riot of flavors, gorgeously balanced.

Matzo ball soup is more like a bowl of gravy or poultry demi-glace with Fresno peppers and parsley adorning the smoked thigh meat that hangs out among the kneidlach. These are a bit denser than bubbe’s, but it would feel churlish to complain, since the whole ensemble puts the recipe on the side of the Manischewitz box to shame.

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Call For Reservation 312-280-8990 34 CHICAGO READER - JUNE 7, 2018

Sandwiches form the core of Frunchroom’s menu and include some extraordinary takes on familiar standards. Ham and cheese on a long bun, griddled under pressure, oozes butterkase, with pickles and mustard inside, a stealthy Cuban Reuben. The BLT is simultaneously airy on brioche and saturated (faturated?) with butter, bacon fat, and basil aioli.

Grilled cheese pushes that fat quotient even higher, leaving slicks of butter, raclette, and caramelized onions trailing down the chin.

The requisite burger is also buttery, coarsely ground, cooked correctly, and just great.

Rotating rococo doughnuts like chocolate-pretzel, lemon-pistachio, and toasted almond-amaretto-dark chocolate share limited space at the front counter with other pastries like butterscotch-pecan pie and rosemary-pine nut shortbread, while tart cherry or caramel shakes with Zarlengo’s gelato—made by Saccaro’s wife’s family—emerge from the kitchen impossibly thickened.

Currently it seems like a number of Portage Park moms and their offspring have taken to Frunchroom’s limited real estate, but I predict long lines in its future as word gets out about Saccaro’s original, idiosyncratic vision for a neighborhood deli. v

m @MikeSula

COCKTAIL CHALLENGE

Classy just like George H.W. Bush

Amazing things happen when you mix pork rinds and Dewar’s.

By JULIA THIEL

Oh Dang, That’s Good é ELLY TIER

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AURA KELTON (SPORTSMAN’S CLUB) and CARLEY GASKIN, who co-owns a cocktail catering business called HOSPITALITY 201, are known for their love of snacks and for always carrying some in their purses. A couple years ago they were driving back from a bachelorette party in Nashville, “feeling not so great,” Gaskin says. “We stopped at a gas station and got two huge bags of PORK RINDS. Before we even got back on the interstate, both bags were gone.” It’s been a running joke between the two ever since, so when it came time for Kelton to choose an ingredient that Gaskin would need to make a cocktail with, she naturally chose pork rinds—and specified that they had to come from a gas station.

That didn’t limit Gaskin’s selection: she found 12 different flavors at a gas station not far from her apartment. “I picked a mesquite barbecue that I think will go really well with Dewar’s White Label,” she says. “[The whiskey has] some nice citrus and honey notes.” She steeped the mesquite pork rinds with the scotch for half an hour before straining out the solids to create pork rind-infused whiskey, which she made into an old-fashioned by adding a little honey syrup and smoked chile bitters.

Her inspiration for pairing the pork rinds with scotch came from a restaurant she worked at in Nashville, she says. The chef used

to make crispy chicken skins the staff would eat as a snack, and one night Gaskin suggested taking a shot of scotch with them. The chef’s first response was “oh dang, that’s good!”— which is also the name of Gaskin’s cocktail—and the combination turned into an after-work tradition. Gaskin thought the slightly smoky scotch would work equally well with pork rinds (it’s also a classy pairing for a snack that, according to a 1989 New York Times article, was elevated in status after George H.W. Bush’s fondness for them became well-known during his first presidential campaign).

OH DANG, THAT’S GOOD

2 DASHES HELLA SMOKED CHILE BITTERS .25 OZ HONEY SYRUP 2 OZ PORK RIND-INFUSED DEWAR’S WHITE LABEL* *Soak a large bag of mesquite-flavored pork rinds in a bottle of Dewar’s for half an hour, then fine strain to remove the solids.

Stir all ingredients with ice, strain into a rocks glass with ice cubes, and garnish with a pork rind.

WHO’S NEXT:

Gaskin has challenged ERIC SIMMONS at MAPLE & ASH to create a cocktail with WONDER BREAD. v

m @juliathiel

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THE NORTHERN TRUST COMPANY is seeking a Senior

JOBS

ADMINISTRATIVE ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANT: ServiceMaster By Simons is hiring! Seeking energetic, positive attitude, stellar communication (phone dispatch, scheduling) & troubleshooting skills. QB & Office a plus. BA, or equiv. 3-5 years office enviro. Sales exp. Pt-time 2535 hrs per wk. $14-$16 per hr. Email resumes to: servicemasterbysimons @gmail.com SR. CARPET & UPHOLSTERY

TECHNICIAN: ServiceMaster By Simon is hiring! Looking for a energetic, professional, well groomed, skilled, hard worker for carpet & upholstery cleanings. Must have valid drivers license, pass background check, drug test, and 3-5 yrs exp. Full time $13-$20/hr. *Email resumes to servicemasterbysimons@gmail.com

FACT CHECKER EVANSTON

100-year-old data publisher seeks FT phone researcher/fact checker. Duties consist of placing outbound calls to collect and verify data. 8:30-4:30 M-F. $11.50/hr plus benefits. Email resumes to jobs@mni.net

SALES & MARKETING COLLEGE OF AMERICAN

PATHOLOGISTS (Northfield, IL) seeks International Region Leader w/Master’s in Bus., Marketing or Finance plus 2 yrs of exp. in marketing & bus. development in healthcare industry (or BS+5). Apply online at www.cap.org. No calls. EOE.

General Business Systems Specialist Flying Food Group, LLC Chicago, Illinois Work with the company’s chefs to continuously evaluate and improve the electronic management, retrieval and storage of the company’s thousands of food recipes. Analyze and document productivity effects of business systems, including reviews of user requirements, business processes, work flows and data flows.

Provide recommendations on maintenance or replacement of IT systems while taking into consideration current industry trends, performance analysis and long term financial impact.

Must have a Master’s degree in Business Administration. The position also requires two (2) years of experience as a Business Analyst. Must also have two (2) years of experience with the following: Agilysys’ EATEC software; Optiva PLM Recipe Formula Product Lifecyle Software; Microsoft’s Dynamics NAV software; database design and development.

If qualified, please submit your resume to ccoudray@flyingfood. com and reference code BSS0518.

Consultant, Application in Chicago, IL w/ the following reqts: BS degree in Engineering, Computer Science or related field or foreign equiv degree. 8 yrs of related experience. Required skills: Design, develop, code review and unit test Markit EDM applications in capital market to load, validate, transform, master and export data (3 yrs); Improve Performance of Markit EDM applications using architecture and design restructure, SQL query tuning, and load testing (3 yrs); Write and performance tune SQL Queries using Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio, Rapid SQL, and SQL Profiler to retrieve, edit and store data in Database (8 yrs); Package and deploy Markit EDM components from Version Control using Markit EDM ImportExport Packaging Wizard and Command Line Import-Export (3 yrs). EOE. Please apply on-line at www.northerntrustcareers.com and search for Req. # 18067

AVP, GLOBAL PLATFORM DELIVERY – SALESFORCE (QBE AMERICAS, INC.; CHICAGO, IL)

Manage IT delivery of Salesforce platform and platform components to support the company’s insurance business in the United States, Asia Pacific, United Kingdom, and Australia market regions. Reqs: Must have a Bachelor’s degree (will accept a three-year or four-year foreign or U.S. degree) in Computer Science, Management Information Systems, Computer Engineering, or a related field, plus 6 years of work experience in the commercial insurance industry.

Must be willing and able to travel approximately 10% of the time. Apply by email, referencing Job Code KBOEYTEST20172-4, Attention: Shannon Furtaw, Lead Recruitment Coordinator, QBE Americas, Inc., Email: Shannon.Furtaw@us.qbe.com.

ADVISORY ADVISORY MANAGER, SAP SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT (MULT. POS.), PricewaterhouseCoopers Advisory Services LLC, Chicago, IL. Use SAP solutns to help clients identify & execute against their enterprise resource planning needs & to solve business problems in the areas of finance, operatns, human capital, customer & governance, risk & compliance. Req. Bach’s deg or foreign equiv. in Bus Admin, Comp.

Sci, Engg or rel. + 5 yrs post-bach’s prog. rel. work exp.; OR a Master’s deg or foreign equiv. in Bus Admin, Comp. Sci, Engg or rel. + 3 yrs rel. work exp. Travel up to 80% req. Apply by mail, referencing Job Code IL1779, Attn: HR SSC/Talent Management, 4040 W. Boy Scout Blvd, Tampa, FL 33607.

Pricing Analyst to work in Chicago, IL; run regression to anal data, set price; Req: MBA w/ major on business or finance, or rel. fld & 6 months exp. in pricing analysis. Apply: LCD Wealth Management LLC, 42 Piersons RDG, Hockessin, DE19707, Attn: HR.

king crab house 1816 N. Halsted St., Chicago

HELP WANTED! Prep Cook

(Some Experience Needed) Apply In-Person (after 4:00 pm)

312-280-8990

THE NORTHERN TRUST CO. is

seeking a Consultant, Tax Compliance in Chicago IL, with the following requirements: BS in Finance, Accounting or Economic Law and 1.5 years of related experience. Prior exp. must include the following: advise on domestic and international tax matters including the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) and the Common Reporting Standard (CRS) (1.5 yrs); analyze current and new domestic and global tax compliance rules and assess their impact on the business (2 yrs); develop forms, certifications, job aids and policy documents to meet tax compliance and reporting requirements (2 yrs). EOE Please apply on-line at www.northerntrustcareers.com and search for Req. # 18070

AMERICAN HIP INST. SEEKS MEDICAL SCIENTIS T – O R T H O P E D I C S in Westmont, IL- Compile & analyze data from ortho surgeries; investigate effect of surgical & nonsurgical treatments of major joints; design & implement research studies; prep articles for med. journals.

Reqs. med. degree & 1-yr exp. in offered position or applied, practical med., med. doctor, physician or med. researcher.

Send resume to E. Solorzano, AHI, 1010 Executive Court, Ste. 250, Westmont, IL 60559 THE NORTHERN TRUST CO. is

seeking a Sr. Consultant, Applications in Chicago, IL with the following requirements: 8 years prior experience. Prior exp. must include 3.5 yrs with each of the following: design and implement any version of IBM Cognos TM1 toolset version from 9.5.

2 and up; design, develop and implement Financial Performance Management Applications; implement business software applications utilizing TM1 architect, performance modeler, Turbo Integrator, rules and feeders, drill-throughs and MDX; perform troubleshooting in a multi-tier production Cognos TM1 environment utilizing TM1 and BI tools. Please apply on-line at www.northerntrustcareers. com and search for Req. # 18061.

DEVELOPER 3 (RR Donnelley &

Sons Company; Warrenville, IL) Develop, create, & modify general computer applications software.

Analyze user needs and develop software solutions. Reqs: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Technology, or related technical field + 5 yrs post-bacc progressively responsible experience. May telecommute 3 days a week. For complete job description, list of requirements, and to apply, go to: https://www.rrdonnelley.com/ about/rrdonnelley-jobs.aspx Job #39019.

Banner & Witcoff, Ltd. seeks Technical Leads for Chicago, IL location to analyze technology & advise internal patent counsel on best approach for protecting intellectual property. Master’s in Eng+2yrs exp OR Bachelor’s in Eng+5yrs exp req’d. Skills req’d2yrs w/reviewing actions issued from USPTO; conducting research on mechanical devices, electronic devices, & comp sci innovations. Must have passed the exam for recognition to practice in patent matters before the USPTO. May telecommute. Apply at: http://bannerwitcoff. com/careers/ Ref. RPL APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT ASSOCIATE MANAGER (MULTIPLE POSITIONS)

(Accenture LLP; Chicago, IL): Develop, design, and maintain software products or systems to enable client strategies. Must have willingness and ability to travel domestically approximately 80% of the time to meet client needs.

For complete job description, list of requirements, and to apply, go to: www.accenture.com/us-en/careers (Job# 00589990).

ARCHITECT AT INSIGHT Direct

USA, Inc. (Chicago, IL): Be proactive in emerging technology & creative trends to actively enhance offering sets, especially the areas of Internet of Things (IOT), Digital Transformation, Modern Applications, Data & Analytics, and Mobility. Require BS in Eng. CS, or IT and 5 yrs exp. Add’l duties, reqs, travel req available upon request. Email resume and cover letter to jason.steiner@insight.com, ref Job#SK01

SOFTWARE DEVELOPER (FULL Stack Web Appl’ns). Design

& dev. web app. platform; build front-end framework. Bach. deg. or foreign equiv. (Electrical & Computer Engineering or related field) or higher req’d. Min. 6 months’ exp. in pos’n(s) w/ a) software dev. &/or testing using C# programming lang. & b) full stack web app. dev. using Angular JS framework req’d. InnerWorkings, Inc., Chicago, IL. Resumes to: Recruiting, InnerWorkings, 600 W. Chicago Ave., Ste. 850, Chicago, IL 60654.

CLEANER WANTED FOR full

time employment. Duties include Cleaning, mopping, dusting, debris pickup, refuse container rotation, light bulb changing, minor landscaping, snow removal, and assistants to trades. Commercial and residential properties. Requires drivers license, work permit or citizenship, and reliable transport. Normal business hours with weekly opportunities for overtime. Email resume to pguerra407@ gmail.com

Snr Software Engineer Aeris Communications, Inc. in Chicago, IL seeks Snr Software Engineer to architct & dev scalble & reliable solutions to automate & increase visibilty to assets thru a single interfce.

MS in EE or CS plus 3 yrs exp in archit & writng lg scale sw & sys req. Mail resume w/ ad copy to Aeris, 435 N. LaSalle St., Ste 300, Chicago, IL 60654 Attn: C Kearns #RK103.

APPLICATION SERVICES DEVELOPER (SQL Developer)

sought by PLS Financial Services, Inc.: Req BS in EE, CE, CS, or foreign equiv. & 5 yrs. of exp. developing software apps, administering ETL jobs using SSIS Packages & working with MS SQL. Position is in Chicago, IL. Mail CV to: Attn: Tracie Marcus, 1 S. Wacker Dr., 36 Fl., Chicago, IL 60606. EOE.

SOFTWARE DEVELOPER MS+2 or BS+5. (CS, any Eng or Technology field). Exp. to include big data architect, Hadoop, MadReduce, Apache Spark and Data Stage. Job Loc: North Chicago, IL. Available for employment at various worksites in US. Send resume to FPM Technologies. 5 Michalik Dr. Ste 500,Sayreville, NJ 08872

ALIVIO MEDICAL CENTER seeks Physician Assistant in Chicago, IL: Assist patients w/ complex, acute, & chronic health conditions, in Spanish & English.

Reqs Master’s degree in Phys.

Asst. studies, IL phys. asst. lic. & Spanish fluency. Send resume to J. Ruiz, 2355 S. Western Ave., Chicago, IL 60608 GROUPON, INC. is seeking a Software Development Engineer in Test in Chicago, IL w/ the following responsibilities: Utilize testing expertise to contribute to the team of engineers to deliver a highly functioning, reliable and scalable platform. Apply on-line at https:// jobs.groupon.com/jobs/R17070

REAL ESTATE RENTALS

STUDIO OTHER GARY NSA ACCEPTING applications for SECTION 8 STUDIO AND ONE BDRM Apartments. Apply Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10am to 2pm ONLY at 1735 W 5th Ave. Applications are to be filled out on site. Adult applicants must provide a current picture ID and SS card.

CHATHAM - 7105 S. CHAMPLAIN, 1BR. $650. 2BR. $750. SEC 8 OK. Heat & appl. Call Office: 773-

1 BR OTHER

WOODLAWN 2BD- $ 9 0 0 3 B D-$ 10 0 0 Move in by July 1.

FELLOWSHIP MANOR Affordable Housing For The Elderly Applications are being accepted for the waiting list at

966-5275 or Steve: 773-936-4749

Free TV & No Security Niki 773-8082043

3 BEDROOM $1250/MO. heat

included, Sec 8 welcome. Vincinty Pulaski and Grand Ave. Call 708-4668828 or cell 708-205-4072.

CHICAGO - LOVELY 4 room apt, 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

Ashland Hotel nice clean rms.

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

Low rates daily/weekly/monthly.

South Side. Call 773-376-5200

1 BR UNDER $700 FULLERTON COURT APART-

MENTS, 2303 N Clybourn Ave. Chicago, IL 60614, (773) 871-8505 Waitlist will be open for our 1 bedroom apartments for Seniors 62 and older ONLY . Monday, June 4, 2018 through Friday, June 8, 2018 from 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. Waitlist will close June 8th at 3:00pm. Rent is income-based. Eligibility is subject to Program guidelines. Income guidelines and restrictions apply. Managed by RELATED MANAGEMENT

108th & Indiana, 1BR, living room, dining room, kitchen $685/mo + security. 773-264-6711

Newly updated, clean furnished rooms in Joliet, near buses & Metra, elevator. Utilities included, $91/wk. $395/mo. 815-722-1212

BIG ROOM with stove, fridge, bath & nice wood floors. Near Red Line & Buses. Elevator & Laundry, Shopping. $121/wk + up. 773-561-4970

7425 S. COLES - 1 BR $620, 2 BR $735, Includes Free heat & appliances & cooking gas. (708) 424-4216 Kalabich Mgmt 6930 S. SOUTH SHORE DRIVE Studios & 1BR, INCL. Heat, Elec, Cking gas & PARKING, $585-$925, Country Club Apts 773-752-2200

Forest Park: 1BR new tile, energy efficient windows, lndry facilitities, a/c, incls heat - natural gas, $895/ mo Luis 708-366-5602 lv msg Newly Decorated 3 Rms, 1BR $600, 4 rms, 2BR, $700. 5800 S Wabash, Lambert Realty 773-287-3380

NEWLY REMODELED UNITS

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

PRE-SPRING SPECIAL - CHICAGO South Side Beautiful Studios, 1,2,3 & 4 BR’s, Sec 8 ok. Also Homes for rent available. Call Nicole 312-446-1753; W-side locations Tom 630-776-5556; CLEAN ROOM W/FRIDGE & micro, Near Oak Park, Food -4Less, Walmart, Walgreens, Buses & Metra, Laundry. $115/wk & up.

773-637-5957 NEWLY REMOD 1BR & Studios starting at $580. No sec dep, move in fee or app fee. Free heat/hot water. 1155 W. 83rd St., 773-619-0204

ADULT SERVICES

NO SEC DEP

7801 S. Bishop. 2BR. $610/mo.

HEAT INCL 773-955-5106

1 BR $700-$799 WEST HUMBOLDT PK, 1 & 2BR Apts, spacious, oak wood flrs, huge closets. heat incl, rehab, $825 & $925. Call 847866-7234 CHICAGO WESTSIDE n i c e 1BR Apartment, Austin Area, quiet building, $750/mo + sec. Laundry room, heat included. 773-575-9283 CHICAGO 92ND AND M a r -

quette, Good location, 2BR, first floor, quiet bldg, Nice! Heat included, $750 w/1 mo rent & 1 mo sec.

773-505-1853

1 BR $800-$899 QUIET, 1BR, steps to Lake Front, hdwd flrs & appls incl, nr cultural ctr, golf course, trans & schls. $750/mo. Section 8 Welc. 773-443-3200

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

2 BR UNDER $900 CHICAGO 7600 S ESSEX PRE-SPRING SPECIAL - 2BR $599, 3BR $699, 4BR $799 w/apprvd credit, no sec dep. Sec 8 Ok! Also Homes for Rent avail. South Side office: 773-287-9999; West Side office: 773-287-4500

NICE ROOM w/stove, fridge & bath Near Aldi, Walgreens, Beach, Red Line & Buses. Elevator & Laundry. $133/wk & up. 773-275-4442

92ND & KING DR. 3BR, 2BA house, $1500/mo. Close to transportation. Call 312-257-7682.

61st & King Dr. 3 Bd/2Ba, Washer/ Dry Hook-up, Alarm, 61st & Racine - 1Bd/1Ba, 1 year Free Heat.

Chicago Heights 4 Bed, 2 Full baths, SFH. Other locations available. Approved credit receive 1 month free rent.

For More Info Call 773.412.1153

Fellowship Manor, 5041 South Princeton Avenue, Chicago IL, 60609 for one bedroom apartments.

Applicants must be at least 62 years of age, and must meet screening criteria. Contact the onsite management office by phone at (773) 924-5980, or Via postal mail.

This institution is an equal opportunity provider.

134TH/BRANDON. 1BR APT,

all appls & utils incl, A/C, fresh paint, roomy, pvt entr & much more. Best Offer. 708-986-8123

BRONZEVILLE - SEC 8 OK! 4950 S. Prairie. Remod 1BR. $690 and up. Heat, cooking gas & appls inc, lndry on site.

AUSTIN BLVD & ERIE , 1&2BR.

Z. 773.406.4841

very lrg beautifully decorated Security system, wood floors/combination carpet. $750-$1100. Section 8 ok.

773-206-9364

HARVEY 15544 TURLINGTON, 2BR, 2nd flr, cen-

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

MONST UNITS INCLUDE..

HEAT & HOT WATER STUDIOS FROM $495.00 1BDR FROM $545.00 2BDR FROM $745.00 3 BDR/2 FULL BATH FROM $1200 **1-(773)-476-6000**

77TH/RIDGELAND. 2BR. Hdwd flrs, Heat Incl. $775.

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

HEAT, HW & CG PLENTY OF PARKING 1BDR FROM $785.00 2BDR FROM $1025.00 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 ∫

tral A/C, appls, hdwd floors, new win dows/kitchen cabinets. $775/mo.

708-692-9177.

75TH/Langley. 3BR. $950.

773-874-9637 or 773-493-5359

87TH AND RACINE 3BR, 1.5BA,

tenant pays utils, $800/mo. 1 month security and 1 month rent required.

312-898-2771

2 BEDROOM, 5 RM, all new rehab,

hdwd flrs, big rms, lots of closets, Clean, fresh, Sec. 8 ready. 6900 South 773-405-9361. $750 MO.

50+ PREF, 1445 S. Karlov. 2.5BR Garden apt, kit, living rm, 1BA, tenant pays utils, appls optional. $750/ mo incl water. 773-544-2114 9112 S. YATES, Great location.

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

HEAT INCLUDED. 773-374-9747 1 & 2 & 3 BEDROOM Unit, newly remodeled, fresh, clean, quiet. 773774-3200 Eugene. South.

2 BR $900-$1099 LYONS,IL - READY Move IN Large

92ND & ADA, 1 & 2BR, lg & spacious w/ DR, hdwd flrs, sunporch, fireplace, heat & appls incl. Sect 8 ok $850$975/mo + sec. 773-415-6914

2 Bedroom apt. / Appliances Included / Car Parking NO PETS. Contact Pat @ 708-447-5930 CALUMET CITY 2-3BR, 2 car gar, fully rehab w/ gorgeous finishes & hdwd flrs. Beautiful bkyd.

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

CHICAGO - BEVERLY, 1 & 2BR Apts. Carpet, Hdwd Flrs, A/C, laundry, near transportation, $785-$1030/mo. Call 773-2334939

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

No Pets. 773-930-6045

LARGE GARDEN APARTMENT. 6802 N. Wolcott. Hardwood floors.

Cats OK. $850/month (heat included) Available 7/1. 773-761-4318.

2BR, 1BA, 1ST flr & 3BR, 1BA, 2nd flr, 115th & Damon. 1 mo sec & 1st mo rent. Starting at $1050. mo. Tenants pay all utilities. $35 credit check. Call 773-837-6256

ADULT SERVICES

ADULT SERVICES

CHATHAM AREA, Gorgeous, 2BR, 1st flr, updated kit & bath.

GLENWOOD,

Updated lrg 1 & 2BR Condos, $850-$990/mo. HF HS, balcony, C/A, appls, heat/water incl.

2 pkng, lndry. 708.268.3762

ADULT SERVICES

STUDIO $500-$599 NO SECURITY DEPOSIT Chicago, Peterson & Damon, Kedzie & Lawrence, Studio, 1, 2, 3 & 4BR Apts. $550 & Up. Section 8 Welcome.

Call 847-401-4574 CHICAGO, CAL PARK & Blue Island: Studio $625 & up; 1BR $700 & up; 2BR $885 & up. Heat, Appls, Balcony, Carpet, Laundry, Parking.

Call 708-388-0170

STUDIO $600-$699 NO SECURITY DEPOSIT Fullteron & Kedzie, Large Studio near bus, train & shopping. Free heat, gas & lights. $650 & Up. Call 773-616-1253 or 847-401-4574 Chicago, Hyde Park Arms Hotel, 5316 S. Harper, elevator bldg, phon e/cable, switchboard, fridge, priv bath, lndry, $165/wk, $350/bi-wk or $650/mo. Call 773-493-3500

JUNE 7, 2018 | CHICAGO READER 35

3 BR OR MORE UNDER $1200

2 BR $1100-$1299

BRONZEVILLE: SECTION 8 WELCOME. No Security Deposit.

4841 S Michigan. 4BR $1300 & 3BR $1100. Appls incl. 708-2884510

BEAUTIFUL REMOD 1, 2 & 3BR Apts, hdwd flrs, custom cabinets, granite cntrs, avail now. $1000$1200 /mo + sec. 773-905-8487.

Section 8 Ok

SECTION 8 WELCOME. NO SECURITY DEPOSIT. 710 W 81st Place, 3BR house, appls included. $ 1200/mo. 708-288-4510

SECTION 8 WELCOME. NO SECURITY DEPOSIT. 7335 S Morgan, 5BR, 2BA house, appls incl., $1400 /mo. 708-288-4510

SECTION 8 WELCOME. NO SECURITY DEPOSIT. 718 W 81st St, 5BR, 2BA house, appls incl., $1300/mo. 708-288-4510

ROSEMOOR: 10222 S. PRAIRIE; Beautiful rehab 3 +1BR, 2 1/ 2 BA, house, finished bsmt, garage, $1500/mo. 708-288-4510

2 BR $1500 AND OVER

LARGE BRIGHT LINCOLN PK 2Bd, 1Bth, In Unit W/D, Roof Deck, Back Porch, HVAC, Fireplace, DW, Hardwood Floors, Available Immediately. $2000-$2900. Call: 773-4725944

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

SECTION 8 WELCOME -

1056 W. 81st St., 2BR, ceiling fans, heat not incl.

312-608-7622

GARFIELD AREA, Mod 5 rms,

2nd flr, sec 8 welc, see to appreciate, Seniors pref, credit check.

Ready 7/1. 773-846-7495

63RD/THROOP. New Renov

2BR in secured bldg. Lrg LR, DR, kitchen, nr CTA Green line. $800.

Tenant pays heat. Call 773-629-0314

MATTESON, RICHTON PARK, HAZEL CREST & UNIV PARK.

RIVERDALE: Must See 3BR, Newly decor. Carpet, nr metra, no pets. $900/mo +sec. Avail Now 708-829-1454 or 708-754-5599 SECTION 8 WELCOME. No Security Deposit. 7721 S Peoria, 3BR apt, appls incl. $1050/mo.

708-288-4510 S. Shore - Near 80th & Paxton: deluxe 7 rms. 3BR, heat incl., newly decorated. hdwd flrs, $1000/mo + move-in fee. Call 773-551-3448.

MORGAN PARK/ WEST PULLMAN Newly decorated 3-4BR, 1.5Ba, Appliances included.

Section 8 ok. 847-606-1369 PRE-SPRING SPECIAL CHICAGO Houses for rent. Section 8 Ok, 3, 4 & 5 BR houses avail. Call Nicole: 773-287-9999; West Side 773-287-4500 CHICAGO S: Newly renovated, Large 3-4BR. In unit laundry, hardwood flrs, very clean, No Deposit!

Available Now! 708-655-1397 3 BEDROOM UNIT, newly re-

modeled, fresh, clean, Section 8 ready, quiet, 773-774-3200 Eugene.

3400 Walnut.

16880 S. ANTHONY - 3BR, wall to wall carpet. $1175/mo. Section 8 Welcome. 773-285-3206

GENERAL

3 BR OR MORE $1200-$1499

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

708-300-5020

80TH & DREXEL, 3BR, 2BA, $1200. 79th & Aberdeen, 3BR & Bsmt Apt, $750-$950. Ten pays utils. Sec 8 OK. Hdwd/ ceram tile. 773-502-4304 SAUK VILLAGE- Ranch, 3 med br, 1 mast br, 2 ba, lrg backyard, appl. incl, laundry hookup, $1300 +1 & 1/2 mo sec. Sec 8 pref, 708-307-5003 78TH/WOODLAWN. Newly

renovated 3BR, 1ba, 2nd flr, sec 8 welc, tenant pays utils. $1200/mo.

708-588-1800 / 773-418-6898

3 BR OR MORE $1500-$1799 BEVERLY/MORGAN PARK. 3BR ranch. C/A, $1,500/ mo + 1.5 mo sec dep req. No pets/smoking, Sec 8 Mobility 3BR Voucher Pref.

708-647-9737

3 BR OR MORE $1800-$2499 LARGE 3 BEDROOM apartment near Wrigley Field. 3822 N. Fremont.

Hardwood Floors. Cats OK. $2175/ month. Available 7/1. Single parking space available for $175/month. Tandem spot available for $250/month.

(773) 761-4318

REMODELED, Brick, Georgian

4BR, 2BA, 2 car garage, great area. $2000/mo.Call Al 847-644-5195

CHICAGO SOUTH - You’ve

tried the rest, we are the best.

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

773-253-2132 or 773-253-2137

roommates CHICAGO, CLEAN ROOM, Near

79th & Avalon, share kitchen & bath, $475/mo. 1 week Security. Must show current proof of employment.

773-731-1134

MARKETPLACE GOODS

6/8 & 6/9 CHURCH RUMMAGE SALE at Grace River Forest Church.

7300 Division Street, River Forest (Please enter Bonnie Brae doors) Friday, June 8 from 9am–6pm Saturday, June 9 from 8am–1pm The gym is packed with furniture, collectables, toys, clothing for kids and adults, dishes, glassware, books and much more.

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

ADULT SERVICES

ADULT SERVICES

ADULT SERVICES

IMMAC

2BR/1BA

OTHER

60 MINUTES FREE TRIAL

THE HOTTEST GAY CHATLINE

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

36 CHICAGO READER - JUNE 7, 2018

STRAIGHT DOPE

BUYING OLD WHISKEY/ BOURBON/RYE! Looking for full/

By Cecil Adams

Buy Harris Bed Bug Killers/KIT Complete Treatment System Available: Hardware Stores, The Home Depot, homedepot.com

sealed vintage bottles and decanters.

PAYING TOP DOLLAR!! 773-263-5320

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

I see ads for all kinds of products to protect pets from fleas and ticks, and nasty tick-borne diseases are becoming more common. I’m tired of having to strip and do an extensive tick check after every walk in the woods. —BILL COSTA

BODY MASSAGE 312-834-2806

VOCALIST SEEKING BAND

to play with or behind for gigs, bars, weddings, etc. I can perform from all genres & all artists from 50’s-present days. Contact Michael J. Lally at 773-203-4738

LOOKING FOR PART-TIME WORK Sunday-Friday (Flexible hours). Personal Assistant & all domestic help for woman (woman executive). Many years experience in the corporate world. Call 815575-6714 LOOKING TO BE MASCOT for

ladies biker group. Will take care of all domestic chores. Very flexible.

Likes to ride in the back seat. Attractive male in good shape. Call

815-575-6714

BUSINESS OPS LOOKING FOR THREE MOTIVATED PEOPLE interested In earning an income of $9000 a month. NASDAQ listed company.

If you are serious and financial security is your goal call: 847-202-0997

ADULT SERVICES

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

vibeline.com 18+

Q : Why aren’t there flea collars for people?

Located Downtown Chicago In Call / Out Call Available

Meet sexy friends who really get your vibe...

www.guyspyvoice.com

Ahora en Español/18+

KILL BED BUGS!

MESSAGES

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

Sec 8 Welcome. 312-519-9771

HUGE

3 BR OR MORE

ROACHES-GUARAN-

Buy Harris Roach Tablets or Spray.

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

MUSIC & ARTS

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

2 & 3BR Houses & T.H. Sec 8 OK. Call 708-625-7355

KILL TEED!

SLUG SIGNORINO

W. HUMBOLDT PARK. 1302-08 N. Kildare. Division/ Pulaski. Newly Rehabbed, 2BR, $785. Sec 8 OK. 773-619-0280 or 773-286-8200

A : The good news on the prophylactic front

here, Bill, is that, particularly in developed countries, modern hygiene has rendered fleas pretty much a medical nonissue. Where they remain a problem (e.g. in sub-Saharan Africa) it’s often because they burrow into the feet and hands—more easily countered with a pesticide wash than with dedicated neckwear.

But let’s separate the fleas from the ticks here, and the havoc-wreaking potential of each. Granted, fleas have run up a more impressive score if you take the historical view—they carried bubonic plague, after all.

But while we’ve got plague all but under control these days, one can’t say the same about the infectious diseases passed along by ticks, which as you note present increasingly grave threats to human health.

Blame climate change in part, as more regions become warm and humid enough to support tick activity; growing populations of deer and mice that carry ticks are playing a role too. The major Lyme-spreading tick was found in just 30 percent of American counties in 1998, but nearly 50 percent by 2016. Last month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention welcomed summer by announcing a three-fold increase in the number of people infected with vector-borne diseases—vectors here being ticks, mosquitoes, and their colleagues—between 2004 and 2016, noting that public-health bodies are woefully underprepared for the growing epidemiological menace.

Conditions spread by ticks constitute a small rogues’ gallery of disease, including low-profile up-and-comers like babesiosis and old favorites like Rocky Mountain spotted fever. But Lyme disease remains the biggest vector-borne game in town: some 30,000 cases are reported every year in the U.S., and studies estimate the actual number is ten times that. If you don’t catch it early, longterm Lyme symptoms include arthritic joint pain, brain inflammation, and facial palsy.

So why no vaccination for Lyme’s disease? In fact, one vaccine was cleared for use 20 years ago—and disappeared shortly

thereafter.

Lymerix, as it was called, had the misfortune of showing up at a crucial juncture of the anti-vax era—i.e., shortly after the 1998 publication of the infamous (and since retracted) report in the Lancet falsely linking the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine with autism.

That year, during the FDA approval process for Lymerix, some members of the reviewing panel expressed concerns the vaccine could theoretically trigger an immune response leading to arthritis. The drug having tested safe in clinical trials and this risk being, again, purely hypothetical, the panel approved it unanimously.

Word got out, though, to a public then in its first flush of vaccine panic. Soon enough, news reports were linking Lymerix to isolated cases of fever and joint pain, and sales of the product fell through the floor. A 2007 study found no increased incidence of arthritis in vaccine recipients, but the Lymerix ship had long since sailed: facing lawsuits and turning relatively little profit, its manufacturer pulled it off the market in 2002. (Other factors that probably didn’t help its chances: the vaccine was expensive, and even after the 12-month, three-shot regimen required for full protection, you still had a nonnegligible 20 percent chance of remaining susceptible to Lyme disease anyway.)

Where’s that leave us? A French company is developing a Lyme vaccine that might provide even better protection, though its CEO acknowledges it will be “hard to convince anti-vax lobbyists,” and the drug’s years away from public release regardless.

So you may as well get used to those fullbody tick checks. One worries any sensible prophylactic treatment could meet its match in a vaccine-wary American populace, just as Lyme vaccine did and may again. You can wear bug spray, tall socks, and long sleeves, but, as they say, there’s no cure for stupid. v Send questions to Cecil via straightdope.com or write him c/o Chicago Reader, 30 N. Racine, suite 300, Chicago 60607.

l

l

SAVAGE LOVE

HOT GIRL

By Dan Savage

BODY RUBS

‘I’m afraid my husband may choose his diapers over me!’

What to do when you’re unwillingly married to an adult baby.

Q : I’ve been married to my

husband for two years. Five months into our relationship, he confessed that he was an adult baby. I was so grossed out, I was literally ill. (Why would this great guy want to be like this?) I told him he would have to choose: diapers or me. He chose me.

I believed him and married him. Shortly before the birth of our child, I found out that he’d been looking at diaper porn online. I lost it. He apologized and said he’d never look at diaper porn again. Once I was free to have sex again after the birth, it was like he wasn’t into it. When I asked what the deal was, he told me he wasn’t into sex because diapers weren’t involved. I went crazy and called his mom and told her everything, and she said she found a diaper under his bed when he was seven!

After this crisis, he agreed to work things out, but then I found adult-size diapers in the house—and not for the first time! I took a picture and sent it to him, and he told me that he was tired of me controlling him and he is going to do this when he wants. He also said he was mad at me for telling his mom. Then I found adult-size diapers in the house again this morning and freaked out. He says he never wants to discuss diapers with me again, and I’m afraid he might choose them over me! Please give me advice on how to make him understand that this is not him! This is who he chooses to be! And he doesn’t have to be this way! —MARRIED A DISGUSTING DIAPER LOVER

A : First, MADDL, let’s calmly

discuss this with a shrink.

“There’s a fair bit of controversy over whether people can suppress fetishistic

desires like this—and whether it’s healthy to ask them to do so,” said David Ley, a clinical psychologist, author, and sex therapist. “Personally, I believe in some cases it’s possible, but only when these desires are relatively mild in intensity.”

Your husband’s interest in diapers—which would seem to go all the way back to at least age seven—can’t be described as mild.

“Given the apparent strength and persistence of her husband’s interest, I think it unlikely that suppression could ever be successful,” said Ley. “I think MADDL’s desire for her husband to have sexual desires she agrees with in order for her to be married to him is a form of sexual extortion, i.e., ‘If you love me and want to be with me, you’ll give up this sexual interest that I find disgusting.’ Without empathy, mutual respect, communication, unconditional love, and willingness to negotiate and accommodate compromises, this couple is doomed, regardless of diapers under the bed.”

Now let’s bring in a voice you rarely hear when diaper fetishists are being discussed: an actual diaper fetishist.

“The common misconception with ABDL (adult baby diaper lovers) is that they are into inappropriate things— like having an interest in children—and this couldn’t be more wrong,” said Pup Jackson, a twentysomething diaper lover and kink educator. “AB is not always sexual.

Sometimes it’s a way for a person to disconnect from their adult life and become someone else. With DLs, they aren’t necessarily into age play—they enjoy diapers and the way they feel, much like people enjoy rubber, Lycra, or other materials. To under-

stand her husband, MADDL needs to ask questions about why her husband enjoys diapers and figure out how to deal with it.”

OK, MADDL, now it’s time for me to share my thoughts with you.

This is not how your “great guy” husband “chooses to be”—people don’t choose their kinks any more than they choose their sexual orientation. And outing your husband to his mother was unforgivable and could ultimately prove to be a fatalto-your-marriage violation of trust.

You’re clearly not interested in understanding your husband’s kink. Instead you’ve convinced yourself that if you pitch a big enough fit, your husband will choose a spouse who makes him feel terrible about himself over a kink that gives him pleasure.

And that’s not how this is going to play out.

Your husband told you he was into diapers before he married you—he laid his kink cards on the table at five months, long before you scrambled your DNA together—and he backed down when you freaked out. He may have thought he could choose you over his kink, MADDL, but now he knows what Ley could’ve told you two before the wedding: Suppressing a kink just isn’t possible. So if you can’t live with the diaper lover you married—if you can’t accept his kink, allow him to indulge it on his own, and refrain from blowing up when you stumble onto any evidence—do that husband of yours a favor and divorce him. v Send letters to mail@ savagelove.net. Download the Savage Lovecast every Tuesday at savagelovecast. com. m @fakedansavage

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Lily Allen 10/31, 7:30 PM, the Vic, on sale Fri 6/8, 10 AM b Amber Run 12/13, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Babys 9/27, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 6/8, 10 AM b Bad Gyal 8/30, 7 PM, Schubas b Bazzi 8/9, 8 PM, House of Blues, on sale Fri 6/8, 10 AM b Big Evanston Block Party with Guided by Voices, Old 97’s, and more 8/25-26, 1 PM, Chicago and Dempster, Evanston, Evanston b Big Sam’s Funky Nation 9/13, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 6/8, 10 AM b Blueprint 7/25, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle Paul Brady 9/10, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 6/7, noon b Crystal Method 6/16, 10 PM, Sound-Bar Dead South 11/26, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 6/8, 10 AM, 17+ Dixon, DJ Tennis 6/24, 10 PM, Sound-Bar Duke Dumont 6/23, 10 PM, Prysm Nightclub Dumpstaphunk 9/6, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 6/8, 10 AM b Lauren Duski 9/16, 7 PM, Schubas b FIDLAR, Dilly Dally 9/8, 7:30 PM, the Vic, on sale Fri 6/8, 10 AM b Ezra Furman 7/28, 10 PM, Beat Kitchen A Giant Dog 8/13, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle Gordon City (DJ set) 6/23, 10 PM, the Mid

Gordon Lightfoot 9/16, 8 PM, Copernicus Center, on sale Mon 6/11, 10 AM b Gorillaz 10/16, 7:30 PM, United Center, on sale Fri 6/8, 10 AM Lyfe Jennings 9/15, 9 PM, House of Blues, on sale Fri 6/8, 10 AM, 17+ Marcus Johnson & Kathy Kosins 7/24, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 6/7, noon b Kayzo, Noizu 8/2, 10 PM, the Mid King Buffalo, Wizzo, Dust Bath 8/15, 8 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Knife Party 7/13, 10 PM, the Mid Jarrod Lawson 7/5, 8 PM, the Promontory b Leftover Salmon, Amy Helm 10/6, 9 PM, Park West, on sale Fri 6/8, 10 AM, 18+ Lettuce 10/4, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, on sale Fri 6/8, 10 AM, 18+ Lil Suzy 11/10, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall Long Beach Dub Allstars 8/24, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, on sale Thu 6/7, 10 AM, 18+ Los Lobos 8/8, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 6/8, 10 AM b Malaa, Codes 8/3, 10 PM, the Mid Mitski, Jessica Lee Mayfield 10/25, 7:30 PM, the Vic, on sale Fri 6/8, 10 AM b Mock Orange 8/25, 9 PM, Subterranean Moon Boots (DJ set) 6/24, 10 PM, Virgin Hotel Motet 10/5, 11:45 PM, Concord Music Hall, on sale Fri 6/8, 10 AM, 18+ Mwenso & the Shakes 9/11, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 6/8, 10 AM b Israel Nash 9/18, 8 PM, Schubas, on sale Fri 6/8, 10 AM

38 CHICAGO READER - JUNE 7, 2018

Aaron Neville 10/12, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 6/8, 10 AM b Porches, Sidney Gish 7/27, 10 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Presets 10/4, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ Progtoberfest IV with Soft Machine, Neal Morse, Nick D’Virgilio Project, Dinosaur Exhibit, and more 10/19-21, 3 PM, Reggie’s Amy Ray & Her Band 11/15, 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, on sale Fri 6/8, 8 AM b Revelers 9/30, 7:30 PM, Szold Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, on sale Fri 6/8, 8 AM b Lucy Roche 9/5, 7:30 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 6/8, 10 AM b Rooney 9/16, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Jack Russell’s Great White, Bulletboys, Enuff Z’nuff 10/25, 8 PM, House of Blues, on sale Fri 6/8, 10 AM, 17+ Serena Ryder 7/23, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 6/7, noon b Saint Etienne 9/13, 7:30 PM, Park West, on sale Fri 6/8, 10 AM b Shiba San, Tim Baresko 8/1, 10 PM, the Mid The Score 10/5, 8 PM, Schubas b Terrance Simien & the Zydeco Experience 8/30, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 6/8, 10 AM b Troye Sivan 10/19, 7 PM, Chicago Theatre, on sale Fri 6/8, 11 AM Sleeping With Sirens, Rocket Summer 8/9, 7 PM, Park West b Smooth Hound Smith, Suitcase Junket 8/1, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 6/8, 10 AM b

b SOB X RBE 10/10, 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Suicideyear, Clara La San 7/11, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle Sunsquabi, Russ Liquid 10/6, 10 PM, Concord Music Hall, on sale Fri 6/8, 10 AM, 18+ Swearin’, Empath 10/18, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Trampa, Savage Society 7/21, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Walker & Royce 6/24, 10 PM, Spy Bar Wax Chattels 7/12, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle The Weight Band 10/25, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 6/8, 10 AM b What So Not, Troyboi 8/5, 10 PM, the Mid Wild Nothing 11/9, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 6/8, noon, 17+ Wintersun, Ne Obliviscaris 10/6, 7:30 PM, Bottom Lounge, on sale Fri 6/8, 10 AM, 17+ Dweezil Zappa Choice Cuts 11/16, 8 PM, the Vic, on sale Fri 6/8, 10 AM Zomboy, Ghastly 8/4, 10 PM, the Mid

UPDATED Bodeans 11/24, 7 and 10 PM; 11/25, 7 PM, City Winery, third show added b Joey Purp 9/22, 9:30 PM, Thalia Hall, rescheduled from 7/7, 17+

UPCOMING Alestorm, Gloryhammer 9/21, 7 PM, Concord Music Hall, 17+ Armored Saint, Act of Defiance 7/21, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Bahamas 8/6, 6:30 PM, Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park Fb Bambara 6/26, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle Beach Boys, Righteous Brothers 8/24, 7 PM, Ravinia Festival, Highland Park Belly 10/6, 8 PM, the Vic, 18+ Brick & Mortar, Unlikely Candidates 6/15, 8 PM, Cobra Lounge, 17+ Code Orange 6/28, 7:30 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ David Allan Coe 6/16, 8:30 PM, Joe’s Bar Phil Collins 10/22, 8 PM, United Center Dinosaur Jr. 7/18, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Donkeys 7/27, 9 PM, Hideout Donna the Buffalo 8/24, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Jeremy Enigk 6/30, 8:30 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Roky Erickson 11/9, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall Jeffrey Foucault 6/18, 8 PM, City Winery b

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Greg Fox 7/28, 9 PM, Hideout Ggoolldd 7/27, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Godflesh, Harm’s Way 8/24, 8 PM, Metro, 18+ Hawktail 10/27, 8 PM, Szold Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b Horrors 6/21, 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Iguanas 6/16, 9 PM, FitzGerald’s, Berwyn Immersion 7/6, 9 PM, Schubas, 18+ J. Cole 9/22, 7:30 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont Jessie J, Ro James 10/12, 7 PM, Riviera Theatre b Khemmis 7/1, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Mark Kozelek 9/11, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Lemuria 7/27, 10 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Jeff Lynne’s ELO 8/15, 8 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont The Make-Up 7/6, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Meat Puppets 6/29, 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b Melvins 7/31, 7:30 PM, Park West b The Men 8/25, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle Negative Approach, Dayglo Abortions 6/28, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Peach Kelli Pop 6/18, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle F Phish 10/26-28, 7:30 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont Quinn XCII 7/31, 7 PM, Metro b Quintron & Miss Pussycast 9/12, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle Racquet Club 7/9, 9 PM, Beat Kitchen The Revolution 10/5, 7:30 PM, Park West Rusko 8/3, 10 PM, Logan Square Auditorium, 18+ Screaming Headless Torsos 6/15, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ The Sea & Cake, Moonrise Nation 8/16, 6:30 PM, Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park Fb Ty Segall, William Tyler 11/2, 7:30 PM, Thalia Hall b Sleep 8/1, 7 PM, Riviera Theatre b Sleigh Bells 8/17, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ Slick Rick 7/21, 7:30 PM, Temperance Beer Company, Evanston, part of Out of Space We Are Scientists 6/22, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle v

GOSSIP WOLF A furry ear to the ground of the local music scene DJ SCARY LADY SARAH has been hosting her Nocturna dance party for ages— it’s been the place to scream and be seen for local fans of goth, industrial, and darkwave since Gossip Wolf was a wee pup.

These days it’s held roughly every other month at Metro, and the party on Saturday, June 9, is also Nocturna’s 30th anniversary. Holy hairspray! It sounds like leather pants won’t be the only thing wrinkled in that crowd. Anyway, apart from the usual mopey-yet-banging dancefloor jams, the celebration will include a GlitterGuts photo booth, a live set from gothic cabaret goofball Aurelio Voltaire, and a preview of a forthcoming book on Nocturna’s history called Thirty Years of Nights. Here’s to 30 more!

Chicago has a metric shit-ton of music festivals, but despite that deluge Gossip Wolf will always pull for new fests run by local indies. On Sunday, June 10, Rad Fake Productions and What’s for Breakfast Records team up for What’s for BrekFest at the Emporium arcade bar in Wicker Park. The 13 bands on the bill include Chicago darkwave trio Staring Problem, scuzzy local punks the Bombats, and Missouri power-pop outfit Mouton. The festival is free to attend and starts at 1 PM. On Thursday, June 7, local psychedelic disco group Shuttle Run headline the Empty Bottle to celebrate their dreamy new album, All These Lights. Dark Matter Coffee’s musical wing, Press Pot Recordings, is releasing a cassette version of the album, paired with the roaster’s June version of its Datura Inoxia coffee blend.

The Brasstax crew and Greg #Feelgood have been throwing monthly dance parties at the Whistler for years, and on Saturday, June 9, they’ll bring their flawless crate logic to Sleeping Village for a back-to-back DJ set. The $5 cover charge benefits youth-advocacy nonprofit Thrive Chicago. Also on the decks are Kyle Woods and King Marie (in another backto-back set) and Brookah. Should be legendary! —J.R. NELSON AND LEOR GALIL Got a tip? Tweet @Gossip_Wolf or e-mail gossipwolf@chicagoreader.com.

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