Chicago Reader print issue of July 13, 2023 (Vol. 52, No. 20)

F R E E A N D F R E A K Y S I N C E 1 9 7 1 | J U LY 1 3 , 2 0 2 3

CLAES OLDENBURG’S A pop art luminary and his hometown

CHICAGO

By DAVID ISAACSON

p. 20

INTERVENTION ON THE RED LINE p. 8 | FUNDING OVERDOSE PREVENTION p. 12 | TV IN CHICAGO p. 31

THIS WEEK

C H I C A G O R E A D E R | J U LY 1 3 , 2 0 2 3 | V O L U M E 5 2 , N U M B E R 2 0

IN THIS ISSUE

CITY LIFE

04 Street View It’s a Barbie world in the West Loop.

12 Opioid overdose prevention Dilpreet Raju: the numbers of overdoses are going up but funding for prevention services is not.

COMMENTARY

16 Joravsky | On Politics On the Chicago Bears: bring them to the south side.

18 Isaacs | On Culture What we talk about when we talk about guns

FOOD & DRINK

06 Sula | Compost Flour Power’s pasta chef rescues food waste and composts it into plant magic.

29 Jinkx Monsoon Drag, witchcraft, and Doctor Who 30 Plays of Note Cymbeline from Midsommer Flight; The SpongeBob Musical from Kokandy Productions

releases by Sam Scranton and Sleep Sinatra + Televangel

FILM

31 Industry A local renaissance of film and television production 33 Movies of Note Joy Ride is subversively clever and delightfully raunchy; The Out-Laws is your basic boy-meets-in-laws rom-com; and Scarlet is more personal than its predecessor.

42 Early Warnings Newly announced and other upcoming concerts and festivals 42 Gossip Wolf New EPs and upcoming shows for both War Effort and Hard Femme

OPINION

44 Savage Love Dan Savage offers advice to a virgin considering using the apps.

ARTS & CULTURE

NEWS & POLITICS

08 Prout | Red Line When a problem of discomfort becomes a problem of safety on the CTA, community violence disruption can be a powerful tool.

20 Cover story: Claes Oldenburg David Isaacson takes stock of the career of a distinctly Chicago artist.

26 Rediscovering Frank London Brown A new book unearths flash fiction from this Black Renaissance writer.

THEATER

28 Comedic meditations Comedian Marcella Arguello on style, self-care, and McDonald’s

MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE

34 Ariel Zetina A preview of the local DJ’s special set at the upcoming Pitchfork festival 36 Chicagoans of Note Emma McKee, aka Stitch Gawd 38 Shows and Records of Note Previews of concerts including RP Boo, Big Joanie, and the Magic Number, plus reviews of new

CLASSIFIEDS

46 Jobs 47 Housing 47 Professionals & Services 47 Community 47 Matches 47 Auditions ON THE COVER: PHOTOGRAPH AND DESIGN BY KIRK WILLIAMSON

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CEO AND PUBLISHER SOLOMON LIEBERMAN EDITOR IN CHIEF SALEM COLLO-JULIN MANAGING EDITOR SHEBA WHITE PRODUCTION MANAGER KIRK WILLIAMSON SENIOR GRAPHIC DESIGNER AMBER HUFF THEATER AND DANCE EDITOR KERRY REID MUSIC EDITOR PHILIP MONTORO CULTURE EDITOR: FILM, MEDIA, FOOD & DRINK TARYN ALLEN CULTURE EDITOR: ART, ARCHITECTURE, BOOKS, LITERARY ARTS KERRY CARDOZA ASSOCIATE EDITOR AND BRANDED CONTENT SPECIALIST JAMIE LUDWIG SENIOR WRITERS LEOR GALIL, DEANNA ISAACS, BEN JORAVSKY, MIKE SULA FEATURES WRITER KATIE PROUT SOCIAL JUSTICE REPORTER DEBBIE-MARIE BROWN DIGITAL EDITOR TYRA TRICHE LISTINGS COORDINATOR MICCO CAPORALE ---------------------------------------------------------------VICE PRESIDENT OF OPERATIONS ANN SCHOLHAMER CHIEF DEVELOPMENT OFFICER DIANE PASCAL DIRECTOR OF PEOPLE AND CULTURE ALIA GRAHAM MARKETING PROJECT STRATEGIST SHAWNEE DAY NEWSLETTER ASSOCIATE CHASITY COOPER DEVELOPMENT ASSOCIATE MICHAEL THOMPSON TECHNOLOGY MANAGER ARTURO ALVAREZ OFFICE MANAGER AND CIRCULATION DIRECTOR SANDRA KLEIN DIRECTOR OF CHICAGO INDEPENDENT MEDIA ALLIANCE (CIMA) SAVANNAH HUGUELEY SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT OF GROWTH AND STRATEGY AMBER NETTLES VICE PRESIDENT OF SALES AMY MATHENY SALES TEAM VANESSA FLEMING, TIM OGDEN, WILL ROGERS DIGITAL SALES ASSOCIATE AYANA ROLLING MEDIA SALES ASSOCIATE JILLIAN MUELLER ADVERTISING ADS@CHICAGOREADER.COM CLASSIFIEDS: CLASSIFIEDS.CHICAGOREADER.COM NATIONAL ADVERTISING VOICE MEDIA GROUP 1-888-278-9866 VMGADVERTISING.COM JOE LARKIN AND SUE BELAIR ---------------------------------------------------------------DISTRIBUTION CONCERNS distributionissues@chicagoreader.com 312-392-2970

THIS WEEK ON CHICAGOREADER.COM

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Something Wonderful once again

Who gets to stay in Wicker Park?

Jeffrey Sweet’s book on Second City and Compass Players

A new $5 million grant divides neighboring art organizations.

2 CHICAGO READER - JULY 13, 2023

Gerald Sims played on two of the most immortal soul songs ever

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The songwriter died in May.

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ELIZABETH Student

WILBUR WRIGHT COLLEGE

We’ll help you achieve your dream, right from your neighborhood.

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HAROLD WASHINGTON • HARRY S TRUMAN • KENNEDY-KING • MALCOLM X • OLIVE-HARVEY • RICHARD J. DALEY • WILBUR WRIGHT

Fall classes start August 24. ccc.edu/apply

JULY 13, 2023 - CHICAGO READER 3

CITY LIFE

MALIBU BARBIE CAFE CHICAGO

Through 9/15: daily with prepaid and timed entries between 10 AM-8:15 PM, 324 S. Racine, $17-$100, bucketlisters.com/experience

Left : visitors pose for photos in the life-size Barbie box; right: the skating rink. ISA GIALLORENZO

I Street View

In a Barbie world Barbie mania kicks off in Chicago with the Malibu Barbie Cafe

BY ISA GIALLORENZO

4 CHICAGO READER - JULY 13, 2023

confess: I was not excited about the opening of the Malibu Barbie Cafe Chicago.

Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against Barbie. I feel like Mattel has done a great job of expanding the Barbie line to include a wide variety of ridiculously stylish characters (yes, their outfits are fabulous). I was delighted when I realized the Barbie I picked at the Malibu Barbie Cafe preview party had a prosthetic leg. In my time, all the Barbies were blonde and unrealistically slim, so that’s quite a welcome evolution.

My problem with these places catered to kids is that the overpriced food usually sucks, and the janky surroundings often disappoint.

Their main focus seems to be the gift shop.

That’s defi nitely not the case with the Malibu Barbie Cafe. Actually, the adults at the opening were so giddy that I’m not really sure the experience is mostly for children.

The decor is 100 percent social-media -friendly eye candy, and it’s hard to resist taking a photo in the life-size Barbie toy box.

Friends Sir’Quora Carroll and Maryam Jama seemed to have a blast using it to pose like real-life dolls. The pageant-winning Carroll (she was Miss Ohio USA 2022) picked out an edgy, rock-star Barbie look. Jama went for 90s Barbie vibes à la Cher Horowitz.

On the preppy side was teacher Jorel Alex-

ander, whose outfit also seemed inspired by the movie Clueless. “My partner and I were thrifting, and we knew we wanted to wear something pink. I also added a cheetah-print boot because we all love cheetah,” Alexander said.

Content creator Rachel Mooreland wore a hot-pink ensemble from GSTQ and accessorized it with sunglasses by Gucci and a bag

by Jacquemus. Food critic Jasmine Jones skipped the pink in favor of a bright azure blue (which is a very Malibu Barbie color).

“I had this dress for so long, and I was like, ‘When am I going to wear it?’ And then the opportunity came along,” Jones said.

The food is surprisingly delicious, so much so that I wish this cafe wasn’t just a pop-up.

With a menu created by MasterChef season three semi-finalist Becky (Reams) Brown, the Malibu Barbie Cafe has plenty of fairly sophisticated options for a “fast-casual” joint.

The scrumptious “Live Your Dream Grilled Cheese” comes on a toasted sourdough with gouda, gruyere, and fi g jam. The “Make Your Waves Avocado Toast” uses sourdough as well and includes toasted sesame, arugula, and feta cheese and is served with a fried egg.

A Barbie cafe worth its (pink Himalayan) salt should also serve some veggie options, so there’s the “Golden Coast CALI-f lower

Bowl” with curry-spiced cauliflower, arugula, pickled onions, quinoa, and tahini sauce.

Desserts go from decadent (“Dreamsicle Ice Cream Sundae”) to healthy (the “Today is the Day Parfait” is made with pitaya chia pudding, mango, fresh berries, and almond coconut granola). Oh, yeah, there are thankfully adult drinks too, and some of them are pretty cute, like the “Cali Collins” (made with 1220 Spirits’s Blue Morpho Gin, simple syrup, and lemon juice). Entry tickets for the cafe include an entree and a side item. Alcoholic beverages cost $15 to $18, other beverages start at $8, and extra sides and desserts range from $8 to $15.

The Barbie experience is not just about taking selfies and snacking on nibbles—definitely not at the Malibu Barbie Cafe anyway.

Inspired by the real Malibu Beach skating strip, a roller skating rink was built as an add-on experience. It costs only an additional $1 to skate with all proceeds going to Girls Inc. of Chicago. And, of course, there’s the gift shop, which offers exclusive Malibu Barbie Cafe T-shirts ($30), key chains ($10), and Barbie dolls ($25). This may not be a bargain outing, but it will certainly be memorable— especially with all those pictures. v

@chicagolooks

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Chicago Storytelling

Celebrate the Power of Storytelling and the Future of Our City Saturday, July 15, 2023 / 1pm to 4:30pm The Newberry Library / 60 West Walton

newberry.org

Chicago author Toya Wolfe will receive the 2023 Pattis Family Foundation Chicago Book Award for Last Summer on State Street.

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30 S. Wacker Drive, Suite 1260, Chicago, IL 60606 JULY 13, 2023 - CHICAGO READER 5

FOOD & DRINK

Find more one-of-a-kind Chicago food and drink content at chicagoreader.com/food.

Wilson Bauer and his totes of rich, slimy, wormy compost CAROLINA SANCHEZ FOR CHICAGO READER

COMPOSTING

From the finest kitchen scraps in the city, Wilson Bauer summons the best worm poop Flour Power’s pasta chef rescues nearly every bit of food waste his kitchen produces and composts it into plant magic.

By MIKE SULA

W

ilson Bauer’s campanelle with oxtail had an impeccable pedigree. The bell-shaped pasta was kneaded with filtered water and imported Italian semolina flour. The braised and shredded beef was harvested from cows who lived out their lives on verdant, rotating, downstate pastures.

The green garlic was grown at Middle Fork Farm, a regenerative farm near Bloomington, and the parsley came from Carroll’s Timber Edge Farm near Pontiac. The chef finished the dish with a hit of orange zest and a squeeze of

6 CHICAGO READER - JULY 13, 2023

lime from fruit grown on an organic ranch in California’s San Gabriel Valley.

When Bauer finished prepping this pasta last spring, the excess vegetable scraps and bits of dough that never escaped his extruder joined an ever-growing collection in the freezer at Flour Power, his Ukrainian Village pasta joint.

Once a week, Bauer throws an icy lump of this organic slurry into his stand mixer and beats it to a pulp. The freeze-thaw process breaks down the plant matter’s cell walls, which gives it a particularly attractive quality.

“It’s kind of slimy,” he says. “That’s what the worms really seem to like.” The red wigglers and Indian blues that live in Bauer’s apartment bathroom got a taste of the oxtails too. He incinerated them into biochar, which doesn’t do much for the worms themselves but contributes necessary carbon to the matrix.

For more than a year, Flour Power has produced almost no food waste. It all gets tossed into two large Amazon courier totes Bauer stores just to the right of his toilet. To this he adds pulverized egg shells; weathered and shredded, untreated cardboard boxes;

and paper flour sacks left to soak in the rain in the alley behind the restaurant. Occasionally he adds amendments from his neighbors’ dumpsters: coffee grounds from Standing Passengers and spent brewers’ grains from Forbidden Root.

“That stuff sets the bins on fire,” he says.

“The microbes just love that stuff.” The worms, however, don’t, so those are added in moderation.

Since Bauer started this meticulous composting regimen, he figures his worms have excreted some 175 pounds of castings, black gold he gives away to friends—medical marijuana users who feed it to their cannabis plants, and a few vegetable gardeners.

“I’ve always been a bit bothered by how cannabis fertilizer companies make it so expensive to grow,” he says. “I’m really bothered by how expensive legalization has made cannabis and somehow diminished quality.”

Bauer grows his own as well, at a friend’s place. “These castings are what’s keeping my friends’ indoor gardens growing. The plants I have there are out of control.”

Before he made his bones in Chicago, cook-

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Paid Sponsored Content

FLOUR POWER R 1642 W. Chicago flourpowerpasta.com

ing at Elizabeth, Longman & Eagle, and Schwa, Bauer grew up in Seattle where his parents composted for their home gardens. But he didn’t pick it up when he first started growing weed with friends. “We were giving the plants an amended Miracle Grow mix. It would work out after a while, but you would start to see deficiencies.” After several generations, the plants they cloned from the mother plants would lose their vigor and health, and they’d have to start all over again with first cuts from a new plant.

Bauer opened Flour Power in the summer of 2020, but the restaurant closed the following year for a mid-pandemic break and reset. He used his time off to go fishing and teach himself to grow cannabis again. And he developed a preoccupation with healthy, living soil.

He saw parallels between his old, unhealthy plants and the diseases and general weakening that afflict humans as they age.

“If you’re clean, you can get a lot more runs,” he says. “I started thinking how the same mechanisms that happen in a plant are the same mechanisms that happen in people. I started going down these rabbit holes on plant nutrition and how it affects human nutrition.”

His compost operation began casually.

He had some spare soil laying around in a 20-quart Rubbermaid bin, to which he added some commercial vermicompost, seeded with earthworms and other organisms that break down organic matter into castings that can contribute nutrients for plants. Occasionally he tossed in leftover worms after fishing, or dead cannabis leaves, and then his own home kitchen scraps. Soon he graduated to another bin, then four, and then the Amazon totes he’d found abandoned in an alley.

“They just left them there for me,” he says.

When the restaurant reopened in March 2022, he went into high gear, experimenting with amendments like spent mushroom blocks from Four Star Mushrooms; rotting forest leaves threaded with fungal mycelium; or horse manure from Janie’s Mill, the purveyors who supply the organic, stone-ground flour he usually uses.

The only time it ever smelled bad was when something went sideways, like when he added too much spent brewers’ grains, whose decomposition produces so much heat it can kill the worms. “That smells like low tide,” he says.

When things are going well, it smells neutral.

It was about this time that he read a pivotal book that validated everything he’d been thinking about plant nutrition and its connection to human and environmental health.

FOOD & DRINK Nando’s gives away free What Your Food Ate: How to Heal Our Land and Reclaim Our Health by David R. Montgomery and Anne Biklé is an argument for regenerative farming that makes the case that humans are suffering from an epidemic of nutrient malnutrition brought on by the overtillage and the overuse of commercial fertilizers and pesticides that are endemic to conventional farming practices.

Bauer, like any self-respecting chef, adheres to the simplest but most important principle of cooking—start with the best ingredients.

What he’s come to believe is that it starts with good soil. The plants and animals that live on it taste superior to conventionally produced food because they’re healthier. And eating them makes people healthier.

He religiously buys from farms that practice organic, sustainable, or regenerative practices. But that’s expensive, and it’s counterintuitive to let any of it go to waste. If a clump of soil makes its way into the kitchen on the root end of a vegetable, he brushes it into the scrap bin. “That stuff is beyond organic,” he says.

At the peak of his compost operations, one of his cooks told him, “You like buying the best stuff just so that you can feed it to your compost.”

Bauer jokes, “It’s like, ‘Dude, if I’m paying two dollars a pound extra for that produce, yeah, save that dirt.’”

His bathroom bins are rarely empty. He’s perpetually adding to the compost, moving it around, turning it to distribute material uniformly, aerate it, and release some of the heat it produces. When a quadrant is ready, he scoops it into a bus tub fitted with a screen and sifts the worm poop from all the undigested cardboard and leaves—and worms. The end product is a rich, black, granular material that’s odorless and light enough to shower through your fingers. And if Bauer hooks you up, it’s ready to feed your weed, tomatoes, or flower beds.

“The goal and the purpose behind this is about sequestering carbon,” he says. “It’s keeping carbon in a system where it’s used over and over again until it’s in our bodies.

It makes us what we are instead of getting trapped in garbage bags and landfills and in the atmosphere. Whether that carbon comes from a kale stem or a carrot or a cannabis plant, it’s staying in the dirt and it’s become something enjoyable.

“I guess I sound like a pot-smoking hippie, but it’s true.” v

@MikeSula

meals at all U.S. restaurants

On July 18th, Nando’s celebrates Mandela Day. The South African restaurant gives customers free flame-grilled PERi-PERi chicken in exchange for donations of back-to-school supplies On July 18, Nando’s PERi-PERi will honor its South African roots by celebrating Mandela Day, in recognition of the South African leader and anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela. To commemorate Mandela’s fight for social justice, Nando’s will give away free meals to customers who donate back-to-school supplies to underserved youth in their area.

The event will run from 4 PM to 7 PM local time at all Nando’s U.S. locations, including those in Chicago and its surrounding suburbs. Any customer who brings in a new back-to-school item will receive a free flame-grilled PERi-PERi chicken leg or breast, prepared at the spice level of their choosing. Following the event, Nando’s will drop off the donations at underserved schools in their community.

“Mandela Day holds a special place in our hearts and we hope that Nando’s fans everywhere will embrace this iconic day of giving,” says Nando’s chief brand officer Sepanta Bagherpour. “So drop off school supplies for our local students in need and enjoy some delicious PERi-PERi flame-grilled chicken in the process.”

Many American families will struggle this summer to afford back-to-school supplies. This Mandela Day, Nando’s will support them by filling backpacks with everything kids need to start the school year off right. In addition, Nando’s employees (aka Nandocas) will donate 67 minutes of volunteer time to clean up and improve local schools in their community in honor of Mandela’s 67-year-long fight for social justice. Nando’s also will provide free meals to teachers at every partner school.

About International Nelson Mandela Day Born on July 18, 1918, Nelson Mandela dedicated his life to the fight for equality and the end to apartheid. In the process, he changed South Africa and the world. In 2009, the United Nations officially declared Nelson Mandela International Day, aka Mandela Day, to be held on Mandela’s birthday each year to honor his legacy and the power of individuals to transform the world with a global call to action to promote peace, reconcil-

iation, and cultural diversity. In recognition of the holiday, the Nelson Mandela Foundation created the Mandela Day Initiative to inspire people to take doable, impactful actions in their community every July 18th.

About Nando’s PERi-PERi After making its 1987 debut in Johannesburg, South Africa, Nando’s has spread its flame to legions of fans in 24 countries on five continents who can’t resist the allure of succulent PERi-PERi chicken that’s been marinated for 24 hours, flamegrilled to perfection, and basted to their preferred flavor and spice. The restaurant is equally renowned for its spicy PERi-PERi—the Bird’s Eye Chilli Pepper that indigenous Africans introduced to the Portuguese centuries ago. Nando’s PERiPERi entered the US market in 2008 with the opening of its first location in Washington, D.C., and now operates nearly 50 restaurants in and around Virginia, Maryland, Washington, Chicago, and Texas. For more information, visit www.nandosperiperi.com. **No purchase necessary. One per guest while supplies last. Offer good for dine-in and takeout only on July 18th from 4-7pm at all US locations.

Must exchange a back-to-school item, or make a financial donation, in exchange for the free meal.

Find a

Nando’s near you

JULY 13, 2023 - CHICAGO READER 7

NEWS & POLITICS

n a f o y m o t na

PUBLIC TRANSIT

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n o i t n e v r e int

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round 9 AM on June 2, I boarded a southbound Red Line train at the Thorndale stop. On the train, I sat down across from a slim, young Black man in a stained white T-shirt who was talking to himself. (I don’t know his name, so I’ll call him Luke.) Periodically, Luke spat on the floor and picked up a bag of shoes resting next to his feet, only to whip it back on the ground.

He was visibly distressed, but not doing anything that hurt me, so I minded my own business and watched other riders do the same.

8 CHICAGO READER - JULY 13, 2023

When a problem of discomfort becomes a problem of safety on the CTA, community violence disruption can be a powerful tool.

By KATIE PROUT Before long, Luke stood up and took a few steps toward the seats closest to the door.

Holding onto the handrail above his head, he started yelling at a young Asian woman (who I’ll call May) sitting next to the window. Luke shouted sexual, derogatory, and anti-Asian language in May’s direction, and at least once, thrust his finger in her face, leaning very closely into her space. As the train lurched on, May sat motionless in her seat, looking out her window and hugging herself.

The rider next to her, who I read as white, was wearing sunglasses and staring into the

middle distance, still as stone, except for the veins rising in his clenched arms.

If you live in a city and you take public transportation, you’re familiar with this kind of story problem: when someone is behaving in a way that is unpleasant or antisocial, you decide whether you want to change seats, switch cars at the next stop, or turn the volume up on your headphones and stay put.

You think about which actions add up to risk, versus discomfort, versus you-do-you-andI’ll-do-me. But sometimes, a situation does escalate and can become dangerous.

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NEWS & POLITICS For as long as there’s been public transportation in the city, Chicagoans have been having conversations about how it’s functioning (or not), who it’s for, and public safety. KIRK WILLIAMSON

At that moment, I didn’t know what to do. I was afraid of May being hurt, and I imagined having to jump on Luke’s back to pull him off her; I also imagined having to pull another rider off Luke, the story of Jordan Neely’s death still fresh in my mind. I thought about the CARE (Crisis Assistance Response and Engagement) program piloting in 15 city neighborhoods right now, and whether it could be useful here. Under the CARE program, a city paramedic and a city mental health worker are dispatched to eligible 911 calls involving mental health crises. These responders “offer de-escalation, mental health assessment, referrals to community services, and transport to community-based destinations as appropriate.”

In interviews and elsewhere, CARE is described as trauma-informed, but sometimes, their teams are still accompanied by police, an institution—particularly in Chicago—with a history of creating or exacerbating trauma, not accommodating it.

And, as Jorydn Jensen, executive director of the Center for Racial and Disability Justice at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, recently wrote in an opinion piece for the Sun-Times, “Fifty percent of people killed by law enforcement have a disability—primarily a psychiatric disability—with Black, Indigenous, and other people of color at the greatest risk.” May deserved to ride in peace and safety, but Luke also deserved to be de-escalated without being harmed.

Still yelling, Luke moved directly in front of May. Behind him, close to the door, another rider held onto the loop above the train door and watched Luke’s movements closely, frowning hard. People were making eye contact with each other with the same question in their eyes. Then Luke took a few steps back. Swiftly, nonchalantly, another rider—a buzz-headed femme in a flowered shirt and mask who I’ll call L—moved into the space that had opened up between Luke and May, and planted their body fi rmly between them.

Why does this matter? Incidents like this happen, or almost happen, on the CTA every day, so why am I telling you about this one?

Because journalists spend so much time reporting on what happens when violence occurs in Chicago, but it’s just as newsworthy

to report on when it’s stopped, and talk about the how and why. Because it’s hot out, and statistically in Chicago (and the rest of the country), when the temperature increases, so do rates of violence. And because I’m personally interested in ways we can keep each other safe that go beyond doing nothing (although sometimes that is the safest and best option for yourself and for others!), calling the police, or turning to the weird kind of vigilantism that only makes a situation worse.

When L stood up and gently moved between Luke and May, I realized I could do that, too.

After I joined L, another rider came up from the front of the train and stood next to me. Together, we formed a shield, blocking Luke’s access to May without engaging him.

At the Sheridan stop, May swiftly exited, as did several other riders, who returned with a security guard. By the time at least three police officers arrived, including one who wore a Thin Blue Line flag adhered to his vest, Luke was quiet and back in his seat. (In an email, CPD confi rmed that patches are not approved under their Uniform and Appearance Standards directive.) The police cajoled Luke off the train; when we pulled away, he was on the platform, talking to them alone. I don’t know what happened next: a FOIA request returned no incident report, which happens when a call doesn’t end in an arrest.

For as long as there’s been public transportation in the city, Chicagoans have been having conversations about how it’s functioning (or not), who it’s for, and public safety. Below are four. You’ll hear from L, the fi rst bystander who intervened that morning, on why they did what they did, along with their two regrets; Tiffany Patton-Burnside, senior director of crisis services for the Department of Public Health and manager of the CARE program; and Andrea Chu, midwest organizing manager for Asian Americans Advancing Justice | Chicago. And fi nally, you’ll hear from Jeff Rasmussen, who I was heading to interview that morning when I got on the train.

When I told him what happened, Jeff, who has experienced public mental health crises in the past and occasionally uses the CTA for shelter, had his own perspective to share.

L “There are a lot of things I just consider relatively unnoteworthy to experience on the subways,” L, which is a pseudonym for the bystander who intervened, told me in an email. L

is a nonbinary, biracial 28-year-old; they had slept in late that morning and were hurrying on their way to work. As it is for thousands of other Chicagoans, the CTA is L’s main mode of transportation.

After that interaction, I kind of had two regrets, which I’ll go on about. I’m nonbinary, but I’m woman presenting, so I’m very aware of how people perceive me and the dangers that surround me just existing in the world.

I was just trying to keep an eye out on what’s going on in my surroundings.

When Luke was just yelling in general, I was just like, “OK, it’s another person yelling, I’ve seen this before, we’ll just ignore it. And he’ll settle down after he’s fi nished with his rant to the ether.” But then he just kept going back to May. When I saw him getting the extra pair of shoes he had from his bag to clap and intimidate her, I was just like, “Oh god, he could hit her! This is not OK.” I don’t know anything about this man. I don’t know if he was unhoused or homeless, and I don’t want to make any assumptions at all. But he was clearly, like, not in his right mind—saying something to this person did not seem like a safe choice.

But at the very least, I was just like, “He can’t touch her; he will not invade her personal space.” And the two guys that were directly next to her weren’t stopping him from doing that. I tried to make it look natural, like I was just changing where I stood. I didn’t face him, I didn’t make eye contact with him, I didn’t want to engage him. I just thought, “You know, at the base of human instincts, object permanence [laughs]—just maybe block his view of her.” And also not give him access to her personal space.

I had some sort of resources: I took one self-defense class, for example. But even if I didn’t, I was in a better place mentally than May was to be able to respond in that situation, if it escalated further. She was crying.

She just kept staring out the window, trying to be as invisible as possible. We were in between stops at that point, so even if you press that call button, he still has to go to the next station [with you]. And then thankfully, you showed up and I was just like, “OK, people are getting it! This is great!” I didn’t even realize that was going to happen, or even a possibility.

One of my regrets was not staying with him and the police. Two stops later, I realized, “Oh my god. I just left him with two white policemen.” My second regret was this: I wish I’d

gone after May and made sure she was OK. I gave her that packet of tissues. When I went to stand there, I leaned in and said something like, “Hey, it’s gonna be OK.” I didn’t look the friendliest with my mask and sunglasses on.

I just hope she went on and got all the good things she needed that day.

Tiffany Patton-Burnside, senior director of crisis services at Chicago Department of Public Health “To date, the CARE team has not responded to any primary dispatches to CTA bus stops or train platforms,” said Tiffany PattonBurnside during our interview. But technically, they could: “If [a call] comes through and it’s on the CTA, that’s not a barrier. But there may be other barriers, like if the individual has a weapon, or if the individual is violent: then it would not be CARE eligible. It can happen, it just hasn’t happened yet.”

Do you see a possible role for CARE on the CTA in the future, both in responding to crisis calls, but also just riding the train, as a presence ready to help de-escalate a sudden crisis or connect folks to help?

So we—the Department of Public Health— and CTA have been meeting around what a CARE response on a moving CTA vehicle would look like, primarily on the trains.

We’ve been discussing the trainings that the CARE staff needs specifically for rail safety.

We have some working knowledge of CTA having some of their own security, so when we get to that place, we’ll probably start engaging with the security staff, so that they can be better educated on the CARE team and get to know who those team members are in their area or their district.

Is the circumstance that I described something that you could see CARE being a good fit to respond to? I know you don’t know all the details.

From what you’re saying, I don’t see why that would not be an appropriate CARE call. Like I said, I think the thing that we still have to

JULY 13, 2023 - CHICAGO READER 9

NEWS & POLITICS continued from p. 9

work through is rail safety. What does this look like on a moving vehicle, on a moving train? And how do we get to the train? From our partners in this space—which are CPD and CFD, who have been doing this fi rst response work for eons longer than us—we’re trying to take the lessons that they’ve learned, so that we can apply them within this CARE space and partner with the CTA. In talks with the fire department, they’ll stop the train [if they respond to a call]. The thing that’s very good with CARE in the fi rst responder world is that we don’t have time constraints of how long it takes to mitigate a situation. Our average time on the scene is an hour, but we can’t have a train stop for an hour. So we have to truly operationalize how to do crisis work in this space. How do we do this, and it not be a complete stoppage of everything? Because for us, once the team gets in that space, we’re in. We’re locked in.

I’ve been there for two hours, and probably a little longer, just on the scene with de-escalation, because de-escalation for us isn’t just “is the person calm.” And it’s not just the one person: we’re working with everybody who was present, whether they’re bystanders or they’re family members. We want to make sure that we don’t leave anybody scarred by the experience.

Andrea Chu, midwest organizing manager, Asian Americans Advancing Justice | Chicago “At Advancing Justice, we build power through collective advocacy and organizing to achieve racial equity,” Andrea Chu told me during our interview. “That’s really our North Star goal.” Under the umbrella of their national organization, AAAJ | Chicago pursues this goal through issue advocacy and organizing.

Multiple times a month, they also offer free, virtual hate-incident bystander intervention training for anyone who wants to learn. For more information or to sign up, check out their bystander training page or email antihate@ advancingjustice-chicago.org.

There was a lot of xenophobia in the COVID pandemic. We wanted to link it to Asian American history: this is something that

10 CHICAGO READER - JULY 13, 2023

“You cannot change structural oppression on the train in three minutes.”

—Andrea Chu, midwest organizing manager, Asian Americans Advancing Justice | Chicago happened to the South Asian community and the Muslim community post-9/11. We acknowledge that this sort of anti-Asian racism and sentiments don’t come from nowhere.

[In our bystander intervention trainings,] we want people to have context around why these incidents show up when they do, and then also have the tools to intervene in them, if it seems possible in the moment.

One of the biggest pieces we want people to leave with is, yes, de-escalation is really the key, and so is prioritizing everybody’s safety.

We’re not trying to get people to, like, be a hero in a way that is fl ashy, right? We want people to prioritize their own safety, and make a conscious decision about what you do want to do and what you don’t want to do. A through line is that your identity—and the identities of the people who are involved— are all intersecting in different kinds of ways.

It’s so different from situation to situation: how you’re feeling that day, what you’re wearing that day, and the triangulation of everybody else in this situation. It changes: I may have certain privileges in a certain situation that I do not have in others. As a small, Asian, femme-presenting person, there are strengths to my identity that I can use to de-escalate, because other people might not see me as a threat.

The question that we ask at Advancing Justice is, “What created the conditions for this situation in the fi rst place?” One, a long legacy of racism in this country. But more specifically, particularly in Chicago, is a lack of social resources. Very specifically, the closing of mental health clinics under the Rahm administration, generally unaffordable hous-

ing that has gotten worse and worse, and a lot of systems that point to punishment, police, and incarceration. This is the consequence of those policy decisions.

When those kinds of systems come up against the long-standing anti-Asian sentiments that flared up during the pandemic, of course these situations [like what happened on the Red Line] are going to happen, because you have created the conditions in which many people are unwell. The weapons that they are reaching for are the ones that are prevalent in society—the cultural scapegoat at the time.

And so, how can regular, everyday people intervene in a moment, when those systems don’t exist right now? You cannot change structural oppression on the train in three minutes [laughs].

In the moment, what we want to do is intervene to make sure that everyone is OK. In the long term, what we’re working on is making sure that situation never arises in the first place, because everybody is OK. What would it look like for Chicago to function for everybody?

Jeff Rasmussen Jeff is a 64-year-old Chicagoan who loves music and mostly lives outside. We’ve known each other for a few years and regularly talk about how the city, and all of us in it, can better support people with physical and psychiatric disabilities: it’s a concern that’s an urgent part of his everyday life.

People out here need to have more respect for each other. Like with the guy you were telling me about on the train. You get these psychos, just try to stay away from them and let them go through whatever it is they gotta go through. But the lady, what she was going through, if he was going to attack her, like what the fuck?

When I was younger, I remember—I mean, I’ve always had crises. And I’m better, but a lot of times when the cops are called, they bring you to a hospital. They’re not gonna arrest you unless you’ve done something really stupid or crazy. Usually they’ll take you into custody, go to a hospital, have you admitted.

I remember being out in the cold, sitting on Belmont off Lakeshore. I remember being there, and nobody would give me no money.

I was so frustrated. I had longer hair then. I just took a light and started lighting my hair

on fi re. Somebody called the cops, and they wanted to take me away to a hospital. And I said nah, man. It took awhile, but I talked myself out of that one. But people do things when they’re frustrated. Like I said, I set myself on fi re, and I would do my yelling, and whatever. But you gotta understand their situation. A lot of people take for granted what you’re going through.

What do you think should’ve happened today, when Luke was yelling at May? Do you think we did the right thing? Could we have done something else? Do you think that the cops should have been called?

I think you done the right thing, because your goal was to protect that lady. It wasn’t to harm him, it wasn’t to cause a scene, it was to make sure she was safe.

A

bout a month after L stepped between Luke and May, Mayor Brandon Johnson’s transition team released “A Blueprint for Creating a More Just and Vibrant City for All.” This 223-page report offers policy suggestions for 11 issues close to Chicagoans’ hearts, including the creation of a “public transit violence intervention program.”

This program would “connect and coordinate persons experiencing a crisis” to community organizations and city agencies that are, per the report, specifically not the Chicago Police Department. The only public transit riders mentioned in this section are “vulnerable residents utilizing the CTA and RTA as shelter.” At this point, it’s unclear if CARE would be involved. It’s also unclear what violence, specifically, the public transit violence program is intended to intervene in: historic disinvestment from public housing and mental health services, police violence (since folks who are homeless and/or mentally ill experience higher rates of violence from the police than those who don’t), or something else? Interview requests sent to the mayor’s press office went unanswered.

In the months to come, Chicagoans will fi nd out more about how the city’s plan will make the CTA safe for every rider. Meanwhile, I keep thinking about that morning on the Red Line—not just the violence that didn’t happen, but the community response that did, and the possibilities for our future contained in both. v

@katie_prout

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JULY 13, 2023 - CHICAGO READER 11

NEWS & POLITICS

Outreach workers and neighbors of Lawndale Christian Health Center gather for the installation of a “Free NaloxBox” at Pulaski and W. Jackson Blvd. in June. DILPREET RAJU

21 boxes were installed throughout the west side as part of a collaborative project by the West Side Heroin/Opioid Task Force and the insurance company Cigna. DILPREET RAJU

HEALTH AND POLITICS

‘Just trying to help him stay alive’ As overdose deaths soar to record highs, patchwork funding streams complicate how harm reduction program providers can schedule services

By DILPREET RAJU

S

heila Haennicke was woken up around 2 AM on November 16, 2021, by an Oak Park policeman who informed her and her husband that their 29-year-old son was found unresponsive and his body was at Ascension Resurrection Hospital.

In the hours before, Sheila Haennicke’s son, David Haennicke, died of an accidental overdose on the CTA Blue Line at the Rosemont stop.

“For several months, I was pretty on edge,” Sheila Haennicke, who is a social worker, said to me on a Friday afternoon in late March. “I’d have to stop myself from wanting to run out the door at odd hours

12 CHICAGO READER - JULY 13, 2023

and get on the Blue Line and just start grabbing people and saying, ‘Don’t use, don’t use.’”

David Haennicke was found unconscious with a pulse by a CTA worker, but was pronounced dead by EMTs who arrived on the scene five minutes later, according to a Freedom of Information Act request Sheila Haennicke filed.

Sheila Haennicke, who stayed in contact with her son and met up with him “ if he was ever in need of even cigarettes or food,” found that he had Narcan in his pockets.

Narcan is a brand name for the nasal spray version of the drug naloxone, which reverses opioid overdoses by binding to opioid re-

ceptors and aiding the recipient’s breathing.

In the months that passed, she “got more energy and decided to get more focused. I just thought, ‘Well, why not have Narcan on the train?’ If that worker who found David had been equipped with it, it’s possible he would have been revived. It’s not certain, but at least it would give a chance.”

In early 2023, Sheila Haennicke joined the West Side Heroin/Opioid Task Force and its CTA work group, which has specified goals like training and equipping CTA workers with naloxone and increasing the availability of naloxone on CTA platforms.

As the number of fatal opioid-involved overdoses in Illinois climbs higher each year, nonprofit social service groups across Chicago work tirelessly to slow the rising toll through harm reduction, a myriad of tactics proven to be effective in saving the lives of those using drugs.

Since 2017, annual numbers of accidental overdose deaths in Illinois have routinely exceeded the total number of homicides and traffic accident deaths, according to the Illinois Department of Transportation and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Still, when adjusting for inflation, state contributions to the Illinois Department of Human Services are hardly up from Illinois’s

budget in 2000, according to the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability’s analysis of the proposed 2024 fiscal year budget.

David Haennicke’s death was just one of over 3,500 accidental opioid-involved overdose deaths that occurred in Illinois in 2021, according to the CDC. His death, along with those thousands of others, was preventable.

University of Illinois Chicago School of Public Health researchers Chibuzor Abasilim and Lee Friedman attest that the state’s official yearly number of opioid-involved accidental overdoses—a staggering 3,000-plus deaths in 2021—is still a hefty undercount.

They contributed to a first-of-its-kind paper, published last September, linking medical examiner data and hospital data to investigate nearly 5,000 opioid-involved deaths in Cook County that occurred from 2016 to 2019.

They found that older patients with more comorbidities were less likely to be sent in for an autopsy.

This hole in critical data has lasting repercussions, according to the UIC team, as autopsies are required to acquire a full toxicology report.

When accounting for prior undercount assumptions and the error range found in

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their Cook County study (as much as 15 percent), Friedman said, “[the amount of opioid-related deaths] is 50 percent higher than what our current estimate is, for a variety of reasons. It’s a big death toll right now.”

“We found older patients, patients with cancer comorbidities, who a lot of physicians are not thinking about,” Abasilim, the lead author, said. “We found that these patients are not being sent to the medical examiner. It isn’t clear why.”

“Not considering this patient means that when you’re making public health decisions, you’re not accounting for the fact that older patients may be more affected,” he said. “If you’re making a budget, you’re not thinking about the fact that you have to provide resources for these patients.”

Death toll is not the only consideration when it comes to budgeting for social services aimed at harm reduction.

Federally, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, partially responsible for funding the Illinois Department of Human Services, utilizes the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) to assess rates of use and see how “federal resources can be used efficiently for prevention and treatment programs,” according to the survey’s website.

“One of the limitations of national surveys is—like NSDUH—in capturing the totality of the care needs of patients who use substances like opioids,” said Danya Qato, director of graduate pharmaceutical health services research at the University of Maryland, Baltimore.

Dr. Ju Park, an assistant professor at Brown University and founder of the Harm Reduction Innovation Lab (HRIL) said that the NSDUH is often painting an incomplete picture of drug use in the U.S. for a complicated mess of reasons.

“Those estimates are very, I would say, wildly inaccurate and probably huge underestimations because drug use is so stigmatized,” Park said. “The way these surveys are conducted, they actually exclude huge numbers of people who probably have the highest rates of substance use.”

The NSDUH does not survey unhoused individuals, or folks who are in jail or incarcerated. Park also pointed out a lack of

language options for the survey to be conducted, “so there are just many limitations to these surveys.”

Surveys also fail to present solutions.

Park recently founded HRIL at Rhode Island Hospital with the goal of promoting the collective well-being of people who use drugs through research in key areas such as reception and strategy of harm reduction centers, technology for overdose detection, and development of pilot drug-checking programs in Rhode Island.

“We definitely need much more investment, not just in harm reduction and substance use treatment, but in public health and prevention broadly,” Park said.

That investment, many harm reduction advocates say, needs to extend to correctional facilities and jails. In Illinois, there is no access to medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD) within Illinois Department of Corrections facilities unless you are a pregnant woman entering the facility on MOUD. It’s still a crime to possess hypodermic needles in Illinois, though it’s not policed as heavily as it was in prior years. According to the Chicago Police Department arrests database, the last time anyone was charged with such a crime was in August 2022. Simple

possession of as little as 15 grams, or about half an ounce, of heroin can result in a minimum sentence of four years in jail.

Since the start of 2020, Chicago police have made over 200 arrests for possession of 15 grams of heroin, according to the CPD arrests database.

The rising number of deaths would be even higher if it were not for the work of the Chicago Recovery Alliance, Thresholds, various departments of health, and numerous other social service organizations determined to save lives.

A majority of those harm reduction services in Illinois are funded through the Substance Use Prevention and Recovery (SUPR) division of the Illinois Department of Human Services. SUPR receives the smallest share of the IDHS budget each year, and most of that money is from federal dollars.

The Reader reached out to SUPR for comment but the division was unable to respond before this article’s publication. “[State] spending priorities and their tax systems are the result of all the budgets that have come before it. All the decisions that have been made are built into that,” said Richard Auxier, senior policy associate at the Urban Institute. “There’s a starting

point that prioritizes what to spend, how to spend it, how to allocate resources.”

Ralph Martire, executive director of the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability, said government spending increases each year “if you’re only looking at nominal dollars and you’re not adjusting for inflation.” He added, “But if you don’t adjust for inflation, you’re not comparing apples to apples.”

When adjusting for inflation for the coming 2024 fiscal year, Illinois has invested 4.5 percent more into the IDHS than the 2000 Illinois General Assembly did, the first bump in two decades.

“I mean, that’s not much of an increase if you think about it over time,” Martire said.

“It’s less than 1 percent a year. It’s about 0.19 percent per year.”

Funding from each source does not hold equal weight in the eyes of program coordinators, who are some of the major officials working to implement more services toward those in need.

Metrics tied to federal grants are often “very frustrating,” according to one former program coordinator from the Cook County Department of Public Health who spoke under the condition of anonymity.

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JULY 13, 2023 - CHICAGO READER 13

NEWS & POLITICS

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continued from p. 13

The Illinois Department of Public Health is managing a multiyear grant from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Association, according to the Illinois Catalog of State Financial Assistance.

The SAMHSA grant prohibits anyone utilizing the grant from distributing naloxone to anyone besides police officers and first responders, which limits the scope of who is receiving doses of naloxone and who is receiving training.

As it currently stands with federal funds, you cannot buy safe smoking supplies or needles. However, with Illinois dollars, harm reduction providers are afforded more discretion on how they can spend their money.

“You can never buy needles with federal funding,” said the former program coordinator. “Illinois is a pretty progressive state legislatively, so if you fall within the state guidelines, you’re allowed to purchase a fair amount of that stuff where other states wouldn’t allow you to.”

“If you’re not engaging people who smoke, you’re not going to be able to get them and stop them from overdosing and dying,” the former program coordinator said.

They said having a diversity of service options “means having different services available, not just needle exchanges. So if you don’t get money for that, you’re always going to have this huge gap in services . . .

There’s been a lot of fuss made about how the Biden administration is more progressive, but they’re just talking and they’re not actually freeing up the money, which is what matters.”

Chicago Recovery Alliance—by way of its late founding executive director Dan Bigg— brought syringe exchanges and naloxone to the forefront of the harm reduction conversation. Today, they have nine full-time outreach workers.

John Werning, executive director of Chicago Recovery Alliance, said that while some rules like geographic restrictions are in place so that programming can be spread out evenly, the overall barriers that program providers face when attempting to access funds can be enough to turn away folks interested in helping.

“Speaking very broadly on harm reduc-

tion, there needs to be lower barriers across the board, especially for midsized and smaller agencies. The application process can also be a huge barrier for a lot [of people], including myself,” Werning said.

Most grants are paid out on a reimbursement schedule, which further complicates how harm reduction organizations can budget their staffing, services, and supplies.

Dr. Thomas Huggett, a family doctor at Lawndale Christian Health Center, said that caring for patients experiencing substance use disorder has become more accessible as a result of the Affordable Care Act and the removal of the DEA waiver that was required for providers to prescribe MOUD drugs like buprenorphine, a popular drug used to help people ease feelings of cravings.

Before, “our options for people were limited so [we told them], ‘Well, go to detox. Go to meetings. Clean up.’ That type of thing, that’s what we used to say, I’m embarrassed to [admit],” Huggett said when I met him and Mr. Rankin, a peer recovery support volunteer, in June.

“As a family doc, I really wasn’t trained in that, how to work with folks with substance use disorder, and I was even saying wrong words like ‘substance abusers,’” he said.

In the past 60 days, as of June 23, Lawndale Christian had seen over 400 patients for MOUD services, and Huggett says there are officially 46 providers who can now prescribe buprenorphine. They are one of many health centers, along with Cook County Health, Heartland Alliance, and others, integrating MOUD services more regularly.

Huggett first met Rankin in 2017, when he was experiencing homelessness for about nine months and living in and out of shelters. Rankin works as a mechanic, is five years free of using, and volunteers with Lawndale Christian Health Center’s peer recovery team as part of his 12th step to recovery.

“I’m doing good, I got my own place. I stay up north. I’m three blocks away from North Avenue Beach,” Rankin said.

“You’ve got some people who are concerned, some people that aren’t concerned” with those struggling with substance use disorder, Rankin said.

Peer support and harm reduction social work, in general, have been proven to be

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effective in saving lives. So far, zero people have died at an overdose prevention site across the globe—the U.S. has two overdose prevention centers operating in New York City. Providence, Rhode Island is set to open one of their own next year. Meanwhile, Canada has nearly 40 safe consumption sites, as they’re also called.

Opening an overdose prevention site in Chicago is a primary goal of state representative La Shawn K. Ford, who said growing up around overdose allowed him to see that substance use disorder is a disease just like any other, not a moral failing.

“The number one harm reduction tool that’s available in the world are overdose prevention sites,” Ford said. “A space that’s a medical setting where people could actually get help. And actually stop using drugs and move to medicate them.”

Dr. Park’s Harm Reduction Innovation Lab in Providence, Rhode Island, is looking at how safe consumption sites are being established across the U.S. and how stigma plays a role in people’s aversion to having one in their city.

“It is a medical intervention and staffed by people who are trained,” Park said. “The idea is that this is a safe and welcoming space where people who use usually just don’t have anywhere else to go.”

“A popular misconception, or complaint, is that these spaces bring drug use or bring discarded syringes and trash on the street.

But when you look at the evidence, it’s the opposite,” Park said. “These spaces are usually set up in places with high drug activity and the idea is that you bring all of the substances, the paraphernalia, indoors and so they have safe disposal.”

“We’ve been pushing for this for two legislative sessions,” Ford said, of getting an overdose prevention site off the ground.

“The progress is educating the members of the general assembly.”

Ford said many members are worried about voting appeal to their respective constituencies.

“It’s not easy to quit, and so we need to have law enforcement and the community to see people with compassion,” he said.

“There are a lot of people like Mr. Rankin who would love to do this type of thing but also need to have some way of paying the

rent,” Huggett said. “Since we know from literature that peer support is really important, we should be paying more for that.”

An overdose prevention site would also open the door to legally requiring the IDHS to have a dedicated number of staff on site, a requirement that IDHS is less privy to, as compared to police departments and school districts.

Even though “there is real demand for more employees to provide the social services that would satisfy our demographically-driven needs,” Martire of the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability said the problem lies in pay, “especially if you look at the pay associated with a number of these human services jobs, these social worker jobs.”

“We lost a lot of those employees during the Rauner administration when human services spending was significantly cut, and it’s difficult in a tight labor market to get folks back in here because the wage level for many of these jobs is somewhat depressed,” Martire said.

Sheila Haennicke still boards the CTA “almost daily” and can “hear this rushing sound as the trains come in and out” from the open windows of her Oak Park home in the summer.

Just over a year after David Haennicke’s death, she sent a letter to CTA leadership asking if the CTA is going to consider training and equipping employees with naloxone. Despite follow-up attempts in the months since, both personally and through her volunteer work at the West Side Heroin/ Opioid Task Force, she has not heard back.

David Haennicke was a polysubstance consumer from age 15 until his death, something that rattled his mother, at first.

“What I realized was that if I couldn’t fix him, which was my driving motive—to try to save him, we would love him,” Sheila Haennicke said. “When it was freezing or he couldn’t get into shelters, we of course let him stay with us but we just were trying to help him stay alive and hopefully come to a point where he would accept help.” v This story was produced in conjunction with the

NOW OPEN An exhibition at the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center in cooperation with the Galicia Jewish Museum, Kraków, Poland.

Reader Institute for Community Journalism’s Racial Justice Writers’ Room.

@dilpreetraju JULY 13, 2023 - CHICAGO READER 15

COMMENTARY A view of Soldier Field from the east SEA COW VIA WIKIPEDIA LICENSED UNDER CC BY-SA 4.0

ON POLITICS

The Delmarie plan Put the Bears’s new stadium on the south side—or don’t help them build it at all.

By BEN JORAVSKY

I

n a case of perfect timing, the MAGA six handed down their decision annihilating affirmative action in the name of “meritocracy” as another local municipality offered the Bears a handout they, the Bears, didn’t need, deserve, or earn.

Proving, again, that meritocracy doesn’t exist in the real world—only in the fantasies of MAGA Supreme Court justices.

Actually, there’s always going to be a little affirmative action for the Bears. As they affirm their right to get as much action as they can— no matter how poorly they play.

And, to remind you, they’re playing very poorly—the league’s worst record last year.

Probably won’t do much better this year.

And yet they have their big Bears paw out, seeking a subsidy for a new stadium because apparently Soldier Field—which Chicago taxpayers already subsidized—isn’t good enough.

The latest town to offer the Bears a handout is Aurora—the offer came in a letter to Bears CEO Kevin Warren from Mayor Richard Irvin.

You must remember Mayor Irvin. He’s the moderate who tried to pawn himself off as MAGA in exchange for roughly $50 million in campaign contributions from Citadel CEO Kenneth Griffin.

Didn’t work. Oh, Irvin got Griffin’s campaign donations. But Darren Bailey clobbered him in the Republican primary, despite all those Griffin-financed commercials.

In his letter to the Bears, Irvin wrote . . .

16 CHICAGO READER - JULY 13, 2023

“The opportunity to partner with the historic Chicago Bears as you search for the perfect new home is one we are eager to take on.”

Which sounds similar to the letter Waukegan mayor Ann B. Taylor wrote in her letter to Warren . . .

“Our City’s staff and I invite you and your leadership team to come to Waukegan to learn about the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity our City can offer the Bears.”

Which sounds similar to what Naperville mayor Scott Wehrli wrote in his letter to Warren . . .

“We have several available or to-be-available sites that may fit the characteristics you are looking for in your future home.”

Of the three, I’d say Naperville is the most pathetic.

Think about it. Naperville is widely viewed as one of the most livable cities in America—a real Pleasant Valley with public schools that are second to none. So, why, oh, why do they need the Bears?

Short answer—they don’t. Longer answer— it’s still, they don’t.

All the Bears will bring Napervillians is more traffic on Sunday and higher property taxes year round as Naperville’s leaders hike everyone else’s property tax bills to underwrite the cost of the Bears stadium.

In reality, Naperville—like Aurora and Waukegan, for that matter—has little chance to win the Bears. Arlington Heights remains

the front-runner in this race to the bottom since the Bears already own the old Arlington Heights racetrack.

However, negotiations with Arlington Heights and surrounding school districts have apparently hit a snag. The Bears want “property tax certainty.” And those school districts don’t want to give it to them.

If the schools up their offer and bow to the Bears’s demands, it will be in part because of the leverage from Naperville, Waukegan, and Aurora. So in reality, all these municipalities will have accomplished with their Hail Mary offer to the Bears will be to raise property taxes on Arlingtonians or whatever you call people who live in Arlington Heights.

It’s symbolic of everything that’s wrong with “economic development” these days.

Corporations pit one town against another in a Hunger Games-like battle to see which set of taxpayers they can squeeze the most money from.

What’s going on with the Bears is a mini version of what went down five years ago, when hundreds of municipalities throughout the country shamelessly offered Amazon billions of dollars to build a headquarters in their community.

Boy, do they all look foolish now.

Again, back to the Bears . . .

They insist they’re not looking for a “handout.” In this regard, I gotta give the Bears credit. They got wise. They realize that the more

honest they are about what they’re seeking, the more opposition they will stir. So they don’t ask for a TIF subsidy—which they may also get.

No, they ask for “property tax certainty.”

That’s just a euphemism for capping the amount they have to pay in property taxes, no matter how much their property grows in value.

Which, of course, amounts to a handout. The less money the Bears pay in property taxes, the more money they get to keep for themselves. And the more money that ordinary taxpayers pay in property taxes to compensate for the tax dollars that Arlington Heights (or Waukegan, or Naperville) isn’t getting from the Bears.

It’s not complicated, people.

Meanwhile, back in Chicago . . .

Mayor Brandon Johnson recently met with Warren to basically say—hey, don’t forget about us.

At the moment, the two most prominent Chicago sites for the Bears are what are widely called the Roeder and Cobb locations. Well, I call them that anyway.

Let me explain.

The Roeder site is a rebuilt Soldier Field. It’s named for David Roeder, the Sun-Times writer who has been championing it.

The Cobb site is the abandoned U.S. Steel plant at 83rd and Lake Michigan. So named for political strategist Delmarie Cobb, who’s been championing it as a location for the Bears.

As a friend to both, I will now play the neutral judge . . .

Sorry, Dave—but I’m with Delmarie on this one. If we’re going to spend money on the Bears, we might as well spend it on a site that needs it the most.

It’s embarrassing that the city has allowed that 400-acre swath of land, right there on the lakefront, to remain a toxic wasteland since the plant closed about 50 years ago.

Chicago should have cleaned that site up years ago. They should clean it up with or without the Bears. But you know how it goes around here—this city rarely does the right thing when there’s so much money to be made doing something else.

And there’s nothing meritorious about that. v

@bennyjshow

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Move Me Soul invests in Chicago youth to uplift a rising generation of professional dancers

Since 2008, Chicago dance organization Move Me Soul has shaped the lives of hundreds of local teens through preprofessional dance training.

The company was born out of a dance elective course led by founder and artistic director Ayesha Jaco at Austin High School.

Inspired by the success of that class, she adapted her teachings—which center storytelling and technique in a wide mix of styles—into a teen apprenticeship program through Chicago arts nonprofit After School Matters and a youth ensemble she called Move Me Soul. “[Jaco] began to do something different for the community,” says Move Me Soul executive director Diana Muhammad. “This was the first time that ballet, modern, jazz, and West African dance were introduced to this community on a preprofessional level.”

Muhammad first heard of Move Me Soul while she was running south-side dance company and youth program DADA Dance Connection. “I realized that what [Jaco] was doing on the west side with teens, I was trying to create and build the same opportunity on the south side,” Muhammad says. “So what we decided to do was join forces.”

In 2010, Muhammad officially joined Move Me Soul as an instructor, and in 2012 she was named executive director to help Jaco expand the company’s After School Matters beyond Austin to the city’s south side. Soon, they also launched a downtown program at the Gallery 37 Center for the Arts.

In addition to their youth ensemble and apprenticeships, Move Me Soul has expanded their vision to include elementary school students, with educational programming that integrates dance vocabulary and history with core subjects such as reading comprehension and math. And last fall, Move Me Soul introduced a new initiative at Prairie-Hills School District that fuses dance and music with STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics) curriculum for students in kindergarten through fourth grade.

“We’re very proud of this program because it is standard curriculum based,” Muhammad says. “The classes are also enhanced by

Muhammed notes that many of Move Me Soul’s current leaders trained with the other companies in the cohort in their youth, including Najwa Dance Corps, Joel Hall Dancers & Center and the Chicago Multi-Cultural Dance Center. She’s optimistic that the organization’s work nurturing the next generation of Chicago dancers will continue the cycle of bolstering the community as their students go on to pursue their own careers in the arts or elsewhere.

Photo courtesy of Move Me Soul

using West African drumming to incorporate a music component that studies counting and patterns using rhythms.”

Move Me Soul marked a major milestone in 2018 with the launch of a professional dance company (many members are former Move Me Soul students). They’re currently generating new choreography and showcasing the company’s signature works, including Chississippi Mixtape, which tells the story of the Great Migration, and Curtis Suite & Sour, a dance tribute to Chicago soul icon Curtis Mayfield. The company will premiere a new excerpt from the latter on December 16, in celebration of the organization’s 15th anniversary, which they have dubbed Move Me Soul Day. They’ll also be performing with Chicago Shakespeare Theatre in late July and early August.

Earlier this year, Move Me Soul joined a select cohort of local Black-led dance organizations in the Chicago Black Dance Legacy Project (CBDLP). Launched in 2019, CBDLP works to reduce inequities by providing a select cohort of Black dance organizations with funding, operational support, and performance opportunities. Move Me Soul’s leadership says the experience has been especially valuable while they continue rebuilding after temporarily halting in-person operations during the first part of the pandemic (though they were able to offer the apprenticeship program virtually). “[We are focusing] on building our capacity from the management side,” Muhammad says of their participation in CBDLP. “I

“It’s a beautiful pipeline that we try to create,” Muhammad says.

“Youth come in and understand what it means to become a professional dancer and all-around person that has a great character, and we develop them up to where they can go on to anywhere and do anything.”

And in fact, many Move Me Soul students have already found success as professional dancers, choreographers, and arts educators. Company member Bryonna Young began training with Move Me Soul when she was in 8th grade, and says the experience has brought her unexpected opportunities, including the chance to perform in Jamaica.

“Through Move Me Soul, I’ve been able to increase my passion for dance and teaching, and I’m grateful for the chance to give back by teaching in the program I grew up in,” Young says.

Likewise, former apprentice artist Joshua Francique transitioned from Move Me Soul to work with Deeply Rooted Dance Theatre, where he became a member of the company. He’s since moved to California, where he is a principal dancer at Alonzo King LINES ballet. “[Move Me Soul] gifted me not only the joy of soul and movement but of community,” Francique says. “MMS bestowed upon me a life altering impact that led me to achieve my wildest dreams.”

“We actually created and cultivated these dancers in terms of everything—their dance etiquette, their dance technique, and the feeling and the emotion that they put into it,” Muhammad says.

“We’ve invested in their lives.”

The Chicago Black Dance Legacy Project is a program of the Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago. Their current cohort of local dance companies includes Chicago Multi-Cultural Dance Center & Hiplet Ballerinas, Deeply Rooted Dance Theater, the Era Footwork Collective, Forward Momentum Chicago, Joel Hall Dancers & Center, M.A.D.D. Rhythms, Move Me Soul, Muntu Dance Theatre of Chicago, NAJWA Dance Corps, and Praize Productions Inc. For more about CBDLP, visit chicagoblackdancelegacy.org, and chicagoreader.com/special/ logan-center-for-the-arts-at-the-university-of-chicago.

JULY 13, 2023 - CHICAGO READER 17

COMMENTARY

Remembrance ceremony July 4, 2023, Highland Park COURTESY CITY OF HIGHLAND PARK

ON CULTURE

What we talk about when we talk about guns There’s a reason we don’t say “bomb violence.”

By DEANNA ISAACS

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n July 4, 2023, the hottest day on earth, residents of Highland Park gathered in front of their city hall to remember the victims of the massacre that took place there a year earlier. There was music, a moment of silence, and Mayor Nancy Rotering spoke of the damage done by a single gun in a single minute: 83 rounds fired, seven killed, dozens more injured. “We know the impact of gun violence,” Rotering said.

“Gun violence.” It happens so often now, there’s a danger that we’re getting inured to it.

Not the bloody event itself, but the term, sliding into our ears as easily as other compound nouns we’re used to, like weather report, or school bus, or even its close cousin, gang violence.

But gun violence is different from those, and the difference is significant. It’s a Trojan Horse, with an opposing army inside.

OK, I’m a writer. I might be hyper-focused on language. But let’s take a minute here to note that the idea that words are important has never had more street cred than it has right now. The nursery school lesson of “sticks

18 CHICAGO READER - JULY 13, 2023

and stones” (“may break my bones, but words can never hurt me”) is ancient history, as are the nightclub seminars of Lenny Bruce, surveying his audiences of spics and micks, kikes and dykes, and any other slur you can think of, to talk about how power comes from the suppression of words, not the use of them.

Nobody’s just blowing off slurs and insults anymore.

Marjorie Taylor Greene addresses another right-wing congressperson as a “little bitch”?

She’s booted from the so-called Freedom Caucus. Alderperson Rossana Rodriguez Sanchez tweets a poll asking if an Italian ice monument would be a good way to honor Italian heritage in Chicago? There’s a demand for her resignation.

But not all damaging words and phrases are as obvious as the b-word or a bad joke.

“Gun violence prevention” is now the favored way to describe the mission of organizations and people seeking to end the Wild West environment that lax and nonexistent gun laws have given us. And Highland Park, under Rotering’s leadership, has been in the

forefront of that effort, enacting its own assault weapon ban in 2013. But the yoking of those two words can imply that guns—like, say, knives—have an existence apart from violence.

They do not.

Guns have a single purpose: to hit their target and take it out. Gun violence is as redundant as “bomb violence” would be. And on a subconscious level, “gun violence” can buy into the fantasy that there’s some other kind of gun activity—a congenial, nonthreatening, even nostalgic culture of hunters and target shooters, harmless as a sewing circle, that needs to be perpetuated.

Do you know anyone who’s hunting because that’s the only way they can put food on the table? Didn’t think so. Hunting now is “sport,” a dying(!) sport, with an ever-dwindling number of licenses being sold.

If we don’t buy into that fantasy, the gun industry wants us to believe that we need guns to defend ourselves from—you pick it: the armed robber, the 15-year-old with bad aim on a drive-by, or the government. This

has been a successful marketing ploy. There are now about 400 million guns in America— more guns than people—and we are afraid of crowds, and of each other.

I’m not kidding myself that a handgun in my purse or pocket would save me in any of those situations. And I don’t want to have to worry that the person in line behind me at the grocery checkout or coffee shop is angry, irrational, and packing. What we need, if not gun eradication, is much stronger gun control, starting with a reinstated federal assault weapons ban and legal liability for manufacturers and sellers. Did you know that they were granted broad immunity by a 2005 law signed by George W. Bush?

In fact, before “gun violence’’ and the effort to reduce it became the favored terminology, “gun control” was the more direct phrase we used to hear a lot from organizations fighting the proliferation of firearms.

Here’s a relevant statistic: domestic violence victims are five times more likely to be killed if the abuser has access to a gun.

We’re not able to eradicate the human tendency to violence, but we don’t have to make it so easy for the brutal husband (yes, it’s almost always a man who’s pulling the trigger)—or the nascent mass murderer—to arm themselves. We don’t have to stand by while our world is saturated with weapons.

The problem we can remedy is a gun problem. v

@DeannaIsaacs

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JULY 13, 2023 - CHICAGO READER 19

ARTS & CULTURE PROFILE

Claes Oldenburg’s Chicago

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t the corner of Madison and Jefferson in Chicago stands a 100-foot-high baseball bat, constructed in a lattice pattern from 20 tons of steel. It is the largest sculpture created by the artist Claes Oldenburg, a man from whose mind sprang any number of super-sized objects: a 45-foot tall clothespin in Philadelphia, a 29-foot-long spoon in Minneapolis. In Kansas City, you’ll find a shuttlecock the size of a steeple.

Oldenburg, who died in July 2022 at age 93, was one of pop art’s most prominent exemplars. He was also a distinctly Chicago artist, a distinction that received only scant acknowledgement in local obituaries. “C.O. equals Chicago,” wrote Oldenburg in his notebook, playfully connecting his initials to the city that nurtured him when he was young and continued to loom large in his imagination as he became a globe-trotting art world luminary.

Indeed, Oldenburg’s ties to the city went far beyond one humongous bat. Much commentary on the artist starts with his 1956 arrival in New York City, as if he had sprouted—fully formed—from the brow of abstract expressionism. But Oldenburg’s Chicago roots were deep and tangled. He was raised in the city from the age of seven, attended the Latin School through 12th grade, and (after college) returned to become a journalist at the famed City News Bureau, attend classes at the School of the Art Institute, and contribute dozens of illustrations for Chicago magazine. Even after his later move east, Chicago often served as a municipal muse for his groundbreaking body of work.

20 CHICAGO READER - JULY 13, 2023

A pop art luminary and his hometown

By DAVID ISAACSON

O

ldenburg’s father became Swedish consul general in Chicago in 1936, and the family—toting along with them heirloom 18th-century Scandinavian crystal chandeliers and golden clocks—moved into 44 E. Bellevue (a residence that has since been replaced by a large condo building).

“When Claes arrived in Chicago,” writes art critic Barbara Rose, “he spoke no English, and communication with other children was extremely difficult. Not surprisingly, he led an even richer fantasy life than most children.”

That fantasy life was a petri dish for the adult artist’s oeuvre: “Everything I do is completely original,” Oldenburg wrote in 1966, as he was taking the New York art scene by storm. “I made it up when I was a little kid.”

The young artist, left to his own devices in his father’s offices, engaged in elaborate, fanciful world-building; he chronicled the geography and culture of an imaginary island, which he called “Neubern,” in endless maps, models, newspapers, and even movie posters. Rose—a primary biographer of Oldenburg—asserts that, “Like the work that Oldenburg was to produce as a mature artist, Neubern was a parody of reality, providing a counterpart cosmos that paralleled the real world instead of imitating it.”

The scenery outside his third-story bedroom window provided more fodder for his imagination. The fire hydrant on the street

Batcolumn, Claes Oldenburg KIRK WILLIAMSON

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ARTS & CULTURE

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A streetscape from Chicago shows pliant, expressive buildings. COURTESY DEIRDRE ENGLISH

(which he called a “fireplug” in the vernacular of the day) proved to be a locus for drama and a cause for contemplation. “I saw firemen vengefully run their hoses through the windows of a car parked by the plug in winter, causing the car to become a solid block of ice,” he reminisced in his notebook years later.

“The details of the plug give a sketch of brutality—the locked caps, their chains, the blunt construction.” In the late 60s, the fireplugs that intrigued him as a child would become the template for hard sculptures, soft sculptures, proposed monuments, and even cuff links.

From third grade through high school, Oldenburg attended the private Chicago Latin School for Boys, a 15-minute walk north from that first Chicago home. He and his classmates would play baseball and stickball on the roof of the building, which is still home to the school’s pre-K through fourth grade students.

When he was in eighth grade, the yearbook reported “Claes Oldenburg insists he is misunderstood by practically all the teachers.” By his senior year, he was editor of three school publications, on the student council, and playing for the private school league champion football team.

Those were not, however, the only “extracurriculars” of Oldenburg’s high school education. He would check out Chicago’s strip joints—perhaps the same ones where another Chicagoan, a teenage Bob Fosse, had worked as a tap dancer just a couple years earlier; the burlesque spirit he encountered there would later infuse his visual aesthetic, notorious for its ribald evocations of breasts and genitalia.

Oldenburg would return to those clubs when he came back to Chicago as an adult. As his first wife and close artistic collaborator

Patty Mucha recalls, “Claes could justify what I thought was his dirty-old-man habit by using these images to make some outrageously shocking, yet beautiful drawings.”

Oldenburg went to college at Yale University, but upon graduation, he was drawn back to his hometown. He soon got a job at the City News Bureau, covering cops and courts at the legendary local wire service. (His tenure there came just after Kurt Vonnegut’s and just before Mike Royko’s.) Oldenburg’s job description spanned the mundane to the thrilling. Longtime editor Arnold “Dornie” Dornfeld recalls in his book on the Bureau, “Claes Oldenburg was terrified that he was going to get chewed out because he had to push the editor’s frozen car by hand for more than two blocks before he could get it started,” but also that Oldenburg used his father’s connections “to get into the exclusive Swedish Club on the north side, something no other reporter had been able to do, to get information on a crazed gunman who was running amok in the building.”

However, as Oldenburg said later, this kind of journalism seemed “a very unidealistic pursuit, you know, and there was no future in it. . . . So then, after about a year and a half of that, I resolved to become a professional artist.”

That impulse led Oldenburg to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he took classes on and off for a few years, painting alongside key figures of the midcentury Chicago art scene: Robert Indiana, H.C. Westermann, Robert Barnes, and Irving Petlin.

Outside school he would pal around with Leon Golub, June Leaf, and George Cohen.

is most significant job in this period was at the 1950s iteration of Chicago magazine, first as staff artist, then as contributing editor. (That publication, founded by Maurice English, has no connection to the Chicago magazine of today.) From March 1953 through February 1956, Oldenburg contributed at least 33 drawings to the monthly.

These are Oldenburg’s earliest professionally published works, and they have never been included in catalogs of his art or discussions of his emerging style.

Even as Oldenburg became famous for his sculptural (and eventually monumental) works, drawing—which he would define as “the accidental ability to coordinate your fantasy with your hand”—for him remained at the heart of it all. But most, if not all, of the originals of the Chicago magazine drawings were likely destroyed. “I went through my drawings about two years ago and destroyed approximately 75 percent of them,” he told an interviewer in 1965, “because I felt that whatever I had said had been re-said in a better way.”

Oldenburg’s magazine work provides tantalizing clues to his future direction as an artist. A streetscape from the February 1956 issue shows pliant, expressive buildings. A pair of headphones illustrated a 1955 article about wiretapping in Chicago. Here, in a harbinger of his future approach, he gives a certain personality to the headphones, transforming an everyday object into an amusing, anthropomorphic form.

At this time, Oldenburg had his first exhibition, showing work in the bar of Club St. Elmo, at State and Maple. The proprietor, St. Elmo Linton, delighted in both exotic cuisine (rattlesnake, rooster combs, and fried agave worms

were on the menu) and the work of young artists: several Art Institute students had their first exhibitions there. Oldenburg contributed “a group of satirical drawings” inspired by a story by one of his favorite authors, Nelson Algren. The story, “The Face on the Barroom Floor,” is a witty yet horrifically violent tale that takes place “in a dingy speakeasy on the wrong side of Van Buren Street.” Brutality and humor would continue to worm their way into Oldenburg’s mature work. “I am for an art,” he would write in 1961, “that imitates the human, that is comic, if necessary, or violent, or whatever is necessary.” We don’t know what the work exhibited at Club St. Elmo looked like, but some of Oldenburg’s caricatures for Chicago may give us a hint.

The Club St. Elmo show was the first of a half dozen Chicago-area exhibitions over the next couple of years. But in 1956, Oldenburg relocated to New York City. He later wrote a farewell poem—a rejoinder to Carl Sandburg’s “Chicago,”—to the city that had raised him and nurtured his nascent artistry. (It is reproduced in Robert Haywood’s book on Oldenburg.) goodbye Chicago you big piece of iron you hard jaw you black crusher you swell sweeping eye your brain of macadam you clunker of boxcars you eye-blackener teeth-smacker asphalt roarer goodbye

At left : These anthropomorphic headphones illustrated a 1955 article about wiretapping. At right: This early drawing appeared in Chicago in 1953, and again in 1954, for the story “Dance of Triumph.” COURTESY DEIRDRE ENGLISH

JULY 13, 2023 - CHICAGO READER 21

ARTS & CULTURE continued from p. 21

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n New York, Oldenburg’s painted sculptural work—rough-hewed from burlap, muslin, plaster, and wire and presented as installations in nontraditional gallery spaces—earned him acclaim. In his early New York years, Oldenburg worked in an aesthetic in some regards sympatico with his cohort from Chicago. Like him, Chicago artists of the 50s and 60s tended to turn away from abstraction and embrace figurative work. “I come out of Goya, Rouault, parts of Dubuffet, Bacon, and the humanistic and existentialist imagists, the Chicago bunch,” Oldenburg wrote in 1960, “and that sets me apart from the whole [Hans] Hofmann-influenced school.”

By the time Oldenburg exhibited work back in Chicago in 1963 (at the Art Institute and the Richard Feigen galleries), he had already established himself as a central figure in the intersecting New York visual and performance art worlds.

That intersection was on full display at the University of Chicago’s Lexington Hall in February of that year, where Oldenburg and colleagues presented a multimedia “happening” entitled “Gayety: Composition for Persons, Objects, and Events.”

Given his background, it is not surprising that his oeuvre would have a theatrical bent.

As a child, his singing-teacher mother got him a walk-on role in an opera “wearing a little suit,” he participated in high school dramatics, and he incorporated performance in a 1954 residency at Ox-Bow, the Saugatuck, Michigan, art school a couple hours from Chicago.

“I remember the first performance involved a raft on the water, which we sank.”

In New York, Oldenburg had fallen in with like-minded practitioners who were devising happenings. His creations (or as he described them, parallel re-creations of a collective reality) were carefully scored series of actions utilizing props and costumes of his own design: “something,” he said, “like a living poem or objects in motion.”

With “Gayety,” the artist’s hometown finally got to see one. “I want to create a civic report on the community of Chicago, in the way I see it,” he wrote in the script. “This is like the civic projects one did in sixth grade.”

Oldenburg and his 23 cast members created a metaphorical map of Chicago, with a welder representing the Gary steel plants to the south, sinks representing Lake Michigan to the east; a central Loop area; and diagonal areas to represent the diagonal streets of Chicago, like Milwaukee or Archer avenues. “The place

22 CHICAGO READER - JULY 13, 2023

in which the piece occurs, this large object, is . . . part of the effect,” Oldenburg wrote, “and usually the first and most important factor determining the events.” Despite 20-degree-below-zero weather, around 150 audience members attended each of three evenings of performances. At the end of the hour-long performances, a “huge stuffed airplane”—meant to evoke the airplanes that hang from the ceiling of Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry—was lowered from the rafters and “thrown onto a group of spectators.”

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s the decade progressed, Oldenburg’s schemes became grander in scope, and he began to conceive monumental projects for urban spaces. “The main reason for the colossal objects,” he wrote, “is the obvious one: to expand and intensify the presence of the vessel—the object.”

Chicago was a destination and an inspiration for such colossi. “I think I like to go back to Chicago to establish contact with my growing up there,” he told filmmaker Michael Blackwood, “but also with the sense of space and infinity that the great lake can present, out of which the city rises very clearly like a series of sculptures, or perhaps a gigantic cemetery.”

In his mind, Oldenburg created an alternative Chicago: instead of Graceland Cemetery’s simple headstone for architect Louis Sullivan, he imagined a “broom closet in monumental scale” containing a “600-foot-long figure of the reclining Sullivan;” instead of the Chicago Tribune Tower, he dreamed up an enormous clothespin; instead of Buckingham Fountain, a giant windshield wiper or a lumpy punching bag; in answer to Picasso’s 1967 steel sculpture on Daley Plaza, a soft canvas-and-rope version. Comiskey Park would be shut down and reopened as a ghost version of itself, a Memorial to Baseball. For the end of Navy Pier, Oldenburg’s “feasible monuments” included a pair of women’s boots, a bed-table lamp, a rearview mirror to reflect the city, and an inverted version of the fireplug that had fascinated him as a child.

None of these proposals were actually constructed, but the establishment of Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in 1967 gave Oldenburg a venue to show off some of his visions. “Claes Oldenburg: Projects for Monuments” was one of two inaugural exhibitions for the upstart museum.

Oldenburg’s relationship with the MCA was to continue, including his contribution to their “Art by Telephone” exhibition in 1969, considered to be a seminal moment for con-

ceptual art. For his contribution, Oldenburg telephoned museum staff each day to dictate messages, which were then written (like a seer “getting messages from the other world”) on a blackboard in the galleries.

T

he police violence at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, however, would profoundly alter Oldenburg’s conception of the city and his artistic vision for it.

He had intended to attend the August convention as an observer, even procuring press credentials for the event. But when then-Mayor Richard J. Daley ordered the brutal suppression of protesters, Oldenburg was caught up in the riot. “In Chicago, I, like so many others, ran head-on into the model American police state,” he wrote to his gallerists Feigen and Lotte Drew-Bear. “I was tossed to the ground by six swearing troopers who kicked me and choked me and called me a Communist. Fortunately my head wasn’t split, my wrists broken, or my groin gored, but I got the message—the evil in Chicago (which is considerable) had been mobilized to destroy the values I came looking for.” Oldenburg informed Feigen that the experience had unsettled him, and that he wanted to postpone his upcoming exhibit at Feigen’s Chicago gallery: “A gentle one-man

show about pleasure,” he said, “seems a bit obscene in the present context.”

Feigen responded by filling the October slot intended for Oldenburg’s show with a “Richard J. Daley” protest show, featuring not only Oldenburg but a who’s who of American art: Lee Bontecou, Christo, Donald Judd, and many more.

The reaction to the exhibition was predictable. As Feigen writes in his memoir, “Daley’s people obviously noticed, because despite the burly bodyguard Oldenburg hired to escort our gallery director, Lotte Drew-Bear, to and from her apartment, some goons came into the gallery and trashed the place.”

Oldenburg’s proposed monuments for the city now took on a new tone. His punching bag images assumed an altered meaning for him, now that “Chicago’s finest” had punched and kicked him, His Feasible Monument to be Scattered in a City Park: Fragments of Nightstick Contact commemorated that beating; even something as insubstantial as smoke was “a good subject for a sculpture there,” Oldenburg wrote. “In April, 1968 [after the assassination of Martin Luther King], I watched parts of the city being burned. The people who set those fires intended it to mean something. That could be called making a monument.”

Claes Oldenburg, Flying Pizza, from New York Ten, 1964. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Robert M. Mayer © CLAES OLDENBURG. IMAGE COURTESY OF THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO

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ARTS & CULTURE continued from p. 22

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A November 1954 Chicago illustration for an article about a ward meeting COURTESY DEIRDRE ENGLISH

24 CHICAGO READER - JULY 13, 2023

fter becoming Chicago’s punching bag in 1968, it is quite the twist to see Oldenburg return to the city wielding a giant baseball bat in 1977. At the unveiling of Batcolumn, acting mayor Michael Bilandic welcomed the artist who had been the victim of his predecessor’s vicious crackdown a decade earlier. Now, the forces of power were arrayed behind Oldenburg. Second Lady Joan Mondale—an Oldenburg fan—struck a patriotic note at the monument’s unveiling, saying, “How fitting, how uniquely American, that the visual arts should flourish in a city that is also a center for commerce and industry.” Oldenburg rhetorically hedged his bets a bit: “The Batcolumn could be called a monument to baseball and, undoubtedly, to the ambition and vigor that Chicago likes to see in itself.” The United States Navy Band played. Chicago Cubs greats Ernie Banks and Billy Williams were on hand, and Banks joined the Second Lady in releasing dozens of white balloons, printed with thread designs to resemble baseballs.

By now, Oldenburg was an establishment figure, and criticism came from the political left. Across the street from the unveiling, artists calling themselves the Surrealist Movement of the United States protested, calling Oldenburg “a miserablist lap dog” and the Batcolumn a “serviceable symbol of repressive authority. . . . When the workers of Chicago tear down this five-story nightstick, then we shall have a game worth playing.”

Oldenburg, however, was no longer equating his work with the police truncheons of ’68.

He now said, “I don’t always see the things in my work that other people see. To me, Batcolumn is just a simple object, very pure, but also very suggestive. It’s always a matter of interpretation, but I tend to look at all my works as being completely pure.” He was thankful, he said, “for the opportunity to create such an unusual project without compromise.”

In reality, the project had faced a history of compromises. His original conception of a giant bat, in 1967, was not exactly “pure form.”

He imagined it outside the new Latin School at the corner of North and Clark, and it was to be “kept spinning at an incredible speed.”

According to Rose, Oldenburg “maintains that his Bat Spinning at the Speed of Light, to be located in front of the school he attended as a youth, originated as an anti-masturbation fantasy—a monument that burned your fingers if you touched it.” Feigen tried to make the idea a reality, but—not surprisingly—funding was unavailable.

The instigation for Batcolumn finally came in the form of a commission (including $100,000 for the artist) from the U.S. General Services Administration, for a sculpture outside the new Social Security Administration building on Madison. The funding garnered controversy.

Wisconsin senator William Proxmire gave the project one of his “Golden Fleece” awards, presented to government programs that fleece the voting public. “Baseball is indeed our national game,” he said. “A statue of Babe Ruth, Ernie Banks, or Bill Madlock, the Cubs’ current star, would have some merit. But a $100,000 bat paid for by all of America’s taxpayers is a strikeout with the bases loaded.”

“I don’t want to be critical,” Oldenburg replied, “but somebody wrote that Proxmire’s hair transplants had gone too far down into his brain.”

Oldenburg toyed with various ideas for the sculpture—an iteration of his fireplug, a giant spoon, a Dutch boy cap—before settling on the (nonspinning) bat. Various contingencies continued to compromise Oldenburg’s schemes: due to property lines, the sculpture had to be moved closer the the building than he would have liked; the color red was rejected because it had already been used for Alexander Calder’s Flamingo outside the federal building. But eventually, the engineering was worked out; sections of steel cage were fabricated, welded together, and sandblasted, and the whole long thing was trucked, horizontally, from Connecticut to Chicago. There, it was lifted into position by cranes from the aptly named Midwest Steel Erection Company, and it joined the fabled skyscrapers—real and imagined—of the city.

O

n July 18, 2022, Oldenburg died in his New York home. The New York Times printed an extensive obituary and, a day later, an appraisal of his work by critic Deborah Solomon. Artforum and Art in America published significant tributes. Even the Kansas City Star, the Dallas Morning News, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times, and the Provincetown Independent published original articles celebrating the artist’s connections to their cities. Obituaries referenced his Chicago upbringing and his Batcolumn, though most skipped over his postgraduate period in the city, when he was cutting his teeth as an artist; Solomon elided those years, writing simply, “In 1956, after graduating from Yale University, Oldenburg moved to New York.”

Chicago media were even less forthcoming, with the local dailies both publishing

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ARTS & CULTURE the Associated Press obituary. The most significant Chicago-centric look at Oldenburg came weeks after his death from venerable Tribune columnist Rick Kogan, who—on the day he wrote the piece—decried the lack of coverage in an interview with the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame. “Claes Oldenburg died, and we don’t run in the Tribune—sadly—the number of obituaries we used to. We did run one of him, but it barely mentioned that he grew up here, for Christ’s sake! . . . And I’m thinking, ‘Wait, this guy deserves more than this.’”

Kogan is right. Oldenburg’s death has been met with a collective shrug from the “City of Big Shoulders.” Given Chicago’s central role in Oldenburg’s personal genesis and artistic evolution, a more thorough reckoning is warranted. In ways big and small, Chicago—with its skyscrapers and museums and graveyards and strippers and smoke—primed Oldenburg to create a new kind of art: one that remade everyday objects in new forms, forms that were often funny, erotic,

political, theatrical, and imbued with connections to Oldenburg’s personal history.

As a child in Chicago, Oldenburg cooked up the imaginary island state “Neubern,” and the same exuberant impulse and meticulous world-building went into his reconception of Chicago as an adult artist. His Chicago illustrations, his Chicago happening, his “feasible monuments,” and finally his Batcolumn, all in some way generated an alternative Chicago, one that captured the city as Oldenburg conceived it. Chicago’s Oldenburg transformed the international art world through his public monuments; Oldenburg’s Chicago—with its melting buildings and giant fireplugs and soft airplanes—represents a different kind of transformation, one that accords with Oldenburg’s “single-minded aim,” as he wrote in 1960, to create “a parallel reality according to the rules of (my) fantasy,” a “geography of the human imagination.” v

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2:21 PM JULY 13, 2023 - CHICAGO7/23/21 READER 25

IS LIFE: REDISCOVERED SHORT FICTION BY FRANK LONDON BROWN R THIS From Beyond Press, paperback, 100 pp., $10.99, frombeyondpress.com

ARTS & CULTURE BOOKS

Rediscovering Frank London Brown

The Black Renaissance writer’s short stories offer a fascinating look at Chicagoans of all kinds.

By REEMA SALEH

T

his Is Life: Rediscovered Short Fiction

by Frank London Brown collects the forgotten writing of a Chicago Renaissance writer at his height, showcasing vivid vignettes of Black life in the city 60 years ago.

Published this June by From Beyond Press, This Is Life compiles Brown’s flash fiction written for the Chicago Daily Defender in 1959 and 1960.

A novelist, civil rights activist, and impassioned journalist, Brown is one of the vital voices of the Chicago Renaissance, alongside Black Chicago literary realists like Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, and Richard Wright. He left a vast, unorthodox legacy through his work as a union organizer with United Packinghouse Workers of America, a Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago, and a seasoned contributor to numerous newspapers and journals in Chicago—whose coverage of the murder of Emmett Till for the Defender led to nationwide coverage.

Published in 1959, his first novel, Trumbull Park, fictionalized the real-life ordeals of the first Black families to integrate Chicago’s Trumbull Park public housing project in the 1950s. A semi-autobiographical book, Trumbull Park chronicled the racist abuse and acts of terrorism that white residents enacted against Black families moving in.

Diagnosed with leukemia in 1962, Brown died the following year at age 34. His second novel, The Myth Maker, was posthumously released in 1969. In many ways, This Is Life is a vivid glimpse into the literary career that could have been. While lesser known than other Black Renaissance writers, Brown has been getting his literary due in recent years.

In 2019, he was inducted into the Chicago

26 CHICAGO READER - JULY 13, 2023

COURTESY FROM BEYOND PRESS

Literary Hall of Fame. “You Remember Frank London Brown,” an exhibition celebrating his legacy and the movements he shaped, is on display at the University of Chicago’s Arts + Public Life for the summer.

This Is Life comprises 133 fictional pieces, slice-of-life stories of Black Chicagoans at the most unexpected of times. Like flies trapped in amber, its characters inhabit a Chicago long gone. Brown drops his readers in the midst of the action—in the minds of couples ready to destroy their marriages or begin new lives together. Driving by the lakeshore, a motorist remembers the woman he once loved and murdered. A crying baby wakes its exhausted mother before a raging fire can burn down their apartment. Two hired hit men muse philosophically about the nature of man while waiting for their target to arrive. Regret, rage, and reverence circle in the minds of his pro-

tagonists. Characters nurse bliss and misery alike—making full arcs or twist endings in 200 words or less. Brown’s writing shines brightest in its dialogue, with biting, funny prose that can tell a lot in little time.

Brown’s writings are filled with the kind of social and political commentary that characterized his journalism and political activism.

A white mob chases two brothers with bricks and bats. Two young men debate why “the poor” can’t help themselves without noticing people begging for money along Madison Avenue. A police officer on trial for robbery walks out of court a free man after pleading that poverty pushed him to desperation. There is an immediacy to his writing that is impossible to ignore, even decades later.

At times, This Is Life is reminiscent of people’s poetry espoused by Gwendolyn Brooks or Langston Hughes. It offers portraits of

ordinary Black Chicagoans in the mid-20th century, many of whom are ground down by northern segregation, poverty, and violence.

The readers instantly find themselves in Chicago—exiting el stations, strolling by hotels and landmarks that have disappeared or in neighborhoods that are still familiar. The city is a character as much as its people. Occasionally, we are transported to prerevolutionary Havana, Korean battlefields, Mexico, Mississippi, and landscapes that are more science fiction than reality.

This Is Life is as much found fiction as it is flash fiction. Many of these stories in the Defender were lost—previously unsigned or only published with the initials F.L.B. From Beyond Press publisher Michael W. Phillips Jr. first learned about the work from Northwestern professor Rebecca Zorach; these stories are now being published as a collection for the first time.

W h e n co n ta c te d b y Fro m B e yo n d Press, Brown’s eldest daughter Debra E. Brown-Thompson was surprised at this discovery. “When these short, short stories were discovered, it was like finding a deep treasure more precious than gold because I was so young when he wrote them. I never knew they existed.” Brown-Thompson, award-winning author Sandra Jackson-Opoku, and Zorach all contribute forewords contextualizing his work, accompanied by a response by Nile Lansana, a poet and interdisciplinary artist from the south side. Lansana, whose work focuses on amplifying marginalized voices and narratives through a lens of Black imagination, attempts to encapsulate Brown’s evocative style through two original pieces of his own.

Brown’s writing enters into the lives of these characters and stays awhile, lingering by the doorway. While quick to read, they present a remarkable empathy for all kinds of characters and the precise details that shape their lives. Some stories leave you with a smile, others offer loss or some sort of unresolved tension to mull over. All pry open a window into the private lives of Black Chicagoans, and each rolls into the next to tell a story of the city.

As Brown-Thompson writes in the foreword, “Through this collection, my father invites readers to peek through the windows of 133 lives. As voyeurs, we are compelled to bear witness to their stories, joys, sorrows, and complexities so eloquently wrapped in the essence of the Black experience with empathy, insight, and authenticity.” v

@reemasabrina

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Boy

after fatimah asghar

By Stuti Sharma

Boy means free walk. Boy is rowdy. Boy wears big shirts. Boy doesn’t care what others think outdrinks every white boy he comes across. Scares them with how tough he is.

Boy talks back. Boy feels no guilt at this.

Boy stares at skirts.

Boy will buy you flowers.

Boy wilted when being called a “woman” for the first time, cried when the period came.

Boy holds in his tears for weeks sometimes. Boy has Frank Ocean as his top artist for three years now on Spotify. Boy skates to dream rock. Boy can sing The Strokes by heart. Boy listens to EARTHGANG and hypes himself up in the mirror.

Boy plays the best pranks.

Boy had to play Mary’s husband Joseph when he was 5 years old because they ran out of parts for the Christmas play.

Boy doesn’t need to write a line in this poem about how much his leg hair is a feminist statement because boy has never cared that much.

Boy talks too soft. Boy runs away a lot.

That doesn’t mean he’s scared of a fight. Boy’s brashness has kept both boy and girl alive.

But Boy is not the angry one– that is girl.

Boy only gets angry if you hurt someone he loves. Boy provided for his family that one hellish winter, paid the plumbing bills, pulled the cars back in working order.

Boy is proud of how his hands look like he works. Boy works one job, two jobs, three when he needs them.

When aunties at the function looked at Boy & boy’s brother, just a pair sister-brothers, and said, “Two daughters? No son?”

Monday Night Foodball The Reader’s weekly chef pop-up series, at Ludlow Liquors.

Follow the chefs, @chicago_reader, and @mikesula on Instagram for weekly menu drops, ordering info, updates, and the stories behind Chicago’s most exciting foodlums.

July 17: The return of Laos to August 14: Dhuaan BBQ returns Your House @laostoyourhouse773 @dhuaanbbq July 24: West African street food with Dozzy’s Grill @dozzysgrill July 31: Revenge of the Hot Dog Box @thehotdogboxofficial August 7: Schneider Deli preview @schneiderdeli

August 21: Alisha Norris Jones of Immortal Milk @_immortalmilk August 28: Vargo Brother Ferments @vargobrotherferments Head to chicagoreader.com/monday-nightfoodball for weekly menus and ordering info!

boy was raised by immigrants who always told him in the car rides back, “You are better than ten sons.”

Boy was raised by immigrants who don’t love when boy moves with the freedom of a son.

But Boy doesn’t ask for permission or forgiveness.

Boy moves with the freedom of the sun.

Stuti Sharma is a queer poet, filmmaker, comedian, and music journalist of Indian heritage, born in Nairobi, and raised in Chicago and the south suburbs. She was a Chicago Desi Youth Rising collective member from 2019-2023, is Program Coordinator at 826CHI, and she is currently working on a debut short film.

This Poetry Corner is curated by Raych Jackson. Rachel “Raych” Jackson is a writer, educator and voice actor. Her poems have gained over 2 million views on YouTube and have been published by many— including Poetry Magazine, The Rumpus, The Shallow Ends, and Washington Square Review. She co-created and co-hosts Big Kid Show, a monthly variety show in Chicago. Raych’s debut collection EVEN THE SAINTS AUDITION (Button Poetry) won Best New Poetry Collection by a Chicagoan in the Chicago Reader fall of 2019. RAYCH-JACKSON.COM A biweekly series curated by the Chicago Reader and sponsored by the Poetry Foundation.

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chicagoreader.com JULY 13, 2023 - CHICAGO READER 27

THEATER

MARCELLA ARGUELLO

Fri 7/14 7 and 9 PM, Lincoln Lodge, 2040 N. Milwaukee, thelincolnlodge.com, $20

Marcella Arguello NATHALIE GORDON

STAND-UP

Comedic meditations Marcella Arguello on style, self-care, and sober vs. drunk ordering at McDonald’s

By CRISTALLE BOWEN

truck stop toilets. And I recently discovered a brand-new one that feels like utter luxury.

I love a spacious bathroom on the road, and I don’t know if people openly appreciate them enough.

The WGA went on a national strike at the beginning of May seeking better pay, among other things. How are you affected by this, and does that dictate how you operate as a comedian these days, even on a tiny level?

Your ’fits are always on point. What’s your best advice on becoming a fashion icon?

As a member of the WGA, I stopped focusing on being a writer a while ago because things were so bad it made no sense to continue pursuing writing for television. It’s really nuts how much money is out there and how much money is not in the pockets of creatives. So, I’ve been able to focus on my own creative endeavors since well before the strike started.

Now it’s just even more precision-focused— not having to worry about auditions or writing submissions means I’m not being distracted by everyone else’s hopes and dreams and I can just focus on mine.

Experiment! Experiment! Experiment! I loved reading my mom’s fashion magazines as a kid, and I couldn’t wait to experiment with clothes and makeup. I guess also historical consumption. Fashion repeats itself, but style is unique, so reading up on the old, the new, and the current is extremely helpful. But once you do that, just do whatever you want. And stop limiting yourself to size and gender; you can wear anything meant for anyone. Lastly, never let people who dress terrible and boring make you feel bad. Confidence will take you to icon status.

S

ince making her network television debut in 2015 on Last Call with Carson Daly, Marcella Arguello has been annihilating crowds with her stand-up. A native of Modesto, California, who now resides in Los Angeles, Arguello is one of the hardest working comedians around. In 2023 she made her HBO Max half-hour special debut with Bitch, Grow Up! The special highlights Arguello’s versatility, displaying confident crowd work, great one-liners, and self-reflective stories. Good comedy is thought-provoking and heartwarming, if it’s done right, and Arguello does it right—brilliantly tackling subjects like pandemic dating, misgendering, drug abuse, “adulting,” and being a very, very tall woman.

A quick look at the dashing 6’2’’ entertainer’s resume reads like an impressive who’s who—she’s shared and commanded the stage with Hasan Minhaj, Hannibal Buress, Bill Burr, the late Norm Macdonald, Paul Mooney, and more. Judging a book by its cover really doesn’t apply with Arguello; the sometimes racially ambiguous, larger-than-life Latinx comedian shocks with personal punchlines you’d never see coming.

At a time when looking inward, expressing

28 CHICAGO READER - JULY 13, 2023

gratitude, and unapologetically living as your authentically flawed self is almost a cliche, Arguello manages to offer a tongue-in-cheek, “real bitch” POV. Accepting the shit that happens to us with an open mind isn’t always easy.

Arguello’s 2022 album, Motivational Monday Meditations, is a hilariously on-point grounding project reminding listeners that happiness is only a feeling, and all of our feelings are worth exploring.

Fast-forward to the present day, and Arguello is still embracing her feelings, flaws, and fascinating experiences, traveling cross-country with new jokes and reimagined quips. She appears this Friday at the Lincoln Lodge with openers Becca O’Neal, Gwen La Roka, and Chloe Mikala. Arguello recently took time to talk to the Reader about comedy, food, fashion, dating a Chicagoan, and much more.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Cristalle Bowen: You’re on the road a lot.

Are you a gas-station connoisseur or are you indifferent?

Marcella Arguello: I’m a gas-station toilet connoisseur. In California I know all the best

What’s your McDonald’s order when you’re sober, and when you’re less than sober? Is there a difference?

I just upgraded my go-to sober order to a deluxe spicy crispy chicken sandwich with extra pickles with fries and a coke because it’s one of the few fried chicken sandwiches on the fast-food market without dairy. But when I’m drunk? A number two, which I think they actually changed to a number seven—what’s the deal with that? You can’t do that to people, especially drunk people. But it’s two cheeseburgers, fries, and a drink. Yes, cheese. My drunk brain could care less that I’m not supposed to have dairy.

Who was your first favorite comedian?

Do you remember the joke that blew your mind?

My dad? Is that an acceptable answer? I really don’t remember. I was always into every form of comedy before I even knew I wanted to pursue it. But I do credit battle rap shows as my first live comedy experience as a teenager.

Those dudes were super funny, and I’ll never forget that feeling of learning that people can just be performatively funny whenever and however they want. That always stayed with me.

Now I’m gonna get into your business. Is it true you have a long-distance relationship with a Chicagoan, and if so, what is your favorite “bae” thing to do in the city?

Eat. And we also love having meals together.

Walk me through a day where you have a set at a small comedy club. What does that morning routine look like, and what are some of the things you do to remind yourself how dope you are?

First, I start with a morning meditation where I tell myself how beautiful, hilarious, and perfect I am. Then I eat a healthy breakfast packed with proteins and nutrients, followed by an intense workout session based on influencers I follow. While working out, I only listen to Mozart and Janet Jackson songs, but only from between the years 1996-2001. I skip lunch so I’m ravenous for dinner but I watch my HBO special on repeat for two hours instead of having lunch so that I get full on myself. Then, I call my agent and/or manager and tell them they’re nothing without me, to really get my blood going. I write ten to 20 new jokes by 7 PM and eat three gruyere cubes, and then I hit the stage.

And if you believed any of that, then please come to my shows so I can make fun of you. v

@PsalmOne

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JINKX MONSOON: EVERYTHING AT STAKE

THEATER

Fri 7/14 8 PM, Chicago Theatre, 175 N. State, msg.com/the-chicago-theatre, $52.50

PERFORMANCE

Drag, witchcraft, and Doctor Who Jinkx Monsoon talks about everyday magic on- and offstage.

By WANJIKU KAIRU

J

ust like magic, Jinkx Monsoon is coming to Chicago for their latest show, Everything at Stake. The reigning champion of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars 7: All Winners has a brand-new title. All hail Jinkx Monsoon—queen amongst queens, legal spouse of a husband, cat mother of Tildee Swintee, avid advocate for therapy—and as always, a card-carrying witch.

Monsoon has spent the last month casting a spell all over Canada, and has now brought their cauldron stateside. For the first time ever, Monsoon and their musical partner in crime Major Scales will tour North America, accompanied by a five-person band and a few very special guests. Everything at Stake combines magic, drag, music, comedy, and political commentary as Monsoon takes aim at the patriarchy and systems of oppression on behalf of LGBTQ+ communities. Monsoon will perform a decade’s worth of cover songs and original music from their critically acclaimed albums The Ginger Snapped, The Inevitable Album, and brand-new material from their upcoming three-part album, The Virgo Odyssey: Prologue.

Of course, Monsoon doesn’t need magic to captivate an audience. But when they do work their witchcraft, they can be considered a kitchen witch. Often referred to as a hearth witch, a kitchen witch uses their home as a primary focus of their craft. Kitchen witches are known to sing, chant, and project their intent while summoning energies within. In an effort to be more mindful, Monsoon remains openhearted to the everyday magic that exists in our world. When dealing with magic, they believe that you get what you give.

“If you take witchcraft seriously and treat it with some reverence in your life, you can open your mind to the world being magical. Even though it is also scary AF, as the kids say,” says Monsoon.

A fabulous witch deserves an even more fabulous altar to display their best crystals and charms. Monsoon has a special custom-made altar crafted by a Portland carpenter. The altar

Jinkx Monsoon ALEC WHITE

is adorned with images of peacocks and the moon cycle, as well as carvings of significant rune symbols. The handcrafted work of original art holds all of Monsoon’s crystals, artifacts, and knickknacks that have been gifted to them throughout the last ten years of their phenomenal journey.

“I think amethyst has been very significant in my life mainly because it cleanses the ego by taking it out of the equation. It focuses on what’s best from the situation. That’s how I want to be as an artist,” says Monsoon. “Of course, I have an ego, I’m a drag queen! I’m a performer! I have to think I’m top shit before I even step up on that stage.”

For Monsoon, the reason they experience success in life is because they do more than serve their ego. They serve the show and the work they’re doing. Monsoon wants to serve the community who put them here, because that’s their favorite way to make better art.

“You have to be concerned with making better art, not making you bigger. I say that as I have embarked on a 44-city tour all about me!

But in being all about me, it’s also very much about systems of oppression that have affected many of us and the importance of a change to those systems. While being very funny and musically delightful!”

Of course, Monsoon was not always sure if witchcraft would get a positive or negative response. For a while, they worried that bringing up witchcraft would be seen as a gimmick, and while they do consider it one, they decided to lean into the title of “witch,” because it’s a trope they thoroughly enjoy.

“I didn’t know that by talking about witchcraft in my own life, I would affect so many people, like folks who are already fans or drag enthusiasts [who] are also practicing witches,” Monsoon says.

“People are constantly telling me they feel really happy to see a representation of witchcraft in something that they love, like Drag Race. I feel like I’ve found this balance where I can be very earnest and genuine about why I practice witchcraft and what it means to me, while still being entertaining, funny, tonguein-cheek. It’s a sweet honor to be someone who does that for people.”

During Monsoon’s day-to-day life, they carry charms and stones at all times. They currently have a few ongoing spells as well as mantras to keep them in good spirits. These days, Monsoon makes sure to focus on selfcare by starting every day with a check-in, gauging what their mood is, and addressing the needs that must be met. They also practice care daily through singing and listening to music.

“The magic is in my voice, much like Ariel the mermaid. My best friend always says if I was a mythical witch I would be a siren, because I communicate very well through music in a way that transcends how I communicate through spoken word.”

Music is clearly Monsoon’s superpower, and they’re not the only one who recognizes this skill. Legendary BBC sci-fi series Doctor Who has created a new character for Monsoon to portray. By the looks of their wardrobe, they either use music to control their audience, or they’re just an average music teacher from Portland. The new villain has been described as Doctor Who’s most powerful enemy yet.

As for their time overseas, Monsoon loved acting with the newest Doctor, Ncuti Gatwa,

and his companion, played by Millie Gibson, and had a blast working with the director and entire crew.

“Every single member of that crew was so incredible. I have been very lucky this year that not only have the experiences I’ve had been so lovely, but so have the people who make those things happen, and the people who are excited for the new queer direction it’s going in,” says Monsoon. “Those are the people who really bring tears to my eyes. Everyone is working together to put on the best show possible.

That is what inspires me so much as an artist, being in a room full of people who just give a shit with their whole heart.”

Monsoon received a very special request from Doctor Who screenwriter Russell T Davies himself, after Davies saw their recent show in Manchester, Together Again, Again!, with Major Scales. After Monsoon accepted the role, Davies reached out and told them he got the idea while walking home from their show that night.

Monsoon says, “It was really exciting because the role already existed and he knew he wanted someone specific for it. That’s huge because I wrote that show! It’s a little nod from someone I really respect as a writer enjoying my performance in a show which I created.”

In addition to a five-person band, Everything at Stake features guest performances from Brandon Rogers; Liam Krug, cocreator of Sketchy Queens; and Drag Race All-Star BenDeLaCreme.

“It’s so many things that I’ve always wanted to do that I finally get to do. It’s all happening on this tour. Whether it’s about witchcraft, queer issues, or feminist issues, trans issues, or gender politics, or whatever, oftentimes if you just get up and share your thoughts about it in a captivating, thought-out, mindful way, you’ll find that a lot of people feel very similarly, and it’s nice to know we’re all on this journey together.”

In honor of Everything at Stake, let’s take it back to 1692. Everyone is wearing yesterday’s soiled clothes, no one knows what a toothbrush is, and Jinkx Monsoon is one of the first witches to be burned, because they are so obviously a witch. As the flames rise, their custom wig catches fire much quicker than expected, and Monsoon screams out their last words.

“After me comes the flood!” v

@HolyBarbie JULY 13, 2023 - CHICAGO READER 29

NO MAN’S

LAND

THEATER

JULY 13 – AUGUST 20, 2023 BY

DIRECTED BY

HAROLD PINTER LES WATERS Featuring ensemble members Austin Pendleton and Jeff Perry with Jon Hudson Odom and Samuel Roukin Pour yourself a drink and let the games begin!

The SpongeBob Musical EVAN HANOVER

R Spongeworthy

The SpongeBob Musical is a goofy excursion.

OPENING

R Shakespearean shaggy dog

Midsommer Flight’s Cymbeline is pleasant nonsense.

Tickets start at $20 steppenwolf.org | 312-335-1650 PREMIER PRODUCTION SPONSOR

30 CHICAGO READER - JULY 13, 2023

GRAND PRODUCTION SPONSOR

For Midsommer Flight’s tenth annual production of free Shakespeare in Chicago’s parks, the company has chosen as shaggy a dog story as the Bard had in his quiver. In ancient Britain, Princess Imogen secretly weds Posthumus to get out of marrying her stepmother’s odious son, Cloten. What follows includes (but is not limited to) alleged adultery, gender-switching disguise, long-thought-dead princes reappearing, a beheading, magical potions, and much, much politicking.

Directed with spirit by founding artistic director Beth Wolf, this is the kind of thing that will live or die by the cast’s commitment to buy into a narrative that strains credulity, to put it mildly. Fortunately, everyone involved is equal to the task. As I sat in my folding chair in the bucolic Chicago Women’s Park in the South Loop among clusters of picnickers, it occurred to me that this was as period-correct a setting to take in this kind of entertainment as was possible in the 21st century.

The ridiculous twists and turns of a story like this were long ago co-opted by daytime TV, then prestige streamers, but watching enthusiastic young people run around swinging swords in a city park is much more satisfying than bingeing yet another piece of recycled intellectual property. As a character remarks near the happily-ever-after conclusion, “Fortune brings in some boats that are not steered.” I can’t imagine summer crowds having a bad time taking in this pleasant nonsense. — DMITRY SAMAROV CYMBELINE Through 8/13: Fri-Sat

6 PM, Sun 2 PM; 7/14-7/16, Gross Park, 2708 W. Lawrence; 7/21-7/23, Kelvyn Park, 4438 W. Wrightwood; 7/28-7/30, Harold Washington Park, 5200 S. Hyde Park Blvd.; 8/4-8/6, Lincoln Park, 2045 N. Lincoln Park West; 8/11-8/13, Touhy Park, 7348 N. Paulina; midsommerflight.com, free, but donations accepted.

The SpongeBob Musical had its pre-Broadway run here in 2016. I missed that, but I can’t imagine it was any more delightful than what Kokandy Productions has concocted in the basement at the Chopin. Stephen Hillenburg’s Nickelodeon series about the plucky and absorbent title character inspired this toe-tapping, whimsical explosion featuring songs by a murderers’ row of artists, including David Bowie and Brian Eno, Cyndi Lauper, Panic! at the Disco, and (in a delightful send-up of themselves as personified by “the Electric Skates”), Steven Tyler and Joe Perry of Aerosmith, who contributed “Bikini Bottom Boogie.”

JD Caudill’s staging leans into the challenging close quarters of the environment. Jonathan Berg-Einhorn’s minimalist but evocative set makes us feel like we are in fact surrounded by a shiny kelp forest. But though the space is small, the performances are generous, expansive, and perfectly synched, aided by Bryan McCaffrey’s musical direction and a tight five-piece live band. (Ele Matelan’s live foley work is also superb throughout.)

Frankie Leo Bennett’s SpongeBob is the optimistic-toa-fault center of the story, but all the residents of Bikini Bottom get their moment to shine, including Isabel Cecilia García’s lovably dopey Patrick Star, Quinn Rigg’s loose-limbed and ever-eager-for-the-spotlight Squidward, and Parker Guidry’s Sheldon J. Plankton, Bikini Bottom’s answer to Boris Badenov.

It’s interesting to note the nods in the storyline to xenophobia and anti-science, both of which affect Sarah Patin’s Sandy Cheeks, the squirrel seismologist whose warnings about the imminent blow-up of Mount Humongous, which forms the spine of the plot, are met with vicious anti-land-mammal rhetoric. But this isn’t a show straining for a message. Instead, it’s a mostly family-friendly sojourn under the sea with familiar characters and some kicky tunes. There are points where it threatens to take on some narrative seawater, but the heartfelt silliness adds up to a very pleasant theatrical excursion. —KERRY REID THE SPONGEBOB MUSICAL

Through 9/3: Thu-Sat 7 PM, Sun 5 PM; Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division, kokandyproductions.com, $40 (students and seniors $30; limited number of $15 rush tickets for artists and students also available for each performance) v

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FILM Behind-the-scenes photos from I Didn’t Mean to Go Mental ABBI CHASE

MADE IN CHICAGO

A local industry renaissance Film and television production in Chicago still lacks the resources, glamour, and consistency of opportunity found on the coasts—but you can’t build Chicago’s community and authenticity in a Hollywood hangar.

By KAT SACHS

“T

raditionally, going back years and years and years, The Blues Brothers, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, 35-40-plus years of films and productions, they came to the state and the city to essentially rent Chicago,” says Peter Hawley, director of the Illinois Film Office. (He was appointed to the position in 2019 by Governor Pritzker). “They wanted to use Chicago as a backdrop. Famously, Ferris Bueller was obviously shot all over the city of Chicago, but Ferris Bueller’s house was in Long Beach, California, and they filmed those scenes there.”

Indeed, if you google “Ferris Bueller house,” there appears on the right side of the screen a map, with one red pin in Chicago (which is actually Cameron’s house, in Highland Park) and the other in California.

This seems like a fitting representation

of Chicago’s position in the country’s film and television production landscape. To the left, sunny California and all the benefits of Hollywood, from Tinseltown’s excess of creative talent (much of it shipped in from other places) to its bevy of production facilities, all ready to turn what’s essentially a giant hangar into Anytown, U.S.A.; to the right, bustling New York City, where one has a better chance of bumping into Sarah Jessica Parker filming the new Sex and the City series than they do of finding affordable housing.

And, nearly in the middle, there’s Chicago. The city has been a bustling production town on and off since the early 20th century, the “ons” of which include Essanay Studios (where Charlie Chaplin briefly worked) in the 1910s, the John Hughes-ification of the North Shore in the 80s, and the recent uptick in Hollywood films like The Dark Knight, Trans-

formers, and Jupiter Ascending (the latter from loyal Chicago mainstays the Wachowski sisters). Yet in spite of the newly expanded and recently extended Illinois Film Services Tax Credit—more on that later—Chicago can still go overlooked, writhing under the shadows of its siblings on the coasts.

Independent productions, however, remain the best example of so-called homegrown initiatives.

“One thing we knew for sure is that we wanted to shoot in Chicago, and we wanted our cast to be here, and most of our crew is from here,” says Amy McIntyre, executive producer of I Didn’t Mean to Go Mental, which premiered in May at SeriesFest in Denver as an official selection for the Independent Pilot Competition in Drama.

I Didn’t Mean to Go Mental, a prime example of a recent production that was entirely real-

ized in Chicago, was created by Carly Glenn, who also stars as one of two women (Katie Maringer plays the other) sent to the same psych ward after they crash their cars in a school parking lot.

Glenn called in from her childhood home in Brooklyn, though she lived in Chicago for many years (even doing the conservatory program at Second City and later enrolling in what was then known as the Harold Ramis Film School) and still calls it her favorite city.

Having just rewatched the pilot in advance of our conversation, it feels like we’re old friends. Presumably if I were talking to, say, Jeremy Allen White from The Bear, it might not feel this way. And while it may be that way for obvious reasons (like Allen White being of the super-famous variety), it nevertheless imbues creative projects like I Didn’t Mean to Go Mental with a more genuine sensibility—even if the pilot doesn’t explicitly appear to be set in Chicago (versus The Bear, which wields the Italian beef like a cudgel).

Producer Ashton Swinford, who now lives in Los Angeles, originally came to Chicago to produce content for the Onion. Though she moved to the coast, she still feels passionate about helping to establish Chicago as a major production hub. “That was really our goal in leaving,” she says, “to bring back projects to legitimize it as more of a creative home where you can hire your writers, your directors, your producers, all of that.”

Several of the key cast and crew members live in either Los Angeles or New York, yet their connections to Chicago run deep. “A lot of us have worked together before, especially on the production team,” Swinford says. “So it was an easy call to be like, this is a position we need, I’ve got the best person who can do this.

And that’s consistently true for us in Chicago.

It’s a very close-knit community of people who are ready to work and get their hands dirty . . . that I feel is very unique to the city, having shot in LA, and being in LA now, and working in New York. It’s very much a family unit, and we take our team to each project that we work on.”

Glenn adds, “It felt so much better to be in the Chicago community of actors and creators because of the willingness to work together,

JULY 13, 2023 - CHICAGO READER 31

FILM continued from p. 31

because of the authenticity that each individual brought to their characters, especially on I Didn’t Mean to Go Mental. I feel like there’s a better ability to cast people rather than actors in the midwest.”

Though this show is certainly an indie production, there are examples of major network television shows that have really stuck to the Windy City. One frequently mentioned example is Work in Progress, cocreated by and starring Chicago improv stalwart Abby McEnany; it premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival and subsequently aired on Showtime for two seasons. Hawley noted that the writer’s room was here in Chicago, it was produced and edited here, the score was composed here, and it was even uploaded to the satellite from Chicago.

Mike Berg, the editor for I Didn’t Mean to Go Mental, also worked as an editor on Work in Progress. As someone involved in the postproduction process, Berg has a different perspective on the industry here. “The talent in this town on the post side is really great,” he says. “[But] even a lot of the shows that do some of their production in Chicago, a lot of them still don’t edit here, don’t finish here.” Though, as he points out, that might be changing. “I literally cut this in my bedroom. You don’t need a big, full facility, and you’re seeing a lot more of that.”

The potential of Chicago’s film and television landscape is a topic about which everyone I spoke to is very enthusiastic.

“I feel like Chicago film is in a state of renaissance, and we are continuing to expand with the Fields Studios sound stages [in Belmont Gardens],” Aimy Tien, executive producer of I Didn’t Mean to Go Mental, says. As Hawley tells me, in addition to the new studios coming online, Cinespace, on Chicago’s west side, is the largest sound stage studio complex between the coasts and the second largest in the country behind Universal Studios. The Illinois Film Office also offers a Film and TV Workforce Training Program and boasts the most diverse crew base in the country, being spurred further by diversity initiatives that incentivize productions for filling crew positions from underserved areas.

“This is my little pet topic,” Tien says excitedly, “because I think more films should be made in Chicago. Fantastic films can be made in Chicago . . . we don’t have to bring in a production designer from somewhere else unless they are genuinely offering us a unique skill set, which is frequently not the case.”

32 CHICAGO READER - JULY 13, 2023

Carly Glenn lies on a hospital bed for a scene in her TV pilot. ABBI CHASE

Much of that talent already exists here in Chicago, and as Hawley says, “We want to retain those people. We don’t want the brain drain. And as Chicago is an arts center in improv comedy and in theater and in food and in music . . . we should be the same way with film and television. We want to have our own film community, as well as bring in all these productions from the coast, to make it a healthier ecosystem.”

Another hot topic is the aforementioned Illinois Film Services Tax Credit, which in 2009 was increased to 30 percent; a headline in a 2010 issue of the Medill Reports Chicago boldly declared, “Illinois Tax Credits put Chicago film industry back on the map.” Just last year, it was extended through 2032 and expanded to allow for a limited number of non-Illinois residents to have their wages included in the tax credit. But what, exactly, is it?

“The Illinois Film Office does two things, primarily. Number one is we process the Film Production Tax Credit,” says Hawley. “The Film Production Tax Credit is a film incentive, or why any production anywhere goes anywhere in the world. The Illinois Film Tax Credit is 30 percent under qualified spend, and so, very simply put, if you make a million-dollar picture here, we will give you a 30 percent tax credit, so $300,000, on your qualified spend of a million dollars. And that’s why productions come to any jurisdiction, as a starting point.

That’s one thing we do. The other thing we do is, we are what I will just call film friendly.

Half of my office works on the tax credit, the other half of my office works with filmmakers on locations and problem-solving and things like that.” With the help of this credit, Illinois broke its own records with almost $700 million of film production expenditures in 2022, up $131 million from 2019.

I Didn’t Mean to Go Mental’s cinematogra-

pher Gianna Aquilina said it was a no-brainer to shoot in Chicago. “A lot of us started in Chicago and grew in the industry here,” she says. “So hearing things, like, ‘Oh, there’s tax incentives and stuff like that,’ it’s great because I think a lot of people are maybe a little bit ignorant to it, and they think there are just a few places where film can grow. But Chicago has been here, and it’s definitely here to stay, and it’s definitely continuing to grow. I think once people come over, like, for example, with the tax incentives, and they see, ‘Wow, there’s a thriving industry here, and everyone here is not only talented but they’re so supportive, it’s such a community,’ it will continue to grow.”

One would be remiss to talk about television production in Chicago without mentioning Open Television (OTV), which, among other initiatives, is “a nonprofit streaming platform and media incubator for intersectional storytelling,” per the organization’s website.

Founded in 2015 by Dr. Aymar Jean Christian and Elijah McKinnon, OTV has long championed Chicago-made television pilots and series, such as the renowned Brown Girls webseries.

But, as McKinnon says, “While Chicago is a really amazing filmscape in terms of market . . . many of the studios and many of the networks and many of the production houses reside in Los Angeles and New York. And that is just a fact.

“It is really vital to invest, not only into stories coming out of Chicago, but also [in] the cultivation of artists and talent that come from Chicago,” they say. “What I mean by that is that there are a lot of individuals in Chicago that are writers, that are directors, that are producers . . . that are based here in Chicago, that oftentimes have to relocate to the coastal cities because of the opportunity. And it’s not that the opportunity is not here, it’s the con-

sistency of the opportunities.”

Actor Kimberly Michelle Vaughn has appeared in Chicago-based shows such as Empire, Chicago Med, and The Chi. In I Didn’t Mean to Go Mental, she plays a group member in one of the pilot’s most ambitious sequences, wherein the relationship between the two leads begins to develop. “Wait, you two know each other?” her character asks as they begin recounting the school parking lot dramatics that got them where they are.

Glenn drew inspiration for the show from her own struggles with mental health. “I got to this point because of the many catalysts that were my mental health experiences,” she says.

“As a writer, the greatest piece of advice I ever received was, write what you know. And this is exactly what I know, and it was just a blast to make.”

The scene stands out because of how in sync the performers are, with each getting their moment to shine. Glenn’s background makes it feel relevant and genuine, almost as if a sense of authenticity—what a film or television show set in Chicago might get if they actually shoot in Chicago, for example—is integral to a creative work’s success.

But there are other factors at play, too. “It just depends on the culture, I really believe that,” Michelle Vaughn says. “Because each set has its own culture, whether it’s a network production or an indie production.”

The Algonquin native, who came to the city to attend Columbia College, plans to move to LA next year, having been faced with the dilemma of lacking consistent opportunities.

“You can only do so much here,” she says.

“You can continue here, and still be successful in whatever success means to you, but if you want more, you need to go to either coast.”

(It’s still indeterminate as to what kind of effect the current Writers Guild of America and potentially forthcoming SAG-AFTRA strikes will have on production in general and in Chicago specifically.)

I, for one, hope I Didn’t Mean to Go Mental gets picked up, as I’m eager to see where it goes. I want to see Chicago emerge as more of a character, so I can relate not only to the plot (if you know, you know) but to its place within the world, the place that is our incredible city.

In the map of our souls, the red pin is always on Chicago.

“It’s just like this gut feeling,” Glenn says, “that Chicago, to me, makes things with a little bit more heart.” v

@Chicago_Reader

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R READER RECOMMENDED

FILM

Get showtimes and see reviews of everything playing this week at chicagoreader.com/movies.

Joy Ride ED ARAQUEL / LIONSGATE

R The Out-Laws

NOW PLAYING

R Joy Ride

9 FILMS

JUL 14 - AUG 17

Subversively clever and delightfully raunchy, Adele Lim’s directorial debut follows a transracial adoptee (Ashley Park) who goes to China to find her birth mother. With her are three friends: a sex-positive struggling artist (Sherry Cola), an up-and-coming actress (Stephanie Hsu), and a deadpan K-pop stan (Sabrina Wu). Together, the four journey across China and get into loads of varied mischief including but not limited to: a slap-fight in a Beijing club, a mistaken drug search on a high-speed train, and a night of carnal delights with half a basketball team. The film toes the line between a poignant search for identity and a frank, full-frontal view of desire, ultimately landing us on a journey to self-love in all senses of the word. Juicy, maximalist visuals, a lithe storyline, and hilarious performances from its four main actors make for a crisp, 90-minute summer comedy that can tackle large questions of diaspora and belonging without getting bogged down in tacky self-seriousness.

—NINA LI COOMES 95 min. Wide release in theaters

Tyler Spindel’s The Out-Laws on Netflix is your basic boy-meets-in-laws rom-com.

Beta male bank manager Owen Browning (Adam DeVine) has to prove he’s worthy of his fiancee’s hip, dangerous, bank-robbing parents Billy (Pierce Brosnan) and Lilly (Ellen Barkin). They think he’s a “pasty little goober”; he thinks they’re dangerous criminals who are taking advantage of him. They’re both right . . . but can they transcend that and live, if not happily ever after, at least long enough to dance together at the wedding?

That may well sound like many an uninspired film you’ve already seen—there are a lot of parallels with the very underwhelming You People, which debuted on Netflix earlier this year. The ritual humiliation, sexual and otherwise, of the boring nice guy was plenty played out some decades back; you could probably write the skydiving and tattoo scenes yourself given the setup.

But, like Owen, the unpromising material ends up looking better than you’d guess. DeVine manages to make unapologetic dweebishness charming, and the movie is elevated by a mish-mash of wonderful character-actor bit parts. Poorna Jagannathan is a joyously bloodthirsty diva villain, and Lauren Lapkus is a joyously bloodthirsty diva dominatrix bank manager. Richard Kind is wonderful as Owen’s fuddier, duddier dad, and Julie Hagerty is even more wonderful as Owen’s mom, who spends the run time reminding us that Hollywood has really let us down by not putting Julie Hagerty in every single movie ever made. Add in a couple of inspired set pieces—including a shoot-out in a cake shop

and a car chase in a graveyard—and you start to appreciate the film’s principled and cheerful lack of ambition.

Again, like Owen, The Out-Laws just wants you to like it. And by the end, I, at least, found myself doing just that. —NOAH BERLATSKY R, 95 min. Netflix

R Scarlet

Where Italian director Pietro Marcello’s 2019 Jack London adaptation Martin Eden was an epic Künstlerroman, tracing the title character’s social and artistic development in parallel with a reactionary (and ultimately ill-fated) desire for individualism, this follow-up film is a smaller, more modest, and altogether more sublime expression of Marcello’s visual aesthetic, dealing in themes less explicitly political but just as subtly radical. Shot in France and based on a 1923 novel

by Soviet author Alexander Grin called Scarlet Sails, the film centers on a small rural family; the hardships they face; and a prophecy foretold concerning the daughter, Juliette (played by Juliette Jouan as an adult). Raphaël (Raphaël Thiéry) returns from the front lines of World

War I to find that his wife has died, leaving baby Juliette in the care of Adaline (Noémie Lvovsky), a farmer on the town’s outskirts whose husband left her with significant debt. In spite of these and more malignant troubles, this makeshift family unit has moments of love and light, largely through their connection to the arts. Raphaël is a skilled woodworker who channels his talent into creating wooden toys and sculptures, and Juliette, in stark contrast to the steely villagers, loves to read and sing (the film is, in fact, a quasi-musical). Magic is another of those forgotten arts, as evinced by a happily hermetic Baba Yaga-esque figure who prophecizes Juliette’s destiny, which, as luck would have it (for her and us), comes in the form of a strapping pilot played by Louis Garrel.

Marcello has said that, in comparison to Martin Eden, this is a more personal and less outrightly ambitious endeavor. Filmed in Super 16mm like its predecessor— and also including colorized archival footage that adds to its sense of realism and rapture—this sparkles with intimate feeling and pure affection for the craft. —KAT SACHS 100 min. Music Box Theatre v

Hong Kong summer

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MUSIC

ARIEL ZETINA

Part of the third and final day of the Pitchfork Music Festival. Sun 7/23, 1-1:40 PM (gates at noon), Green Stage, Union Park, 1501 W. Randolph, one-day ticket $115 (plus ticket $229), three-day pass $249 (plus pass $449), children ten and under free Ariel Zetina (at right) at a costume fitting for the group bringing her upcoming Pitchfork performance to life, with artist and makeup designer Tali Halpern (seated) MILES KALCHIK FOR CHICAGO READER

Ariel Zetina brings an inspiring queer community to Pitchfork The live debut of her album Cyclorama features an ensemble of queer dancers and singers of color, supported by queer designers, choreographers, and managers.

By JOAN ROACH

I

n just over a week, Ariel Zetina debuts a live performance of her brazen 2022 album, Cyclorama, at the Pitchfork Music Festival.

When it dropped, Zetina described the album as “an imagined theatrical production,” and this week that production takes its next step: onto the Green Stage in Union Park early next Sunday afternoon.

Building on what she calls the “ensemble nature” of the album, Zetina has chosen to premiere a live collaboration instead of simply delivering a DJ set. She’s enlisted Mia Arevalo (half of electro-pop duo Magin) and multi-

34 CHICAGO READER - JULY 13, 2023

faceted nightlife star Cae Monāe as vocalists, as well as dancers Angelíca Grace, Liviana, and Thee David Davis—all of them queer people of color. The entire cohort of choreographers, designers, and managers who’ve helped with this project behind the scenes is also queer and local.

Pitchfork launched its Chicago festival in 2006, two years before Zetina moved to the city to study theater and creative writing at Northwestern University. The DJ, producer, and performer has been on Pitchfork’s radar for a long time, and Cyclorama and its singles

received rave reviews. Last summer Pitchfork published an essay about trans women DJs taking over the club, whose subjects include Zetina and heavy-hitting Chicago-born house producer Honey Dijon. At the 2022 Chicago festival, Zetina played the DJ-focused stage in Zelle’s “Purple Parlor” VIP area.

Zetina’s name is synonymous with queer nightlife in Chicago, and she’s earned a prominent place in the city’s dance-music community—it’s surprising that Pitchfork has taken so long to invite her onto the main lineup. She was Smart Bar’s resident for Diamond Forma-

tion, and she still helps organize the collaborative monthlies Club Wives and Ariel’s Party.

Zetina’s original music and DJ sets weave together 2000s electroclash, Chicago acid house, and hip-house—think Green Velvet/Cajmere’s transformative 90s tracks, especially “Brighter Days” with Chicago vocalist Dajae— with influences such as Belizean punta and maximalist techno. Given their elevated bpm (beats per minute), her tracks are often classified as techno, a faster and more industrialsounding sibling of house.

Zetina is interested in house—especially its legacy of combining influences to create danceable tracks. “I think of Chicago house and my music as being very percussion heavy,” she says. What she finds most inspiring “is house music’s history of creating spaces where you could go where people didn’t look like you.” House and techno have Black roots, of course, and it’s still important for marginalized people to be able to maintain exclusive spaces, but Zetina speaks to another vital function of dance music—it brings people together.

As a performer, Zetina draws on the electroclash DJs and drag performers of the 2000s, but more important, she feels beholden to her early art experiences in Chicago. She recalls her time within a majority Latina arts community that flourished in Pilsen nearly a decade ago, pointing to the work of queer performance artists Keioui Keijaun Thomas, Paula Nacif, Kiam Marcelo Junio, and Glamhag.

Zetina remembers this period as one of intentional exchange between Pilsen natives and non-natives, which encouraged community in the Chicago art world. She says the sense of “collaboration during that time was palpable”—something she often misses as she moves among dance-music, performance, and art spaces. She feels that these scenes can be too separate.

Collaboration is at the core of Zetina’s art practice, and many of the people participating in her Pitchfork performance are longtime associates who’ve worked with her as part of the drag show Rumors or the DJ monthly Club Crush. The sentiment driving her Cyclorama set is intended to demonstrate the benefits of interdependence among thriving artistic and

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Graham Parker In Maurer Hall musical communities.

In theater, a cyclorama is a backdrop, a layer that mimics the depth of reality, a border that separates upstage from behind the scenes.

Zetina’s world-building album situates the audience at the theater, and each song and performer is part of a larger mise-en-scène.

“I imagine all the tracks on this as the lights and action projected onto the cyclorama,” Zetina says. Not only does the album turn “club music into a wide-ranging interrogation of queerness,” as Gio Santiago describes it in their review for Pitchfork, but it also creates a boundless theatrical arena where Zetina and the girls can go to play.

On July 5, I headed behind the curtain to the performance ensemble’s first costume fitting at Rocky Vintage’s Pilsen apartment and studio. When I arrived, Zetina, Arevalo, Liviana, and Angelíca Grace were already there. The dolls sat on the couch, shelves of multicolored yarn above their heads, passing around an Elf Bar during introductions and planning discussions. This costume fitting was the first opportunity for the whole team, including costume designers Alyssa Wright (Rocky Vintage) and Renee Moreno, to be in one room together.

Zetina had connected with Moreno at one of Bobbi O’Keefe’s long-running series of underground dinner parties earlier this year and proposed the project there. At Rocky Vintage, Moreno streamed her “Ghey” playlist in the background, and as the fittings commenced, Zetina broke into a bottle of champagne.

Everyone held aloft multicolored goblets and crystalline glasses while Zetina gave a quick toast to acknowledge the excitement in the room. A joyful commotion suffused the day, with multiple conversations starting and ending in different rooms, as Angelíca Grace, Liviana, Arevalo, and Zetina tried on their looks.

Zetina’s powerhouse troupe of friends also includes emerging mixed-media artist and makeup designer Tali Halpern and drag icon and Rumors organizer Dutchesz Gemini.

Dutchesz (who I’m hoping will make a special appearance at Pitchfork) is doing hair and styling alongside the designers. At one point she had to set a hard boundary with Zetina, who’s still in her long-lasting athleisure phase.

SATURDAY, JULY 22 8PM

Holly Near In Maurer Hall SATURDAY, AUGUST 12 8PM

Mason Jennings In Maurer Hall SUNDAY, AUGUST 27 8PM MONDAY, AUGUST 28 8PM

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Clem Snide In Szold Hall SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 23 8PM

“No sneakers,” Dutchesz said. Performers will wear thigh-high boots instead.

Zetina surrounds herself with creators and makers she trusts. Though much of the discussion at the fitting was directly about the performance, people also made time for casual chats about hookups among friends and serious dialogues on the complexities of working as trans women of color in a drag and performance scene still dominated by cis white gay men.

As the girls got in and out of their costumes, everyone agreed on one thing: how striking Arevalo looked in her tight pink mesh bodysuit. It fit her in all the right places, and Wright quickly decided that they’d be able to build Arevalo’s cerulean costume from the pattern.

As Arevalo twirled and posed, it was easy to imagine her onstage at Pitchfork, singing “Gemstone” with dancers Angelíca Grace and Liviana flourishing around her, her vocals complementing the song’s bubbly synths and upbeat breakbeats as they pour over the crowd. Like standout Cyclorama tracks “Slab of Meat” and “Have You Ever,” “Gemstone” explores the lived trans experience. The song revels in the euphoria of transitioning, celebrating the immeasurable beauty that women are free to explore and display on their own

terms.

The album’s cover pictures Zetina, Arevalo, and Monāe on a theater stage, starring in an imagined production that features only trans women of color. With this Pitchfork set, Zetina brings her production into the real world, its performers and their looks supported by the local queer community.

Zetina plans to unveil new tracks as well as extended and remixed versions of her older songs, and this performance will also preview an upcoming collaboration with Arevalo. With the help of a recently awarded DCASE grant, Zetina is making a video for “Gemstone” with Arevalo, shot by Chicago film director Aliya Haq (who’s also worked with Tatiana Hazel and Shawnee Dez).

Cyclorama is a performance experience that builds power with each iteration, and Zetina capitalizes on this momentum. She’s pulled together artists from several disciplines to build upon the creative potential of her album and career. Her use of the stage reflects her penchant for interconnection and draws much-deserved attention to the immense talent in the present-day queer Chicago arts ecosystem. v

Tom Paxton & The Don Juans In Maurer Hall THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 28 8PM

David Longstreth (of Dirty Projectors) In Maurer Hall F

fretboard journal & old town school of folk music

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@Chicago_Reader JULY 13, 2023 - CHICAGO READER 35

MUSIC CHICAGOANS OF NOTE

Emma McKee, aka hip-hop cross-stitch firebrand Stitch Gawd “I really enjoy speaking truth to power. If I’m doing all this fun stuff for brands . . . I also have to be doing something that’s for the good of the people.”

As told to MICCO CAPORALE

In 2012, Emma McKee taught herself to crossstitch to make a Christmas present for her mother. Shortly after taking her talent public, she began making elaborate cross-stitched jackets for local hip-hop artists. Her first commission was for Chance the Rapper in 2014, but since then she’s worked with the likes of Lil Yachty and Saba. Most people know McKee as Stitch Gawd, a name she reluctantly adopted after Reader contributor Tara Mahadevan, while interviewing McKee for the Fader, used it as a joke. This year, the Hyde Park Summer Fest invited McKee to make a jacket for one of the performers at last month’s event, and she chose headliner Lil’ Kim. In her eyes, Kim is an undersung hero of hip-hop who was treated cruelly by the popular media during her come-up.

But McKee hasn’t let her success go to her head. She’s a midwest-born, Chicago-raised artist still easing into her craft. The daughter of an opera singer and a priest, she spent her formative years in Kansas City, Saint Louis, and Tulsa. When she was old enough to get out of Oklahoma under her own power, she left for Canada—which she describes as “ideologically as far away from Tulsa” as she could imagine as a teenager—to study at the University of Toronto. She concentrated on postcolonial American literature with a double minor in film and American studies, and during those years she first got involved in the music industry, where her roles since then have included journalism, publicity, and corporate ticketing.

She remains humbled to be a working creative, and now she’s trying to use her platform for more than just celebrating hip-hop heroes— she wants to change hearts and minds.

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I

’ve always just really, really loved music.

My mom’s an opera singer, so I grew up, like, playing under pianos and being in rehearsal halls and things. From the time I was seven to 15, I lived in Saint Louis, and there were two great record stores that I could walk to. I would pick CDs based off the cover art, and I remember picking up the Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill and being like, “Oh, this is cool.” I was probably 11, but at home all we really listened to was classical and religious music. Rap music just blew my fucking mind.

I have loved it since I first heard it. I’m a “big feelings” person. When I love something, you just can’t keep me away, and you cannot keep me away from music.

I was in Canada from about 2004 till 2012, and then I ran into visa issues and had to leave.

I was like, “Fuck, where am I gonna go?” At the time my parents still lived in Oklahoma, but there was no way I was going back. LA seemed too far away. And New York was just . . . New York has always stressed me out. When I lived in Saint Louis, my dad and I would take spring break trips to Chicago. We’d stay, like, two days, eat deep dish, and hit the aquarium. I had these great memories here, so I was like, “Why not Chicago?”

When I left Canada, I’d been working at an independent record label and studio, so I had some friends in Toronto who had a music blog.

They had a sponsorship with Red Bull, so when I moved here, they were like, “Hey, Emma, can you go to these DJ events and write blog posts for us?”

It was great, because I didn’t know anybody.

I met a ton of people and became super enamored with the scene because I was getting

Emma McKee MERCEDES ZAPATA

credentials to go to venues and write about DJ sets. I remember seeing Kids These Days, which was Vic Mensa’s first group. They had an album that was produced by Jeff Tweedy with a bunch of other folks on it who went on to do big things. But I remember seeing them and being like, “Well, if this is Chicago talent, I’m in the right place. This is gonna be big.”

I

started stitching at 27. I’d never picked up a needle before. I was working in corporate ticketing for Groupon, so one year I surprised my dad by flying him out for a World Series game with special access I got through Groupon. It was really epic, and he loved it so

much. I was like, “Well, now I have to do something for my mom!”

She had wanted me to cross-stitch forever, and I had no interest in it. Everybody in my family cross-stitched except me. So I thought that I would make her this Christmas present as a surprise. And then it was like, “Oh no . . .

I’m very good at this cross-stitching thing.”

At the time I was really trying to find my calling. I really believe people have callings.

My parents both found their callings and made major career switches in their 20s. My dad was a civil engineer, and then he got his calling and went off to theology school and became a priest. My mom was a teacher and then got her

ll

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Emma McKee stitched her 2021 message to the mayor onto a scarf from the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. COURTESY THE ARTIST

calling and went off to sing. I was like, “Well, this means that I have to find meaning in my life and, like, the great vocation of things!”

And as I was doing this Christmas-themed cross-stitch for my mom, I was like, “You have got to be fucking kidding me.”

Cross-stitching calms my brain and helps me channel a lot of emotion. At first I was really self-conscious, though. I was making pieces about what I loved, which was rap music, but I kept it a secret. It just seemed like a really weird thing to be into. I still don’t totally realize how far this little thing has taken me. It feels unreal. I was just doing what felt natural to me: expressing my deep love and appreciation of these artists and musicians.

My first big dream was like, “Ohh . . . wouldn’t it be cool if I got some stuff on Chance the Rapper?” And then it happened! It happened really quickly! And then stuff like that kept happening, several times over, and I was like, “Well, I guess I’d better start dreaming bigger.”

That was hard for me at first, because I’d already achieved what I thought was the best possible outcome. What else could I possibly want? In the beginning, I wouldn’t even let people call me an artist. I felt like such a fraud.

McKee’s nine-foot portrait of Fred Hampton was her first large-scale cross-stitch project. COURTESY THE ARTIST

I learned to think bigger, and now I’m like, “What if I got something in the MCA? Or . . . the Whitney?” It took a long time to even let myself imagine that.

Before “Stitch Gawd,” people would always be like, “Oh, you’re the girl with the jacket.”

But even then, I wasn’t trying to be the girl with the jacket. I made one piece, and it kind of spiraled out of control. My first, second, and third [commissioned] pieces were on magazine covers. Celebrities were wearing this stuff. And that was really early on!

I ended up in all these spaces and working with all these people. And I’m a sponge, right?

I always want to know everything. I research, I read, I pick up on things. I was learning a ton through the artistic communities I was part of, like about the city and by extension America.

And I was kind of like, “OK, the jackets are cool. But if this is really my calling, it needs to be less about celebrity worship and more about things that I care about.”

C

hicago represents everything that’s great and terrible about this country. It’s got that midwestern, blue-collar, hard work ethic. We have really passionate, activated

people and beautiful architecture, great public parks . . . public arts! We also have horrible police brutality and some of the worst segregation in the country. Because of that duality, Chicago produces all this amazing cultural stuff. And I think that America has that in spades, but there’s nothing quite like Chicago.

We make truly incredible music and art.

I have discovered I have this influence through this art form. People are interested in talking to me. “Well, if I have this attention, then I need to use it for something bigger than me.” My first large cross-stitch was a ninefoot portrait of [Illinois Black Panther Party] Chairman Fred Hampton. This was way before that movie came out, and people weren’t as aware of Fred Hampton because of the nature of his work and the state’s involvement in his death.

So I thought, if you see this giant blue velvet portrait, you’re going to want to know, “Who is this, and why is this piece so large?”

And for people who know that history, I want them to ask, “What continues to happen to men like him?” I don’t feel like it’s my place to shock people into recognition or come down heavy-handed. We’re human, we’re

fallible, and we have to find ways to connect with one another if we want to change hearts and minds. It’s the only way we’re going to get anywhere, I think.

I need my work to reflect that part of me and hopefully start a conversation—or inspire someone to learn, say, about Fred Hampton and the Black Panthers. It’s crazy. The 60s were, like, a second ago, and a lot of people still don’t know that history. The Black Panther Party were just trying to educate people and feed babies and protect one another. And the U.S. government thought that was way too scary.

That’s why I was harassing our former mayor with some art for a while in 2021. I just had big beef with her—I thought she was so terrible for this city. I found this really beautiful silk handkerchief from the [1933] Chicago World’s Fair. It’s really cute and pink.

And then I stitched on top of it, “Fuck you Lori.” And I had it turned into postcards and wheatpastings. I sold 300 postcards that were pre-addressed to City Hall so people could express their own grievances to Lori. I wanted it to be like that scene in Harry Potter where all the letters come through the mail slot in the door and just flood the room. I wanted them to be like magic letters on a mission, except it’s a bunch of pink postcards saying “fuck you.”

I really needed Lori Lightfoot to know how I fucking felt—but also how some of her constituents felt. People get so hung up on presidential elections, but local politics are where you can effect the most change. And I thought maybe this was a way to engage some people who aren’t so typically engaged. A few hundred of those went to City Hall, and then we pasted them in her neighborhood. I love being engaged in that way and showing people there are avenues for them too.

I really enjoy speaking truth to power. If I’m doing all this fun stuff for brands—if I’m working with Nike and Gatorade and all this stuff—I have to find ways to make it celebratory, but I also have to be doing something that’s for the good of the people. Always for the good of the people. Toni Cade Bambara is an abolitionist author, and she said, “The role of the artist is to make revolution irresistible.” I love that.

That’s what we gotta do. v

@JuggaloReporter JULY 13, 2023 - CHICAGO READER 37

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Recommended and notable shows and releases with critics’ insights for the week of July 13

b ALL AGES F

PICK OF THE WEEK

Footwork pioneer RP Boo mines mundane details for dance-floor thrills

CONCERT PREVIEWS THURSDAY13 Big Joanie Frida Kill open. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $18. 21+

WILLS GLASSPIEGEL

RP BOO, DJ SPINN, DJ PHIL, DJ T-RELL, CUENIQUE

Fri 7/21, 10 PM, Smart Bar, 3730 N. Clark, $20, $15 advance. 21+

LIKE BASICALLY ANYONE who works or plays in a developed country, I’m familiar with the frustrations of technology that stops working properly—it bothers me irrationally that I have to really lean on my laptop’s “R” key to get the letter to appear. Sometimes I repeatedly hammer on the errant key, which produces spelling errors rather than fixing anything. I’ve often thought about failing hardware, but usually as an annoyance—I never considered its potential musicality till I listened to RP Boo’s 2005 track “Pop Machine.” The Chicago footwork pioneer included it on his new Legacy Volume 2 (Planet Mu), which compiles material he created between 2002 and 2007.

RP Boo made “Pop Machine” in homage to a malfunctioning vending machine at the Speedway Oil Change near 59th and Western.

He worked there at the time, so he tended to hear about it when the machine ate a customer’s cash. One frustrated patron kept pressing

38 CHICAGO READER - JULY 13, 2023

the button repeatedly, which RP thought was funny—he went over and started pressing buttons himself, saying “work!” as if he could talk the machine into cooperating. That night he went home and devised a cheeky footwork track that used voice recordings of him saying “pop machine” and “work!” By arranging these vocal samples in loops that run at different speeds on parallel tracks, RP gave the song’s trellis of electronic bass and percussion a giddy, propulsive energy, as though it were bouncing across the surface of the moon.

Like much of Legacy Volume 2, “Pop Machine” continues to reveal new internal patterns on subsequent listens. They can hypnotize me into a dance (or at least a vigorous head nod), and they give me a newfound appreciation for the untapped musicality in my everyday experiences. All I need now is a way to make music from a busted “R” key. —LEOR GALIL

UK punk trio Big Joanie played their first show at the 2013 First Timers Fest, a grassroots event where all the bands are making their debuts. First Timers seeks to diversify London’s DIY scene by encouraging people to try things they’ve never done before, and every act has to be able to tick two out of three boxes: one or more members must have never played in a band, be playing a new role in a band, or identify as part of a group marginalized in DIY. (Members of Big Joanie identify as queer, and all three are Black women.) After a couple EPs, the band released their 2018 debut full length, Sistahs, on Thurston Moore and Eva Prinz’s Daydream Library Series label. Big Joanie’s insightful, politically charged lyrics and fresh dance-punk sound (which recalled the minimalist aesthetics of early-2000s feminist punk bands) helped the group build momentum, and they landed gigs opening for the likes of Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney. The pandemic would soon sideline the entire music industry, of course, but Big Joanie emerged from it stronger than ever. Last year’s Back Home showcases a retooled style that builds on the strippeddown punk of Sistahs with bolder arrangements and a broader mix of influences. The album questions the concept of home from many angles: Is “home” the place you sleep at night? Is it a community or tradition? Is it something intimate between individuals? “Your Words” combines lush, swirling synths with the choppy guitar of singer Stephanie Phillips, who ruminates on the potentially crushing power of words. “In My Arms” embraces sunny indie-rock melodies and impressive multipart vocal arrangements, and later in the album a slowed-down reprise leans into the song’s romanticism with a “Be My Baby”-style beat. Some of the most poignant moments on Back Home also rock the hardest, such as the yearning grunge-meetspower-pop banger “Happier Still.” Big Joanie were poised to make their debut U.S. tour this spring, but postponed it due to a medical emergency. Their rescheduled dates include this Empty Bottle show.

—JAMIE LUDWIG

Protomartyr Stuck open. 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport, $22. 17+ Protomartyr are the kind of band who create a lot with a very minimal palette. Ever since the Detroit four-piece began releasing music in 2012, they’ve made postpunk with a capital P: wiry guitar, throbbing bass, and jumpy drums topped with the dry, deadpan speak-singing of front man Joe Casey. The first few seconds of Protomartyr’s brand-new sixth LP, Formal Growth in the Desert (Domino), give the impression that the band simply have more of the same in store for you. Casey opens the song drawling over a quiet, spiny guitar line, but then the music kicks in with a dramatic, sweeping, cinematic chord—announcing a bigger and better Protomartyr, who don’t let up once over the album’s 12

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Protomartyr TREVOR NAUD

Big Joanie JAMIE MACMILLAN

tracks. The title Formal Growth proves apt, because Protomartyr flesh out their sound with complex rhythms, layers of synths, cushy pedal-steel guitars, and roomy dynamic shifts. The things that have made Protomartyr so magnetic for more than a decade are still there—the catchy darkness, the locked-in playing—but this time around the music has even more depth, style, and heart. Formal Growth in the Desert is a stunningly sophisticated take on a genre that often seems like it doesn’t have any new heights to reach—it proves that Protomartyr are the band to lead the drive to discover them.

Come early for local four-piece Stuck, who also bring plenty of pleasant surprises to the postpunk revival. —LUCA CIMARUSTI

FRIDAY14 M. Sage The duo of Zander Raymond & Beth McDonald open. 7:30 PM, International Museum of Surgical Science, 1524 N. DuSable Lake Shore Dr., $25. 21+ Experimental artist Matthew Sage, better known as M. Sage, moved to Chicago from Colorado in 2014, and within a couple years I’d become quite fond of his work. The reflective solo material he’d put out on Atlanta label Geographic North and the gigabytes of other peoples’ recordings he issued via his own label Patient Sounds made him a vital part of Chicago’s music firmament. He wound Patient Sounds down in 2019 with no intention of running a label again, but the pandemic changed his mind, and in 2020 Sage launched Cached Media—an imprint that he initially used to gather together a series of ambient-jazz recordings he made online with saxophonist Patrick Shiroishi, violinist Chris Jusell, and multi-instrumentalist Chaz Prymek. That group, better known as Fuubutsushi, brought Sage a windfall of new exposure. Though he’s since returned to Colorado, Chicago remains part of his expanding musical practice. In May, RVNG Intl. released the

M. Sage album Paradise Crick, which Sage wrote and recorded in his Portage Park home before the move.

Sage recently told Aquarium Drunkard that he devised the album’s serene, naturalistic tones entirely with electronic instruments, which helped him avoid a technique that’s become a cliche in experimental music. “One thing I didn’t want to do was use field recordings,” he said. “All the ‘nature’ sounds that you hear on the record are all made on synthesizers. That was part of the motif—like synthesized nature.” Sage occasionally tips that aesthetic balance toward the synthetic, but this doesn’t disrupt his tranquil vision. I’m not sure I’ve heard anything in the wilderness that resembles the lightweight electronic percussion he sprinkles into “Mercy Lowlands,” but when I search for a way to describe its gentle pitter-patter, I can only seem to come up with naturalistic comparisons—sometimes it reminds me of twigs crunching beneath boots or raindrops falling in a pond. In any case, it transports me to an idealized great outdoors, which I have to specify because the real outdoors are a mess—I’m writing this on a day when Canadian forest fires have transformed Chicago’s air into an unhealthy acrid fog. I hope the rest of my summer days remind me more of Paradise Crick. —LEOR GALIL

M. Sage MATTHEW SAGE

SATURDAY15 Footballhead Habitats, Bottom Bunk, and Friko (solo) open. 9 PM, Sleeping Village, 3734 W. Belmont, $17.51. 21+ Last year, Chicago multi-instrumentalist Ryan Nolen launched a solo project called Footballhead as an outlet for material too poppy for his ongoing band, Kirby Grip, who play soaring, sometimes serious space rock. On Footballhead’s debut, the July 2022 EP Kitchen Fly, Nolen made his affection for 90s alt-rock radio hits, caramel-sweet emo, and turn-ofthe-century pop punk explicit. But he avoided staid

Footballhead COURTESY OF DARK SECRET MEDIA

JULY 13, 2023 - CHICAGO READER 39

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Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/musicreviews.

Imarhan FEHTI SAHRAOUI

continued from p. 39

retreads of those touchstones by developing sharp arrangements with Eric Reyes, aka local emo sensation Snow Ellet. As Nolen told CHIRP Radio in January, Reyes helped him arrange the EP’s percussion digitally, sampling live drums to give Nolen’s crunching guitars a jolt of energy that carries them aloft like a sudden gust of wind. Nolen has since evolved Footballhead into a more fleshed-out project, with a live band that includes bassist Adam Siska (who cofounded the Academy Is . . . and spent a few years touring with Carly Rae Jepsen). He also beefs up Footballhead’s sound on the project’s self-released first album, the new Overthinking Everything.

The blustery instrumentation on “Ugly Day,” for example, should win over newly converted punks obsessed with superclean contemporary hardcore bands, and Nolen’s relaxed, understated singing coats the music with a sugary glaze. The high points on Overthinking Everything give me a feeling I rarely get from the radio-ready descendents of goldenera alt-rock: a shot of bliss. —LEOR GALIL

The Magic Number An evening of trios and a sextet with Roscoe Mitchell, Joe McPhee, Mats Gustafsson, Ken Vandermark, Nate Wooley, and Jason Adasiewicz. 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $25. 18+ The Magic Number is three. It’s the number of musicians that gallerist, record label proprietor, and music scholar John Corbett deems to be ideal for an improvisational encounter. And since he’s organizing this event—which coincides with his observation of a significant birthday that’s divisible by three—he gets to pick the terms of engagement under which the players will perform. This extraordinary all-star lineup includes woodwinds and percussion player Roscoe Mitchell, reeds and brass player Joe McPhee, trumpeter Nate Wooley, vibraphonist Jason Adasiewicz, and reeds players Ken Vandermark and Mats Gustafsson. Each partici-

40 CHICAGO READER - JULY 13, 2023

Louise Post ALISON DYER

pant (whose ages range from 45 to 83) is a celebrated practitioner of jazz and improvised music. All of them have released records on, played at, or presented work in other media at Corbett vs. Dempsey, the gallery and label that Corbett operates with Jim Dempsey. And while a decades-spanning network of working relationships connects some of them, other players—most notably octogenarians McPhee and Mitchell—have never collaborated before. This ensures that two very different dynamics—established rapports and initial encounters—will come into play at this concert. The evening will include a series of improvisations by subsets of three artists, selected to maximize the number of first-time musical meetings, and will conclude with a piece for all six whose parameters will be determined by Vandermark. —BILL MEYER

TUESDAY18 Imarhan The Arab Blues open. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $22. 21+ Imarhan emerged from southern Algeria’s closeknit Tuareg community in 2006. Fans of Tuareg rock greats Tinariwen will already be familiar with the quintet; Imarhan front man Iyad Moussa Ben Abderahmane (aka Sadam) is a cousin of Tinariwen bassist Eyadou Ag Leche, and he’s toured with the band to fill in for members who couldn’t go for conflict- or visa-related reasons.

On their three full-length albums for Berlinbased City Slang, Imarhan (“Those I care about”) sing predominantly in their native Tamasheq language and firmly embrace the musical traditions of their hometown of Tamanrasset, even as they branch out into other styles. Their third album, last year’s Aboogi, is titled after their rehearsal space and recording studio (in turn named for a type of traditional house in the region), and it weaves together light springing rhythms, sinuous vocals,

and nimble guitar lines with global modern influences of rock, funk, psychedelia, and jazz. The quintet seamlessly absorb and integrate their guest stars, which on Aboogi include Sudanese singer Sulafa Elyas (who sings in Arabic on “Taghadart”), Super Furry Animals front man Gruff Rhys (who sings in Welsh on “Adar Newlan”), and several members of Tinariwen. The bluesy “Tamatidin” features one of the last recordings of poet, guitarist, and Tinariwen cofounder Mohammed Ag Itlale, aka Japonais, who passed away in 2021.

Aboogi is evocative and ever-changing, and it takes its soulful journey at an assured pace. “Achinkad” mixes joy and sorrow in a folktale allegory, while “Imaslan N’Assouf” is reflective and melancholy, with chiming guitars and deceptively soft backing vocals. Imarhan’s music acknowledges the grief and horror of poverty and colonialism, but it also celebrates resilience, the beauty of Algeria, and Imarhan’s collaborations with international artists. With Aboogi they present a multifaceted jewel that captures the current moment in every sparkle.

This show at the Empty Bottle is part of Imarhan’s first U.S. tour since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and it offers a great opportunity to catch the band in an intimate setting. —MONICA KENDRICK

THURSDAY20 Louise Post The Dumes open. 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln, $25, $20 in advance. 18+ It’s been nearly a decade since Louise Post played at Lincoln Hall. At that time the guitarist and singer was in good company, alongside her longtime Veruca Salt cohorts Nina Gordon, Steve Lack, and Jim Shapiro during a stop on the band’s 2014 reunion tour. Chicago’s musical landscape has continuously changed since it birthed the 90s alt-rock mainstays (along with contemporaries Smashing Pumpkins, Liz Phair, and Urge Overkill), and Post has likewise

entered a new era of music making.

Last month, Post released her debut solo album, Sleepwalker, via El Camino Media. Though fuzzy rock opener “Queen of the Pirates” and plugged-in power-pop single “Guilty” could easily be dusted-off B sides of Veruca Salt hits such as “Seether” or “Volcano Girls,” she infuses much of the record with a more mature sonic palette and stylistic needle pushing. “Secrets” features a soft horn section, and “Hollywood Hills” has a pinch of the alluring magnetism of current Top 40 pop dames such as Lana Del Rey and Billie Eilish (in a press release, Post credits her child for introducing her to Eilish’s music). The record was produced by multi-instrumentalist Matt Drenik, who makes music under the name Battleme and opened some dates of Veruca Salt’s 2014 tour.

He brings out a new side of Post: compared to her 90s work, Sleepwalker has more complex arrangements, and its instrumentation goes beyond the guitar-bass-drums combination associated with altrock to include piano and synths (Post played most of the instruments on this record). Standout ballad “What About” shows the artist at her most vulnerable—it’s a catchy diary entry that could best Foo Fighters’ suggestive confessional “Everlong,” which Dave Grohl is rumored to have written about his relationship with Post.

This Chicago homecoming show is part of Post’s monthlong jaunt with a touring band that includes former Smashing Pumpkins bassist Nicole Fiorentino, which should thrill anyone with a thirst for that special Chicago alt-rock flavor. So should Post’s set list, which to date has been sprinkled with Veruca Salt staples for a balance of new and old.

—SELENA FRAGASSI

FRIDAY21 RP Boo See Pick of the Week, page 38. DJ Spinn, DJ Phil, DJ T-Rell, and Cuenique open. 10 PM, Smart Bar, 3730 N. Clark, $20, $15 advance. 21+

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3730 N CLARK ST METROCHICAGO.COM @METROCHICAGO photo by Catalina Florea

SUN JUL 30

A METRO 40TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION

MICHAEL SHANNON & JASON NARDUCY

TUE AUG 08

THE DRUMS

and Friends play Murmur Celebrating the 40th Anniversary of REM's Murmur

with special guest Cold Hart

WED AUG 09

SAT AUG 12

93XRT PRESENTS

CELEBRATING THE RE-RELEASE OF THEIR FIRST THREE ALBUMS

THE DANDY WARHOLS Sam Scranton MOLLY ROTH SCRANTON

ALBUM REVIEWS Sam Scranton, Body Pillow Moon Glyph samscranton.bandcamp.com/album/body-pillow-2 ndboard Info.

On his new solo album, Body Pillow, Chicago percussionist, composer, and improviser Sam Scranton presents a menagerie of immersive, bubbly electronics. I’d become familiar with Scranton through his work with local new-music ensemble Honestly Same, so I expected this record to be an electroacoustic sound pastiche—along the lines of The Ceiling Reposes, a stunning album that his bandmate Lia Kohl released in March on American Dreams. Though the two albums do share a joyous, Technicolor approach to experimental music, they couldn’t be more different.

While Kohl’s record weaves field recordings, electronics, and cello together in a delicate, tranquil collage, Body Pillow is a colorful, bugged-out glitch album that’s sure to please fans of contemporaries such as Ulla, G.S. Sultan, and Nobukazu Takemura.

Warm synthesizers power its melodic core, though Scranton drenches them in so many layers of percussive sound that it can be hard to differentiate the acoustic from the electronic (not that there’s any need to do so). Some songs, such as “Big Glider,” have noisy textures, while others, such as opener “Luna,” could almost be considered straightforward by ambient-music standards—though there’s always enough lingering weirdness that they don’t quite get there. Linking it all together is a consistently nutty energy that reminds me of Looney Tunes.

Body Pillow is partially informed by Scranton’s use of found objects—many sounds on the album come from a contact-miked piece of balsa wood whose output is run through filters and resonators.

But whatever connections the music maintains to acoustic sound sources, they’re balanced out by electronic frequencies that simultaneously recall video-game music and the work of trumpet player and composer Jon Hassell. The record is jittery and constantly busy, but Scranton imbues it all with the sort of introspection that defines most great ambient and experimental music. —LEVI DAYAN

Sleep Sinatra + Televangel, Incorruptible Saints Self-released televangel.bandcamp.com/album/incorruptiblesaints Midwest hip-hop is alive and well in . . . Lincoln, Nebraska? The richness of Lincoln’s hip-hop scene may go largely unnoticed by mainstream fans, but that doesn’t negate the subterranean greatness of local stalwarts such as Adrian Madlock, who makes music as Sleep Sinatra.

Sleep’s discography is bountiful and aggressively independent; his Bandcamp page hosts more than 20 titles. The MC has also done plenty of collaborative work, including releases with Chicago-linked rappers, including Vic Spencer, Davis, Skech185 (who now lives in New York), and Säge, the 64th Wonder. And Incorruptible Saints, his new fulllength with Ian Taggert, a producer from Portland, Oregon, who goes by Televangel, is a gratifying no-skip project that begs for repeat plays at high volumes.

On opener “S.L.E.E.P.,” Sleep declares, “I done been through so much shit and I ain’t broken,” setting the tone for an album full of survivalist grown-man bars, which he delivers over crumbly, cloudy samples and smartly calculated breaks where Televangel’s production work soars. The bountiful, jazz-injected break on “Widows Peak” comes through like a concerned stroll through a colorful concrete jungle, following as it does Sleep’s poignant lines: “Been training my mind for warfare, that’s how we hit reps / Crazy how we create beautifully amongst a grim death.”

Drums emerge from the abyss on “Fire Forged” to smack hard, front and center, amid deft guest verses from Pacific Northwest rappers Milc and Lord Olo. Prolific Seattle underground hiphop artist AJ Suede turns in an arresting verse atop the dusty horns, staccato snares, and electric piano of “Blaksmith.” Incorruptible Saints is a wake-up call for anyone snoozing on Televangel’s ornate production, Sleep Sinatra’s nimble lyricism, or Nebraska hip-hop in general—I have no doubt that it will grace more than its share of “best-of” hip-hop lists later this year.

—CRISTALLE BOWEN v

+

PELICAN

+ Uniform / Upper Wilds

SAT JUL 22 / 6PM / ALL AGES R IOT FE ST P R E S E N TS

SU N AU G 13 / 8 PM / 21+ @ SL EEP ING VIL L AGE

+ Gully Boys / Destructo Disk / Jigsaw Youth

+ Hey, ily / Bottom Bracket / Life Looks Good

DESTROY BOYS FRI JUL 28 / 10PM / 21+

EDEN: A SAPPHIC SPACE Music by: Zolita / BOOTS! (DJ SET) K. Hole Kardashian (Putivuelta Bogotá) and more!

MICHAEL CERA PALIN TH U AU G 17 / 8 : 30 PM / 18 + SEA N HEA LY P R ESENT S

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AUG 26

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AUG 29 AUG 31 SEP 08

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JULY 13, 2023 - CHICAGO READER 41

WOLF BY KEITH HERZIK

EARLY WARNINGS

UPCOMING CONCERTS TO HAVE ON YOUR RADAR

b ALL AGES THU 10/5 Sammie 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ FRI 10/6 Shamarr Allen 9:30 PM, Hideout MON 10/9 Roc Marciano 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ TUE 10/10 Noah Gundersen, Casey Dubie 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston b FRI 10/13 Lucinda Williams & Her Band 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ SAT 10/14 James Blake 9 PM, Aragon Ballroom, 17+

Trippie Redd COURTESY THE ARTIST

JULY THU 7/27 Gráinne Duffy, Rosa 7:30 PM, Martyrs’ Kickback & Jennifer Hall, Burning Lights 8:30 PM, Sleeping Village FRI 7/28 Eden: A Sapphic Space featuring Zolita, Boots! (DJ set), K. Hole Kardashian 10 PM, Metro SUN 7/30 Kowloon Walled City, Jay Jayle, Anatomy of Habit 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Peso Pluma 8 PM, Credit Union 1 Amphitheatre, Tinley Park b Telekinetic Yeti, Stinking Lizaveta, Rifflord, Shrineburner 7:30 PM, Reggies Rock Club, 17+

AUGUST MON 8/7 Uniflora, Fruitleather, Plant Matter 7:30 PM, Schubas b TUE 8/8 Cheap Monarchy, Livingroom, Gazebo Effect 7:30 PM, Schubas, 18+ THU 8/10 Triptides, In the Pines 9 PM, Sleeping Village SAT 8/12 Chucky Ar La Festival featuring Yoko & the Oh No’s, Corn on My Dinner Plate, Fundamental Kink, Guitars Over Guns 6 PM, Martyrs’ b Temple of Angels 9 PM, Sleeping Village

SUN 8/13 96 Bitter Beings, Hirs Collective, Reign, Clear Coat, Glasshouse Owl 7:30 PM, Reggies Rock Club, 17+ WED 8/16 Resonant Rogues, Michelle Billingsley 9:30 PM, Hideout Shortparis 9 PM, Sleeping Village THU 8/17 Shadwick Wilde & Quiet Hollers, Nathan Graham, Lacey Guthrie (solo) 8 PM, Gman Tavern SAT 8/19 A Celebration of Lin Brehmer featuring Bob Mould, Los Lobos, LinBurgers with Jon Langford & Kelly Hogan, Michael McDermott 7 PM, Metro, 18+ THU 8/24 Dominic Fike, Hether 8 PM, Huntington Bank Pavilion b SAT 8/26 Parachute Day, Tiny Voices, Excuse Me Who Are You? 8:30 PM, Gman Tavern Six AM 15 Year Anniversary featuring Perc, Brenda, Lowki 10 PM, Smart Bar THU 8/31 Tillers 8:30 PM, Hideout Together Pangea, Thick, Reckling 8:30 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+

BEYOND FRI 9/1 Scarlet Demore, Kangaroo Court, Superkick 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+

42 CHICAGO READER - JULY 13, 2023

SUN 9/3 Little Image, Hastings, Levi Evans 6:30 PM, Reggies Rock Club b TUE 9/5 Trippie Redd, Lucki, Jean Dawson, D Savage, Ekkstacy, K Suave 7:30 PM, Credit Union 1 Amphitheatre b SUN 9/10 Kadabra 8 PM, Reggies Music Joint TUE 9/12 Blk Odyssy, Eimaral Sol 9 PM, Schubas, 18+

SUN 10/15 Orions Belte 9 PM, Empty Bottle MON 10/16 Monowhales, Glimmers 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ WED 10/18 Easy Honey 8 PM, Subterranean, 17+ SUN 10/22 Bullet for My Valentine, Of Mice & Men 7 PM, Riviera Theatre b MON 10/23 Lil Uzi Vert 6:30 PM, Aragon Ballroom b

THU 9/14 Corinne Bailey Rae 8 PM, Rockefeller Chapel, University of Chicago b

TUE 10/24 A Giant Dog 9 PM, Empty Bottle Porno for Pyros 8 PM, Aragon Ballroom, 18+

FRI 9/15 Peso Pluma 8 PM, Rosemont Theatre, Rosemont b

THU 10/26 Frenship, Bizzy 8 PM, Subterranean, 17+

SUN 9/17 Escape From the Zoo, Holy Locust 8 PM, Reggies Music Joint

FRI 10/27 Blü Eyes, Avery Lynch 8 PM, Subterranean, 17+

SAT 9/23 Man on Man 9 PM, Empty Bottle SUN 9/24 Max Barskih 8 PM, Park West, 18+

SUN 10/29 Faye Webster 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre b TUE 10/31 Del Water Gap, Kristiane 7:30 PM, Metro b

Early Warnings newsletter: sign up here

GOSSIP WOLF

FRI 11/10 Driveways, Eternal Boy 7:30 PM, Bottom Lounge b

A furry ear to the ground of the local music scene

SAT 11/11 Anti-Heros, Noi!se, Fear City, Antagonizers ATL, Liberty & Justice, Fighting for Scraps, Old Salt 5 PM, Reggies Rock Club, 18+ Into It. Over It., Owen, Queen of Jeans 7:30 PM, Bottom Lounge b Puma Blue 9 PM, Empty Bottle

THE PUNISHING five-song cassette that local D-beat crew War Effort dropped last summer was rumored to have been written and recorded in one day—and the band have maintained that pace on Path to Glory, a scorching seven-inch EP (released last month via Bay Area label Warthog Speak) that ups the ante on the tape’s aggression and power. Singer Bill Molloy tells Gossip Wolf that War Effort’s technique is a reaction to members’ previous bands overthinking things and sputtering out: “We go to the practice space, set up recording equipment, flesh out the instrumentals, and record them as soon as we’ve got them down,” he says. “Afterward we go back to someone’s house and record vocals that same night.”

Molloy, drummer Dave Fortunato, bassist Kevin Parmer, and guitarist Ian Wise have played in a long string of bruising bands in Chicago and Houston, including Fuerza Bruta, Lost Legion, and Cidadão. On Friday, July 14, War Effort open for Philly street punks the Virus at Reggies Rock Club on a stacked bill with locals Shitizen, Complacent, and Evasive Actions.

Chicago singer-songwriter Jean Cochrane charmed this wolf with their 2021 indie-pop album as Hard Femme, A Layer of Topsoil . Cochrane has since expanded Hard Femme into the five-piece band that recorded the new EP Thank God I’m Damned. Lead single “The Car That Kills Me” supports Cochrane’s wry lyrics and tender singing with relaxed, country- inflected instrumentation—it sets a high bar for the rest of the record.

Thank God I’m Damned drops Friday, July 14, and Hard Femme will celebrate the following day by headlining a 4 PM concert on the patio at Build Coffee (6100 S. Blackstone). Hemlock and Lightleak open. Your $10 suggested donation benefits Clean Air Club, which places air purifiers with local and touring musicians to help safeguard their shows against COVID-19 and other airborne diseases.

—J.R. NELSON AND LEOR GALIL

SUN 11/12 Gera MX, Nanpa Básico 8 PM, Radius Chicago b Periphery, Mike Dawes 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Jeremy Pinnell 8:30 PM, Hideout MON 11/13 Far Caspian 8 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Periphery, Mike Dawes 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ SAT 11/18 Dark Star Orchestra 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ Dessa 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ THU 11/30 Sam Tinnesz 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ FRI 12/1 Angel Olsen, Kara Jackson 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ SAT 12/2 Angel Olsen, Natural Information Society 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ SUN 12/3 Angel Olsen, Joanna Sternberg 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ TUE 12/5 Meshuggah, In Flames, Whitechapel 6 PM, Hard Rock Live Northern Indiana, Gary, IN

THU 9/28 Ralph, Tedy 8 PM, Schubas, 18+

SAT 11/4 Craig Robinson & the Nasty Delicious 7 PM, Park West, 18+

FRI 9/29 Brian Jonestown Massacre 8 PM, the Vic, 18+

SUN 11/5 Slaughter Beach, Dog 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+

FRI 4/19/2024 Magnetic Fields 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+

SUN 10/1 Wynne 7:30 PM, Reggies Rock Club b

WED 11/8 Arch Echo, Stellar Circuits 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+

SAT 4/20/2024 Magnetic Fields 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ v

SAT 12/16 Armed, Model/Actriz 8 PM, Metro b

Got a tip? Tweet @Gossip_Wolf or email gossipwolf@chicagoreader.com.

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1245 CHICAGO AVE, EVANSTON, IL EVANSTONSPACE.COM @EVANSTONSPACE

AUGUST 4 BODEANS EARLY SHOW IS SOLD OUT DOORS AT 6:00 PM & 9:00 PM

AUGUST 6

FREDDY JONES BAND DOORS AT 7:00 PM

JULY 13, 2023 - CHICAGO READER 43

SAVAGE LOVE Never been kissed “I’m the only 25-year-old in the world who’s still a virgin.”

By DAN SAVAGE Q: I’m a 25-year-old woman who has never been in a relationship.

As a consequence, I’ve never kissed anyone and obviously never had sex.

I’m not from a conservative family and sex has never been a taboo for me.

However, as a teenager, I disliked my body. I’ve always been shy and introverted, and I felt awkward interacting with the opposite sex.

At 22, when I finally felt ready to date, the pandemic started. Now it has been three years and my life isn’t going the way I was expecting it to when I was younger. I’m dealing with mental health issues, and I lost whatever confidence I had in my early 20s.

As I’m getting and feeling older, I’m anxious and desperate about this situation. Irrationally, I think that I’m the only 25-year-old in the world who’s still a virgin and I’m extremely ashamed of this. I’m worried that I’m missing a lot of opportunities and that later on I’m going to regret this. At this point, I don’t mind the idea of meeting someone through a dating app and having disinterested sex (I’m not looking for a serious relationship), but I’m worried that my potential partner might notice that I’m completely inexperienced.

At this point I feel like I will never have the chance to be intimate with someone.

My questions: 1. Should I tell them?

2. Should I look for someone older and more sympathetic to my situation?

3. Are dating apps the only solution?

4. I generally feel more attracted to men once I get

to know them. How long can I reasonably ask someone who is looking for something casual to wait?

5. Anything else I should know?—THIS DESPERATE GIRL

a: My answers:

1. Yes, you should tell them.

I know, I know: the thought of telling someone you’re inexperienced before having sex for the first time fills you with anxiety. But you know what will cause you more anxiety? Worrying that someone—your first someone—is going to realize you’re inexperienced before he can fill you with his dick. Now, you’re still going to feel anxious when you have sex for the first time; a lot of people feel anxious about sex the hundredth time. But pretending you’re someone or something you’re not—pretending you’ve done this a hundred times already—is going to make you feel more anxious in the moment than you need to or should. Also, being honest about your inexperience will simultaneously decrease your chances of winding up in bed with someone who wouldn’t want to be with an inexperienced partner and increase your chances of winding up in bed with someone who will be patient and understanding.

2. The right person, i.e., the more sympathetic person, might be older (by a little or a lot), he might be younger (by a little or a lot), or he might be close to your own age (by hours or days or weeks). You’re not looking for the right number, TDG, you’re looking for the right guy. Someone you feel comfortable being honest with, someone who’s willing

44 CHICAGO READER - JULY 13, 2023

to invest a little time getting to know you, and, most importantly, someone who regards your inexperience as a responsibility. Not a burden, not an opportunity, but a responsibility. Some guys won’t want that responsibility; they’re the wrong guys for you. Some guys won’t be willing to get to know you; they’re the wrong guys for you. Don’t think of guys who pass or even ghost as having rejected you, TDG, think of them as having done you a favor. If the wrong guys get out of your way, TDG, the right guy (or guys) will get your attention.

3. Most people—mildly experienced, moderately inexperienced, severely experienced—meet on dating apps these days. According to the Pew Research Center, one in five partnered adults under the age of 30 met their partners or spouses online.

Pew doesn’t have a stat for people who met their last hookup online, but if one in five people your own age met their committed romantic partners online—and one in ten of all partnered adults met their committed romantic partners online (according to the same study)—then we can safely say that one in way more than five people your age met their last (or first!) hookup online. Get on the dating apps.

4. We’re in the midst of a sex recession. According to a study conducted by Indiana University—a study conducted just before the pandemic—one in three men between the ages of 18 and 24 hadn’t had sex in the past year; according to a study conducted by New York University in 2022, 34

“At this point I feel like I will never have the chance to be intimate with someone.”

CLEYTON EWERTON/PEXELS

percent of young women were single and 63 percent of young men were single.

Now, some of those single men are unfuckable hate nerds, as comedian Marc Maron famously described them (think guys sitting in front of their computers all day, watching porn, playing video games, and attacking women), but they’re not all unfuckable hate nerds. Some of these guys have histories similar to your own: they were shy, slow to launch, and then the pandemic hit.

Which means there are lots of men out there, including millions of men close to your own age, who are just as inexperienced as you are. So, instead of being something

that complicates your ability to connect with the right guy (or guys), TDG, your inexperience could be something that helps you connect. Don’t put “inexperienced and terrified!” in your profile—don’t lead with it—because that could attract the attention of guys seeking to leverage your inexperience against you. No, this is something you’ll want to share with a guy you’ve been texting with for a bit and have a good feeling about. Meet up for a quick coffee in a public place, TDG, and have plans that can’t be canceled immediately after your date. If the guy passes the vibe check—if he doesn’t come across like an unfuckable hate nerd, if he

resembles his photos, and if he doesn’t try to pressure you to cancel the plans you made for after your coffee date—tell him you’re interested in seeing him again and that you’re a pandemic virgin.

There’s a pretty good chance he’ll be one too.

5. You’re telling these guys one thing they need to know about you—you’re inexperienced—but their reaction will tell you everything you need to know about them. v A sk your burning questions, listen to podcasts, read full columns, and more at https://savage.love

@fakedansavage

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JULY 13, 2023 - CHICAGO READER 45

CLASSIFIEDS JOBS RESEARCH HOUSING PROFESSIONALS & SERVICES AUDITIONS COMMUNITY MATCHES ADULT SERVICES

JOBS Sales/Biz Dev Representative-Chicago Reader Sales representatives sell print, digital, and ad products to local businesses. Sales reps shoudl have 2 years of sales experience OR similar skills, & knowledge of media/advertising products. Ideal candidates will be familiar with CRM software & GSuite. Comp packages vary (full or part time), & include salary, commission, and health benefits. Diverse candidates encouraged to apply. This is an ongoing search. Send a resume to careers@chicagoreader. com.

TranSmart, LLC seeks Civil Engineer, Roadway Design in Chicago, IL to design highway alignments, drainage systems & traffic control plans; manage utility relocations. Requires bachelor’s in civil engineering, related or equiv. & IL driver’s license. Travel throughout Chicagoland area, as needed. Send CV to cli@ transmartinc.com. Use job code RD126.

TranSmart, LLC seeks Electrical Engineer in Chicago, IL to solve issues related to power distribution lines (4kV to 12kV lines and 34 kV lines); design utility distribution infrastructure, underground cable plans, distributed automated devices. Requires bachelor’s in electrical engineering, related or equiv., IL driver’s license & knowledge of the National Electrical Code and power distribution design. Travel throughout Chicagoland area, as needed. Send CV to cli@ transmartinc.com. Use job code EE125.

Relativity (Chicago, IL) seeks Sr. Software Engineer Relativity (Chicago, IL) seeks Sr. Software Engineer t o a rc h i t e c t / d e s i g n / implement & test high performance apps. by applying best practice software engineering.

Must take & pass preinterview coding test.

Remote work option.

S u b m i t re s u m e s t o R e c r u i t i n g @ re l a t i v i t y. com, to be considered, reference Job ID: 239002 in the subject line.

Relativity (Chicago, IL) seeks Sr. Software Engineer Relativity (Chicago, IL) seeks Sr. Software Engineer responsible for delivering results for product development department by contributing to Agile team that solves complex challenges & builds working software/ rapidly producing high quality code & being a dependable & highly skilled development resource for peers. Remote work option w/occ.

46 CHICAGO READER - JULY 13, 2023

travel to the Chicago, IL headquarters. Submit resumes to Recruiting@ relativity.com, to be considered, reference Job ID: 23-9001 in the subject line.

Relativity (Chicago, IL) seeks a R&D Engineer Relativity (Chicago, IL) seeks a R&D Engineer to ensure the company continued leadership in creating AI solutions to identify and protect sensitive information b y re s e a rc h i n g n e w methodologies for unsolved problems in the space of machine learning, natural language processing & social network analysis. Remote work option. Submit resumes to Recruiting@ relativity.com, to be considered, reference Job ID: 23-9003 in the subject line.

Relativity (Chicago, IL) seeks Sr Software Engineer Relativity (Chicago, IL) seeks Sr Software Engineer to work w/ Relativity’s Cloud Engineering dept. & improve enterprise-sized compute latform by maturing eet of over 20 Kubernetes clusters & improving capability of job orchestration platform to break additional scale thresholds. Remote work option. Submit resumes to Recruiting@relativity. com, to be considered, reference Job ID: 239004 in the subject line.

Relativity (Chicago, IL) seeks Associate Product Manager Relativity (Chicago, IL) seeks Associate Product Manager to participate & lead discovery & development to achie e a s ecific roduct goal & help lead a team of skilled designers & engineers focused on creating exceptional user experiences & actualizing the project goals. Remote work option. Submit resumes to Recruiting@ relativity.com, to be considered; reference Job ID: 23-9005 in the subject line.

S I M U L AT I O N E N G I N E E R B o rg w a r n e r Transmission Products, LLC seeks a Simulation Engineer based out of our office at 700 25th Avenue Bellwood, Illinois 60104. Note, this is a hybrid position whereby the employee will work both from home and from the aforementioned o ce address. Hence, the employee must live within a reasonable commuting distance of the aforementioned office address.

Note, this position requires domestic travel, as needed, up to 10%.

Conduct discrete event simulation for future state scenarios to calculate c a p a c i t y, u t i l i z a t i o n , number of equipment’s, and resources; among other duties. Apply to job reference number R2023-

4206 at borgwarner.com/ careers

or online https://www. junologistics.com

IT Manager Skyway Concession Company is seeking an IT Manager in Chicago, IL. Direct the information and data integrity of the Company and its business units.

Must live within normal commuting distance of worksite. Apply via email to jobs@chicagoskyway. org and reference Code 99304 in subject line of email.

Assistant Consultant, Civil Engineer Assistant Consultant, Civil Engineer - WSP USA Inc. (Chicago, IL): Prfrm roadway dsgn tasks using computer-aided s/w (Bentley, Autodesk, Transoft,...)

Reqs: Bachelor’s Deg in Civil Engg, or rltd, & four (4) mnths exp as an Engineer, Engg Intern, or a rltd pos. Internship exp accepted. EIT certification ef mail resumes to: Attn: Julia a aneli ef , Julia.Savaneli@wsp.com

Assistant Prof. The School of the Art Institute of Chicago is seeking an Assistant Prof. in Chicago, IL. Teach and advise graduate students and contribute to the general goals of the Art Therapy Dept. Must be a Board Certified Art Therapist (ATR-BC). Send resume to saicteach@saic.edu and reference Code 4567 in subject line of email.

Medline Industries, LP in Mundelein, IL is seeking: A) Sr. Digital Product Designers to identify, define, dsgn engaging digital interfaces & apps.

Apply at: https://medline. taleo.net/careersection/md_confidential/ jobapply.ftl?lang=en&job=E-C01001A B) Sr. IS Developer Analysts (SharePoint) for prod backlog, spring pln’g, b a c k l o g re f i n e m e n t , s p r i n t re t ro s p e c t i v e , sprint review, & incremental release. Apply at: https://medline. taleo.net/careersection/ md_confidential/jobapply.ftl?lang=en&job=INF0100V0 C) Sr. Data Architect/Modelers for dvlp’g & maint’g supply chain bus. intelligence, data warehousing & reporting solt’ns. Apply at: https://medline. taleo.net/careersection/ md_confidential/jobapply.ftl?lang=en&job=INF0100VB Post’ns A & B no tr l benefit avail.

Application Developer Elite Workforce, IncSkokie, IL- Req: Masters in Computer Science, Software Eng or rltd + (6) mths of exp in developing RESTFUL Web Serv.

Send resume to: raj@ eliteworkforceinc.com (Itasca, IL) Juno Logistics seeks Business Development Analyst w/Bach or for deg equiv in any fld & 2 yrs exp in job offer on in logis indus spec in custom hvy goods cargo incl 1 yr exp prep highly detail logis plans for hvy good cargo bus; calc cargo dimns offer solute & BPO & proj mgmt in a logis envrn.

Freq dom & int trvl reqd.

Send resume to HR, 333 W. Pierce Rd, Ste 250, Itasca, IL 60143

Sr. Analyst, Strategy & Commercial Analytics Horizon Therapeutics USA, Inc. seeks a Sr. Analyst, Strategy & Commercial Analytics in Deerfield, IL to build & im lement field-based mgmt. level reporting and KPIs to measure launch of TEPEZZA by building back-end processing & coding. Reqs: Master degree in Mgmt Info Sys, Comp Sci & Eng or rel d yr rel e lt ill accept, Bach degree in Mgmt Info Sys, Comp Sci & Eng or rel fld & 3 yrs rel exp. To apply, go to: https://horizon.wd1. myworkdayjobs.com/ en-US/Horizon/details/ Sr-Analyst--CommercialAnalytics_R0005021 Senior Analyst, Strategy & Commercial Analytics Horizon Therapeutics USA, Inc. seeks a Senior Analyst, Strategy & Commercial Analytics in eerfield, to de elo deliver bus. insights focus on Sales, Marketing, & Ops teams through custom, data-driven analytical projects. Reqs: Bach degree in Math, Econ, Analytics, Comp ci, or rel uantitati e d & 2 yrs rel exp. To apply, go to https://horizon. wd1.myworkdayjobs. com/en-US/Horizon/job/ Senior-Analyst--Strategy--Commercial-Analytics_ R0005018 TECHNOLOGY Pure Storage, Inc. has the following job opp. in Chicago, IL: Sr. Manager – People Technology. Lead a team responsible for deploy’g technical solutns, scal’g processes & tech used by the co.’s Ppl Team Sal ary: $156,957 to $224,000 per year. To apply email resumes referencing e t o S u b m i t Yo u r C V @ purestorage.com.

SYSTEMS ENGINEERS (ORACLE) SYSTEMS ENGINEERS (ORACLE) Itasca, IL area.

Oracle database admin deployment & implementation.

Te l e c o m m u t i n g p e r m i t t e d . Tr a v e l /

re l o c a t e t o v a r i o u s unanticipated locs as reqd. Send res to: Prorsum Technologies, Inc., 650 E Devon Ave., Ste. 175, Itasca, IL 60143.

Sr Industrial Designer: Chicago, IL location.

Send resume to: MNML, LLC, 170 N Sangamon St, Chicago, IL, 60607.

Attn: M. Puhalla.

F T H VA C D e s i g n Engineer/BIM Modeler Premier Mechanical, Inc. seeks an FT HVAC Design Engineer/BIM Modeler at our o ce in ddison, Req: Bachelor’s degree or equiv. in Architectural Engin., Mechanical Engin., or a rel. field & 3 years related exp. in HVAC design. Must have Prof. Engineer certif. in the State of Illinois (P.E.) and certif. in LEED AP BD+C. Must also have 12 months of exp. with each of the following: 1) Producing permit and constr. drawings in compliance with local building codes; 2) Creating 3D models for MEP systems; 3) Creating and developing HVAC systems; 4) Drafting drawings and other documents using REVIT, AutoCAD, Navisworks, HAP Load Calculations, C O M C h e c k , H VA C Solutions; and 5) Exp. designing hydronic and refrigerant piping. Apply online at https://www. premier-mechanical-inc. com/ Medline Industries, LP in Mundelein, IL is seeking: A) Sr. IS Business Systems Analyst(s) (SAP MM IM PP) to supprt, archt., dsgn & help w/ reqmnts elicitation in MM area.

Apply at: https://medline. taleo.net/careersection/ md_confidential/jobapply. ftl?lang=en&job=INF0100V3 B) Team Lead - TMS Business Systems Analysts to lead a team of analysts & developers in creating & implmnt’g processes.

Apply at: https://medline. taleo.net/careersection/ md_confidential/jobapply. ftl?lang=en&job=INF0100V6 C) .NET Developers (CMOP) to dsgn, code, test, implmnt, maintain & supprt CMOP app SW. Apply at: https://medline. taleo.net/careersection/ md_confidential/jobapply. ftl?lang=en&job=INF0100V5 D) Sr. .Net Developer(s) (MFG Apps) to dsgn, code, test, implmnt, maintain & supprt .Net apps.

Apply at: https://medline. taleo.net/careersection/ md_confidential/jobapply. ftl?lang=en&job=INF0100V4 E) Sr. Demand Planners for collab dvlpmnt, monitor’g, & communicat’n of demand forecast for assigned bus. units.

Apply at: https://medline. taleo.net/careersection/ md_confidential/jobapply. ftl?lang=en&job=INF0100V2

WANT TO ADD A LISTING TO OUR CLASSIFIEDS? Go to classifieds.chicagoreader.com

F) Sr. DevOps Engineers to drive the dsgn & automat’n of processes to supprt continuous delivery of apps & srvcs.

Apply at: https://medline. taleo.net/careersection/ md_confidential/jobapply. ftl?lang=en&job=INF0100V1 G) Demand Planning Managers to interact crossfunctionally to enhance capability of S&OP process.

Apply at: https://medline. taleo.net/careersection/ md_confidential/jobapply. ftl?lang=en&job=SUP010193 All post’ns no trvl req’d. All ost ns benefit a ail

Risk Valuation and Modeling Analyst StoneX Group Inc. seeks a Risk Valuation and Modeling Analyst (Job Req 2023-8779) Chicago, IL to apply knowledge of firm ide trading ositions to develop systems, models, data inputs and pricing sources to ensure completeness, accuracy and validity of all prices and margins and develop financial models. Apply online at https://www. stonex.com/careers/ under the US Careers section for the Risk Valuation and Modeling Analyst position, Job Req. 2023-8779. EOE. Project Manager Serrala Americas, Inc. seeks Project Manager (Senior Expert) in Chicago, IL, manage complete life cycle of large and international projects. Up to 10% of domestic & intl. travel. Telecommuting permitted. Apply at https://careers.serrala. com/.

Eagle Market Makers, Inc. Eagle Market Makers, Inc. seeks Financial Quantitative Analyst in Chicago, IL to rev dev of anlytcl sftwr to adrs prfmnce msrmnt, atrbtn, pft & loss msrmnt, & prcng mdls; Reqs MS in Comp. Sci, Mthmtcs, or a clsly rltd d mths exp in a rltd ocptn. Reqs mths e the ng: , ythn cdng lang; Admnstr, crte & implmt mthmtcl algthms; Admnstr mthmtcl rsk mdls; Crte & mntn mthds of dta clctn; Anlyz sftwr sltns; Dtbs Mgmnt usng SQL. Mail resumes to Timothy Lewis at 328 South Jefferson Street, Suite 670 Chicago, IL 60661.

Data Scientist II, Psychometrics Data Scientist II, Psychometrics w/ MCKINSEY & COMPANY, INC. US (Chicago, IL). Provide guidance on task/assessment blueprints & product designs. Innovate on psychometric model dvlpmnt for assessment calibration, scaling, or equating. Telecommuting permitted. Req’s Master’s in Applied Stats, or rel field, or foreign degree equiv & 1yr of exp performing stats analysis.

Email your resume to CO@mckinsey.com and refer to ob (Hoffman Estates, IL) Tate & Lyle Solutions USA LLC seeks Senior Scientist w/Bach or for deg equiv in Food Sci, hem, ng or rltd d yrs e in ob offer or in food ind. Must have exp w/food formul, food sys & ingred funct; & food sci, food chem, food microbiol or food proc.

Occasional travel req’d.

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