EXPO Chicago preview, by Kerry Cardoza and Shira Friedman-Parks, p. 11
Art week picks by Micco Caporale, p. 13
Chicago’s first civil disturbance marks its 170th anniversary. by Shawn Mulcahy, p. 8
THIS WEEK
FRONT
03 Reader Letters
03 Editor’s Note Sovereign nations CITY LIFE
04 The To-Do Cannabis events in celebration of 4/20
FOOD & DRINK
07 Reader Bites | Caporale Absinthe service at the Violet Hour
NEWS & POLITICS
08 Feature | Mulcahy One hundred seventy years ago, the Lager Beer Riot of 1855 changed policing in Chicago as we know it.
ARTS & CULTURE
11 EXPO Preview | Cardoza & FriedmanParks A guide to what local institutions have in store for the art fair.
13 EXPO Picks | Caporale Recommendations for local exhibitions to check out during EXPO Art Week.
THEATER
16 Review | Reid David Mamet’s Henry Johnson is a portrait of an all-American patsy.
17 Plays of Note Hell in a Handbag’s Scary Town blends melodrama and whimsy; Brian Friel’s Translations comes to poetic life at Writers Theatre.
FILM
18 Feature Doc10 Film Festival celebrates its tenth anniversary.
20 Movies of Note Blue Sun Palace harnesses grief in its purest form, Drop turns an absurd premise into a genuine thriller, and more.
21 Moviegoer Film fortune
22 Secret History of Chicago Music The Notations have never le 60s soul behind.
24 Shows of Note Previews of concerts including Circuit des Yeux, Marie Davidson, Murs, and Dim
27 Jobs 27 Services
(Clockwise from top le )
Tony Fitzpatrick, Sugar COURTESY CHICAGO PRINTMAKERS COLLABORATIVE
Thomas Gibson (le ) and Daniil Krimer in Henry Johnson at Victory Gardens Theater MICHAEL BROSILOW
Bitchin Bajas COURTESY THE ARTIST
In Waves and War (2024) COURTESY DOC10
Enjoy responsibly KIRK WILLIAMSON
PUBLISHER AMBER NETTLES
CHIEF OF STAFF ELLEN KAULIG
EDITOR IN CHIEF SALEM COLLO-JULIN
ASSISTANT MANAGING EDITOR
SAVANNAH RAY HUGUELEY
PRODUCTION MANAGER AND STAFF
PHOTOGRAPHER KIRK WILLIAMSON
SENIOR GRAPHIC DESIGNER AMBER HUFF
GRAPHIC DESIGNER AND PHOTO RESEARCHER SHIRA
FRIEDMAN-PARKS
THEATER AND DANCE EDITOR KERRY REID
MUSIC EDITOR PHILIP MONTORO
CULTURE EDITOR: FILM, MEDIA, FOOD AND DRINK TARYN MCFADDEN
ON THE COVER
Background photo of the Social Turners, a 19th century German American gymnastics club promoting German culture, physical activity, and liberal politics. Chicago’s chapter formed in 1852. Social Turners photo courtesy Chicago Public Library. Foreground photo and cover design by Kirk Williamson.
CULTURE EDITOR: ART, ARCHITECTURE, BOOKS KERRY CARDOZA
NEWS EDITOR SHAWN MULCAHY
PROJECTS EDITOR JAMIE LUDWIG
DIGITAL EDITOR TYRA NICOLE TRICHE
SENIOR WRITERS LEOR GALIL, DEANNA ISAACS, BEN JORAVSKY, MIKE SULA
FEATURES WRITER KATIE PROUT
SOCIAL JUSTICE REPORTER DEVYN-MARSHALL BROWN (DMB)
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EDITOR’S NOTE
So my father died in January. He was 75, within the range of U.S. mens’ average life expectancy (it’s anywhere from 74 to 77 years old depending on if you believe the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Bank, or Johns Hopkins University). It still feels like too soon. He was living with a heart condition and some mental health concerns, including PTSD from serving in Vietnam and Cambodia. He was a veteran of the U.S. Army and told me that most of his later years there were spent working on military intelligence and security command. And still, his death was unexpected.
I’ve been sorting papers and belongings for the last few months and had to call an audible last week when I realized I still don’t have all the financial information I need to process his taxes for last year. Let’s hope the extension process actually works in this administration’s version of the IRS. But the stu itself is looming with more force, and last weekend was just another reminder of how much I’ll need to deal with for the rest of the year.
For the last few years, my father was the sole proprietor of a small record and vintage goods shop in rural Ogle County, Illinois. In the first few weeks after he died, I told friends and relatives that I would plan an open house at the store to get to meet his regular customers and celebrate a little bit of what he surrounded himself with: books about blues musicians, jukeboxes fi lled with 45s (there’s six of them, if you’re in the market), vinyl records, assorted pop culture paraphernalia. It would have been great to do it on Record Store Day, but I just couldn’t get there. And everyone tells me that’s fi ne, even if I don’t feel it.
Let’s lighten the mood. This is undoubtedly the series of objects that illustrates my father’s sense of humor (and maybe mine) best: a collection of baseballs signed by people with varying degrees of fame who were decidedly not baseball players. His friend Willie Hayes (a drummer who once toured with B.B. King) signed, “Throwing you a curve, Mike.” The comedian Steven Wright’s ball just o ers his scribbled signature, but Dad liked to tell people that when he handed Wright the ball to sign, Wright said, “Did you want me to sign it on the outside?”
I’m lucky enough to have a bunch of folks (friends, family, colleagues) who have been checking in with me. And on the practical side, I have help with the tasks I’ve mentioned (I hired a lawyer, and I’ve had a few o ers for some of the store’s inventory). But
when the tasks are complicated (which form do I need to fi le now ?) and the emotions are also complicated, it’s amazing that we all don’t just take o for the hills and start our own sovereign nations. Solidarity to those of you who had to file someone else’s taxes this year. v
—Salem Collo-Julin, editor in chief m scollojulin@chicagoreader.com
Reader Letters m
Re: “Singing from the last ditch,” written by Kerry Reid and published in our March 20 issue (volume 54, number 24)
Not sure where I would be without the Chicago Reader. From finding my first Chicago apartment in 1993 to finding my first Chicago cat (Woody) the following year . . . to getting the big review from Albert Williams for the first play I ever directed . . . to getting covered for all 60 16th Street Theater productions (most of those reviews written by the late Jack Helbig). But it’s not about what was. The Chicago Reader is about what is happening right now in our great city. Covering artists, plays, music, dance mostly ignored by all other publications until those artists have already been deemed “important” or “worthy” of being seen. For the arts to continue to thrive in our city, the arts need to be seen, written about, and documented. That’s why I am a donor to Chicago Reader. You can be too. Join me? —Ann Filmer, via Facebook
Find us on socials: Facebook and Bluesky: chicagoreader X: Chicago_Reader Instagram and Threads: chicago_reader LinkedIn: chicago-reader
The Chicago Reader accepts comments and letters to the editor of less than 400 words for publication consideration. m letters@chicagoreader.com
MORE WAYS TO SCORE BIG
calendar
The To-Do
A chronicle of 4/20–infused events
By SALEM COLLO-JULIN
We couldn’t miss giving you a 4/20 edition! Many dispensaries, smoke lounges, and CBD shops are running sales this month with special deals on items like prerolls, topicals, and accessories. Here are some cannabis-related events to check out. Some are meant to make you get in the door and shop, and some are just ganjainspired, but be warned: none of these are family-friendly, and all but one are 21+ only. Smoke ’em if you got ’em.
Ongoing
If you’re looking to give back with your purchase, Verilife dispensaries in Illinois offer Round Up for Cannabis Reform . When you check out, round up your bill to the nearest dollar and the donation will go to Mission Green, the national nonprofit initiative founded to secure the release of those serving time for cannabis-related offenses. Chicago location open 8 AM–10 PM seven days, 60 W. Superior, verilife.com
THu 4/17
Bud & Rita’s Dispensary stores are hosting the weeklong, multilocation High Holidaze 420 Variety Show, featuring “mind-blowing” entertainers like glass blowers from Otto’s Smoke Shop and tarot reader Psychic Fatima. Each store gets a daily drop-in; tonight, you can have your portrait drawn by caricature artist Solomon Bovey from 6–8 PM at the West Town branch, and Otto’s artists will be on hand in Avondale from 4–8 PM tomorrow.
1914 W. Chicago (West Town), 3425 W. Belmont (Avondale), other locations and full schedule of events at budandritas.com/events
FRI 4/18
Spark’d hosts events at several of its area locations this month, kicking o with today’s Second Annual Stoner Olympics in northern Lake County’s Winthrop Harbor. Competitors (including volunteers from the audience) will be tested on tasks such as “how many joints
you can roll in five minutes,” and “Who can blow the biggest O’s.” It’s free to enter, and reservations are requested at Eventbrite.
4–8 PM, 935 Sheridan, Winthrop Harbor, sparkdcannabis.com
And the South Loop Spark’d location doesn’t want to be left out of the celebration: Spark’d Social: A 420 Kickback promises a meet and greet with rapper King Louie, a visit from Reggie’s Smoke Bus and Food Truck, brand pop-ups, and DJs.
4–8 PM in-store and in their adjoining parking lot, 2114 S. Wabash, free with reservation requested at Eventbrite, sparkdcannabis.com
Sat 4/19
Dispensary 33 hosts Studio 420 by D33 , a disco-themed afternoon at Pizza Lobo’s Andersonville location. Plugged Into the Universe DJ collective will furnish music throughout the event, along with special performances by Them Bad Apples b-boy
crew at 2:20 and 4:20 PM. There’s an array of vendors, including a dab bar from Aeriz and a themed photo booth courtesy of Ozone, Simply Herb, and GlitterGuts. Rapper King Louie will be available for autographs. Roger Rickshaw o ers shuttle service between the party and Dispensary 33’s Andersonville location. If you show proof of purchase from the dispensary when you enter the party, you’ll get a bonus VIP bag.
Noon–5 PM, 5457 N. Clark, free with reservation requested at Eventbrite, dispensary33.com
The Spark’d Wicker Park location o ers 420 specials and doorbusters today, with DJ Mike Jams o ering a soundtrack.
2–6 PM, 1212 N. Ashland, sparkdcannabis.com
SUN 4/20
Prohibition THCafe presents the daylong Prohibition 420 Smoke Fest , with most events hosted at their South Loop location, capping o with “Chicago’s ultimate 4/20 hip-
Bud & Rita’s Dispensaries have four locations, with two in Chicago. COURTESY BUD & RITA’S
CITY LIFE
hop show” at neighboring Reggies. The day includes Elevate & Meditate, a limited-space yoga, sound bath, and tea ceremony session punctuated with THC-infused beverages (10 AM–noon); and the CannaVerse Battle Open Mic Competition, where rappers are invited to compete for an opening spot in the evening’s show, featuring headliners Crucial Conflict. Store events 10 AM–11 PM, 2113 S. State; concert 6:30 PM at Reggies Rock Club, 2109 S. State, $30-$75 (concert only, see Prohibition’s website for entry details for other events), prohibitionthccafe.com
The Cannabist Company’s locations on the northwest side and in Villa Park offer a gift card giveaway for the first one hundred customers in line today. Each card has a surprise amount from $5–$100 and can be used immediately for purchases.
Chicago store hours 11 AM–4 PM, 4758 N. Milwaukee, gocannabist.com
The Grass is Greener: a 4/20 Variety Show features a group of drag artists, comedians, and musicians who banded together last year to perform for community causes. Proceeds from today’s show will be donated to Albany Park Mutual Aid.
2 PM, Color Club, 4146 N. Elston, $18.13, 18+, colorclub.events
Spend your 4/20 with local event organizers High Focus Media as they visit Honeycomb Hideout, a truly hidden lounge in the suburbs run by Mr. CBD Chicago stores. (Yes, it’s in the same building as the U-Haul office, but
the moving company has nothing to do with it.) The stoner session will feature a “Weedster” adult easter egg hunt with both candy eggs and “stoney treasures” available for the finding, a 4:20 PM CBD mocktail toast, complimentary vapor at the ZenCo vapor bar, and chill hangout energy.
2–5 PM, 17W350 W. Lake, Addison, sliding scale tickets starting at $1, highfocusmedia.com
Annoyance Theatre hosts a special edition of the ongoing theater experience 420 Shakespeare , which tasks a di erent ensemble actor each presentation to play the lead of a Shakespeare classic while “increasingly getting into a higher state.”
4 PM, 851 W. Belmont, second floor, $24.20, theannoyance. com/show/420-shakespeare
Lottie’s Pub in Bucktown, celebrating 91 years in business this spring, embraces the confluence of 4/20 and Easter with an afternoon sampling of
Lagunitas Waldo and 3 Floyds o erings, along with a genius free tater tot buffet available at 4:20 PM.
1925 W. Cortland, lottiespub.com
If you want to create something while your smoke settles in, head to Color Me Mine’s 420 Bud & Bongs painting event. You can’t smoke in the store, but you’ll be given free rein to paint the ceramic smoking apparatus (or knickknack, depending on what you use it for) and bring it home.
6:30–8:30 PM, 3849 N. Lincoln, $15 plus the price of the items you choose to paint, northcenter.colormemine.com
Chisme 420: a Total Smokeshow features hosts and self-proclaimed chismosas Kenny and Spenny and a Latine and queer-focused evening of “comedy, burlesque, gossip, and music.”
7–11 PM, Dorothy, 2500 W. Chicago, $12 advance, $15 at door, dorothydownstairs.com
SAT 4/26
The Chicago branch of nuEra dispensaries hosts a medical card certification event at Eris Brewery and Cider House. Walk-ins are welcome, but it’s fi rst come, fi rst served. There’s information about what documents you should bring at the link labeled “Interested in getting your medical card?” at nuEra’s Instagram.
Noon–5 PM, 4240 W. Irving Park, card registration is $75, instagram.com/nuera.il
SUN 4/27
Jungle Cae and High Focus Media collaborate on a private venue session to celebrate the end of 4/20 month, featuring a designed environment by Jungle Cae, brand sampling, free pizza, and DJs.
1–5 PM, north-side Chicago address to be delivered to ticket holders before the event starts, $15-$30, highfocusmedia.com v
m scollojulin@chicagoreader.com
A lounge area in the Cannabist Company’s Villa Park location COURTESY THE CANNABIST COMPANY
GREY
Sometimes, I think about the pressures of a artist
And what it takes to get called a success even with no college
We barely even considered
Don’t label me with them niggas
Infatuation with plastic, I wanted it to be realer
First, they wanted it hip-hop
And then they wanted guerilla, and then they wanted drug dealer
And then, they wanted a dancer; now, they want a drug addict
Infatuation with plastic, white girl wanna be sister Driver wanna be walker, and walker wanna be sitter
The best song is probably on the B-side Won’t be surprised when the label deny
Disagree
Grey
The best song was probably on the demo
But that’s not the one that got you your limo
Limousine
Grey
The single the one that wasn’t as honest
But this is what they say make you the hottest
In the game
Grey, grey
By SABA
FOOD & DRINK
TTahj Malik Chandler, better known by his stage name Saba, is an American rapper and record producer. Hailing from Chicago’s Westside, specifically within the Austin neighborhood, he’s a member of Pivot Gang.
Poem curated by Frsh Waters. Frsh Waters from Chicago’s Westside is a writer, performance artist, & community outreach coordinator for Chicago youth arts non-profit John Walt Foundation and is a member of Chicago’s incomparable Pivot Gang.
he Violet Hour is renowned for its cocktail menu. While its door is hidden within an ever-changing mural along Damen Avenue identifiable only by an unassuming lavender light, the upscale speakeasy-style lounge has won four James Beard awards and long been a Reader Best of Chicago winner or finalist for best cocktail list. But there’s a lot more happening at the Violet Hour beyond the menu provided, including a second menu available via QR code and many off-menu selections for connoisseurs. I like the Violet Hour for its Chartreuse flight and private reserves, but I love the Violet Hour for its absinthe o erings.
neat; it’s a standard way to serve spirits, but absinthe is not meant to be consumed this way. Always request absinthe service. At the Violet Hour, absinthe is served using a single-person seesaw dripper that sits atop the glass. A sugar cube can be placed via spoon or tray between the dripper and drink, then water is hand-poured from a baby carafe over the ice until the desired ratio is reached. This is done not only to dilute the alcohol but also to open up the absinthe’s flavors while creating a gorgeously subtle visual e ect called the “louche.”
Opening Hours
Wednesday, Friday, Saturday: 11:00 AM–5:00 PM Thursday: 11:00 AM–6:00 PM
Exhibition Opening: Escaramuza, the Poetics of Home Escaramuza, the Poetics of Home is a collaborative work by photographer Constance Jaeggi and poets Angelina Sáenz and ire’ne lara silva. The exhibition explores escaramuza, the team sport of women’s precision horse riding, addressing complex themes of identity, family, and gender with a lush combination of poetry and photography. April 17, 2025 at 6:00 PM
Poesía en Abril: Dialogo entre Poetas (Evento en español)
Una conversación entre los poetas del festival internacional de poesía en español, Poesía en Abril. Al terminar la conversación se presentara una lectura en español por poetas de Chicago. April 26, 2025 at 2:00 PM
Learn more at PoetryFoundation.org
Absinthe is tricky in Chicago. To my knowledge, only two places serve it: Delilah’s and the Violet Hour. Brindille used to serve it but now only o ers Herbsaint, a cheap anise liqueur. True absinthe is made from anise, fennel, and grand wormwood (artemisia absinthium)—the latter being the contested ingredient that distinguishes the drink from imitations. Absinthe is extremely high proof, with most bottles worth their fairy wings hovering around 120, so it’s best enjoyed in a ratio of one part absinthe to three to five parts water, depending on your palate. Do not get it
When water touches any anise-based drink, it releases oils, which can transform both the flavor and appearance of the drink. A well-crafted anisebased spirit not only tastes good but harnesses this quality to produce a quietly breathtaking display. The Violet Hour only o ers five true absinthes alongside five of the drink’s most respectable knockoffs. They’re all worthwhile selections, but beginners should start with the Jade 1901. It’s an a ordable standard for the ideal absinthe, which should evoke something of an alpine meadow on a spring day. Served in the bar’s restrained aesthetic and low-light ambience, you can really focus on absinthe as a feast for the senses. —MICCO CAPORALE THE VIOLET HOUR 1520 N. Damen, $10–30, 773-252-1500, theviolethour.com v
Reader Bites celebrates dishes, drinks, and atmospheres from the Chicagoland food scene. Have you had a recent food or drink experience that you can’t stop thinking about? Share it with us at fooddrink@ chicagoreader.com.
SCREENWRITERS!!
Movie and TV producers, “hungry for good stories,” will pay $250,000 plus for a script! Grant Robbin, professional writer-producer-teacher (Northwestern, Columbia College), Hollywood script doctor, former Second City actor, will help you develop/market your scriptfilm or TV. One-on-one phone or zoom sessions. FREE screenwriting book with registration. “Grant teaches screenwriters what they need to know!” Pam Wallace, Oscar-winning screenwriter
Absinthe service at the Violet Hour
A weekly series curated by the Chicago Reader and sponsored by the Poetry Foundation.
NEWS & POLITICS
The Lager Beer Riot of 1855
One
hundred seventy years ago, an uprising over beer changed policing as we know it in Chicago.
By SHAWN MULCAHY
Chicago’s first police riot started with beer.
In his inaugural speech on March 13, 1855, newly elected, Kentuckyborn mayor Levi D. Boone proposed the wholesale prohibition of the sale in Chicago or, barring that, a substantial increase in the price of tavern licenses. To enforce his temperance agenda, Boone also outlined his vision for a reorganized, professionalized police force made up entirely of “native-born” citizens. Immediately upon taking office, Boone cracked down on violations of a never-before-enforced 1851 law that banned saloons from operating on Sundays. He also pushed through an ordinance that hiked the cost of tavern licenses sixfold, from $50 to $300.
This was a direct a ront to Irish and German immigrants, who traditionally spent Sundays—their only day o from work—drinking in taverns. Boone painted them as “drunken” and “disorderly” and the source of Chicago’s crime, and he vowed to restore order in the largely immigrant north and west sides. Within a month, hundreds of saloonkeepers had been cited for selling alcohol on Sunday or failing to pay for a new license, according to a Chicago Tribune report, and 19 were being held in jail.
The city attorney and the lawyer representing all 19 saloonkeepers agreed to take a test case to trial on April 21. German north-siders packed into Judge Henry L. Rucker’s courtroom in the old courthouse on Clark Street between Washington and Randolph to demand their release. Onlookers spilled out into the hallway, down the steps, and into the square to form a crowd that spanned “several acres,” according to the Tribune’s firsthand account.
Boone ordered his nascent, all-native police force, under the command of Captain Luther Nichols, to clear the square. The meager squadron of cops—outnumbered and illequipped—stood their ground until “a burly fellow, a little worse for the drink,” attempted to push his way past, noted the Tribune. This shove tipped off what became known as the Lager Beer Riot.
Long before President Donald Trump employed militarized law enforcement in service of what he calls the nation’s largest massdeportation effort, a virulently nationalist mayor ultimately used the Lager Beer Riot to create the modern, militarized police department we know today. Boone tasked this agency with enforcing a vague mandate of “law and order” on the city’s growing working-class, immigrant communities.
The name blames the beer, but the uprising that rocked Chicago 170 years ago was born from a nativist, anti-Catholic movement that swept the U.S. in the 1850s. It was the culmination of years of clashes between an increasingly militant working class desperate to assert its autonomy under a new system of industrial capitalism and an increasingly terrified class of capitalists that sought new ways to exert its control.
Ttown, and the vast majority of newcomers were Irish and German immigrants drawn by the promises of a new wage-labor economy under the beginning of urban industrial capitalism.
Though the population remained about evenly divided between native- and foreignborn, Chicago’s wealthy regarded the thousands of new immigrants with unease or outright hostility. Nationally and locally, the temperance movement was gaining steam as a direct response to anti-immigrant sentiments.
the majority of Irish in our country.” In an 1853 editorial, published two days before Christmas, editor Henry Fowler labeled the Irish Catholics’ drinking habits a primary cause of civil disorder and contrasted it with the “noble, law abiding and virtuous” behaviour of Irish Protestants.
At the same time, a national debate was playing out over the future of chattel slavery in the U.S. Three decades earlier, the Missouri Compromise of 1820 had divided the nation into “free” and “slave” states along the 36th
Its proponents viewed their new neighbors as unruly, drunken, and vice-ridden.
he decade between 1850 and 1860 was one of explosive growth—and upheaval—for Chicago. In ten years, its population ballooned from just under 30,000 to nearly 110,000. Early in the decade, Chicago was still, in many regards, a frontier
The majority of new arrivals were also Roman Catholics, a departure from the city’s predominantly Protestant population. The Chicago Daily Tribune , ever a mouthpiece for the city’s bigoted and elite, excoriated the “influence the Catholic priesthood exercises of
parallel. In the intervening years, the addition of new U.S. territory under the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the California gold rush the following year caused wealthy industrialists to feel increasing pressure to organize the western territories into states.
The Mississippi River proved a reliable north–south transportation corridor, but
The Clark Street bridge separated the largely German north side from downtown. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
KIRK WILLIAMSON
the country’s western expansion demanded an east–west transcontinental railroad. The question in the mid-1850s was which route it should take. Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois, a fervent supporter of railroads, wanted to bring trains on a northern line through Chicago, but that would have required construction through the unorganized Nebraska territory, which laid in “free” land north of the 36th parallel. Enslavers in the south, meanwhile, pushed for a southern pass, perhaps through Texas. Douglas needed a compromise of his own.
In 1854, Douglas introduced the Kansas–Nebraska Bill to create two new states and lay the groundwork for railroad construction. However, Douglas’s bill suggested the states be organized “with or without slavery, as their constitutions may prescribe,” essentially reneging on the Missouri Compromise and leaving the legality of chattel slavery up to the new states’ gentry. Under pressure from southern hardliners, Douglas took the bill even further and adopted language to repeal the 1820 compromise in its entirety.
This incensed antislavery northerners, who felt that it flew in the face of the agreement reached 30 years earlier. The law ultimately passed, tearing open the debate about the future of chattel slavery anew and setting o a messy political realignment that frequently boiled over into political violence.
It was under this climate that a tenuous coalition of antislavery Democrats, teetotalers, and nativists came together in Chicago under the banner of the KnowNothing Party in May 1854.
In those days, Chicago held mayoral elections annually, and Democrat Isaac L. Milliken had just defeated his opponent, Amos G. Throop, of the prohibitionist Maine Law Party. The lesson the city’s principled nativists took from the contest was that, rather than fuse their platform with prohibitionists to win power, they should organize their own political party and attract anti-liquor voters to them.
The exact details surrounding the formation of Chicago’s Know-Nothing Party chapter are shrouded in secrecy. The group, o cially the American Party, got its name because its members were expected to deny knowledge of its existence if asked. In Chicago, they spent the year building political power underground and outwardly fanning the flames of xenophobia that smoldered among the upper class. In the lead-up to the spring 1855 election, Chicago newspapers were largely unified in their opposition. The Tribune stood alone in its “unqualified encouragement” under editor Thomas A. Stewart, according to historian Thomas M. Keefe in his 1971 article “Chicago’s Flirtation With Political Nativism, 1854–1856.”
The Tribune “proclaimed loudly and often the
merits of nativism and violently abused the Irish Catholic population and its church.”
At the top of the Know-Nothings’ 1855 ticket was Dr. Levi D. Boone, a southerner and great-nephew to infamous pioneer Daniel Boone. Levi Boone’s father died when Levi was just nine years old. It proved devastating for the family, who lived in financial precarity. Nonetheless, Levi went on to graduate from Kentucky’s Transylvania University with a degree in medicine in 1830 and opened a medical practice a couple years later in Hillsboro, Illinois. He served as a cavalry captain and later a surgeon in suppressing the Black Hawk uprising in 1832 (the Tribune looked fondly on his credentials as an “Indian fighter”), and he returned to Hillsboro before ultimately settling in Chicago in 1836.
Despite their insurgent appeal, the Know-Nothings picked for mayor a candidate who was no newcomer to politics. In 1848, o cials appointed Boone the city physician at a time when the cholera epidemic was first sweeping Chicago. He mounted an unsuc-
Press wrote of the March 6, 1855, election, “Ordinarily the occasion is one of great interest,” but “today, however, there is no such issue before the people. The canvass has been conducted in private.” Instead of o cial printed ballots, voters received blank slips of paper upon which they wrote the names of their chosen candidates. In the end, the Know-Nothings came away with the mayor’s o ce and the rest of the city’s administrative posts plus seven seats on the City Council.
Whether this feeble amalgamation of political persuasions could actually govern remained to be seen. Internally, abolitionists grew increasingly wary of southern influence. Temperance advocates hoped to throw the party’s weight behind a statewide prohibition referendum that was scheduled for June 1855. And nativists hoped to weaponize that support to control and contain a growing and increasingly heterogenous immigrant class of wage laborers.
M“In a pattern that would be repeated time and again, a crisis of order prompted a major reform of policing in the city.”
–Historian Sam Mitrani
cessful campaign for mayor in 1850 and spent almost six years in City Council before taking another shot at the city’s chief executive seat in 1855.
Like the party’s operations, the election was determined behind closed doors. An accurate slate of Know-Nothing candidates didn’t even appear in a newspaper until the Tribune published it on election day. The Daily Democratic
ayor Boone knew from the outset that Chicago lacked the police power to enforce his anti-alcohol, anti-immigrant agenda, writes historian Sam Mitrani in The Rise of the Chicago Police Department: Class and Conflict, 1850–1894. Until 1853, the city operated a small contingent of armed municipal o cers, but policing was a duty of the Cook County Sheri . Instead, constables and night watchmen were elected alongside other municipal officers. The positions were parttime and perennially unfilled due to their grueling natures, which mostly entailed walking a city beat and looking out for fires. In 1850, Chicago employed just nine constables and night watchmen to police a city of nearly 30,000. In 1853, the City Council passed an ordinance that o cially created the Chicago Police Department, though this was in name only, according to Mitrani. Positions remained part-time, the force remained small, and it kept intact the division between night watches and daytime officers. This left the city’s working-class population, which lived north and west of downtown, largely out of the business elite’s reach.
Irish and German immigrants typically spent Sundays, their only days off, in taverns. COURTESY CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY
KIRK WILLIAMSON
NEWS & POLITICS
continued from p. 9
Chicago’s powerful sought a police force not to prevent crime but to enforce order and protect their interests from strikes and riots. On August 3, 1853, for example, several hundred workers walked o the job and paraded from workplace to workplace through the city’s downtown, demanding eight-hour workdays on Saturdays. The city’s employers implored the mayor to use the newly formed police department to put down the strike, but there were too many workers for cops to reasonably handle.
Boone wasted no time after the election following through on his inauguration-day promise to shore up policing in Chicago. He immediately hired 80 o cers, all native-born, and placed them under his command.
It was these officers who hauled 19 saloonkeepers off to jail and who cleared the courthouse square of onlookers under Boone’s orders when a “burly,” “drunken” man attempted to force his way back in. “The battle was a short one,” reads an 1872 account of the clash published by the Tribune, “a rough and tumble of angry men and fierce men, a polyglot of curses, a bang of drums and then the destruction of the instruments.” Eighteen of the “more violent of the assailants of police” were arrested and jailed, including Alder Stephen D. Larue, who a day earlier had encouraged saloonkeepers along Clark and Wells Streets to attend the hearing. Larue had climbed atop a cab and attempted to quell the crowd, but police pulled him down by his coattails and arrested him for his role in helping incite the riot.
By noon on April 21, order had been restored
in the square, but it wouldn’t remain long. Protesters regrouped north of the river and prepared to return “in force to release their friends from jail,” according to the Tribune. Boone ordered the bridgetender to raise the Clark Street bridge while he hurriedly deputized an additional 150 police officers and mustered the county sheriff’s forces. Once in place, they lowered the bridge to confront a group of about 200 German north siders, armed with shotguns, cleavers, iron bars, and hammers. It’s not clear who shot first, but once the crowd reached the northeast corner of the courthouse, the groups exchanged fire. Sixty people were arrested. A police officer named G.W. Hunt lost his arm, and the man who shot him lost his life, the only official death tied to the riot. (According to Mitrani, north-side funeral records indicate that number is probably higher.) “Witness the thick platoons exposed to the leaden rain of the battle-field,” the Tribune reporter wrote of the affair. “There were many broken heads, many persons roughly handled, more arrests, and again the repulsed assailants retreated to the North Side.”
Fearing outbreak of wholesale war, Mayor Boone instituted martial law and called in the support of the state’s volunteer militias. Cannons were stationed in the streets, and the courthouse was put under garrison. The rich and powerful were visibly shaken.
Two days after the Lager Beer Riot, on April 23, Chicago citizens convened at South Market Hall for a public meeting on “law and order.” Attendees appointed a committee to work with the city to see to it that their demand for a larger, stronger police force was met. It took just a week for the City Council to pass a set of reforms that e ectively signified the birth of the Chicago Police Department. The April 30 ordinance passed 8–7 over the opposition of every north-side alder, whose constituents were predominantly German. It abolished the night watchmen and constables
in favor of a military organization that divided the city into precincts and, crucially, for the first time provided officers with uniforms, creating a distinction between individuals and police as an extension of state authority. “In a pattern that would be repeated time and again,” Mitrani writes, “a crisis of order prompted a major reform of policing in the city.”
New Orleans was likely the first city to develop a military-style police department, formed to manage the state’s enslaved population, but Chicago looked east to cities like New York, which founded its police department in 1845 in the style of the London Metropolitan Police Service. Rather than exert their influence over enslaved people, police departments in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore functioned to maintain order in response to increasing class divisions and urban industrialization in the mid-19th century.
The Lager Beer Riot was the culmination of growing stratification between laborers and those who profited from their labor. An increasingly militant class of immigrant wage workers fought for the right to use their leisure time as they wished, and an increasingly wary class of rich business owners sought to
A ragtag assembly of 200 saloonkeepers and workers alike occupied the streets and refused to comply.
majority of people arrested during the uprising were released without charges. “Neither the nativists nor the rioters could impose their will,” Mitrani writes.
The Tribune’s 1872 account of the incident concludes that the “shadow it cast was larger than the substance.” The paper complained of “untold uneasiness” among the city’s elite that “harmed the very cause it set out to serve.”
Rather, the writer counseled protesters, “the safest redress of wrongs and the safeguard of rights is found in the constitutional channels secured for the expression of popular will.”
But 170 years later, the legacy of the Lager Beer Riot continues to shape Chicago. Now that we’re facing renewed attacks from politicians and the media that again seek to paint immigrants as inherently disorderly and criminal, the uprising o ers us a road map of resistance. A ragtag assembly of 200 saloonkeepers and workers alike occupied the streets and refused to comply. Their defiance so shook the city’s rich and powerful that it inspired the creation of a professionalized law enforcement agency that would be deployed time and again over the next two centuries to stifle dissent, maintain vague notions of “order,” and protect capital. Whether during the Haymarket protesters’ demand for an eighthour workday in 1886 or months of sustained demonstrations against police murder in 2020, cops have always existed to enforce the will of the ruling class on the city’s poor and immigrant communities.
expand their power to control the workers in their employ. From this was born a nativist movement that swept the country in the 1850s. Ultimately, the uprising forced a compromise in which the City Council agreed to lower the fee for tavern licenses from $300 to $100, still double the original price. Councilors narrowly voted against releasing the saloonkeepers jailed for failing to pay the fee, though the
Chicago journalist Sydney J. Harris once remarked, “History repeats itself, but in such cunning disguise that we never detect the resemblance until the damage is done.” As Donald Trump expels college students for protesting genocide and unilaterally disappears citizens to overseas concentration camps, the similarities between his desires and those of the nativists in the 1850s, or the Nazis in the 1930s, are now plain to see. What we choose to do about them is up to us. v
m smulcahy@chicagoreader.com
KIRK WILLIAMSON
Chicago Light Artillery memorial at Rosehill Cemetery. The volunteer militia helped put down the Lager Beer Riot. RON COGSWELL, CC BY 2.O / FLICKR
4/24-4/27, Thu 5–8 PM opening night tickets required, Fri–Sat 11 AM–7 PM, Sun 11 AM–6 PM, Navy Pier Festival Hall, 600 E. Grand, admission information at expochicago.com/tickets
Locals only
By KERRY CARDOZA AND SHIRA FRIEDMAN-PARKS
My tenure in Chicago dates back almost precisely to EXPO Chicago’s launch in 2012. While I haven’t had the privilege of attending every year, I have caught quite a few, and without fail, my favorite presentations are always from local institutions. There was Paige Taul’s indelible short film 7-7-94 For my babe, shown at Chicago Artists Coalition’s booth in 2022. That same year, everyone was buzzing about local artist Soumya Netrabile’s rich, kinetic paintings presented by Andrew Rafacz. Interactive booths by 6018North and the vibrant, colorful installations by Arts of Life always delight. And who can forget Yvette Mayorga’s hot pink wonderland for the Arts Club of Chicago booth in 2017?
ARTS & CULTURE
Profile
Volume Gallery, booth #237
Solo exhibition by Shenequa
Shenequa explores Afro-Caribbean diaspora and Black womanhood through complex weavings of synthetic hair and fabric. Her layered textiles fall in organic forms from large wooden bobby pins. Some are intertwined with beads and jewel embellishments. They feel close to the heart, brimming with raw emotion. As Shenequa recalled in an inter-
So this year, we’re highlighting some of our most anticipated local participants—focusing on booths outside of the main fair space, from EXPO’s Profile and Exposure sections to Special Exhibitions to Editions + Books. We hope you find something that stands out amid the sensory overload that is the modern art fair. Kerry Cardoza
BB Chair
view with Sugarcane Magazine, “Oftentimes, the only time my sister and I communicated e ectively was when she would do my hair.” Similarly, her weavings embody the impulsivity of conversation: patterns diverge into tangents—spontaneous braids and coils. Most recently, Shenequa has been tending towards vibrance, inspired by the Sugar Mas Carnival of Saint Kitts and Nevis. Volume Gallery will be showing four of these works at EXPO: It’s Kharnaval , Gha Mas Na , Bronze Wumaan , and Island Breeze (SFP) wvvolumes.com/fair/ expo-chicago-3
Engage Projects, booth #241
Solo exhibition by Edra Soto
Over the past decade, Edra Soto has emerged as one of Chicago’s most exciting artists to watch. In recent years, her site-specific public sculptures, drawing from Puerto Rican architecture, have dotted the city—from Millennium Park to the Chicago Botanic Garden to the Western Blue Line station. For West Town’s Engage Projects (formerly Aspect/Ratio), Soto will show a new series of sculptures, including the place of dwelling , a gorgeous wall-hung work that alludes to migration and cultural heritage. Also on view are sculptural box fans
and Bad Bunny–wrapped lawn chairs sure to be a social media sensation. (KC) engage-projects.com/engage-expo-2025.html
Exposure
Anthony Gallery, booth #319
Solo exhibition by Kalan Strauss
Kalan Strauss—who earned a BFA from the School of the Art Institute and founded the local project gallery the Latent Space—often delves into nostalgia through his work. Previous paintings reference the technology and mass media of the 80s and 90s—Blue Velvet, Minesweeper, Lisa Frank. For his new series, Strauss renders ubiquitous kids’ water gun the Super Soaker in hyperrealistic acrylic paintings. The artist explores how militaristic objects are marketed to children, which influences not only how they play but how they conceive of ideas around gender, power, and more. (KC) anthonygallery.com
Goldfinch, booth #221
Solo exhibition by Scott Wolniak
Scott Wolniak paints lively works of accumulated fragments, emulating the imperfect repetition of organic forms. These rhythmic, immersive, and abstracted patterns are rooted in a sense of overwhelming wonder for the natural world, inviting the viewer to sit and soak in the details as they would a secluded garden or forest. At EXPO, Goldfinch will show four pieces shrouded in primary colors: the red Sparks, covered in brief explosive marks; the yellow Golden Clutter , which snakes around itself; the green PBS (Plant Broadcasting System), an elaborate world; and the contemplative blue Garden Window (Moony Painting). “I have a strong heart connection to wild places,” Wolniak writes. This exploration of wildness, from the weeds in the sidewalk to the forests to our internal dialogues, shines through in his work. I’m not sure what’s going on in Wolniak’s head, but I’m happy to see the end results. (SFP) goldfinch-gallery.com
Editions + Books
Chicago Printmakers Collaborative, booth #355
Installation by Raeleen Kao, selected works by Tony Fitzpatrick and Kumi Obata
Chicago Printmakers Collaborative tests the boundaries of print with a large-scale, site-specific printed installation by Raeleen
L: detail, Shenequa, Gha Mas Na; Edra Soto, L: KENDRA POWERS; MARIA BURUNDARENA
EXPO CHICAGO
ARTS & CULTURE
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Kao. To construct it, Kao has cut the negative spaces from large printed woodcuts, resulting in a black lacy material that creeps around the booth and the prints on display. Also featured will be etchings by Tony Fitzpatrick, whose bold, harsh linework creates abstractions of day-to-day Chicago life, and color intaglio by Kumi Obata, who crafts sweet and gentle scenes from muted colors. Kao’s drawings and artist books will also be displayed, among a vast selection of print methods employed by other artists, such as relief, copper etching, photo etching, monotype, and mezzotint. (SFP) chicagoprintmakers.com
Process/Process, booth #449
Not quite a year old, this printmaking studio invites artists to make editioned prints to help build the market. For their first showing at EXPO, Process/Process will show prints from their striking inaugural portfolio, including work from ten artists—most of them with local ties. Among the highlights is a colorful abstraction from Candida Alvarez and a grid of dandelion seeds from Selva Aparicio. In addition to recent collaborations with Selina Trepp and Alice Tippit, the studio is also debuting a new screen print from Edie Fake; all prints will be available for purchase at the fair. (KC) process-process.com
Special Exhibitions
6018North, booth #146
Installation by Lu werk
Prairies used to occupy two-thirds of the midwestern landscape; Illinois at one point housed 22 million acres of prairie. Luftwerk duo Petra Bachmaier and Sean Gallero hope to remind you of this loss with their two-part installation, Prairie Colorfi eld , for 6018North. The first part, Acres of Blooms , surrounds the viewer in three abstracted prairie walls coated with flowers and grasses collected, dried, and ground into pigments. The second part, Extraction , is an interactive heap of sand and botanicals. Visitors are invited to contribute to the pile from a range of botanical options, representing how prairies have been removed for human settlement and industry. In exchange for adding to the pile, visitors are given native pollinator seeds to plant at home. (SFP) 6018north.org/current-upcoming-projects#/ prairie-colorfield
Chicago Artists Coalition, booth #143
Chicago Artists Coalition’s residency programs nurture some of the brightest artistic talent in the city, both artists and curators. For this year’s EXPO presentation, CAC’s current
curatorial residents—Francine Almeda, Gordon Fung, Sidney Garrett, Christine Magill, and Christina Nafziger—chose work from over a dozen current artist residents. Working in a wide range of media, from textile to metal work, painting to photography, the artists will explore identity, culture, and how to make a livelihood. (KC) chicagoartistscoalition.org/ events/expo-chicago-2025
Artists in Public Schools, booth #148
At a time when Chicago Public Schools still struggle to find and fund art teachers for every school, the nonprofit Artists in Public Schools (formerly CPS Lives) brings tremendous value to the community. The organization places professional local artists in schools throughout the city to collaborate on projects that focus on the specific history and culture of that school. This year, two of their artists in residence, Kat Bawden and Nyia Sissac, will show work they’ve been making in collaboration with their schools, on the themes of connecting with nature and community and legacy, respectively. On view will be large-scale fabric prints, cyanotypes, black-and-white portraits, and botanical lumen prints. (KC) cpslives.org
Center for Native Futures, booth #356
The only all-Native artist-led nonprofit in the Chicagoland area, the Center for Native Futures sprung out of the pandemic and now has a permanent home in the Loop’s Marquette Building. For this year’s EXPO, CfNF will show work by cofounders Andrea Carlson, Chris Pappan, Monica RickertBolter, and Debra Yepa-Pappan, alongside Jason Wesaw, June Carpenter, Noelle Garcia, Haley Greenfeather English, and Kalyn Fay Barnoski; English and Barnoski also currently have work on view at the Center’s gallery. (KC) centerfornativefutures.org
Project Onward, booth #142
Solo presentation by John Behnke
Longtime Project Onward artist John Behnke has a tendency to explore the eerie and otherworldly through his mixed-media work. At EXPO, Behnke’s detailed, cerebral works tell three stories: One explores mannequins that come to life in an abandoned shopping mall. The other two focus on spaces occupied by cults. All were created using a range of mate-
rials, from gel pen to acrylic paint. The artist is interested in “how distorted guidance leads individuals down destructive paths, blurring the line between reality and delusion,” the nonprofit shares—situating Behnke’s work in Chicago’s storied lineage of vibrant surrealism. (KC) projectonward.org
Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago (MoCP), booth #256
What does cultural memory and attachment to land look like? MoCP provides some answers to this question with a selection of photographic works by a variety of artists. Dawit L. Petros holds a militarized historical photo against its same Eritrean landscape today. In The Village Now Knows My Name , Cecil McDonald Jr. recalls James Baldwin’s “Stranger in the Village” against the Swiss landscape Baldwin looked at 60 years prior, pondering the permeation of history within and from identity. Marshall Brown constructs new worlds from old ones through architectural collage. Priya Kambli explores methods of navigating migration and identity in her series Buttons for Eyes. Meghann Riepenho records environmental impermanence with cameraless cyanotypes that, in turn, evolve over time. And more! (SFP) mocp.org
Hyde Park Art Center, booth #354
Solo exhibition by So a Fernández Díaz
Sofía Fernández Díaz sculpts cute characters of decay. Juxtaposing anthropomorphised sculptures with the found items and heaps of beads composing them, Díaz explores the environmental impact of discarded objects and argues for their potential beauty. “I am looking for the transformative aspect of each material, homing in on the little shifts that will allow them to become sculptures,” she writes. In doing so, Díaz turns a variety of mediums—beeswax, basket weaving, fiber, beading, natural dye—on their heads, playing with viscerality. Her characters have many legs or many eyes or are covered in lumps; they are as disturbing as they are sweet. Take a peek into their world with Hyde Park Art Center’s installation. (SFP) hydeparkart.org/ exhibition-archive/sofia-fernandez-diaz-atexpo-chicago v
m kcardoza@chicagoreader.com, sfriedman-parks@chicagoreader.com
Candida Alvarez, Adjust your eyes
JONATHAN MICHAEL CASTILLO
ARTS & CULTURE
EXPO CHICAGO
Art beyond the EXPO booths
Staff writer Micco Caporale shares their must-see picks for EXPO Art Week.
By MICCO CAPORALE
EXPO Chicago as an art market innovator is something not always appreciated outside the ivied walls of the art world, if acknowledged at all. Technically, it’s the oldest modern art fair in North America; it started as Art Chicago in 1980, then was bought and rebranded as EXPO in 2012. EXPO’s legacy has been eclipsed by edgier American art fairs, like Art Basel Miami Beach, over the years. And the city doesn’t have the same colonial history or ocean access—and by extension, the concentration of wealth—that’s long made New York a power player in the international art market. Despite multiple financial setbacks, the fair has endured thanks to Chicago’s diverse exhibition opportunities and its support for social practice artists and creators whose work is more rooted in “craft” or “design.”
Whether you’re visiting the city or just looking to get more acquainted with the art scene, here are eight exhibitions happening during EXPO Art Week that capture the spirit that makes the fair possible.
Barely Fair
Now in its fifth year, Barely Fair is a private, artist-organized exhibition that showcases an international roster of presenters in booths of 20 by 20 inches—that is, 1:12 of the scale of EXPO booths. Run by local avant-garde artist collective Julius Caesar, the show’s size restrictions are also its greatest feature. The scale calls attention to the resources necessary to participate in something like EXPO and how that barrier to entry influences what art is deemed attention- or collection-worthy. At the same time, it invites an unparalleled amount of imagination from participants. Barely Fair will have 24 exhibitors this year, all of whom showcase something exciting and underappreciated by the broader art market, especially with regard to certain approaches, regions, or attitudes. 4/23–5/11; 4/23–4/27 11 AM-4 PM, 5/3–5/4 and 5/10–5/11 noon–5 PM, additional hours and location TBD, tickets required, barelyfair.com
Sukaina Kubba’s “Textile Museum” at Western Exhibitions
Western Exhibitions will be at Barely Fair, and it’ll also host two gallery shows during EXPO week. “Dogman Lives on the Ground” is an ode to a late friend by beloved painter, cartoonist, and textile artist Jessica Campbell, while “Textile Museum” is by lace-obsessed artist Sukaina Kubba. The Toronto-based creative has spent years developing a body of work to reflect lace’s evolution from something handmade with natural fibers via a preindustrial cottage industry to a machine-made product of synthetic materials via a postindustrial manufacturing industry. In exploring this, she also gets at how lace and its makers have been devalued over time. Kubba’s work relies on hand-drawn patterns she makes based on archives at the Textile Museum of Canada—an institution facing closure because of
arts defunding. Here, she debuts work based on objects from the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Europe, North America, and South Asia. Through 6/7: Tue–Sat 11 AM–6 PM, Western Exhibitions, 1709 W. Chicago, westernexhibitions.com/ exhibition/textile-museum
Robell Awake’s “Human Resources” at Volume Gallery
Using handmade ladderback chairs marked with symbols, patterns, and materials, Atlanta-based artist Robell Awake makes Black history contemporary. Not only does he evolve the rich traditions of various Black chairmakers, but he also creates objects that allow people to literally sit with the past, present, and future simultaneously. In this show, he’s created six chairs inlaid with physical and figurative nods to the digital world—cords, cables, and even binary coding—as well as protective imagery drawn from various African spiritual traditions such as Hoodoo, or conjure. The chairs get at the malleability and policing of digital personhood, especially as it a ects Black people, and the need to remain grounded and safe. Simultaneously, the chairs rebel against the false binary between functional objects and sculpture, emphasizing artisans as artists. Through 6/7: Tue–Sat 11 AM–6 PM, Volume Gallery, 1709 W. Chicago, wvvolumes.com/upcoming
Damon Locks’s
music with the free jazz groups the Exploding Star Orchestra and Black Monument Ensemble; and in January, he dropped a funk-infused solo record called List of Demands (International Anthem). But like most great artists, especially ones from Chicago, he’s multidisciplinary, and he’s long maintained a visual art practice, including teaching art to people behind bars. This show assembles two rooms’ worth of inkon-paper drawings inspired by Locks’s interest in Black liberation histories, Afrofuturism, and anticarceral justice. Through 5/3: Fri–Sat noon–4 PM and by appointment, Goldfinch, 319 N. Albany, goldfinch-gallery.com/exhibitions/94-damon-locks-we-are-our-people
Hugue
e Caland’s “Bribes de
Corps” at the Arts Club of Chicago
“We Are Our People / Listen to This” at Goldfinch
Local artist and educator Damon Locks is better known in the music world. In the 80s and 90s, he had a punk band with Fred Armisen called Trenchmouth; more recently, he’s made
Women are too often written out of modernism, especially if they’re not American—but Huguette Caland is finally getting her due. Caland was the daughter of Lebanon’s first postindependence president and grew up with strict expectations about how to look and behave, which she was great at rebelling against. She was overweight by her parents’ standards, married the nephew of her father’s political
Damon Locks, Leave Everything Alone
TOM VAN EYNDE
Let’s Play!
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rival, and had multiple well-known a airs. In 1970, while in her late 30s, she ditched her husband and children to move to Paris and pursue art. Her paintings and sculptures are distinguished for their spontaneity and sensuous use of line and color. It’s the work of a woman not anguished by constraints; rather, she had an appetite for life that tore right through them. Through 8/2: Tue–Fri 11 AM–6 PM, Sat 11 AM–3 PM, Arts Club of Chicago, 201 E. Ontario, artsclubchicago.org/exhibit/ huguette-caland-bribes-de-corps
“Wakaliga
Uganda: If Uganda Was America” at the Renaissance Society
Wakaliga Uganda, a film studio that also goes by Ramon Film Productions, makes action-packed movies on shoestring budgets. Teen actors with no experience? Check. Homemade props? Check. Ultraviolence? Check, check, and check. Since 2005, the movies have developed something of a cult following— they’re more like the movies you expect Ghana’s over-the-top Deadly Prey movie posters to be (which were also brought to the States via Chicago), with a lot of sharp geopolitical commentary. In the studio’s first U.S. exhibition, the film If Uganda Was America plays alongside some of the studio’s other works in a site-specific installation designed to focus
less on the films’ bombastic qualities and more on the company’s community-minded spirit of freewheeling creation. Through 4/27: Wed–Fri noon–6 PM, Sat–Sun 10 AM–6 PM, Renaissance Society, 5811 S. Ellis Avenue, Cobb Hall, 4th fl., renaissancesociety.org/exhibitions/558/ wakaliga-uganda--if-uganda-was-america
Huguette Caland, Self Portrait (Bribes de corps)
Uganda
“Into the Hourglass: Paño Arte from the Rudy Padilla Collection” at the National Museum of Mexican Art
The Chicago area is home to the second-largest Mexican immigrant population in the United States, and during EXPO, there’s no shortage of opportunities to see incredible art meditating on Mexican American identity. Among them is “Escaramuza, the Poetics of Home,” a portraiture series at the Poetry Foundation that captures the women domestically sustaining the Mexican equestrian tradition of escaramuza charra, and “Multiple Exposures,” a survey at the DePaul Art Museum of photographer Christina Fernandez’s work probing gender and labor. One could make a whole day out of visiting the National Museum of Mexican Art, but if I had to pick one show out of them all—at the museum or otherwise—it’d be “Into the Hourglass: Paño Arte from the Rudy Padilla Collection,” which showcases paños on handkerchiefs as tableaus popular among incarcerated artists and thus art objects to consider
when exploring how Chicano iconography is adapted and shared between the inside and outside worlds. Through 8/10: Tue–Sun 10 AM–5 PM, National Museum of Mexican Art, 1852 W. 19th St., nationalmuseumofmexicanart.org/events/into-the-hourglass, free
1 in every 20 print readers becomes a member
ARTS & CULTURE
Installation view, “25!” at Monique
“25!” at Monique Meloche
Monique Meloche is turning 25, and the gallery is celebrating its silver jubilee with a group show reflecting on its history. Namesake Meloche transitioned from art museums into galleries under the mentorship of local powerhouse Rhona Ho man before founding her own contemporary art space. She grew it from her home into a West Town storefront that’s propelled the careers of emerging artists. Meloche will have a booth at EXPO (and is part of the fair’s selection committee), but it’s worth swinging by the gallery to get a better sense of her unique influence through artists she’s long championed, including Sanford Biggers, Rashid Johnson, and Ebony G. Patterson. Through 5/23: Tue–Sat 11 AM-6 PM, Monique Meloche, 451 N. Paulina, moniquemeloche.com v
m mcaporale@chicagoreader.com
Meloche BOB.
THEATER
HENRY JOHNSON
Through 5/4: Wed–Fri 7 PM, Sat 3 and 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM; no shows 4/ 18 - 4/20 ; Victory Gardens Theater, 2443 N. Lincoln, victorygardens.org, $ 64 -$ 69
REVIEW
Henry, portrait of a patsy
By KERRY REID
Many years ago, my late sister got a job right out of law school working for Bernie Mamet, father of former Chicago playwright David. One time, she told me, they went to court together and Bernie gave his name to the court reporter, who asked, “Any relation to David?” “Yeah, I’m his father.” “Well, I bet you taught him everything he knows.” To which Bernie replied, “I taught him everything he knows. I just didn’t teach him everything I know.”
It’s a funny story, but as I watched Mamet’s Henry Johnson, now onstage at the Biograph in a coproduction of Relentless Theatre Group and Victory Gardens Theater, I thought about how that little anecdote contains the seeds of most of Mamet’s worldview—namely that life is largely a quest for status and dominance, often revolving around bits of information parceled out to the underdog to bolster the needs (financial, psychological, or both) of the top dog. From his 1984 Pulitzer-winning Glengarry Glen Ross (just revived on Broadway with a bushel of stars in the cast) to films like 1997’s The Spanish Prisoner, Mamet’s long been a stalwart chronicler of the takers and the taken in society.
First produced in 2023 in Venice, California, and soon to be released as a film featuring Shia LaBeouf (who starred in that premiere), Henry Johnson focuses on the title character—a hapless patsy who goes to jail for trying to help a college “friend” out of a jam, and finds an even bigger frying pan in the person of Gene, his
cellie who wastes no time at all getting into Henry’s head. “Many dream. Of a wise man, who would set them straight. Most people will fall for a line. Sweet talking promoter, swindler, thief, who’s going to sell ’em snake oil, claiming to be that man,” Gene says as soon as Henry enters their cell. (Does nobody just say “hello” anymore?)
Does Henry fall for Gene’s machinations? Does David Mamet think Donald Trump is a great president? Yes and yes. Mamet’s rightward political shift (announced in a 2008 Village Voice essay entitled “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain Dead Liberal’” and amplified through many more recent statements in support of Trump and against “wokeism”) isn’t the direct subject matter of his latest play. But it’s interesting to think about how someone who supports Don the Con can write with such facility about the human capacity for seeing and hearing only what you want to see in another person—especially a person who obviously doesn’t give a shit about anyone except himself.
Last year before the election, the Tribune ran an editorial from Mamet about what a crime-ridden hellhole Chicago is—even though he hasn’t lived here for decades and, as Reader contributor Jeff Nichols pointed out in a response, the homicide rate in the city was much higher when Mamet first hit it big with Sexual Perversity in Chicago in 1974. (Nichols also noted that “Chicago newspapers of the past, which fostered many of the writers
Mamet reveres, didn’t give a voice to every political viewpoint. They did, however, make a blood sport out of covering amoral, inept businessmen. Mike Royko called Trump ‘the National Goo all’ and ‘a wet-look loser.’”)
The production here, directed by Relentless cofounder and longtime Chicago theater stalwart Edward Torres, hasn’t been without its own controversy based on its relationship with Victory Gardens, which has largely been moribund since the board fired artistic director Ken-Matt Martin in 2022. A group of Chicago artists held a “block party” protest last Wednesday outside the Biograph as a call to “reinstate the communitywide boycott of Victory Gardens.”
But it’s unclear what there is to boycott in the long run. Reportedly, the partnership with Relentless came about in part because Dennis Začek, the former artistic director and the man who created Victory Gardens’s signature (and now-defunct) playwrights ensemble over many years, advocated for Torres, his protege. Though billed as the kickoff to Victory Gardens’s 50th anniversary, the company website still contains no information about future productions. Nor does it list any sta or the current board members as of this writing, which is highly unusual, to say the least. (Maybe they’ve decided not to tell us everything they know. Or maybe they just don’t know.)
So, OK, if one can put aside the politics of its creator and the venue’s recent history, is this a show worth seeing? If you like Mamet, sure. It’s stronger than anything he’s created in some time. But that’s not saying a lot given his literary output in recent years, aside from his political essays, has barely caused a ripple; none of his work since 2009’s Race (produced in 2012 at the Goodman) has made it back to his hometown. Henry Johnson contains echoes of earlier Mamet works, notably 1982’s Edmond, which features another white-collar guy who goes to prison after dallying with the underworld. And like Ricky Roma in Glengarry , Gene is a guy who loves to talk people into something through discursive pseudo-philosophical pontifications about Snow White and Christ and politicians that all add up to the same thing: telling Henry that Gene is the face-eating leopard in this world.
The story, presented in four stark scenes with an intermission that mostly seems inserted to rearrange some set pieces (the
changeovers between scenes generally feel a little awkward), has a pleasing and familiar Mametian rhythm. The performances are strong and fun to watch, and though Thomas Gibson (formerly of television’s Criminal Minds and Dharma & Greg ) gets star billing as Gene and brings appropriate mind-fucking menace to the part, I was mostly pleased to see Chicago’s Keith Kupferer, who plays a prison guard, back onstage after his rightly lauded turn in the film Ghostlight , and the splendid Al’Jaleel McGhee, who plays Henry’s alpha-male boss, Mr. Barnes, in the first scene. Kupferer and McGhee both excel as men who seem to operate on a higher moral code than Henry but are no less likely to have their own agendas.
But if you get beneath the facile swathes of dialogue, there’s not a lot new here. And more importantly, I don’t think there’s a lot that’s actually challenging anyone’s worldview, least of all Mamet’s. The story depends on our willingness to believe that Henry (played with guileless desperation by Daniil Krimer) will fall for anything, anywhere, anytime, as long as someone is dangling something he wants, most of all status. It’s a zero-sum, nihilistic view of the world that maybe fits well with the MAGA notion that one can only succeed by tearing down and eliminating others. But it’s also, to put it charitably, bullshit.
Not everyone falls for the con. Not everyone is so desperate for the approval of seemingly powerful men (well, lots of other people who want to be powerful are, I guess) that they toss aside common sense and self-preservation, ignoring all the neon-bright warnings about the con men along the way. And if you’re going into Henry Johnson for insight into why the title character falls for it over and over, you may as well ask hardcore Trumpers why they still support the man. They do because they do. Because it’s who they are.
So while there is great skill on display here in the crafting of the story, there is a hollowness at its heart, as if Mamet were still trying to convince us that he knows a mark when he sees one. I’m not against bleakness in theater, god knows (I’m on record as loving Brett Neveu’s Eric LaRue , also turned into a film, which o ers no easy answers for why isolation and violence are so often hallmarks of American life). But Henry Johnson ultimately feels like a retread of Mamet’s favorite themes. He’s telling us what he knows. But we’ve heard it all before. v m
kreid@chicagoreader.com
Al’Jaleel McGhee (L) and Daniil Krimer in Henry Johnson MICHAEL BROSILOW
David Mamet’s Henry Johnson temporarily reopens Victory Gardens Theater.
OPENING
R Bunny angst
Scary Town blends melodrama and whimsy.
Deven (Colin Callahan) is an angst-filled brown bunny in a Misfits T-shirt who spends his days commiserating with his fellow goth Penelope (Al Duffy). Since the latter is a porcupine, she’s already used to people finding her (and her quills) a little off-putting. Life’s hard enough when you’re an angry kid about to turn 13 in an aggressively upbeat place like Merry Town, where every day starts with an ode to how neat everything is. But when Deven uncovers a family secret about his parentage, no amount of carrot juice or birthday cake can make it right. Not even losing several of his younger bunny siblings under mysterious circumstances compares to the pain of being lied to by his mother, Betty Bunny (Stevie Love), who turns to wine as a refuge from her stormy marriage and the demands of mothering hundreds of offspring.
Based on playwright and founding artistic director David Cerda’s family history, Hell in a Handbag’s Scary Town has a lot of fun sending up the anthropomorphic head-scratchers from the world of children’s author and illustrator Richard Scarry. For example, Deven’s other pal Willie Worm, played by the ingratiating Jerod Turner, is the adopted child of Ed Jones’s warmhearted Wanda Waterbuffalo and her goat husband (like Mrs. Bunny’s spouse, we never see Wanda’s hubby). Somehow, the bunnies are absolutely OK with living in a town dominated by a factory run by a fox—even when Grant Drager’s Mrs. Fox shows up sporting a sinister Natasha Fatale accent and a bunny-fur stole she swears is synthetic.
Danne W. Taylor’s sympathetic Granny Bunny is the one who puts Deven on the path to finding out the truth about who he really is while getting some measure of peace and insight into his mom’s history. Directed with verve and efficiency by Cheryl Snodgrass on the small Clutch stage (the space is usually the company’s rehearsal hall), the production finds a sweet balance between the ludicrous and the earnest, with a sprinkling of metatheatrical jokes. (“Do you like melodramatic flashbacks?” Deven asks his pals at one point, before the lights flash and we are indeed back in time.)
Marcus Klein’s scenic design consists mostly of an oversize storybook with pages that turn over to provide the different settings (the famous apple car from Scarry’s world also makes an appearance). Puppets designed by Lolly Extract of Jabberwocky Marionettes make for an efficient (and hilarious) way to expand the cast of characters. (Look for the barflies in a scene at the Bunny Hutch in Big Town, where Deven goes to find his roots.) By melding the sweet-but-odd aesthetic of Scarry with a personal—but also universal—story of an outsider kid looking for any clue to who he is, Scary Town is both honest and whimsical, without ever being cloying.
—KERRY REID SCARY TOWN Through 5/11: Thu–Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 and 7 PM; also Mon 5/5 7:30 PM (industry night), no show Sun 5/11 7 PM; the Clutch, 4335 N. Western, handbagproductions.org, $35 general admission, $43 VIP reserved
RRomance language
Brian Friel’s Translations finds a beautiful voice at Writers Theatre.
Irish dramatist Brian Friel set much of his work in the fictional Donegal town of Ballybeg; in 1980’s Translations, now in a lovely revival at Writers Theatre under Braden
THEATER
Translations
Abraham’s direction, he showed us how the name of the town changed from the Irish Baile Beag (literally “small town”) to the Anglicized version. Friel’s play is a study of how those who control words can control worlds—but also of how humans can transcend the limitations of language to find connections, even if only for a few fleeting moments.
It’s 1833, and the hedge school run by hard-drinking Hugh O’Donnell (Kevin Gudahl) and his partially disabled son, Manus (Andrew Mueller), provides education for the local Irish-speaking peasants. (Andrew Boyce’s lovely evocative set includes a projection of those famous green Irish hills behind the barnlike school.) Some, like Jonathan Weir’s Jimmy Jack, take to ancient Greek and Latin like a duck to water (complete with colorful fantasies about marrying Athena). Others, like Ian Maryfield’s Doalty, struggle with arithmetic. Tyler Meredith’s Maire, set on emigrating to the United States, studies geography to help her figure out what her new land will be like (unless Manus can somehow figure out a way to make enough money to ask her to marry him). Sarah (Julia Rowley), who is apparently nearmute, struggles to just say her name. Chloe Baldwin’s Bridget worries about the sweet smell from the potato fields—a harbinger of the blight to come a decade later, which would forever alter Ireland’s course.
The arrival of Hugh’s successful son from Dublin, Owen (Casey Hoekstra), with two British redcoats in tow (they somehow think he’s named “Roland”), provides the more immediate infestation. Determined to map and rename local places, as all colonizers are wont to do, the Brits pay Owen to serve as translator and guide.
Gregory Linington’s Captain Lancey is all stiff-necked business. But Erik Hellman’s Lieutenant George Yolland falls for both the countryside and Maire. A late-night scene a er a dance in a cottage shows the growing passion between the two despite the language barriers. (Though the play is in English, we’re given to understand that the locals are speaking Irish, which makes the Brits’ ham-handed attempts to communicate with them comical.) But as we know from countless other stories set in Ireland, romances like George and Maire’s o en carry grim baggage.
WHERE LANGUAGE DIVIDES, LOVE CONNECTS
Certainly, the notion of renaming things just because you feel like it hits home, given the recent “Gulf of America” nonsense. But the great beauty of Friel’s play (and there are many beautiful as well as funny interludes in Abraham’s thoughtful staging) is that, while it’s clearly rooted in Irish history, it offers insight for anyplace where people have felt torn between the traditions they were born into and the ones thrust upon them, and where the choice to adapt in order to survive sometimes comes at a very high cost indeed.
—KERRY
REID TRANSLATIONS Through 5/4: Wed–Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3 and 7:30 PM, Sun 2 PM; also Wed 4/16 and 4/30 3 PM, Sun 4/27 2 and 6 PM; open captions Thu 4/24, ASL interpretation Sat 4/26 3 PM; Writers Theatre, 325 Tudor Ct., Glencoe, 847-242-6000, writerstheatre.org, $35-$120 v
Written by Brian Friel Directed by Braden Abraham
MICHAEL BROSILOW
FILM FESTIVAL Fri 4/25 –Sun 5/4, locations vary; single tickets $15 –18, festival passes $200, discounted tickets for seniors, students, military; doc10.org
In waves and war, Doc10 returns
The documentary film festival celebrates its tenth anniversary with house music, nostalgia, politics, and more.
By KAT SACHS
Elegance Bratton’s Move Ya Body: The Birth of House —opening the 2025 Doc10 Film Festival on Wednesday, April 30, at 7 PM at the Davis Theater—will make you proud to be a Chicagoan. As a document of the house music scene, the 2025 film is an ecstatic detailing of this particular feather in the city’s cap, taking us back to the beginning and leaving no stone unturned. Though Bratton can be heard assuring Vince Lawrence, cocreator of what’s considered to be the first house music album, that the film isn’t only just about him, Lawrence is our guide and his life largely the map for this journey through the genre’s origins and his innovations within it.
Something especially illuminating about the film is its exploration of the marginalized groups that fomented the emergence of house. It features in depth the Disco Demolition Night of July 12, 1979, at Comiskey Park, where a largely white audience celebrated the destruction of crates of disco records. What might seem like a fun piece of lore around a period when good ol’ rock ’n’ roll was asserting its dominance over dance music is deconstructed as a racist and homophobic dog whistle (one subject notes that many people also brought funk and R&B records to destroy), as disco has its roots in Black queer culture. This is another history thoroughly explored through the lens of the Chicago music scene; the genre’s name, “house,” was taken from the Warehouse, the nightclub where Frankie Knuckles DJed, mixing already existing disco music to establish new beats.
The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Lawrence and the film’s producer, Chester Algernal Gordon, and an afterparty at Smartbar with special guest DJ Celeste Alexander. Though this is the main showcase’s opening night film and celebration, there are several events taking place beforehand. There’s a shorts program on Sunday, April 27, at the Gene Siskel Film Center, and between Friday, April 25, and Sunday, May 4, there will be several film screenings as part of a 2025 Docs Across Chicago lineup (most of which are free to attend): Stanley Nelson and Nicole London’s We Want the Funk! (2025) at the Chicago Cultural Center on Friday, April 25; Alejandra Vasquez and Sam Osborn’s Going Varsity in Mariachi (2023) at the National Museum of Mexican Art on Saturday, April 26; Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson’s Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project (2023) at Sisters in
Stanley Nelson and Nicole London’s We Want the Funk! (2025); Alejandra Vasquez and Sam Osborn’s Going Varsity in Mariachi (2023) COURTESY DOC10
A still from Move Ya Body: The Birth of House (2025) and a portrait of director Elegance Bratton VINCE LAWRENCE; COURTESY DOC10
Cinema on Monday, April 28; Cristina Ibarra and Alex Rivera’s The Infiltrators (2019) at the Film Center on Tuesday, April 29; and Naja Pham Lockwood’s 2025 short film On Healing Land, Birds Perch at the Davis on Sunday, May 4, all with special guests in appearance for postscreening Q&As.
Doc10 always has its pulse on the contemporary moment, with documentaries such as Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes’s The Janes (2022), Daniel Roher’s Navalny (2022), Brendan Bellomo and Slava Leontyev’s Porcelain War (2024), and Stephen Maing and Brett Story’s Union (2024) from previous years aptly reflecting the current political moment (sans anything around what’s happening in Palestine, curiously). Continuing in the same vein as Roher’s film, James Jones’s Antidote (2024), screening as part of this year’s slate, involves the activist Alexei Navalny, who died last year in a Russian prison; the film’s subject, investigative journalist Christo Grozev, had discovered who poisoned Navalny and was even featured in the previous film. Antidote follows him after he’s helped expose Russia’s poison program, in the process exfiltrating a whistleblower (who appears digitally altered to protect his identity), after which Grozev, too, attracts the ire of Putin and himself becomes a target. The screening, taking place on Friday, May 2, at 5:45 PM at the Davis, will be followed by a Q&A with Grosev moderated by Monika Bauerlein, the CEO of Mother Jones Since Laura Poitras’s Citizenfour (2014) came out, documentaries—perhaps even more than the mainstream news—have provided unprecedented access to the goings-on of an increasingly complicated world. Seeing behind the curtain of what once might have come to light decades later creates an uncanny
sensation of watching history unfold whilst still being unsure of its immediate reverberations. Sometimes, as in the case of Mstyslav Chernov’s 2000 Meters to Andriivka (2025), the follow-up to his Academy Award–winning documentary 20 Days in Mariupol (2023), it’s even more immediate, the stu of literal life and death for those involved. Largely through the use of cameras attached to Ukrainian soldiers’ helmets, 2000 Meters to Andriivka details the mission of a platoon to liberate the Russian-occupied village at increasingly close intervals. It screens at the Film Center on Sunday, May 4, at 1:30 PM, with a Q&A with Chernov to follow.
A trend in the documentary sphere is nostalgia. These can be entertaining, but maybe not the most enlightening; David Osit’s Predators (2025) is, rivetingly, both. It’s an overview of the popular Dateline NBC program To Catch a Predator, hosted by Chris Hansen, which ran from 2004 through 2007, and a deconstruction of the premise as well as imitators that have popped up in its wake. There are, of course, interviews with the show’s decoys—people legally of age who passed as being under 18, used for the sake of luring the men into the decoy homes so that Hansen could then pop out and confront them—and even Hansen himself, sating viewers’ curiosity for glimpses of these cultural icons.
There’s also, more interestingly, a consideration of the moral diciness at play, this quasi-extrajudicial punishment mounted for entertainment rather than any sort of justice or rehabilitation. Osit also reveals that he is a survivor of child abuse and that for him, the fascination with To Catch a Predator came when Hansen would ask the men why they’re doing what they’re doing, for which there was
never a satisfying answer. Though the show and its imitators remain popular for their compelling approach to a singular problem, they evidently bring us no closer to understanding the complex human psyche that causes people to act this way. Screening on Friday, May 2, at 8:15 PM at the Davis, Osit will participate in a postscreening Q&A.
Another exploration of a curious cultural phenomenon, Elizabeth Lo’s Mistress Dispeller (2024) delves into the emerging profession of “mistress dispelling” in contemporary China, following Wang Zhenxi, also known as “Teacher Wang,” a professional hired to covertly intervene in extramarital a airs with the aim of preserving marriages. Wang is enlisted by a woman desperate to save her marriage; she integrates herself into the lives of the husband and his mistress, becoming a confidante to both as part of her intricate plan to end the affair and reunite the couple. It screens Sunday, May 4, at 4 PM at the Film Center.
Jon Shenk and Bonni Cohen’s In Waves and
War (2024) will screen on Thursday, May 1, at 5:45 PM, followed by a Q&A with special guests. That evening continues with Rodney Ascher’s Ghost Boy (2025) at 8:15 PM, followed by a Q&A with Ascher and producer Ryan Bartecki. On Saturday, May 3, Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s Folktales (2025) will screen at 1 PM with a postscreening Q&A with Ewing, and at 3:30 PM, Geeta Gandbhir’s The Perfect Neighbor (2025) will screen, followed by a Q&A with director Gandbhir and producers Nikon Kwantu, Alisa Payne, and Sam Bisbee. Nyle DiMarco and Davis Guggenheim’s Deaf President Now! (2025) will follow at 6 PM with a Q&A featuring DiMarco and interpreter Grey Van Pelt. And, finally, the festival wraps with Lindsay Utz and Michelle Walshe’s Prime Minister (2025) on Sunday, May 4, at 7 PM, followed by a Q&A with Utz and special guests. All screenings above will be held at the Davis. v
m letters@chicagoreader.com
Cristina Ibarra and Alex Rivera’s The Infiltrators (2019); Mstyslav Chernov’s 2000 Meters to Andriivka (2025) COURTESY DOC10; MSTYSLAV CHERNOV
Wang Zhenxi in Elizabeth Lo’s Mistress Dispeller (2024) COURTESY DOC10
FILM
NOW PLAYING
RBlue Sun Palace
Thirty minutes into writer-director Constance Tsang’s feature debut Blue Sun Palace, the title card suddenly cuts in. By then, we’ve already been immersed in the textured lives of a few Chinese immigrants navigating work and life in Flushing, Queens—New York’s largest Chinatown. When the title card appears, it signals a quiet rupture. From that moment, the film fractures from a world with one of the film’s primary characters, Didi (Xu Haipeng), and the lingering absence of a world without her.
We meet Didi over dinner with Cheung (Lee Kang-sheng), a reserved, lonely man who, we later learn, sends money home to support his ailing mother, wife, and daughter in Taiwan. There’s an effortless intimacy between them: “I want to eat with you every day,” Didi says over this meal. The date progresses to a tender karaoke duet—a moment that will convince everyone to root for this romance. The next morning, the two talk about Didi’s dreams, particularly of opening a restaurant with her friend (and coworker) Amy in Baltimore, where Didi’s daughter lives with her aunt.
they struggle together in the vacuum le by Didi. (The scale of this void is a testament to Xu’s performance in its first act.) Blue Sun Palace requires viewers to slowly let the reality of this loss sink in alongside Cheung and Amy, but we’re still le wondering when, if ever, the wounds will heal. —MAXWELL RABB 116 min. Limited release in theaters
a pistol at one another. Just before a trigger is pulled, the screen goes black. We then meet Violet (Meghann Fahy) as she speaks with one of her clients; she’s a widowed mother working as a therapist for sexual abuse survivors. Later that evening, she intends to step into the unknown: a first date with a dashing photographer, Henry (Brandon Sklenar). Her snarky younger sister (Violett Beane) arrives to babysit her five-year-old son, Toby (Jacob Robinson). One outfit change later, and everything feels good.
Get showtimes and see reviews of everything playing this week at chicagoreader.com/movies
the tour and the unconventional love story it contains, centering on Edward (Gonçalo Waddington), a British civil servant who abandons his post in Rangoon (now Yangon, Myanmar) just as his long-time fiancee, Molly (Crista Alfaiate), arrives to marry him.
Didi and Amy work together at a massage parlor in Flushing with a couple of other women. The two friends share a meal on the claustrophobic stairway, establishing yet another potent bond. On the front door of the parlor, a loose paper reads “No Sexual Services,” hinting that the exact opposite is true for extra cash fees under the table. Despite this, the parlor is a place of respite and connection between the women, each of whom longs for home and family. This closeness is strikingly evident as they eat Amy’s cooking blindfolded and try to guess the meal. Just before the title card punctures the film, Didi is killed in an armed robbery. A er this moment, Blue Sun Palace is likely to provoke split reactions. Some might find the ensuing hour and a half meandering, dragging its feet as it studies the fallout of Didi’s death through her two principle relationships. To be fair, Tsang chooses to forgo much attention to plot or character development, instead prioritizing mood, choosing to harness grief in its pure form. The film conveys a loss so severe that we are fixated on the slow movements of Amy and Cheung as
R Drop
If you haven’t yet received an unsolicited AirDrop in public, it’s likely only a matter of time. Our digital footprints are out there for the world to see, ready to share at the push of a button. It’s a bit unsettling. O en, a random AirDrop is a harmless meme or prank, but it is frankly enough to make anyone a tad paranoid. What if one day it’s something more sinister?
Christopher Landon’s Drop fuels that paranoia with one of the most outrageous frameworks for a thriller in recent memory.
A gripping opening sequence immediately sets hearts racing as a distraught couple takes turns pointing
The date is at a flashy, upscale restaurant in a high-rise along the Chicago River. As Violet waits, she interacts with odd waitstaff and eccentric customers (a mixed bag of suspects). All the while, she is receiving increasingly threatening—and personal—drops (equivalent to Apple AirDrops). Once Henry arrives, she tries to ignore the messages before turning them into flirtation fodder. But the drops escalate, and the faceless messenger demands more and more from Violet, escalating from snatching items off Henry to outright killing him. If she tells anyone or tries to leave, a masked gunman, whom she spots on her home security app, will kill her sister and son.
With a premise so absurd, Drop could easily lose its footing. But Fahy doesn’t make a single misstep. Her performance is taut, progressing from first-date butterflies to life-anddeath anxiety without so much as a second to catch her breath—let alone ours. The 50-foot radius of the restaurant never feels overly claustrophobic, perhaps because, like in the best (and honestly worst) of first dates that escalate unexpectedly, there’s a flicker of hope that against all odds, everything will turn out just right. —MAXWELL RABB PG-13, 100 min. Wide release in theaters
R Grand Tour
It’s ironic, though not at all inhibiting, that parts of Miguel Gomes’s aptly titled Grand Tour—referencing the journey taken by its protagonists across several Asian countries, this part set in the early 20th century—were shot on sound stages. Even the contemporary, documentary-style interludes that punctuate the central narrative were directed remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, imbuing the film with a curious dissonance: they pull the viewer in while also keeping them at a distance. Nevertheless, the film feels as sprawling as both
The first half of the film follows Edward as he moves from country to country, planting cryptic messages for Molly in his wake. The second follows her in pursuit as she maintains complete faith in her fiance’s intention to marry her. Endowed with a kind of blind conviction that only sharpens her beauty and resolve, Molly’s unshakable belief casts a stark contrast against the trappings of colonialism—then, and in its lingering present-day forms—the latter of which are rendered in vivid color. This disparity dulls the romantic sheen of a love story built on the hard labor and eventual deaths of those tasked with charioting her through the jungle. Still, Gomes doesn’t undercut the romance entirely. Instead, he leans into its petulance, allowing the formal ambiguity of the nonnarrative sections to suggest the possibility of another interpretation entirely. —KAT SACHS 128 min. Gene Siskel Film Center
RThe Pee Pee Poo Poo Man
The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man (2024) exists in the context of all in which it lives and what came before it. It’s a low-budget existential thriller for the terminally online made by Braden Sitter Sr., a breakout filmmaker in the burgeoning indie film scene dubbed the New Toronto Bizarre. Taking its title from a meme—one of the first poster parodies of 2017’s The Bye Bye Man—the film brings its initial source material’s logline (“Don’t think it. Don’t say it.”) into terrifying new places by creating a backstory for a viral news item. In 2019, a Toronto man was arrested for dousing strangers in shit in a crime series local news outlets dubbed the “feces attacks.” What kind of person would do such a thing?
The film mashes together familiar cultural detritus to hone in on the existential absurdity of hyperconnectivity. If shitposting was a movie, it would be The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man, because the best shitposters don’t just entertain—they harness a blasé ridiculousness to get at something real. All the music is pop songs by artists like Nirvana, Neil Young, and the Pixies, except rewritten to be about poop, so it’s fair use and cheap. The story relies on thriller tropes, like outrunning the government and entrusting your story to a lone brave journalist, but it’s done in the most sideways ways. There are also a lot of Internet references, including ones going as far back as 1996. (If you don’t remember the Dancing Baby, aka one of the first online memes, it’s time to bone up.) Amid all the absurdity, the film still manages to capture a lot about alienation, especially in a very digital world, as well as the absolute terror and humiliation of getting poop dumped on you. For all its familiarities, it’s delightfully unlike anything you’ve seen before. —MICCO CAPORALE 79 min. Screening Thu 4/24 at the Music Box Theatre v
Blue Sun Palace and The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man LA SEMAINE DE LA CRITIQUE; MUSIC BOX THEATRE
FILM
It’s not that I actually believe in most of the woo-wooey stuff I practice. Really, it’s just some fun and, occasionally, an affirmation of sorts, instructions for how to proceed on whatever’s happening in my life. More often than not, this takes the form of daily horoscopes and the odd tarot pull, and sometimes I look to movies as either a reflection or a portent, heeding their advice or warning depending on the circumstances.
I’ve been in a funk lately, which has resulted in me not feeling connected to much of anything, movies or otherwise. It’s a worrisome state when that which fulfills me most ceases to do so, but I’ve also found that if I stay the course, it eventually comes back. That’s been the case this past week (even though, in addition to being listless, I’ve been sick with some sort of cold or flu), with a few screenings that have slowly but surely reinvigorated my will to live, so to speak, and have even spoken to my present state.
On Saturday night, my husband and I went to the AMC River East to see The Woman in the Yard , the latest from Jaume Collet-Serra. (Like many, I especially enjoyed his straightto-Netflix film Carry-On from last year, though in general, I’ll see pretty much anything the idiosyncratic Spanish auteur is attached to— and yes, that includes his live-action Disney movie Jungle Cruise from 2021.) A relatively compact thriller, the film centers on Ramona (Danielle Deadwyler), a mother of two whose husband has recently died in a car crash. She’s understandably depressed, forgetting to pay the electric bill or charge her phone, leading to the family being cut o from any outside help when a woman dressed entirely in black begins
sitting ominously outside their house.
I don’t want to give too much away, but it’s less an outright horror film than a psychological thriller of sorts (emphasis on “psychological”). Ramona isn’t battling the odds as much as yearning to submit to them, something antithetical in horror, as the impulse is most often to survive at all costs. This impulse is a sentiment that even in my healthier mindset I don’t quite understand; if there’s a zombie apocalypse or even a particularly gnarly haunting, I’m accepting that my odds of survival are low. Factor in a funk, and the “twist” of The Woman in the Yard only makes more sense.
Speaking of survival, on Thursday, I went to the Gene Siskel Film Center to see Aura Satz’s 2024 essay film, Preemptive Listening , as part of the Conversations at the Edge program. An exploration of the siren, the film is also a sound experiment, as Satz invited more than 20 collaborators to reimagine its sound. Sirens are also portentous, an alert and a call to action to take heed and, if possible, get away. In a way, The Woman in the Yard also felt like a siren, more than just recognition of a feeling but a warning against letting it fester.
I also saw William Worthington’s The Dragon Painter (1919) at the Music Box Theatre on Sunday, presented by the Chicago Film Society and with live musical accompaniment by the Miyumi Project. The movie was just OK, but the music was great.
Until next time, moviegoers. —KAT SACHS v
The Moviegoer is the diary of a local film bu , collecting the best of what Chicago’s independent and underground film scene has to o er.
A still from The Woman in the Yard (2025)
THE SECRET HISTORY OF CHICAGO MUSIC
The Notations have never left 60s soul behind
They didn’t climb to the heights they should have, but a er six decades they’re still putting out new music.
By STEVE KRAKOW
Since 2005 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place.
Chicago has made huge contributions to soul music, and many of the city’s bestknown groups—including the Emotions, the Chi-Lites, and Earth, Wind & Fire—continue to perform occasionally, decades after their peaks. The Notations have never gotten as famous as those acts, but founding member Cli Curry has kept the group’s name alive for more than 60 years.
The honey-voiced Curry has led the Notations through several longtime lineups, and they continue to release new music today. He took time out before a west-coast gig to speak with me for the Secret History of Chicago Music. Big thanks to fellow Reader contributor Aaron Cohen, author of the 2019 book Move On Up: Chicago Soul Music and Black Cultural Power, for connecting us.
Cliff Curry was born at Cook County Hospital on March 11, 1946, and grew up in Englewood. As a kid, he met LaSalle Matthews, later a pillar of the first Notations lineup. They both sang at home and in church, and they’d go on to be lifelong friends and collaborators—even their mothers became close. (Matthews’s mother, Lucy, played piano with gospel group the Caravans, then featuring popular vocalist Albertina Walker.)
While attending Paul Robeson High (known as Parker High till 1977), Curry and Matthews went for the big prize in the school’s talent show, developing a rivalry with Sheila and
Wanda Hutchinson, two future Emotions. It says a lot about the wealth of talent in Chicago that two great soul groups (at least!) were incubating at the same school at the same time.
Curry and Matthews began using the Notations name in 1962, during their sophomore year. (Curry had started writing songs, and Matthews had remarked that he was always “taking notes.”) By age 17, Curry was performing with a more experienced group called the Accents—he sings background vocals uncredited on their 1963 single “New Girl,” written by Bernice Williams of “Duke of Earl” fame. Curry still wanted his own thing, though, and he and Matthews soon turned the Notations into a trio by enlisting James Stroud, a recent graduate of Dunbar Vocational High School in Bronzeville.
The group’s dazzling three-part harmonies quickly landed them club gigs. They first attempted to make a record in 1967, but Curry’s song “Young Girl” ended up stranded on an unreleased acetate—it wouldn’t see the light of day till 2015, when the Numero Group put out a compilation of Notations material called Still Here: 1967-1973 . By the time the group connected with Tad Records for a second try in 1969, they were already seasoned performers on the local club circuit.
“It was a Polish guy who had the label,” Curry told Ryan Boyle, who wrote the liner notes to Still Here . “It was a small little
operation way up on the Northside. What scared him was that he didn’t realize after you record—payola was the thing to get the record played. That scared him to death.” Tad released a small pressing of “Trying My Best to Find Her” b/w “Gonna Get Ready,” and the Notations sold it mostly at shows—it didn’t dent the chart, despite its commercial, Motown- adjacent sound. A fire destroyed Tad’s building in the 1970s, and even the owner’s name has been lost.
After the Notations left Tad, they started working with Brad Bobo, who’d met Curry a year or so before. “He was fresh out of Lindblom [Technical] High School in Englewood— he was 17 years old when I met him,” Curry says. “I knew he was a good guitar player, and he put it all together. He knew all these guys that he played with here and there.” Bobo assembled a band he called the Soul Creators to back the Notations, and he started contributing to the group’s songwriting too. The whole crew could practice in his parents’ basement.
(Better known as a bassist, Bobo would later work with Eddie Harris and Natalie Cole.) At around this time, Chicago R&B star Syl Johnson caught a Notations show and showed up at their practice space with the address of his current label, Twinight Records. The band signed a contract with Twinight owners Peter Wright and Howard Bedno, booked a studio, and recorded with Johnson’s backing band at the time, the Pieces of Peace. Their first Twinight single included what would become their best-loved song, “I’m Still Here,” with a crucial opening guitar hook provided by Bobo. In August 1970, the dreamy tune reached number one at local radio station WVON, and soon it hit number 26 on the Billboard R&B charts. In the studio, Johnson had vetoed Stroud’s lead vocals on “I’m Still Here,” insisting on a more original sound. Curry, handed the role, turned in an o -the-cu performance (with his now-famous squeaky yelps in the chorus) that he’d intended as a goof on Johnson’s demands. Ironically, Johnson loved it, and Curry was
With saxophonist Ronnie G, guest vocalist Mack “MackaRello” Miller, and the Notations Orchestra.
Hosted by Dinahlynn Biggs. Sat 7/12, 7:30 PM, Morgan Park Academy, 2153 W. 111th St., $60 floor, $45 balcony, all ages
STEVE KRAKOW FOR CHICAGO READER
stuck singing the song that way—something he says it took him a year of shows to accept.
The Notations followed this hit with two more lush singles for Twinight, both in 1971. Neither found any traction, though, and the band felt they weren’t being promoted properly. They wanted out of their contract with Twinight, but the label wouldn’t cooperate.
“I never told this but once, so this is the second time—how we got away from the company [was] Jim’s brother, Frank Stroud, worked for the mob,” Curry says. “Frankie came to one of the rehearsals, and we was telling him the problem we was having getting away from
“He told me to register at the music conservatory in downtown Chicago, learn music theory, learn how to read and write [music].” As Curry tells it, Mayfield explained his advice: “Then if you decide you don’t want to sing no more, you’ll be able to play for anybody, any genre of music.”
Twinight. So he said, ‘Give me their names. Give me a few days. I’m gonna pass this on to somebody—you don’t need to know who.’”
After a couple weeks of strategic stonewalling, Curry took a call from Wright, who had clearly gotten a message in the meantime. According to Curry, he said, “I don’t want trouble.” Somewhat disingenuously, Curry replied, “I have no idea what you’re talking about—all I want is for us to leave.” The release papers were ready the next Monday morning. Twinight folded in early 1972.
Beginning in the Twinight period, the Notations toured with a backing band called the Weapons of Peace (led by future musical comedian Finis Henderson), and Bobo continued to work with the group. They must’ve put on a hell of a show—Curry tells a tale of the Notations opening for James Brown in the early 1970s, and after the first set, Brown told them to tone it down to avoid upstaging him or making him work too hard.
Even before the Notations left Twinight, Curry had been in touch with the Windy City’s king of soul, Curtis Mayfield. Curry says he’d first met Mayfield in 1964, just before graduating high school, and in ’67 they reconnected at the famed Regal Theater during a battle of the bands featuring the Jackson 5 and the Five Stairsteps. “That was my mentor,” Curry says.
Mayfield connected Curry with plenty of studio work, beginning with an invitation to the sessions for the massively successful Super Fly soundtrack in 1971 and ’72. He got Curry some gigs too, beginning with a mid-70s engagement playing guitar with Smokey Robinson. In 1972, the Notations auditioned for Mayfield, and a few years later he helped them get signed again. After the group’s departure from Twinight, Stroud had left to enter the ministry. The Notations had brought aboard Santos Dominguez to replace him, and in 1973 they put out a couple singles on Gene Cash’s C.R.A. and Cash labels. Both records performed poorly; the labels mostly released country music, and distribution didn’t extend far beyond the band selling copies onstage. Fortunately, Mayfield was an in-house producer for Gemigo (an imprint of his Curtom label), which launched that same year, and in ’75 he brought the Notations aboard.
Dominguez had left to raise his family, and the Notations became a quartet with the addition of Curry’s old pal Walter Jones of the Five Crowns and Bobby Thomas of Channel Three. They also added a new backing band called Nitro. The Notations’ first single for Gemigo, the classy “It Only Hurts for a Little While” b/w “Superpeople,” charted almost as high as “I’m Still Here.”
Their next single for Gemigo, “Think Before You Stop,” hit number four on the new disco chart, but it barely cracked the R&B chart. Tracks from both singles appeared on the band’s first LP, a self-titled release from 1976. The album also features the similarly slapping “Bills Breakup Homes,” but the Notations’ Gemigo contract ended in 1977. They signed to Mercury for one single, and then Matthews decided he wanted to write gospel material with his ailing mother. That spelled a temporary end for the band.
The Notations re-formed in the early 90s, motivated by the rediscovery of “Superpeople”—the funky, wah-wah-soaked B-side from
’75 had become a staple of DJ sets. A lineup consisting of Curry, Thomas, and new member Michael Thurman made new recordings for a 1996 CD called 2nd Time Around, released by the Sunlight label (run by Wright from Twinight). In the 2010s, the Notations found a new audience—the Numero compilation helped, and they got a big unexpected boost when Snoop Dogg sampled “I’m Still Here” for a song on his 2017 album Neva Left. These days, the Notations are staying busy, gigging with the trio of Curry, Eric Rapier Bryant, and Marzette Griffith. (Sadly, Matthews passed away in 2004.) They’ve been signed to California-based label Silent Giant since 2019, and they’re recording fresh versions of Notations classics as well as other dusties (“I’m Your Puppet”) and supple new tunes (“All Day Music”). At publication time, they had a respectable 832,000 monthly listeners on Spotify—more than the Chi-Lites, but not within an order of magnitude of the Emotions. The Notations’ newest single, a take on Tommy
James’s ethereal “Crystal Blue Persuasion,” drops on April 25.
“I look at it this way,” Curry says. “It’s a blessing, because God is still placing good things in front of me and the group. So I say, I don’t stop until He says it’s time to stop.”
The Notations perform on Saturday, July 12, at Morgan Park Academy, a few miles south of where Curry grew up. v
The radio version of the Secret History of Chicago Music airs on Outside the Loop on WGN Radio 720 AM, Saturdays at 5 AM with host Mike Stephen. Past shows are archived at outsidetheloopradio.com/tag/secrethistory-of-chicago-music.
The Secret History of Chicago Music is sponsored by Dusty Groove Records. Find rare, new, and used LPs and CDs at dustygroove.com or in-store 9 AM–7 PM, 1120 N. Ashland.
Recommended and notable shows with critics’ insights for the week of April 17
MUSIC
PICK OF THE WEEK
Circuit des Yeux steps into darkwave territory on the new Halo on the Inside
Thu 4/17, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport, $22. 17+
HALEY FOHR’S VERSATILITY AND AMBITION
have made her one of Chicago’s most exciting musical talents. Her alter ego Jackie Lynn is a rock-disco queen with a country songwriting style, but she’s better known for her project Circuit des Yeux, an experimental odyssey she’s sustained for almost two decades. In that time, Fohr has refined her striking vocal delivery—she has a four-octave range and sometimes sounds like avant-garde singer-songwriter Anohni—while artfully zigzagging through disparate musical terrain, including noise rock, ambient electronica, and folk music. Circuit des Yeux’s 2021 album, -io, which featured a large complement of classical musicians, grew its lush orchestrations from solid rock ’n’ roll foundations, and Fohr earned praise for her highly theatrical performances in support of the release.
On Circuit des Yeux’s latest full-length, last month’s Halo on the Inside (Matador), Fohr confidently steps into darkwave territory, building songs around her poppiest hooks to date while resisting many of the genre’s cliches. She wrote the record over several months, holing up in her basement for months and working late into the night. The material, inspired by the Greek god Pan, is also indicative of the way the pandemic whetted a cultural appetite for all things goth. In a world drastically reshaped by mass death, people hunger to honor not just beauty and ecstasy but also agony and darkness.
Opening track “Megaloner” sets a perfect tone. It underscores its refrain (“Gotta give
it up / Gotta get a second chance / Gotta give it up / Thinking about the big romance”) with synth arrangements and guitar licks that sound like something o a John Carpenter soundtrack. “Truth” showcases Fohr’s genre-bending whimsy: Its combo of the free-spirited jazz pop of Björk’s Debut and the folkloric, almost ceremonial electronica of Merlina Herlop’s Pripyat hits like a steroid
THURSDAY17
Circuit des Yeux See Pick of the Week at le . Facs and Kinsella & Pulse, LLC open. 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport, $22. 17+
FRIDAY18
Marie Davidson 9 PM, Sleeping Village, 3734 W. Belmont, $25, $22 in advance. 21+
Marie Davidson is a techno trickster. Electronicmusic lovers have been grooving to the Quebecois artist for a minute, especially a er Pitchfork chose her third album, Adieux au Dancefloor , as one of the 20 best electronic records of 2016. But Davidson really connected with wider audiences two years later, with the release of the propulsive single “Work It,” from 2018’s Working Class Woman “You wanna know how I get away with everything?” she speak-sings with her signature acerbic delivery, which comes across sharp and chic in her French-Canadian accent. “I work / All the fucking time.” The track has all the single-minded attitude of Britney Spears’s 2013 classic “Work Bitch,” but very little warmth and no candy. While Spears depicts the daily grind as a means of achieving a luxury lifestyle, Davidson emphasizes something intrinsic about her hunger to work. When she ends the track insisting that to maintain your stamina you have to “Love yourself / Feed yourself,” she stamps it as an anthem for process-oriented perfectionists throughout the world.
On February’s City of Clowns (Deewee), Davidson takes on surveillance capitalism as a woman who recognizes her star power and privilege (she’s beautiful, thin, and white, and she’s benefitted from Canadian arts funding) as well as her limitations. She’s simply one dot in a constellation that shines for dance-floor demons who think critically about labor and wealth. The record opens with something of an airy sound poem about the “third modernity”—an economic and existential shift caused by the rise of artificial intelligence. On “Demolition,” Davidson growls and sings from the perspective of a data miner, delivering her lines (“I don’t want your cash, no / All I want is you / I want your data”) in a psychosexual crescendo. “Sexy Clown” laughs at the necessity and futility of individualism in the face of big tech, while the old-school techno masterpiece “Contrarian” revels in the tension between the refusal to bow down to authority and the ubiquity of algorithm-fueling digital contrarianism. City of Clowns is as intellectually provocative as it is danceable. Britney could never. —MICCO CAPORALE
shot, albeit mixed with a lot of existential darkness. Fohr meets the moment as a sonic voyager disinterested in a tidy home. Her ongoing foray into strongly visual live sets coupled with her mind for melding unexpected inspirations makes me suspect this will be one of the most interesting local shows for synth-pop and goth audiences this year.
—MICCO CAPORALE
SATURDAY19
Dim Accessory XL, Mute Duo, and Brian Case (DJ set) open. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $15. 21+
Dim’s name is familiar to Chicagoans who love shoegaze that goes heavy on the guitar pedals, but the local four-piece should be more widely known. The band debuted in 2015 with a powerhouse
CIRCUIT DES YEUX; FACS; KINSELLA & PULSE, LLC
Haley Fohr of Circuit des Yeux DANA TRIPPE
MUSIC
self-titled cassette via local boutique label Physical Medium, then followed it with the industrial-tinged full-length Stereo 45 in 2017. The gauzy, distorted four-track EP they dropped in 2023 is still their latest release. Dim are distinguished by borrowing just enough from sonically adjacent styles—think cakey grunge riffs or the cold mechanical twitches of industrial—to be something of a wild card while maintaining fidelity to shoegaze.
Dim’s 2023 EP is so good that its run time—just over 11 minutes—feels criminally short. Ethereal, distant vocals loop in and out like images shi ing between mirrors, an effect that’s more pronounced on some tracks than others—except on “008,” which is less than a minute of wandering, fuzzy, blissedout rock with no vocals at all (and no drums either).
“Same to Me” creates a rich collage of grungy sounds, tacks on vocal phrases like tissue-paper cutouts, and ends with 30 seconds of airy, droning
hiss. “I Mean I Guess” opens with fervent, distorted rhythm guitar that recalls the Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now?,” but instead of treating each sound as a clean, distinct element, it creates a field of textures with elements blossoming throughout. Dim don’t perform o en these days, which makes this show a rare treat for devotees of that wall-of-sound experience. —MICCO CAPORALE
MONDAY21
Murs Platinum Max, 3rd Wrld, and Jasper Logan open. 8 PM, Subterranean, 2011 W. North, $20. 17+
Murs is a prolific proletarian artist who’s given us heartfelt, earnest verses since he began rapping
professionally in the mid-90s. Born Nicholas Carter, the veteran Los Angeles MC is an indie rap godfather, with a résumé that could humble the most seasoned artist. He got his start with groups such as 3 Melancholy Gypsys and Living Legends before dropping his solo debut, F’Real, in 1997. He’s since released solo and group projects on iconic indie labels, including Strange Music, Definitive Jux, and Mello Music Group, and put in years of quality work with producers from every corner of hip-hop—a short list includes El-P, RJD2, Oh No, and Terrace Martin. He’s also no stranger to side quests: An avid gamer and streamer, he set a Guinness World Record in 2016 for rapping nonstop for 24 hours during a Twitch livestream.
I’m hard-pressed to choose a favorite track from Murs’s phenomenal catalog, but I’m partial to 2003’s “The End of the Beginning,” which features an epic story rap with the late Shock G. More recently, I
Marie Davidson NADINE FRACZKOWSKI
Dim CORY POPP
Murs COURTESY THE ARTIST Natural Information Society & Bitchin Bajas NOLAN CHIN
MUSIC
enjoyed 2020’s Love & Rockets Vol. 2: The Declaration , with its production from funk-rap purveyor DJ Fresh. Murs’s latest single, “Silverlake Rec League,” is a trunk clanger with a B-side ode to fellow west-coast legend Will.i.am (“Flowers 4 Will I Am”). The tracks will appear on his upcoming 13th solo album, Love & Rockets 3:16 (The Emancipation), which he’s announced as his final record before he retires from music to focus on his family. Before he hangs up his hat, though, he’s doing one last nationwide tour, which includes this stop in Chicago. Murs is GOATed in all MC categories, and hip-hop is in a better place because of his work. That makes this a must-attend concert. —CRISTALLE BOWEN
WEDNESDAY23
Natural Information Society & Bitchin Bajas 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $25. 18+
Natural Information Society and Bitchin Bajas emerged from different corners of Chicago’s music scene, but the commonalities between the two ensembles made their collaborations feel inevitable. Joshua Abrams has been a first-call bassist for jazz, postrock, and improvised-music projects since
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the early 1990s. He first instituted Natural Information Society (NIS) in 2010 as a setting to play trance-inducing music that vibrated sympathetically with his guimbri, a three-string bass lute associated with Gnawa community of Morocco. The NIS lineup expands and shrinks around Abrams and harmonium player Lisa Alvarado (who also creates the group’s striking visual backdrops), but since 2017 the core ensemble has also included drummer Mikel Patrick Avery and bass clarinetist Jason Stein. Bitchin Bajas , aka synth and organ player Cooper Crain, woodwinds player Rob Frye, and electronic musician Daniel Quinlivan, began as a synth- oriented side project of instrumental rock band Cave in 2010. Like NIS, they’re besotted by hypnotic rhythms and rich textures, and the groups first collaborated on 2015’s Automaginary—an example of how two great visions can go great together. Their brand-new second effort, Totality (Drag City), goes further and synthesizes the sounds of NIS and Bitchin Bajas to arrive at a new third thing with a character uniquely its own. Neither group is big on ballads, but that’s exactly what the ultralento “Always 9 Seconds Away” evolves into. And while the title track’s interwoven layers of circuitgenerated and breath-driven textures will sound familiar to followers of either band, its abandonment of explicitly articulated time in favor of a drifting pace will not. This concert celebrates the release of Totality —BILL MEYER v
Chicago Dryer Co. in Chicago, IL seeks
Mechanical Design Engineer w/MS in Mech Eng, Systems Eng, Automation or rltd & 2 yrs exp. Exp w/CAD & automation technologies & systems. Must speak Polish. Send res: Mtishler@chidry.com
Logistic Coordinator: Monitor distr of goods at transp comp. Resolve complex situations inv customers, staff, supply chain personnel. Monitor stocking capability. Logistics planning. Manage & monitor perf of fleet, routing, sched planning. Ensure vehicles are in good condition. Analyzing & optimizing logistical procedures. Bachelor’s degree in any field. 2 years exp in a profession related to logistics. Res: Polmax LLC dba Experior Transport; 12161 South Central, Alsip IL 60803.
Security Operations Center Analyst sought by UncommonX Inc. in Chicago, IL to mng svcs team in a 24x7x365 Security Operations Center (SOC). Reqs: BS in IT, Info Security/ Assurance, Engnrng, or Cybersecurity. Must possess work or course work exp w/ Info security, N/work security, N/work architecture, N/work firewall, Cisco ASA, n/work dsgn, QoS configuration, IDS & IPS, Data privacy, Data Protection, access control, SDN, & DLP; Linux & Windows Systems Admin, Windows Server, Active Directory Domain, Azure AD, virtual machines (VMWare & Virtual Box), & security mngmnt; & etc. Salary: $75,442/yr; Resume to hello@uncommonx. com; Ref Job 101
Senior Analyst, Planning, Chicago, IL, for Team TAG Services, LLC. Responsible for analytics, reporting, performance evaluations, market insights, and industry trends. Compile and interpret data from multiple sources and present business insights to guide organizational strategy and choices. Req’d: Bach. (or foreign equiv.) in Comp. Sci., Data Analytics or related & 3 yrs. of exp. with inquisitive and predictive data analysis using SQL, Tableau, R / Python. Exp. may have been gained prior to, concurrent with or after completion of degree requirements. May work remotely up to 2 days/wk. Salary/Benefits: $124,848 and a generous benefits package that includes paid time off, health, dental, vision, and 401(k) savings plan with match. Resumes to code TW-SAP, c/o Juliana Ximenes, TAG, 800 W Fulton Market, Chicago, IL 60607 (juliana. ximenescoutinhodias@ teamtag.com).
Software Developer Software Developer, Simplex Investments LLC, Chicago, IL. Build proprietary, lowlatency, algorithmic trading applications. Req: bachelor’s in comp sci or closely related field + 2 yrs exp in same or related occupation developing lowlatency software apps. Exp must include building GUI apps & C++ programming in a Linux environment.
$125,000-$200,000/ yr. Benefits include med/dental/vision/ life/disability ins, PTO, 401K, incentive pay, tuition reimbursement, parental leave, daily meal stipends, employee discounts, charity match program, commuter benefits, FSA/HSA & fun events. Email resume to careers@ simplextrading.com
Sr. Java Developers, Oak Brook, IL: Design, implement & maintain Java apps for high-volume/ low latency; Design, build, test & deploy data ETL pipelines using AWS tools & technologies; Implement UI design by writing HTML5/HTML, CSS3/CSS, Bootstrap 3.0, JavaScript, JQuery. Salary: $110,000/year; standard co benefits. Send res to: Maxil Technology Solutions, Inc., info@ maxiltechnology.com
Wilshire Advisors, LLC in Chicago, IL is seeking Sr Analyst, Investment Solutions to dvlp quant techs to inform securities investing, equities investing, pricing, or valuation of fincl instrs. No trvl. WFH w/in commut’g dist. $85,000/ yr. Comprehensive bfts pkg incl collab. wrk envrnmt, generous PTO, 401(k) match, affordable & comprehensive med/ dental/vision insur, CFA & other prof membership reimb & more. Send resumes to recruiting@wilshire.com
Chicago, IL - 66degrees, a data and AI solutions co. seeks Business Intelligence (BI) Architect to perform dev’ment & admin tasks in MicroStrategy (MS); use MS API & SDK tools to customize per client; write scripts to perform migrations & build reports, perform development tasks to build Looks, Dashboards, and schema development via LookML in Looker BI tool; perform migrations of Looker instances b/w selfhosted to cloud hosted; perform customization of Looker tool processes using API endpoints, e.g. user management & automation scripting; assist AI/ML team on
project tasking. Duties may be performed remotely from anywhere in the U.S. Req: BS in CS, Computer Information Systems, Engineering, Data Analytics or closely related degree + 24 mos exp as BI developer or closely related occupation AND Certification in MicroStrategy. To apply & for add’l duties/benefits email resume to HR at Recruiting@66degrees. com Pay range: $137k to $185k. Benefits include: Med., dental, vision, STD/ LTD/Life ins, 401k match & health incentives .
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takes the year 1869 as its starting point, when the word "homosexual" was first used by an activist to argue against the criminalization of same-sex relations. Over 150 years later, queer and trans people around the world are still being targeted. This exhibition invites viewers to consider LGBTQ+ history in a new light and to
the contributions of queer artists amidst the rise of homophobic and transphobic politics across the globe.
The First Homosexuals