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You don’t have to search far into 20th century music to find one of my favorite albums. Janet Jackson’s Control , first released in 1986, is filled with dance-pop beats and R&B-influenced lyricism. One of the album’s tracks, “The Pleasure Principle,” can give us some insight into the themes of this issue of the Reader
Janet sings, “What I thought was happiness was only part-time bliss / You can take a bow,” to an unnamed lover who seems to have confused pleasure with possession. The song was written by keyboardist Monte Moir of the classic Minneapolis band the Time. In 2012, Moir told the website One Rad Song that the lyrics were inspired by personal relationships as well as Freud’s theory of the “pleasure principle,” which posits that when one’s primitive urges (hunger, sex, anger, companionship, etc.) aren’t addressed, the result is a state of anxiety or tension.
techno clubs of Kyiv, where dancing is a balm for partygoers living under the threat of Russian attacks. The clubs also provide a necessary source of fundraising for the Ukrainian military.
And in our news section, we republish a report Wei originally filed for our friends at Borderless Magazine about Chicago’s deep Ukrainian and Ukrainian American communities and their work to support the resistance. It starts on page 6. Wei received a support grant from the International Women’s Media Foundation to do on-theground reporting in Ukraine.
There’s lots of different ways to seek out pleasure, and in this issue our writers, illustrators, and photographers tackle a few possibilities. In a world that is constantly feeling off-balance and dangerous, it seems more important than ever to both cherish fleeting moments of joy and also demand pleasure and happiness for all. What is the point of the struggle without the reward? They may seem surprising on the surface, but with the pleasure principle in mind (and, for my part, while in my office trying and failing to replicate Jackson’s choreography from the music video), the double features in this issue from contributor Wendy Wei about the situation in Ukraine are a perfect fit for this package. In our music section (starting on page 24), Wei brings us to the dance and
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When we first decided to tackle the theme of pleasure, wartime resistance and public trauma were not first in mind. But the resilience of humans to adapt under tremendous pressure and adverse conditions seems to be the basis from which we truly feel happiness. Whether it’s soaking in a tub while dining (Sula, page 10), enjoying the encompassing experience of drinking Chartreuse (Caporale, page 12), or learning to enjoy your new body (Brown, page 18), seeking out moments of contentment or ecstasy are part of the balance we should be trying to achieve as we live out our days.
Let’s go back to Janet’s song for some inspiration. She warns, “What I thought was happiness was only part-time bliss / You can take a bow.” Let’s not confuse fleeting moments of what we assign as self-care with basic human rights. Everyone should be allowed the time, resources, and support to experience pleasure. The man said “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” no? v
—Salem Collo-Julin, editor in chief m scollojulin@chicagoreader.com
The Reader accepts comments and letters to the editor of fewer than 400 words for publication consideration. m letters@chicagoreader.com
STREET VIEW
Lucky era
An
art student
proves that style thrives on personal flair and a healthy sense
of humor.
By ISA GIALLORENZO
Iran into 20-year-old Ella Slossburg—an illustration and printmaking student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago—fresh o her shift as a hostess at one of Logan Square’s coolest spots. Her outfit embodied the elusive style of our post-postmodern era. How to describe it? Highly personal, thrifted, multidimensional, whimsical, Y2K-adjacent, and somewhat puzzling. It was the kind of outfit that makes you look twice but ultimately decide you love it.
The first thing to catch my eye was Slossburg’s baby T-shirt announcing “Flop Era,” which she scored from the LA brand OGBFF’s web store. She paired the shirt with corduroy cargo pants, a Western-style heart belt, silver ballet flats, and uterus-themed accessories. Despite the T-shirt’s message, the ensemble was quite a success.
“Every time I wear [the T-shirt], random people come up to me and ask, ‘What is flop? What does that mean?’” said Slossburg. “I used to think it was cursed because when I wore it to class, I messed up an entire project, and my professor goes, ‘It’s because you’re wearing your flop era shirt—you flopped.’
“Then I wore it to work, dropped a plate on my leg, and cut it open. So everybody’s like, ‘Never wear that shirt again.’ But I won’t give up.” Slossburg told me that she thinks the curse was o cially broken the day she was photographed for this column.
JOE MILLS FOR CHICAGO READER
Slossberg’s capri pants are vintage. ISA GIALLORENZO
Another focal point in the look is Slossburg’s silver footwear— her signature shoes, she said.
“I’ve been in a ballet flat era—well, I’ve been in a flop era, but also in a ballet flat period of my life,” she said. “Lately, I’ve been pairing more masculine outfits with these giant silver shoes, and it throws people off like crazy. I’ll wear a sports jersey with my silver Mary Janes, and people don’t know what to make of it.”
For even more intrigue, Slossburg complements her glossy silver shoes with white tube (or, shall we say, white fallopian tube) socks, each featuring a drawing of a uterus.
“I got them as a gift since I’m known for being a feminist, so I love these socks a lot. I once got stopped in the airport for them. The airport security lady was like, ‘Is that a
uterus on your sock?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ Then she asked, ‘Why? Is it supposed to be funny?’ I told her, ‘No, it’s supposed to be empowering. This gives life. What are you talking about?’
The uterus is the most powerful symbol—it creates life,” Slossburg said. The uterine motif also appeared on one of the keychains hanging from her belt loop, alongside a “Princess” custom key.
The rest of Slossburg’s outfit came with
CITY LIFE
equally entertaining backstories. Her roommate keeps trying to steal her vintage corduroy capri pants. The pants remind her of her carpenter cousin. The Western heart belt was free from her sister, who works at Free People. She carried a Levi’s bag that can fit “eons of items” and goes with everything. She donned a star-shaped, gingham pimple patch.
Accessories also included a heart necklace her friend infused with good vibes and mood
rings that are “usually stuck on this weird grayish blue.”
“I don’t know what [a blue mood ring] means, but I’m usually happy, so maybe that means happy,” Slossburg mused, before revealing the secret to her joy: “I do what I love. I go to art school. I love painting, drawing, and making art. That makes me happy.” v
m letters@chicagoreader.com
Fun accessories, like a Western-style belt buckle and a pink uterus keychain pal, infused Slossburg’s ensemble with personal style. ISA GIALLORENZO
NEWS & POLITICS
Is rebuilding enough?
Chicago’s Ukrainian diaspora has funded millions to reconstruct bombed communities. But as some humanitarian workers pivot to military action, volunteers face hard questions about effective resistance.
By WENDY WEI, BORDERLESS MAGAZINE
INVESTIGATION
This reporting was supported by the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Women on the Ground: Reporting from Ukraine’s Unseen Frontlines initiative in partnership with the Howard G. Bu ett Foundation. It was originally published by Borderless Magazine.
In the basement of a secret location in Kyiv, Kseniia Kalmus, 36, has trained hundreds of volunteers to make drones.
Serving as headquarters for her workshop, KLYN Drones, the singular room is modest but lined floor to ceiling with stacks of drones in various stages of assembly, their multicolored parts glittering like insects.
A Ukrainian flag is wrapped around a support pillar in the workshop, which serves as half den, half manufacturing hub. Three years ago, Kalmus, a florist by trade, was rebuilding bombed-out roofs on the front lines of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine. She was an early partner with Ukraine Trust Chain, a volunteer network run from Daniil Cherkasskiy’s Evanston apartment since 2022. It has channeled over $10 mil-
lion from Chicago’s Ukrainian diaspora to communities under fire in Ukraine. The artistry of her rebuilding work earned recognition by the Royal Academy of Arts in 2024 and the Venice Biennale in 2025.
But when Russian bombs destroyed her reconstruction projects for the second time in May 2024, Kalmus quit humanitarian aid with Trust Chain to focus on weapons manufacturing, specifically first-person-view drones. Today, her pitch to donors is frank: “A $340 drone disabling a $1.2 [million] Russian tank—that’s 3,600 [times] the bang for your buck.”
Kalmus’s shift to prioritizing military action over civil aid reflects a broader question confronting volunteers in Chicago and Ukraine as the war with Russia drags into its fourth year: Is it enough to rescue and rebuild when the destruction never stops?
Borderless Magazine’s Kyiv correspondent spoke with Trust Chain volunteers across Ukraine and Chicago to explore how volunteer work during prolonged conflict has reshaped their approach to resistance on the front lines and abroad.
The online connection
As Russian forces reached Kyiv’s city limits in late February 2022, Natalia Mitsuta tore through bombed streets in her white Kia hatchback, delivering medication to elderly residents trapped in their apartments. Between supply runs, she scoured Telegram group chats and Facebook feeds, responding to requests from strangers for prescriptions or food and purchasing them with her own money.
About five thousand miles away in Evanston, Cherkasskiy, 42, was also glued to his phone, consuming every bit of information about Russia’s invasion. Born in Kyiv, but a Chicagoan for the past two decades, Cherkasskiy has loved ones in Ukraine. So when his friends in Kyiv were searching for baby formula for their premature twins, the Ukrainian American tech executive and performance artist posted it everywhere he could think of online.
“Need anybody in Kyiv who could [find formula] for premature babies who are running out of life force right now. Please.” ‘Da Nichë’ posted on Facebook on February 28, 2022.
Three hours later, it turned up on Mitsuta’s feed.
“Write to me. I’ll do it,” she responded.
Mitsuta’s voice messages rolled in immediately: one about a pharmacy that miraculously stayed open, another detailing specific routes and bridges that closed due to the military curfew. Through her phone, she transported Cherkasskiy to the reality of Kyiv under siege.
He eventually secured baby formula through other channels, but Mitsuta left a lasting impression. Here was a stranger who had jumped in her car and driven through active warfare to help people she’d never met, based on a Facebook post. It felt to him like proof of concept that civilian-to-civilian support was happening organically across social media platforms during wartime.
That’s how Cherkasskiy forged the first link of the Ukraine Trust Chain.
Within a month, what had started as a single Facebook plea for baby formula matched with one willing volunteer would formally become Ukraine Trust Chain, a registered 501(c)(3) based in Chicago that finances a network in Ukraine. Together, the two teams work to channel people’s instinct to help others into sustained programs to rebuild among communities a ected by war.
Glass windows of a daycare center taped with anti-shock strips
WENDY WEI FOR BORDERLESS MAGAZINE
After selling his real estate tech company months before the invasion, Cherkasskiy had time, capital, and acumen to support humanitarian logistics. His business mind began noticing glaring ine ciencies in humanitarian efforts. So many people were individually trying to solve the same problems—food delivery, last-minute evacuations, and access to medication—yet efforts were duplicated, and those with stronger social networks received more help, while others went unnoticed.
But unlike other wars or humanitarian disasters, the banks remained open, the Internet worked, and goods moved relatively freely. Donors were also generous in the early days of Trust Chain. In the first few months, the organization initially collected around $11,000 per day, and at its peak, averaged about $100,000 per week, Cherkasskiy said.
Within a week of connecting, Cherkasskiy wired $1,000 directly to Mitsuta. She used it to coordinate the evacuation of 50 elderly residents, deliver supplies, and bake thousands of loaves of bread at a local school.
From there, the network of support expanded.
“Every person I talked to gave me a contact, more or less, and I reached out,” said Cherkasskiy. “I would just, like, say, ‘Hey, I’m Daniil from Chicago. I heard you were doing something. I want to send you money.’”
Cherkasskiy was introduced to Kalmus, who
NEWS & POLITICS
was already distributing food and medicine in the Kyiv and Chernihiv regions.
This rapid “call-and-response” mobilization became Trust Chain’s blueprint. The U.S. team secured donations through their network of white-collar professionals and high-net-worth donors. Ukrainian partners like Kalmus and Mitsuta put the money to work on the ground.
Since 2022, the U.S.-based operations team has channeled over $10 million, 100 percent of all donations raised, directly to 17 civilian-led volunteer groups across Ukraine. These groups have provided emergency services, supplies, and carried out rebuilding e orts for over a million Ukrainians throughout the war, Cherkasskiy said.
Through it all, Cherkasskiy says the U.S.based team accepted zero dollars for their time.
“We are only doing this because we wanted to do this.”
Pavlo Bilan, 51, an Australian citizen, moved back to his hometown of Dnipro. WENDY WEI FOR BORDERLESS MAGAZINE
NEWS & POLITICS
continued from p. 7
“They have a heart for this land.”
Things work differently for Ukraine-based teams. Russia’s 2022 invasion devastated the country’s economy, shrinking the national GDP by an estimated 30 percent. Approximately 4.8 million jobs were lost, leaving one in three Ukrainians unemployed. For many, unpaid work is unsustainable—unlike some international teams, local humanitarian workers often rely on these roles for their livelihood.
Since the full-scale invasion in 2022, humanitarian groups have proliferated in Ukraine—from massive United Nations agencies to scrappy volunteer networks like Trust Chain. The group’s partnerships with Ukrainian teams have endured with Cherkasskiy’s lean operating model, mutual trust, and commitment built over the years.
“These guys are hands-on. They have their finger on the pulse,” said Pavlo Bilan, 51, volunteer lead of one of Trust Chain’s partner organizations, Step with Hope. The group is located in Dnipro, a southeastern Ukrainian city about 30 miles from the front line. As a humanitarian and manufacturing hub, Dnipro is a frequent target for Russian air strikes. From his o ce, Bilan points out the spot a missile had recently hit over the fence next door.
local teams is a mismatch between real and perceived needs on the ground, which they described as a Band-Aid approach to systemic issues. When Russian forces destroyed the Kakhovka Dam and flooded Kherson in June 2023, aid groups and media crews swarmed the city within hours, recounted Bilan. But they didn’t stay long.
“They want to make the appearance that [they]’re helping and they’re gone. Look, we had hundreds of visitors like that.” Bilan said.
“After day three, most are gone.”
Yet much of the hard labor happened after the cameras left. Trust Chain funded Step with Hope’s team, who stayed for months of unglamorous cleanup. Volunteers pumped basements, ran industrial dryers, dealt with rat infestations, and treated mold growth in homes.
“They have a heart for this land,” Bilan said.
Limits to mutual aid
National laws clearly define what nonprofits can and cannot do, with guidelines that volunteers must follow.
For example, U.S. nonprofits cannot fund foreign militaries or donate supplies that could be repurposed for military use. UN organizations must stay neutral—no country flags can appear in their promotional materials. Despite following every legal safeguard, humanitarian workers still find a target on their backs.
Russian forces have killed aid workers in what Amnesty International investigations suggest are deliberate attacks since February 2022. The evacuations that groups like Trust Chain conduct from frontline villages grow more perilous each month, as Russian drones hunt civilian vehi-
“Every time we had a rocket strike in the Dnipro area, straight away, [Trust Chain] would be on a call, what’s happening? What support do you need?” Bilan said.
Step with Hope and all Trust Chain partner organizations spend every dollar on an evacuation mission or project, accounting for it through receipts and expenditure logs. Bilan said these logs keep the relationship accountable and healthy.
The Ukrainian-diaspora leadership’s cultural familiarity is also key to their success.
“They understand not only the language, they understand how people think and how people move, what makes them sad and what makes them happy and what makes people tick,” said Bilan.
One frequent pain point experienced with foreign aid workers for Bilan and other
“This is not solving a problem. Drones solve the problem. I needed to find some project that will not be destroyed by [the Russian government].”
cles along escape routes.
Across Ukraine, nearly everyone knows at least one friend or family member killed by Russian attacks.
“They aim directly at us. They pay attention to us,” said Dmytro Myshenin, the founder of Angels of Salvation.
In the fall of 2024, Mitsuta lost one of her team members. A Russian drone killed a 27-year-old while he was distributing firewood in the Mykolaiv region.
“He didn’t have [a bulletproof vest] on because they thought there were no Russians nearby,” recounted Mitsuta.
U.S. law prohibits nonprofits from donating to people in combat, though there is no explicit law banning personal donations to foreign military personnel. As a 501(c)(3), Ukraine Trust Chain maintains strict boundaries around funding military activities. But even this careful distance creates friction as Ukrainians seem more invested in military action.
The walls of Kyiv are plastered with posters advertising fundraisers for military aid, such as raves to sponsor specific army brigades, store discounts for active-duty soldiers, and special clothing lines with a portion of proceeds going towards the military. Online, links to direct deposits of soldiers proliferate, featuring photos of the exact vehicle or drone system needing repair.
Kalmus, 36, has trained hundreds of volunteers to make drones at her workshop, KLYN Drones.
While foreign governments and donors have given millions to humanitarian aid in Ukraine, local fundraising e orts have partially shifted to support the military. According to Angels of Salvation, which operated with a budget of over $19 million in 2024, domestic donations to their humanitarian organization totaled just $20,000 in the three years since the fullscale invasion.
When the buildings get bombed again
When the invasion began, Kalmus split her time between humanitarian missions and military support, including procuring and donating supplies, medical kits, and drone equipment to frontline units. But when Russian forces crossed the border again in May 2024 and bombed the Kharkiv region villages she’d been reconstructing, something broke inside her.
“I was angry, and like they broke my heart. With what I was rebuilding, I gave my emotions. I loved those people.
Kseniia
TOP: WENDY WEI FOR BORDERLESS
MAGAZINE; BOTTOM:
COURTESY KSENIIA
KALMUS
& POLITICS
Love— loved the locals. We became friends,” she said.
After that, she saw no reason to focus on rebuilding or humanitarian missions altogether.
“Because this is not solving a problem. Drones solve the problem. I needed to find some project that will not be destroyed by [the Russian government],” she explained.
Throughout the summer of 2024, she studied at a drone school before launching KLYN Drones in August. Her new venture is what she calls “closing the loop.” When she can, she searches for the military units deployed in the same villages she helped rebuild with Trust Chain, and supplies them with drones.
“They hit the targets of the enemy in Russia, and in this way, they prevent shelling our villages that we had been rebuilding,” Kalmus said.
Her operation runs like a small factory. Kalmus recruited about three dozen volunteers who work in shifts of five to seven people, assembling frames, attaching motors, and applying insulation. She said they’ve gotten so good at their work that they can put together 100 drone frames in four hours. While other volunteer organizations have cited burnout, Kalmus says she never lacks willing hands to help assemble drones.
Klynn Drones’s donors also receive updates on where their money goes, just like Trust Chain supporters, though the content is of a different nature. Thousands of small-dollar donors follow Kalmus’s regular stream of first-person drone footage soaring over buildings or tanks before detonating an explosion, paired with screenshots of the money transfers that made each hit possible. Between February and April 2025, Klamus rode the media splash that ensued from a viral interview between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, raising approximately $75,000 from foreign individual donors, mainly from the United Kingdom and Germany.
Meanwhile, watching his former partner give up on humanitarian work and switch to military operations was painful for Cherkasskiy.
“That hurt me deeply,” he admitted. “[But] I understand it, I respect it, I totally support you, but it is a tragedy for me. . . . It does make me feel like what we do is irrelevant.”
He still promotes Kalmus’s work on his personal social media. Trust Chain’s social media accounts regularly share updates about Kalmus’s military operations, even though the organization can’t legally support them financially.
Redefining resistance
Three years of war have fundamentally changed the nature of volunteer work in Ukraine. The initial surge of foreign donations has slowed. What once felt urgent to Americans now struggles to maintain their attention, as the Trump administration’s bait-and-switch on military support to Ukraine fades into the background amid many other crises. The simple rescue operations of 2022—get someone to a train, provide basic assistance, and make it to safety on their own—have been replaced by situations with no one solution.
“It’s a totally di erent context, much harsher, much more tragic—just a [much] more complicated story,” Cherkasskiy said. The repetitive nature of fundraising has worn him and even the most dedicated volunteers down.
“After three years, where every week you get $2,000 to do this, it’s impossible to feel that this $2,000 is [still] something special, you know, but it kind of takes the same e ort to collect it,” he said.
The toll has been both physical and emotional. Mitsuta picked up a smoking habit
during her long drives to the front lines. Days of wearing a Kevlar vest and helmet on end have injured her back. Some volunteers have stepped away altogether.
“Many people burned out, many people, of course, moved on, tired and so on,” said Bilan, of Step for Hope.
Those who remain have learned to adapt their methods and community relationships to the work. Mitsuta has found ways to reclaim parts of her personal life. “The past three years are gone, and they are not coming back. I allow myself to enjoy life when I can,” she said, showing o her touched-up platinum blonde hair and gel manicure.
Early in the war, he pulled all-nighters for weeks and was ready to take out a second mortgage on his house to continue the work. Now, he is more honest about his limitations. He still sends monthly newsletters and takes every scheduled call with the Ukraine team. However, he is more skeptical of an aid industry that expects volunteers to maintain indefinite crisis-level engagement.
Is it enough to rescue and rebuild when the destruction never stops?
“I buy new clothes. I go to karaoke with my friends.”
Hardly a natural politician, Kalmus says her experience of becoming a public figure for KLYN Drones has made her more confident—and more cynical.
“Before that, I was seeing life in dark or bright colors only. Now I see the gray,” she said.
Ukrainian military personnel tell Kalmus they’re exhausted and don’t have vacations, “but they said, like we will, ‘This is our land. We will fight till the end, but we need the support.’”
In Chicago, blue and yellow Ukrainian flags still wave from many two-flats. Cherkasskiy continues playing traditional Ukrainian folk songs in bars.
Cherkasskiy pragmatically describes his work as “like a sail.”
“It’s set. As long as there is wind, it’s going. But if the wind stops, it’s gonna stop.”
In their own way, Trust Chain partners in Ukraine remain committed to the e orts that started over three years ago.
As Mitsuta explained when everything began in February 2022: “I was here. I had my car. I had money. I can go.”
Today, volunteers still face the same fundamental choice—they’re here, they have resources, they can act. The only question is: how? v
Liubov Sholudko contributed reporting and translation support.
m letters@chicagoreader.com
Daniil Cherkasskiy and Kseniia Kalmus in front of a burnt column of Russian tanks COURTESY KSENIIA KALMUS
A KN-23 ballistic missile hit a residential building in Kyiv in April, killing 13 and injuring
Grub in the tub is like a return to the womb
Don’t let anyone yuck your yum.
By MIKE SULA
Everything hurts all the time.
I’m more than halfway through an 18-week training regimen for October’s Chicago Marathon. It’s the second time I put myself through this, so the progression of pain is familiar: My right hamstring whimpers at the slightest tension. The left hip flexor strain that enfeebled me a few weeks ago lingers like a bad dream. The ghost of last year’s shin splint haunts me mile by mile. And phantom daggers periodically pierce my cracked and calloused orc feet without warning.
So I’m spending a lot of time in the bathtub, trying to freeze or heat my muscles and joints into some state of functionality, alternately with blue ice packs bobbing in the frigid water, or heaping scoops of eucalyptus Epsom salt dissolving in the scalding schvitz.
I’m also eating a lot of carbs, which the human body converts to glucose that burns like rocket fuel during long runs.
I’m always hungry. So one of the few physically enjoyable outcomes of this torture is the freedom to eat as much pasta as I want, whenever I want—wherever I want—with no consequences like, say, weight gain or diabetes.
One evening, alone at home, the ache, exhaustion, and ravenous hunger awoke something primal. Rather than risk either one of them going cold, I chose to sink into the tub with a heaping bowl of bucatini with pesto. There were consequences.
As I shoveled parmesan-dusted pasta into my face, dopamine flooded my brain, and I fell into a trance. In full limbic hijack, I couldn’t see or feel anything but pure consumptive reward. I couldn’t hear the back door opening either.
The person I live with, who usually keeps my most degenerate impulses in check, came home earlier than expected and caught me, with the steam rising around my head and a twirl of noodles forked halfway toward my open gob.
“I’m really worried about the person you’re going to become if I die first—some kind of bathtub eater. My god, that’s so fucking gross.”
I left it unsaid that this was a clear violation of a preexisting house rule: Don’t Yuck Someone Else’s Yum.
But is it fucking gross? This harmless hedonistic practice that goes back millennia to the very dawn of humanity?
Eight years ago, paleontologists described the fossil of a 530-million-year-old microscopic sea creature they concluded was humanity’s oldest ancestor. The “bag-like” Saccorhytus resided on the seafloor where, according to the journal Nature , it ate by engulfing food particles with its oversize mouth, not unlike the way responsible grown adults evolved to eat pasta in the bathtub.
Just because we eventually grew flippers and galumphed out of the sea didn’t mean we stopped eating in the water.
These days, the aquatic ape theory, which holds that our human ancestors branched o from the great apes when they learned to hunt shellfish, is mostly discredited as pseudoscience. But consider when our very first experiences with nourishment occur: They’re well before we even become viable fetuses, when we’re mere embryos implanted in the dark comfort of the maternal womb. Surrounded by amniotic fluid—which is composed mostly of water—we first absorb electrolytes through our developing tissues. And then as the fetus develops, proteins, lipids, and, yes, carbohydrates come into the stew (four critical things you need to consume when training for a marathon, by the way). Who doesn’t long to dive back into that nurturing sanctum from time to time?
It’s been pointed out to me that fetuses pass urine back into the amniotic sac, and occasionally they poop into it too, which can cause serious medical problems when labor day rolls around.
The authors of the Saccorhytus study also suggest that the critter might not have had an anus and that it excreted its waste back out through that big, gaping mouth (not too far o the mark from your favorite scampish fetus). It kind of subverts the old chestnut that one shouldn’t shit where one eats. Let the record show that I do not endorse peeing or pooping in the bath—especially when eating.
The record also shows that in 2021, Nature dialed back its assessment about the Saccorhytus–human connection. Instead, they think the big bag-mouth might actually be an Ecdysozoa, a group of invertebrates that include arthropods and nematodes. Nevertheless, they still can’t find a butt on Saccorhytus. Putting that aside, humanity’s first known ancestors were fish that definitely shat where they ate.
But speaking of poop, high and low culture is full of precedent, if not permission, for eating in water. Think of Bill Murray’s idiot genius Carl Spackler in Caddyshack (1980), sanitizing the evacuated and drained Bushwood Country Club swimming pool after a rogue “doodie” was spotted bobbing in the clear, chlorinated water. Sweeping the bottom in a hazmat suit, he discovers the suspect log and
holds it aloft. “There it is,” he shouts, taking then takes a lusty chomp out of the o end-
older ones, seem kind of judgy. There’s the Greek mythological Tantalus,
he tried to feed them his dismem-
punishment, he was sent to Hades
ever he bent to drink, right under
holds it aloft. “There it is,” he shouts, taking a whiff. “It’s no problem,” he says, then takes a lusty chomp out of the o ending Baby Ruth candy bar. Some references, especially the older ones, seem kind of judgy. There’s the Greek mythological character of Tantalus, who stole ambrosia from the gods. Or maybe he tried to feed them his dismembered son. The record’s unclear. As punishment, he was sent to Hades and forced to stand chin-deep in a pool whose waters receded whenever he bent to drink, right under a fruit tree with its branches just out of reach. On the other hand, the seeming inverse of this, the ancient Roman-Celtic carny game that caught on during Samhain and evolved into Halloween’s bobbing for apples, was initially all about scoring (i.e., making a baby) with a
loween’s bobbing for apples, was initially with future mate.
Then there’s the middle panel of Dutch
Then there’s the middle panel of Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, which, among other temptations, features a polycule of hot, naked young things in a pond nibbling on a giant floating blackberry, implying they’ll pay dearly for the pleasure in the afterlife.
Modern myths are a little more ambiguous. The “enormously fat” glutton Augustus Gloop from Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory chugs from the chocolate river only to tumble in and get sucked up through a tube leading to the fudge room, which squeezes him down to waiflike dimensions.
A few years later, Roger Daltrey was wallowing in a tub full of cold baked beans, a few dribbling down his chin, on the cover of 1967’s The Who Sell Out. That had to feel nice. In the 2023 film Saltburn, the dubious comeon “I’d drink your bathwater” was weaponized when Barry Keoghan’s plebeian Oliver spies on Jacob Elordi’s blue-blooded Felix pleasuring himself in the tub, then proceeds to slurp up the brew as it circles the drain. In my initial defense of water-born eating, I also failed to remind the self-appointed bathtub Taliban at home that when this film first came out, they thought that scene was “dripping hot.”
No one bats an eye at a glass of whiskey or wine in the tub. A shower beer is perfectly acceptable in polite society. The Reddit subthread R/showerorange seems wholesome too, devoted to the “enlightenment” of people eating refreshing citrus in the shower, the collateral stickiness washed cleanly down
JOE MILLS FOR CHICAGO READER
the drain. It features mostly oranges, but also yuzu and Buddha’s hand. And some go rogue with Skittles, cookies, Haysmith’s Seville orange and Persian lime gin, and deep-fried chicken wings.
“I’m really worried about the person you’re going to become if I die first—some kind of bathtub eater. My god, that’s so fucking gross.”
eating I’ve come across since discovering its pleasures on my own, especially since some posters block lurking foot fetishists by wearing socks or Crocs in the water. (That kink has its own subreddits.)
That latter group seems better suited for the 4,700-member subthread with hundreds of photos of people bathing and enjoying everything from saucy ribs to deviled ham on toast, to (lots of) pasta, often with their bare feet splayed under the faucet in the background. Some photos are quite civilized, especially when folks take the time to support their food above the bathwater, like a pair of baguettes serving as the cross-tub tray for Babybel cheese and a copy of Sissela Bok’s Exploring Happiness: From Aristotle to Brain Science
At first, this seems like the most pure, shame-free, id-enabling expression of bathtub
Then again, a lot of it is stunty: a raft of Cap’n Crunch free-floating in the tepid water; raw turkeys as bath slippers in a tubful of potential salmonella; clumps of Duke’s mayo coagulating in warm water.
In fact, that last one comes from the subreddit’s top 1 percent poster, who just seems like a performative menace.
Come to think of it, most of r/bathfoods is pretty fucking gross. But I don’t like to yuck other people’s yum.
I do like to lock the bathroom door now, though. v
m msula@chicagoreader.com
Chartreuse is pure, ascetic, Carthusian pleasure
The herbal liqueur enjoyed a pandemic-era renaissance, inspiring inventive products like Green Key to keep up with demand.
By MICCO CAPORALE
At the height of lockdown, one curious trend emerged that has outlived everyone’s sourdough starter and Animal Crossing village: a taste for Chartreuse. Named for the Grande Chartreuse monastery in the Chartreuse Mountains of France, the herbal liqueur is produced by a small sect of Carthusian monks using a recipe given to them in 1605 that took more than a hundred years to refine. Shortly after stay-at-home orders were issued, consumer demand for Chartreuse doubled. But unlike most alcohols, roughly the same amount of Chartreuse is made each year regardless of appetite. Even five years later, Chartreuse can still be tricky to find at many liquor stores, so distilleries across the country have been making attempts to satisfy Chartreuse’s rabid fan base. The most impressive yet might be the locally made Green Key.
For decades, Chartreuse was considered old-fashioned—not something most people would order on its own, except maybe goths attracted to its romantic history, emerald hue, and spicy-sweet flavor like a liquid clove cigarette. (I first learned about it as a teenager reading horror author Poppy Z. Brite; Chartreuse was the leisure drink of choice for the vampires animating the world of Lost Souls.) Then the Last Word—a cocktail made from equal parts Chartreuse, gin, maraschino liqueur, and lime juice—became one of the biggest drinks of the cocktail revival in the early aughts. Chartreuse suddenly had a place on the front bar, and mixologists delighted in experimenting with its range. When COVID-19 hit and most bars closed their doors, many people took up bartending as their lockdown hobby.
I was walking down the street wearing a Chartreuse T-shirt,” recalls Matthew LoFink, the national manager and spirits specialist for Chartreuse’s American distributor, Frederick Wildman & Sons. “Someone came up to me like, ‘I’m a bartender, I love Chartreuse.’ ‘Great, where do you work?’ And they’re like, ‘Oh, I bartend at home.’ Like, ‘You’ve never bartended at a bar before?’ They’re like, ‘No,
I just watched these videos, and I make these cocktails.’”
tending into a modest social pleasure during an otherwise isolating time. As an ingredient of choice among drink slingers, Chartreuse began flying o store shelves—but, according to LoFink, it was suddenly in higher demand at the few bars still open, too.
Maybe enthusiasm was higher because the conditions were better for appreciating Chartreuse’s subtle complexity. Similar to Buddhist monks who renounce worldly life in pursuit of spiritual discipline, Carthusians retreat to the countryside to practice asceticism. All they do is sleep, work, and pray—in most cases, entirely within the confines of their minimalist monasteries. In an excerpt from her book You Have a New Memory shared with n+1 magazine, author Aiden Arata describes her experience on a two-week silent retreat at a French Benedictine abbey similar to the Chartreuse monastery: “Spiritual sequestration is meant to punish—as the ascetic monk Dorotheus of
things on their own timeline—what they see as God’s timeline—regardless of the outside world’s demands. When filmmaker Philip Gröning approached the monastery about making a documentary, 16 years passed before he got a reply. To the Carthusians, things take as long as they take. The results speak for themselves.
Chartreuse is made from 130 secret herbs, plants, and flowers to create what was first promised to them as an “elixir of life.” As the story goes, a French artillery marshal shared an alchemical manuscript of that title with some monks living near Paris in 1605. The loosely described recipe traveled to the order’s headquarters, where monks devoted more than a century to perfecting the drink’s distillation process until 1764, when they debuted Elixir Végétal de la Grande-Chartreuse. Today’s green Chartreuse—its milder counterpart and the color’s namesake—and yellow Chartreuse arrived in 1840. Multiple times, the order has faced religious persecution that’s required safeguarding Chartreuse’s recipe or fighting for its manufacturing rights. How it’s made continues to be such a secret only three monks at a time know: two hand-selected distillers and their apprentice. According to LoFink, the monks will even place orders for ingredients they don’t use just to confuse anyone attempting to pry.
“Slightly a year after the pandemic started,
Home bartending gave people a way to experience some of the comforts from their lives before lockdown. Not only could they still unwind with their favorite drinks, but they could also share them with members of their household or pod, transforming home bar-
Thebes succinctly wrote of his body, ‘It kills me, so I kill it’—but it’s also a means to an end: mortification of the flesh, the deadening of human sensation to heighten awareness of the holy.”
Sensory deprivation to increase perception is a cornerstone of multiple spiritual traditions, but the Carthusians also prefer to do
Before 2020, not as many parties were curious. Then the beverage became more precious than toilet paper. Not only were everyday people hoarding Chartreuse, but pandemic-related shipping delays interrupted supply replenishment. In 2021, the business arm of Chartreuse asked Father Superior, the head of the order, if the monks could provide more to satisfy high demand. He refused. In January 2023, the order issued a formal statement on the matter. The Carthusians maintained that making more Chartreuse would interfere with their ability to maintain a high-quality product with low environmental impact and still allow for appropriate time for devotion rituals.
As the pandemic started, local hospitality veterans Michael McAvena and Soo Choi were returning from a vineyard and distillery tour
Locals Michael McAvena and Soo Choi created Green Key, a Chartreuse-inspired spirit made with more than 72 botanicals
JEREMY YAP/COURTESY WILDERNESS CLUB
Chartreuse is made from 130 secret herbs, plants, and flowers to create what was first promised to them as an “elixir of life.”
Alexander before launching
of Europe—what the couple describes as a “wine nerd’s dream.” McAvena cut his teeth at the Violet Hour and the Publican before receiving StarChefs Chicago Rising Star Sommelier award in 2010 and being appointed to Zagat’s 30 Under 30 for Outstanding Industry Excellence in 2013. Choi began working in restaurants at Lula Cafe and was mentored by One O Hospitality’s Terry Alexander before launching two successful coffee shops, one of which— Hyde Park’s Plein Air Cafe—she continues operating today.
Columbia College, Cicerone classes. They’ve
The art school alumni (School of the Art Institute and Columbia College, respectively) met in 2009 when Choi, then working at Big Star, attended one of McAvena’s Cicerone classes. They’ve been inseparable since, sharing an artist’s sensibility for coffee and alcohol and an obsession with terroir—how environments influence crops and their flavor. Holed up in a onebedroom in Logan Square in the spring of 2020, Choi, ever the entrepreneur and taking solace in her vacation memories, began daydreaming about the pair becoming winemakers.
“I was like, I would love to make wine, but none of us come from a winemaking background or a winemaking family,” McAvena says. “We don’t have vineyards; land is super expensive.”
But McAvena is a tinkerer. As a hobbyist, he’s homebrewed everything possible. As a professional, he’d just finished developing a series of low-alcohol botanical-infused cider spritzes for a client and was experimenting with making cider-based vermouths. Getting into winemaking would be a challenge, but he saw a path to making a wine-based aperitivo. In 2023, the pair did a short run of a northern Italian–style bitter called Misoo—a portmanteau of their names. Reception was generally positive, but the couple saw that it didn’t solve any problems. Keeping up with the Chartreuse
India to source them. After much fanfare and many messes, he settled on a recipe that uses upwards of 72.
“I have to thank Soo for her patience with my lunacy,” McAvena says. “[Soo had] to taste 110 proof alcoholic spirits at like nine in the morning because that’s when your palate is most neutral. . . . I’d be chasing her around the house with glasses while our dog barked.”
“I’d be like, ‘No! No! I can’t do it today!’” she laughs. “Eventually, I’m like, ‘Mich, it’s perfect. Pencils down.’”
Chartreuse,” LoFink says. “It’s meant to be enjoyed out. I don’t think you should have a bottle of Chartreuse at home and sit on it for years and years. . . . Chartreuse is very easy [for bars] to obtain in Chicago right now. Any bars that say they can’t haven’t tried in a while or their reps or distributor don’t understand the allocation system. Just make a phone call and ask.”
not the Carthusian one,
Wine
liqueur recipe from 26 Luxardo—purveyor
therefore a company with a vested interest in protecting the availability of a Last Word–style
demand? Now there was a problem. Creating a spirit that rivaled Chartreuse had become something of a holy grail in the booze community. Passionate bartenders began making DIY attempts, and manufacturers started introducing Chartreuse-inspired products. For instance, the small Brooklyn distillery Faccia Brutto introduced Centerbe (supposedly, it’s styled after a Benedictine recipe, not the Carthusian one, and while its name translates to “one hundred herbs,” it only uses 20). Terlato Wine Group resurrected a “secret” herbal liqueur recipe from 1874 to make Fontbonne 1874 (it only uses 26 plants). Even Luxardo—purveyor of the gold-standard maraschino liqueur and therefore a company with a vested interest in protecting the availability of a Last Word–style drink—entered the market with Del Santo herbal liqueur (it uses around 20 plants). Apart from their lack of depth relative to Chartreuse, each one misses other signatures—by using artificial colors; leaning into the wrong flavors, like lemon or anise; or using herbal extractions rather than macerating herbs.
After three intense years of research and development, McAvena and Choi launched Green Key in March. McAvena loved the challenge of achieving something around 110 proof that stays green from natural chlorophyll and draws inspiration from a recipe that was perfected extremely slowly. He scoured the depths of Reddit and read every Chartreuse-inspired recipe he could find, even seeing if ChatGPT could solve the mystery. (“I don’t love AI . . .” he adds.)
He read about the plants indigenous to the region and the history of the Carthusian order, and he fell in love with the idea of church as a cure-all, with Chartreuse having a medicinal quality influencing a mind–body sense of wellness. He identified as many as 50 quintessential botanicals, some of which were new to him, then worked with suppliers as far away as
McAvana and Choi felt something sacred about their own journey pursuing the enigma of Chartreuse, and they share the monks’ dedication to all-natural ingredients, complex flavors, and sustainability. They think of Green Key as something that unlocks a portal to that deeper spirit. LoFink is of the mind that Chartreuse substitutes only deepen enthusiasm for the brand (“You’re basically always saying, ‘Compare me to the original’”), and while he recognizes there’s still a low Chartreuse supply on the consumer side, 75 percent of the stock goes to bars for a reason.
“Bars and restaurants are the lifeblood of
Chartreuse hasn’t raised its wholesale price in more than 20 years, but some liquor stores have been selling bottles at a 150 percent markup simply because they can. The hoarding continues, and no one knows if or how tari s might impact future prices. For those looking to enjoy a Chartreuse-based cocktail at home (the pandemic hasn’t ended, and many vulnerable people still need to stay home more than they’d like), Green Key promises a delightfully reverential take on the iconic French liqueur with a whole lot of Chicago charm. And at about $60 per bottle (Chartreuse is $53 wholesale), there’s a lot more to enjoy than its flavor. v
m
mcaporale@chicagoreader.com
20). Terlato
RWILD & SUBLIME
Seventh anniversary show Sun 10/ 12 , 6 PM, Lincoln Lodge, 2040 N. Milwaukee, eventbrite.com/e/wild-sublime-7th-anniversary-show-tickets-1588457441969, $28 ; podcast episodes at wildandsublime.com
LET’S TALK ABOUT SEX
Karen Yates reminds us that pleasure can be W d & Sublime
The theater artist and sex educator wants us to connect with our bodies and minds.
By KERRY REID
Karen Yates spent years as a theater artist, so being connected to her body was something that would seem to come naturally to her. “I always had a real interest in physical theater, and the physicality of theater, and how the body moves in space,” she says.
Her many credits as a performer and director include work with companies such as Writers Theatre, American Blues Theater, and now-defunct companies such as Oracle Productions, Backstage, Eclipse, Red Tape, and Piccolo Theatre. She also served as associate artistic director of Chicago Opera Vanguard, directing workshop productions of longtime Chicago solo artist David Kodeski’s The Suitcase. The latter, like much of Kodeski’s work with “true-life tales” drawn from personal artifacts such as journals and letters, involved a hidden story of a life from a past time, spurred by his acquisition of a suitcase full of letters and photos documenting relationships among the gay literati of 1950s New York.
Yates began her own voyage of self-discovery after a midlife divorce set her on what she describes as “a really deep sexual journey, really discovering aspects of myself and very much exploring myself. And as that was happening, I realized learning about sexuality or working in sexual health or working in the sexual realms would be very interesting.” Yates’s new path included getting trained as a neotantra teacher (a practice which combines tantric practices with more Western sensibilities and personal transformation).
“And then right after that I found out about somatic sex education,” says Yates. “And so that’s really working with the idea that we are able to sense the body from within. It’s like the body in total, the sense of this body spirit, if you will, and the sexual implications of that. So somatic sex education can be hands-on, but it can also be helping clients understand how to really process and interpret the signals their bodies are giving them around sexual impulses. This was very mind-blowing. This wasn’t just like sex ed—reproductive system, STIs. I was in my early fifties, and a lot of what I was learning was stu I had never thought about, contemplated, knew nothing about.”
Yates went on to train as a somatic sex educator who now does intimacy coaching with couples. But she hasn’t left the stage behind.
In October 2018 at Stage 773, Yates began what was originally called Super Tasty—a live talk show about sex, relationships, and intimacy. It soon moved to Constellation Chicago and was renamed Wild & Sublime. During the 2020 pandemic shutdown, Yates pivoted to create a podcast version of the show, which is still going strong. In October, Wild & Sublime celebrates its seventh anniversary with a live show at Lincoln Lodge.
The impetus for going public about sexuality came from a private experience. Yates says,
“I had a real turning-point moment with a man in an intimate encounter where his shame was so great about his sexual preferences and what he wanted to do that he walked away from the encounter. And I was blown away. And I thought, ‘What can I do? What can I do as a person who is now becoming an educator and has this background in theater?’ And it was just a lightning bolt moment. It was, like, ‘I’m gonna do a show where we talk about sexuality, frankly, and we talk about sex positivity.’”
The subjects covered in Wild & Sublime run a broad gamut, but especially in the live version, they draw on the theatrical sensibilities and connections that Yates honed during
her years on Chicago stages. “It’s like the old-fashioned talk shows. There’s conversation, then there’s some entertainment.” The latter, says Yates, could be anything from an erotic storyteller to a stand-up comedian to a burlesque act. “Sometimes there’s a demo of some sort.”
With the advent of the podcast, Yates went from producing the show live monthly to three or four times a year. Since the podcast started during COVID, it’s perhaps not surprising that the first two episodes focused on “getting laid during COVID.” Since then, the podcast has covered polyamory, healing from sexual trauma, therapeutic BDSM, spicing up long-term
Karen Yates (R) and guests at a live presentation of Wild & Sublime JEFFREY
relationships, and much more. The fifth season, entitled “Sex With Comedians,” brought in local comics such as Adam Burke, Deanna Ortiz (twice named best stand-up in the Reader’s Best of Chicago poll), and Archy Jamjun.
Yates’s work in theater often showed an interest in economic and political hierarchies woven with personal conflicts. Yates directed April De Angelis’s Ironmistress for Oracle, which follows a mother and daughter (the former inherited her late husband’s foundry) as they spar over the latter’s ability to freely choose a husband out of love rather than social position. She’s continued to explore those personal and political power dynamics with Wild & Sublime.
“There is a saying that I learned in somatic sex ed school, which is, ‘People who are in touch with their pleasure can’t be controlled,’” says Yates.
“We, society at large, at the moment, especially now in these days of late-stage capitalism—it’s all like the mechanization of the body, and the body as producer of goods and services. We can all get very controlling about how well we are producing and are we doing enough every day, and ‘I don’t wanna take the time to do X,’ or ‘I don’t wanna take the time to just sit and look out the window.’ Or ‘I’m not even aware of how uncomfortable my body feels right now as I work on this deadline, because my boss wants this deadline.’ Or ‘I’ve been standing in a plant doing this mechanized work over and over again, and my body is exhausted and my body hurts.’”
my lover to take so much time with me.’” Yates wants to help people connect in the moment and realize, “I’m in charge of my impulses. I understand what I’m doing.”
It’s not just about personal connections and intimacy, either. Yates observes, “COVID really fucked us over, and I think we all realize this. Like, I think many of us are realizing we’re still in a post-COVID world where this massive disruption has happened, and it hasn’t entirely resolved itself. And one of the really unfortunate things around COVID that is still reconciling itself is group activities and the dearth of group activities now. And I see the recent theater closures [including Stage 773, where Yates’s show started out, and Links Hall, where Yates did a residency] as part of this. A lot of the places I used to go to don’t exist anymore, or people just don’t wanna go out.”
She adds, “But bodies and space together, we are community. We are community organisms, we are tribal organisms. And to be in the field with other people—I mean the same energy field smelling the pH pheromones, feeling what we’re giving o . When groups are together, there is kind of a giving over of control to the group spirit. This can be very pleasurable.”
“People who are in touch with their pleasure can’t be controlled.”
Connecting with your body is an act of resistance, as Yates sees it. “Once people start really owning their pleasure, they begin refusing situations where their body is not in a pleasurable state. Now, when I say pleasure, I’m talking from small-‘p’ pleasure to big-‘P’ pleasure. From the pleasure of just existing in a body, which is a privilege, you know? We’re here right now in a body. The body is what connects us to this reality. And we treat our bodies like shit.”
For Yates, a big part of what she hopes to do with Wild & Sublime and her coaching and education work is to help people overcome shame, much of it related to trauma, and to our collective national inheritance of puritanical views about being self-indulgent.
“Shame keeps us sometimes from this large‘P’ pleasure, you know, like, ‘Oh, I don’t want
I ask Yates about some of her own favorite discoveries from all the guests she’s had on Wild & Sublime over the years.
“I will say probably my biggest shift has been around how I conceive of kink,” she says. “And, you know, when I first started the show, I was very obviously pro-kink because the show was about sex positivity and dismantling shame. But there were definitely kink and other areas of sex positivity where I was growing with the audience. I was learning and understanding why people gravitate toward kink. Some people just skew naturally toward the practice. And so my understanding has really expanded hugely.”
If you free your body, your mind can follow.
“We all have these areas in sexuality where maybe we’re confused or we don’t understand, or there are maybe blocks or obstacles,” Yates says. “And these are amazing places to, instead of seeing something as a block, see it as a doorway. And are we willing to open the door? Because there can be some really amazing stu on the other side.” v
m kreid@chicagoreader.com
Featuring
steppenwolf.org
W LF DANCE OF THE DEATH
ensemble members Kate Arrington, Tim Hopper, Caroline Ne and Namir Smallwood with Emilie Maureen Hanson
Written by ensemble member RAJIV JOSEPH
Directed by ensemble member K. TODD FREEMAN
An ode to the onscreen hand job
Across genres and sexualities, it’s a storytelling device that comes in handy.
By DANIELLA MAZZIO
The hand job. Also known as a handy or HJ. Getting jerked, tugged, or whacked off. Second base, short stop, or even third base, depending on the regional dialect. Fingering, finger-banging, finger-blasting. Manual stimulation (if you’re particularly freaky). . . . Blushing yet? Or just cringing?
There’s a juvenility to the act, often associated with the earliest exploratory brushes of sexuality one experiences before leveling up to the good stuff. “I remember hearing like, ‘Oh, this girl would go on this date with this guy—oh my god, she gave him a hand job in the movie theater!’ It was kind of a branding,” says Iona Bodem, shorts programmer for Reeling, Chicago’s LGBTQ+ international film festival. Upcoming erotically charged programs like LUST and His Sacred Flesh might arouse some movie theater heavy petting, but Bodem emphasizes that the symbolism of touch in a short like Skin on Skin (2024)—about the connection of two men in a German slaughterhouse—is worth the audience’s attention. “It’s this very raw, incredibly beautiful portrayal of trying to get what you want in a world that largely doesn’t want you to have it.”
Much fuss has been made about the state of the sex scene; undoubtedly, sex, eroticism, and sensuality have declined in cinema. What is lost is more than titillation, but crucial information about character, relationship, and theme that can’t—and shouldn’t—always be limited to words.
And so, we go back to the hand job, because for its immature reputation, it’s been a longtime star of sex scenes—and arguably, it is one of the most valuable storytelling tools in a filmmaker’s grasp.
Almost 30 years later, the Wachowskis’ Bound (1996) continues to set the standard for a well-crafted sex scene. Susie Bright, author of Susie Sexpert’s Lesbian Sex World, ended up serving as a consultant on the sweaty, sapphic
scenes and is often considered one of the first intimacy coordinators for a major film.
“It’s not in our role to sanitize the ‘steam,’” says Jyreika Guest, a Chicago-based performer and intimacy coordinator, “but to support the development of physical language so the performance can be brave, look dangerous, and not traumatize those within the work.”
Like any other scene in a movie, there’s a
ship. Violet leads the seduction, takes Corky’s finger into her mouth, and directs it downward toward its target. Violet’s control in this moment keeps us guessing throughout the film whether she’s pulling Corky’s strings.
the scene marries Chiron’s loss and isolation with his growing desire to be cared for.
The Master (2012), a very different flavor of sexual repression, also places a significant hand job at the midpoint—an intimidating one in which Peggy takes control of the slipping behavior of her husband, Lancaster, revealing the cracks that could undermine the fallacy of Lancaster’s position as an untouchable leader.
right way and a wrong way of doing things, and one misstep could turn sexual chemistry from steamy to sleazy. Bound’s lead baddies
Corky (Gina Gershon) and Violet (Jennifer Tilly) may indulge in sleaze, but the sex is all spark. The pair give in to their attraction just 12 minutes into the movie—the magnetism pulling them together is instant and explosive, adding danger to their relationship by juxtaposing their fiery chemistry against the temper of Violet’s gangster boyfriend, Caesar. But there’s more important information that we learn from their coupling, and it all comes back to the hands: We’re introduced to Corky as a handywoman working on the apartment next door, communicating to us (and Violet) that she’s good at fixing all sorts of things with her hands. They’re a multiuse commodity— and Violet’s ticket out of her stifling relation-
Minutes later, a much more explicit scene tells us this isn’t just a consummation of opportunity, but true desire. As both women are naked, there’s a vulnerability that was absent in their previous engagement, and Corky, whose hands are so skilled in plumbing and pleasuring, is now the one prone and receiving. We learn later how powerless she feels with her hands literally and figuratively tied, and that’s what makes her relaxed intimacy with Violet especially significant. We may continue to question Violet’s motives throughout the movie, but ultimately, we learn that Violet is fixing up Corky in a way no one else has before.
More recent movies understand touch as symbolism for care, particularly in queer relationships, adding a sensitivity to the act even if it’s exploratory and new. Moonlight (2016) frames an intimate moment and hand job between teenage Chiron and Kevin on the beach—the former’s first sexual encounter— with tenderness and significant weight. Taking place almost exactly at the film’s midpoint,
“I think in queer portrayals, anytime there’s a hand job, it’s usually a signifier of, like, ‘I’m giving you this.’ It’s almost an act of kindness,” says Bodem. “For straight couples, it’s weaponized.”
Indeed, it’s common to see a hand job easily exemplifying the gender dynamics of the movie. (A number of these aggressive handys penetrate Nicole Kidman’s career.) Look at Parasite’s (2019) mutual masturbation exchange between the Parks (in their very silky pajamas) and the uncomfortable way it expresses the dispassionate, oblivious nature of their relationship; the hand job Gawain receives in The Green Knight (2021) and its representation of his failure to embody true knighthood; or two separate hand jobs in The Brutalist (2024) that reveal László and Erzsébet’s struggle to find mutual understanding as they reclaim their lives.
There are exceptions to Bodem’s observation, as the power dynamic of touch and pleasure isn’t limited to heterosexuality: In The Favourite (2018), Queen Anne’s blurred ideas of servitude and love are exploited as Abigail turns a moment of tending to the queen’s pain into a manipulative, sexual act. In Passages (2023), the narcissistic Tomas explores bisexuality with Agathe, but the di erences in their gaze foreshadow that Tomas is not interested in Agathe’s joy, but her a rmation of his talents.
Regardless of sexuality, “Much of the art created and presented today reveals the depth of dynamics, psychoses, and traumas faced by characters that are very relatable to real life,” says Guest.
Shame—whether warranted or not—has been a staple of sexuality since at least the arrival of the Puritans, and shame particularly pulses through the act of the hand job in its symbolic overload of innocence and control, distance and connection, and give and take. These are experiences that make us human, and lying back through the ebbing sensations of shame and curiosity can work us through the long, hard path to happy endings. v
m letters@chicagoreader.com
SHIRA FRIEDMAN-PARKS
FILM
The pleasure evoked by moviegoing (of which, this past week, Clint Eastwood’s 1985 film Pale Rider at the Davis Theater has been the standout) is di erent for everyone who counts it among their biggest vices. For me, it’s wholly unquantifiable but rather qualified by small, discrete moments in the experience that add up to my overall gratification. First, there’s the movie theater itself. Often a commanding structure, less so than they used to be (one source claims that the average movie palace had more than three thousand seats), it has a clear purpose often denoted by its facade. It houses the magic within; it’s the portal to another world. There’s also a purity to it—a big building wherein what’s asked of you is only to watch.
There’s pleasure also in the lobby and at the concession stand. This is the first point of gathering before each moviegoer enters the movie of their choosing. It’s also where, once the screening is over, some viewers may choose to stand and chat about whatever it is they just saw. The pleasure inherent to the concession stand is obvious, of course, though I’m somewhat of a purist (less so than actor Isabelle Huppert, who famously once said, “No snack, no drink, no food, just am focused on the movies—no noise”) and think popcorn—maybe candy—and soda— maybe beer—are the true moviegoer’s snack of choice. But what a delight it is. I’ve been to Alinea, but fresh, buttery popcorn and crisp Diet Coke might just be better.
For some reason, I find walking the aisle to my seat at the movies a particularly pleasurable
A still from Gremlins (1984) COURTESY WARNER
ENTERTAINMENT
experience. At the Music Box Theatre especially, I like to go in stage left, all the way down the aisle, and then plunk either in the front row or in the two-to-four-seat rows on that side. When I get the seat I want, with an unobstructed view: heaven. Pure heaven.
You’re probably asking yourself, what’s better than all this? Well, the movie itself, of course. Most of the time, at least. One could say movies are like pizza, much like sex is like pizza: Even when it’s bad, the experience of having viewed it in a movie theater is still pretty good. But when it’s exceptional, it has the potential to be life-changing and become a tattoo on one’s soul, a permanent mark that forever changes who you are as a person. It’s an ecstatic experience—I think often of Kathleen Collins’s Losing Ground (1982), wherein the protagonist is concerned with having such an occurrence—that for me is unlike any other. (And perhaps the best part is that I often get to have these experiences with the love of my life, so, you know, the primary definition of pleasure is also a factor.)
I’ve come almost five hundred words to say that I can’t really describe the kind of pleasure that movies give me. Rather, like real, physical pleasure, I feel it in my bones, on my skin, in my hair, on my tongue. It’s an entirely ine able experience, and that’s part of what makes it so gratifying.
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.
REARLY TO BED Sun-Thu 11 AM-7 PM, Fri-Sat 11- 8 PM, 5138 N. Clark, 773 -271-1219, early2bed.com
Since I started testosterone, or T, in April, I’ve wanted to talk about my dick: the one I’ve always had (my mom says large clitorises run in the family), the one I’m growing, and the one I want to buy. It’s a keystone of my transition, and it excites me. But it’s di cult to slide into casual conversations with virtually anyone without it feeling inherently sexual. So, alone in my bedroom I remain, handheld mirror between my thighs, eyes wide as I scroll the Grow Your T Dick Reddit page and compare what I’ve got to my peers on the web.
Bottom growth, or clitoromegaly, occurs when the clitoris lengthens and the clitoral hood widens in response to testosterone hormone therapy. Not only do we grow a phallus, but the world of what we can do with our bits expands, too. The lack of open conversation about bottom growth, however, means some guys are surprised when it starts happening to them.
“I was scared. I’m not gonna lie,” says 28-year-old Yarit Rodriguez. When Rodriguez started testosterone in Idaho nine years ago, their doctor prescribed them a higher dose than he should’ve, so their bottom growth developed quickly over a short period of time. They were initially confused, so they checked in with their doctor to make sure there weren’t any complications.
Rodriguez remembers telling their partner that they felt shy about being intimate because of the changes they saw unfolding. “I had built a relationship with my vulva in a very di erent way, and now it doesn’t look the same, and it feels very di erent. It’s a lot more sensitive. . . . And, so, I [was] wanting to be transparent about all those things in a way that didn’t feel like I’m sexualizing anything.”
Jude Eggert calls bottom growth the most surprising thing to happen to him during his five years on T. Two months into hormone therapy, his area became more sensitive. It would protrude and strain against their underwear. Eggert could feel blood rush toward his growth—he started to get erections.
“I freaking grew one myself,” Eggert says. The longer they’ve been on T, the larger it’s grown. He had to figure out what was going on down there on his own, though. “I don’t think anybody’s, like, shouting it from the rooftop. So, it’s hard to find available information.”
Why does bottom growth happen? Medical research shows that the clitoris develops from the same basic area and tissue as the penis—
but doctors don’t know much more than that.
Family medicine doctor Kathleen Bock says it’s useful to think of the body as a rocket ship that grew on a tree—in other words, it’s extraordinarily complicated and underresearched. They say it was a running joke among classmates in medical school that they never learned about the clitoris. “I can learn about the molecular basis of digestion, but all you can tell me about the clitoris is it’s basically a penis?” they joke. “There’s always a point at which we don’t know the answer to ‘why?’ ‘What happens?’ is the question we answer before we can ever answer ‘why?’”
never learned is the question ever answer prescribing hor-
What do I do with this thing?
How trans guys can get acquainted with their new dicks
By DEVYN-MARSHALL BROWN (DMB)
Bock has been prescribing hormone replacement therapy (HRT) and working with trans patients for four years. They say that starting T will cause a person’s voice to lower, their skin to become more oily, their muscles denser—it’s easy to get buff whether you’re trying to or not—and their body to produce more red blood cells. Other common changes include increased acne, changes in aggression and sex drive, and bottom growth.
Some people on HRT can grow up to three or four inches of bottom growth. This is different from a micropenis, Bock says, which describes a penis that’s two standard deviations below average for people assigned male at birth, usually one to two inches in length.
“Oh, my god. I love it,” Rodriguez says of their own bottom growth. What began as confusion eventually turned to euphoria. The more they talked about it, the more they liked their body.
Eggert says the changes to his body on T make him feel like he’s seeing himself for the first time. For years, he felt disconnected from sex with strap-ons. With his bottom growth, he can insert into and fully penetrate his partner in most positions. “We [also] practice anal sex,” he says. “And so, then, the bottom growth made sense. The way that I have sex now is mostly like a heterosexual couple.”
Kai Scott doesn’t have rigid expectations for his transition. Now two and a half years into hormone treatment, they say they’re committed to taking their body’s changes as they come. But sometimes, when he’s turned
didn’t know that that
on, intimate, and in the bedroom with someone, he’s shocked. “Watching my dick grow has been great,” Scott says. “I’m like, ‘Damn, that’s me.’ Like, ‘Oh, it’s big.’ I didn’t know that that could happen down there.” The first time they penetrated with their T-dick, they felt rattled. “I was like, oh shit, it actually went in there.” Before HRT, Scott always enjoyed scissoring with a partner. Penetrating someone with his bottom growth is a similar sensation. “But I can stroke,” he adds, “and it’s a very a rming stroke.”
For all the fun it brings, growing a dick feel can feel awkward, too. When my own bottom growth becomes erect, I start walking like I’m trying not to piss on myself. I get those Demi Lovato Disney knees as I try to manage the sudden sensitivity.
Taj Warren, who has been on T for five years, says it was sometimes painful—not unbearably so, but enough to be uncomfortable. “It was cool until it wasn’t,” Warren says. “[When] you’re trying to handle [work] business [and it’s] rubbing against underwear . . . after a while, it hurts because it’s so much friction.”
The first time they penetrated went in there.” Before HRT, Scott always enjoyed scissoring with similar sensation. “But I can very a rming stroke.” bottom growth becomes erect, to against underwear . . . after a while, it hurts much
Eggert says it can be inconvenient, because they’ll become insatiably horny in nonsexual situations. After a year and a half on HRT, the discomfort of Eggert’s underwear chafing his dick made him go commando in every pair of pants he owns. “I literally stopped wearing underwear 100 percent of the time.”
Searah Deysach wants to make sure that everyone who wants a penis has access to one.
As the owner of Chicago’s premier feminist sex shop, Early to Bed, Deysach wants everyone to access pleasure and gender-expressive items in a safe and comfortable environment. When she opened her shop in 2001, she says she received lots of requests from trans folks for items like packers and stand-to-pees
KIRK WILLIAMSON
BOTTOM GROWTH
(STPs), that weren’t readily available.
A packer is a phallus-shaped object or prosthetic someone wears to create a bulge and mimic the shape of a penis. An STP allows people with vulvas to urinate while standing up. Many packers today double as STPs.
Deysach recalls that, back in 2001, the only packer on the market was a product called Mr. Limpy. It was sold by Fleshlight, a company that primarily sells cisgender male sex toys, as
with a blue silicone cup that creates suction and works for a variety of sizes. “We cannot keep [it] in stock,” she says. “It’s like the gold standard.”
The same goes for pumps, which have long been marketed to cis men under the false premise that they can lengthen one’s penis. They can, however, increase blood flow to the area, making the penis seem temporarily larger and helping to maintain an erection.
The lack of open conversation about bottom growth means some guys are surprised when it starts happening to them.
a novelty item. Unbeknownst to the creators, however, it quickly became a favorite for trans folks to use as gender-a rming packing gear.
“Folks were taking the Mr. Limpies and retrofitting them into STP devices by boring a hole in them, including tubing, and then attaching a baby bottle nipple or a medicine spoon to the wearer’s side,” Deysach says. “We actually had someone in Philadelphia who was retrofitting those for us back then.”
Similarly, smaller pumps and clitoris pumps have been used to temporarily enlarge nipples and the clitoris.
either the arm, leg, or abdomen to create a larger phallus.
J.A., who asked to remain anonymous because he is partially stealth at his job, had a metoidioplasty in 2021 after being inspired by the stories of people like Lou Sullivan.
Sullivan was an activist and trans man who, before his death in 1991 at 39 years old, published We Both Laughed in Pleasure about his social and medical transition, which included a metoidioplasty.
Eggert has a passive interest in bottom surgery but doesn’t think he’ll ever pull the trigger. He doesn’t do well with anesthesia, worries about complications that can come with the surgery, and doesn’t think he’ll be happy with anything besides a penis he was born with. “I just wish I had a dick. Like . . . a real dick.”
his packer and STP combo. His packing not careful. “You can eas-
Deysach says one of the most popular is called the Trans Masc Pump. Made by the New York Toy Collective, a queer-owned company, the product is designed with masculine packaging and comes in a smaller size to better fit the anatomy of trans guys. Many anecdotal stories from trans masculine folks on testosterone who consistently pump report that doing so leads to a growth in the phallus while erect, but not flaccid.
Warren eventually wants to get a phalloplasty, because he can influence the final size and will be able to penetrate his partner with it. “It’s something that I always was curious about,” he says. “I used to wake up and pray and be like, ‘God, please, let me wake up tomorrow and have a penis.’”
Rodriguez has no interest in bottom surgery, although they did when they were younger. For them, meeting gender-expansive people and “nonbinary trans baddies” has reframed their ideology around gender and sexuality. “I’ve really grown to have a healthier relationship with my vulva. I’ve grown to like my body and how it looks.” v m dmbrown@chicagoreader.com
I haven’t graduated into packer territory yet. I feel sufficiently gender-affirmed just using the men’s locker room at my neighborhood gym, even if I’m one of the only guys using the stall every day to piss. But whenever Warren is trying to look his best, he wears his packer and STP combo. His packing underwear is a little too big, so it moves around when he’s not careful. “You can easily look like you have the most awkward boner if you’re not careful,” Warren says. “You definitely want to get more snug-fitting boxers if you’re going that route.”
Eggert pumps as regularly as they can remember to and notices that it helps them get hard more quickly and generally helps blood flow to the area. He’s not sure if growth has happened because he never measured himself, but he wants to be bigger, so he pumps. “I’ll stop whenever I decide that it is really working for me.”
Deysach says small, have begun making products
Deysach says small, boutique and mainstream companies alike in recent years have begun making products specifically for people who have experienced bottom growth from testosterone and want to engage their “bits” in a traditionally masculine jack-o action. While strokers have been sold in sex shops for years to cisgender men, Deysach recommends the ShotPocket,
Two surgical procedures for people assigned female at birth can make their dicks look like a stereotypical cis man’s: a metoidioplasty and a phalloplasty.
A metoidioplasty keeps the original size and shape of the phallus created by bottom growth, but it creates an incision where the phallus meets the body so it becomes free-moving. Other procedures like a scrotoplasty, for example, can create a scrotum with implanted testicles. During a phalloplasty, a graft of skin is taken from
area. He’s not sure if growth because but created by bottom growth, but
PHOTO ESSAY
The personal is pleasurable
Cultivating our own peace is both restful and radical.
By KIRK WILLIAMSON
“Joy is resistance. We can’t fight if we’re exhausted and demoralized.”
Giving herself space to unplug is admittedly tough for Dawn Xiana Moon of Andersonville. In addition to her full-time position as a UX (user experience) design manager trying to help Medicaid serve people better, Moon is the founder and director of Raks Geek/Raks Inferno, a belly dance, circus, and fi re performance company. “There’s always what I call my ‘internal Asian parent’ that guilts me when I’m not being ‘productive.’ Curling up with a book is the ultimate indulgence—it’s restorative, and it’s just for me. I’m trying to remind myself that rest isn’t optional—it’s a requirement,” which is a vital realization in the wake of what she calls “the Everything.” As an Asian American and an immigrant in a country invested in deputizing masked men to effectively disappear Brown people from its streets, creating a cozy, private, inviolable space is key to survival. And Moon has made her space into a true extension of her personality. “A lot of the art on the walls is my painting, my photography. I stenciled the walls. The basement is my home dance studio, and my piano and guitar are there. There are sculptures and paintings made by friends, stuffed animals from artists at comic cons, hundreds of books, and crocheted Baby Yodas stuffed into unexpected corners.” KIRK WILLIAMSON
“Time spent alone, in the quiet, being accountable to nobody but myself, and not having to worry about anyone else’s needs for a bit is a rare treat.”
Residential real estate broker Rob Teverbaugh of Irving Park navigates a constant stream of “personalities,” whether they belong to buyers, sellers, attorneys, appraisers, lenders, or inspectors. Teverbaugh considers it an honor to be trusted with a decision as important as fi nding a new home, but his genuine love of people can be a bit taxing on his mental well-being. “Being an only child, I’ve always found comfort in solitude—it’s my default state of ease and comfort. I like people, I just want them to be just a little farther away from me than they usually are.” Teverbaugh fi nds that distance and disconnection—or is it really reconnection?—in his garden. His grand plans for the garden involve knowing the right time of day to work, photographing and charting the garden’s progress, all the while holding true to his instincts. “Being in the garden now, I’m surrounded by proof that trusting myself, my knowledge, my vision for what can happen if I try hard enough, and following my convictions have value.” But the garden has further philosophical lessons to impart: “Conversely, as I continue to try to bend nature to my will, and nature pushes back just as relentlessly, I’ve learned that compromise may also have value.”
KIRK WILLIAMSON
Iwas hoping to move past checking my phone first thing every morning to see what megastupid course of action our government has taken today. But as things only get more stupider, it’s just gotten harder to take a break. The neverceasing shitstorm that is our world can crush us only if we don’t take up armor against it. Self-preservation, and how we do it, is our will and our choice.
Staying sane and strong requires action—and sometimes
“ . . . the feeling of being in the great outdoors, which helps me keep at least a bit of a grip on my sanity.”
that action is simply slowing down to find peace and recharge your mental, social, and spiritual batteries. Slowing down is a deeply personal process, as we all have our own triggers and our own paths to recovery. “What makes me happy and fulfilled?” “What do I need to make it through not another day, but today, this moment?” It’s only once you’ve asked yourself these questions that you can begin to formulate what the answer looks like for you.
Stowell of
Park is an avid outdoorsperson, but health circumstances have precluded him from enjoying that exploration to the fullest extent. So Stowell, currently recovering from surgeries and unemployed as a result, took matters into his own hands, creating a back-deck oasis. “I normally take long walks, hikes in order to keep my mind right. I’ve had to have a series of surgeries on my feet, so I’ve had to vastly lower my activity level the last few years, which sucks. But having the back patio set up nice lets me at least get the feeling of being in the great outdoors, which helps me keep at least a bit of a grip on my sanity.” And what does Stowell carry with him into this accessible Eden? Nothing more than his own thoughts, books (both comic and text), maybe a snack and a beer, and “occasionally, my existential dread.”
KIRK WILLIAMSON
The four people in this piece have done the work and are reaping the rewards. Cognizant of the fact that we can only do so much to change the outside world, these Chicagoans have been able to reflect and to find the nurturing pleasure of personal peace, however often and for however long they can grab it. v
m kwilliamson@chicagoeader.com
“It is just me and my favorite indulgences for no purpose other than a perfect hour.”
“Baths are a big luxurious hug to yourself, a reminder that you’re a human being , not a human doing .” Lincoln Square’s Beth King seeks this hug at least two or three times each week, more o en in winter. The bath ritual, which she calls “Perfect Hour,” represents a deliberate escape from outside stressors. “This space gives me a door to close—literally and fi guratively—on the attention grabs of digital devices, projects to address, and decisions to make. It is just me and my favorite indulgences for no purpose other than a perfect hour. I mean, I get clean, but that is largely secondary.” King has her rejuvenating ritual down to a science. “Nothing enters the room that doesn’t serve ‘Perfect Hour.’ I bring a book, a New Yorker, a very cold gin and tonic, a jazz cigarette, and a thick towel. I have a little stool that stays beside the bath. It has bath oils I make, a pitcher of Epsom salt, bubble bath, and candles from friends, and a small pot of shea butter for a er-bath slathering.”
KIRK WILLIAMSON
George
Rogers
NIGHTLIFE AS RESISTANCE
Dance against war
In the midst of invasion, clubs in Kyiv draw on Chicago house music’s spirit of communal liberation.
By WENDY WEI
Just after sunset on a Saturday in April 2025, the fog machine at Kyiv’s hottest techno club, K41, was already working overtime. I could barely see a foot in front of me, so I kept my hand on the shoulder of my Ukrainian friend Tetiana Burianova as we weaved through partiers in fetish gear, pasties, or the standard black tee and Salomon shoes.
Formally called ∄ (a mathematical symbol indicating “does not exist”), K41 is famous for hard techno, but it’s also firmly rooted in the inclusive ethos of Chicago house. The club is a queer safe space, with no windows and a strict ban on photography and video. Outside, the last light of dusk was still visible, but inside, the darkness, the packed crowd, the programmed lights, and the thick cloud of vape smoke and sweat made the party feel convincingly like an after-hours rave—especially because I was sleep-deprived after a week of nightly air-raid sirens.
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Kyiv has been under a strict midnight curfew. Venues close at 11 PM to give revelers time to get home before transit shuts down and the real trouble starts. Attacks have ramped up dramatically since Trump took o ce again— in July, Russia launched more than 6,400 missiles and drones into Ukraine, the highest monthly total of the war. Phone out of battery? Can’t find an Uber? Tough luck. That encore better be worth risking a fine, police detention, or even your life.
It was only 8 PM, but by wartime math, we were fashionably late.
The Ukrainian capital’s nightlife was vastly different just a few years ago, before the invasion turned the country into the site of the biggest European conflict since World War II. Kyiv’s electronic scene became famous in the 2010s for marathon sets, insatiable audiences, and experimental excesses, but it has
contracted sharply during the war. It’s also grown more caring, community driven, and tight-knit. The city’s parties are more than just a balm for the trauma of years of Russian attacks; they’re literally helping Ukrainians survive by raising money for the military.
Yatsenko wants to keep Closer open and thriving not because he imagines clubbing will keep the war at bay but rather because he knows it’s going to creep in no matter what he does.
“We aren’t just hedonists partying during war,” says Borys Stepanenko, 41, a DJ and cofounder of Kyiv shop ABO Records. The store opened in August 2022, just a few months after Russian forces were pushed out of the region. Early in the invasion, Stepanenko stopped DJing for a while and thought about quitting the music business entirely. But he
and other DJs have come to understand that it would be a self-inflicted wound to shy away from throwing loud, joyful parties.
Thanks to their dedication, spaces to get lost in the music endure. Wartime Kyiv has emerged as an unlikely sanctuary for not just the rhythms that define Chicago house but also the communal values from which the genre emerged.
In February 2022, Sergey Yatsenko was looking forward to hosting Chicago house artists for his 42nd birthday bash.
It had been a good couple of years for the Dnipro native. Yatsenko is a cofounder of dance club and cultural center Closer, which is built into a cavernous former ribbon factory, and he’s put the space to good use. There’s ample room for concert stages, art exhibitions, cinema screenings, lectures, street-food vendors, and more. Before the war, Closer’s flagship festivals, Strichka (Ukrainian for “ribbon”) and Brave! Factory, were drawing thousands of people each May and August, respectively. Its regular music programming, famous for sets that went on as long as people
kept dancing, fueled Kyiv’s rising reputation as one of Europe’s best places to party.
Yatsenko, a lifelong house head, had just the lineup booked to celebrate—Honey Dijon and the Blessed Madonna (both familiar to regulars at Chicago’s Smart Bar) and French deep-house producer Dyed Soundorom.
“But I was just dreaming,” says Yatsenko. “They didn’t come.”
Two weeks later, Russian forces attacked Ukraine on three fronts—in the Donbas region in the east, from Crimea in the south, and across the border with Belarus in the north. The latter included a ground invasion of Kyiv. Instead of bumping wall-to-wall with crowds swaying to driving beats, Closer would be quiet for months to come.
Since then, Yatsenko hasn’t been able to hear what he considers real live Chicago house music straight from the source, but he keeps it present. When I met him at Closer in April of this year, his close friend Stepanenko, a fellow house head and Closer resident, was outside in the club’s garden space spinning an all-vinyl set inspired by what he calls the “nasty Chicago house” sound.
Revelers at the Strichka Festival in May 2024, held at Kyiv club and cultural center Closer
I sat inside with Yatsenko in the vintage furniture shop that’s tucked away in Closer’s maze of corridors. It’s filled with Bauhaus couches and modern reading chairs, and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy is rumored to have an armchair on back order. As soon as I mentioned that I was a journalist with the Chicago Reader, he smiled and said, “Oh cool, Chicago city for the house music.”
Yatsenko grew up in the 90s in what he calls a “regular Soviet family.” He doesn’t remember hearing music played in the house, so his awakening came through local radio, where he heard mixes of artists such as Aphex Twin, Green Velvet, and Derrick Carter. He collected Russian magazines that covered rave culture, most notably Ptyuch. Western cultural commodities were still di cult to get.
“If you had this magazine, you are the boss and everybody wants to speak with you, because you know what they are writing about music,” Yatsenko says.
Stepanenko has had a similar journey. ABO Records has the only collection of old-school house records in Kyiv, a small but expertly curated selection sourced from labels all over
the world—Strictly Rhythm, Fragile, Two Step, Natural. As a kid in the 90s, he could only get his hands on mainstream electronic CDs and tapes that in retrospect he says are “not even worth mentioning.” Back then, only the smallest stores sold a respectable variety of international music. When he started collecting, he soon found legendary Chicago label Trax Records.
“Chicago music, when I discovered it, it really changed my view,” Stepanenko says. “I think it was my biggest, earliest influence. I read and discovered every single that preceded [Trax] and what was after.”
By the early 2000s, Derrick Carter, DJ Sneak, and other Chicago house DJs were regularly touring in Eastern Europe, giving folks used to Berlin’s stripped-down sound the opportunity to experience house in person. Yatsenko caught his first house show at Romania’s Sunwaves Festival in 2008. He’d bought a ticket because he was intrigued by the bill, which included minimal techno DJ Ricardo Villalobos and DJ Sneak playing back-to-back on the same stage. “Usually it’s not possible to see” such a combination, he says.
that would have put Ukraine on a path to enter the European Union. It had been overwhelmingly approved by the country’s parliament, and Yanukovych himself had seemed to support it—but under intense economic pressure from Putin, he chose instead to align with Russia. As the possibility of EU membership slipped away, young Ukrainians saw their dreams of freedom, mobility, and better jobs go with it. Tens of thousands gathered in Kyiv’s Independence Square, called Maidan Nezalezhnosti, and their defiant protest grew into the largest democratic mass movement in Europe since 1989.
The Maidan Revolution culminated in the February 2014 removal of Yanukovych, who’s been living in exile in Russia ever since. That victory came at a steep price: Security forces killed more than a hundred protesters, most of them targeted by snipers or shot at closer range by police.
Standing in the crowd as the duo went on, he felt confusion shift into excitement. “[There] was maybe like four thousand people on the dance floor, and they played 132 BPMs, quite fast,” Yatsenko says. “It was all the way house music, but quite fast and quite pumpy. It was lots of surprises. It was like a new invention. We just didn’t hear [any]thing similar.”
International exchange has always included the dissemination of music. And whenever Ukraine’s physical borders have been permeable, the country’s electronic music scene has been transformed by an infusion of new records, influences, and people. After the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 and Ukraine’s independence in 1991, American records made their way into the former Eastern Bloc and fell into the capable hands of producers such as Stepanenko and Yatsenko.
When Ukraine’s scene blossomed into a global electronic music destination in the 2010s, it was also the result of political turbulence and democratic victories.
In late 2013, Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych turned his back on an agreement
During the months of unrest, aboveground nightlife was suspended, so Kyiv events collective Cxema threw underground parties in abandoned factories and under bridges, serving glitchy, droney techno music to Ukrainian youth surviving economic and political crisis. For Ukraine’s club scene, the end of the revolution was a turning point. What had started as sporadic illegal parties marred by police raids suddenly went mainstream amid international recognition from venerable media outlets such as Dazed, i-D, and Mixmag.
In 2017, Ukrainians were granted visa-free travel to the European Union. Cheap flights started popping up between Kyiv and big cities with thriving club cultures—Berlin, Barcelona, London—bringing international DJs in and sending Ukrainian ravers out.
“This helped our younger population to see the world, to learn something new,” Stepanenko says. “It was a very fruitful time when new parties were happening all the time. We saw a lot of interest from people from abroad who were just coming to have a good party. A good long party.”
In November 2019, K41 opened its doors on Kyrylivska Street, the source of the “K” in its nickname. It’s run by an anonymous team whose members have still not been identified. Their decision to make the venue an LGBTQ+ safe space was inspired by a visit to legendary Berlin club Berghain and the freedom they could feel there. A K41 team member explained the di erence between Berlin and Kyiv for The Face in 2022: “When I go partying in Berlin or Paris, I always feel that people take their freedom for granted because it’s normal
Strichka Festival, May 2024 COURTESY SERGEY YATSENKO
for them,” they said. “When Ukrainians go to Kyrylivska Street, they don’t take this freedom for granted because outside of that street they can’t be themselves in the same way.”
In Ukrainian society, homosexuality and gender nonconformity are still hugely taboo, and same-sex marriage remains illegal. To protect the privacy of partiers and help them enjoy being fully themselves, K41 enforces its “no photos or video” policy by requiring everyone to tape over their camera lenses at the door.
K41 and Closer share a mission to bring up the next generation of global Ukrainian DJs. In the community programming at Closer, Yatsenko tries to mimic his own omnivorous formative process. He wants people who come to the club to feel like he did back then, searching across the radio dial for mixes and poring over magazines, digging indiscriminately into disco, gabber, minimal, and every other style he encountered.
Yatsenko hopes Closer can capture the vitality and variety the Ukrainian scene enjoyed before war isolated the country. “It’s educa-
tional that people were not [bound by] this border,” Yatsenko says. “So they start listening and realize that there are lots of super nice electronic artists. Maybe they are not popular, but they really deserve to be listened to and to be here.”
K41 operates an on-site music production school called Module Exchange, where anyone can learn the ropes; talks by international DJs also help students deepen their knowledge. This commitment to giving back was a huge part of what drew DJ Alinka, 44, to Kyiv early in her career. Though born in Ukraine, she spent her formative years in Chicago, where she’d established herself as a DJ by her mid30s—in 2014, she cofounded Twirl Recordings with Smart Bar resident Shaun J. Wright. But in 2015 she took a leap of faith and moved permanently to Berlin to explore the European scene.
Kyiv stood out to Alinka right away. “It was one of the few places that I traveled where I felt like I could just grow and build something based on my skills and not anything shallow or industry based,” she says. “When I first started going there, I wasn’t a huge name, [but]
they didn’t give a fuck. They cared more about the music.”
She may not have been big then, but DJ Alinka is a staple in Kyiv now, regularly playing at-capacity shows rooted in Chicago house music and occasionally giving talks on gender in house as part of K41’s programming. In May, K41 announced her as its first international resident.
“The world kind of looks at Berlin because of the culture and the history and the importance of the music there,” Alinka says. “But I think Kyiv has its own thing, and the quality deserves its own spotlight.”
The scale of Russia’s assault on Ukraine is hard to grasp from afar. Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, and it now controls about a fifth of Ukraine’s territory. At least 1.5 million Ukrainians live under occupation. Every day, Russian tanks and infantry inch westward, aiming to claim even more ground. Since 2022, constant missile and drone attacks have killed more than 13,500 civilians and forced more than nine million people out of their homes—5.6 million of whom
have fled the country entirely. Estimated damage to infrastructure has topped $176 billion, according to the World Bank, and the cost will be shouldered by generations to come.
Stepanenko wasn’t the only DJ who stopped working when the war started. Many of his peers likewise struggled to justify making, playing, and partying to music as Russia bombed their country and their city into an unrecognizable landscape.
“I think it was not just me but all of us,” Stepanenko says. “We were questioning ourselves—like if what I’m doing is important. Because if you’re not a doctor, if you’re not a soldier, then you question in yourself, how should I help my relatives? My country?”
During the first week of Russia’s 2022 assault, K41 converted its space—a former brewery—into temporary housing for almost 200 people seeking shelter from the ground invasion. The Closer team welded together pieces of beams from festival stages to make hedgehogs—spiky steel obstacles resembling giant toy jacks, placed in the street to deter tanks. The on-site cafe sta cooked meals for local hospitals. By April, the unexpected force
continued from p. 25
Le : DJ Borys Stepanenko at ABO Records, the Kyiv shop he cofounded. Center: The 2019 Brave! Factory Festival, presented by Closer in a disused cement factory (top). Right: K41 resident DJ Alinka (second from right) rides a train from Berlin with Nastya Vogan (a fellow K41 resident), Bjarki, and Phase Fatale to play K41’s fourth-anniversary party in 2023. WENDY WEI, ROBERT POLYAK, DANIL PRIVET, COURTESY DJ ALINKA
of Ukrainian resistance had pushed the Russians out of Kyiv.
And for many youth, that meant having a spot to let loose on a Friday night.
“People do [create] culture during the war,” Yatsenko says. “They think that maybe they’re doing something not correct or not right for this period. Maybe it’s better to go to war. And we just try to [say] that it is important.”
Yatsenko says it was actually more disorienting to completely stop his routines and hobbies as a response to the invasion. He wants to keep Closer open and thriving not because he imagines clubbing will keep the war at bay but rather because he knows it’s going to creep in no matter what he does.
“You go home after the party and then you sit under the bed to feel and listen to some missiles,” he says. “You wake up and you read the news that ten people die.”
ular time. Now most events start at 4 PM and end by 11 PM.
The sound has also changed.
Stepanenko has modified his sets—no siren effects, no lyrics in Russian, no tracks from Russian producers. (A large percentage of Ukrainians can speak Russian, but in Kyiv it’s now frowned upon to use the language in public.) He used to collaborate often with Russian artists—“There was a bit of connection always between Kyiv and Moscow in terms of parties”—but he’s since cut all ties.
As for house music, Yatsenko says interest in its soulful, flowing melodies has been “very down” during the war. “People just prefer more harder music or minimal music,” he laments.
TCloser returned to holding events, but the first few featured slower, quieter music. “We just started doing a little bit of a dance party, because we think that people just need to switch o from this news,” Yatsenko says. But it soon became obvious that what people needed was a semblance of normal life.
The entire industry had to adjust to operate in the new reality of war. One nonnegotiable factor was the midnight curfew dictated by martial law. Kyiv had been notorious for indulgent all-night DJ sets that regularly lasted up to 17 hours. Back then, Stepanenko says, people showed up around 2 or 3 AM, and DJs weren’t required to stop playing at any partic-
he war has also forced Ukraine’s club scene to take on a role that might seem antithetical to its roots in a subversive underground—it’s become a fundraising network for the military.
K41, Closer, and ABO Records all donate part of their revenue to army units, often tied to former employees or regulars who’ve gone to continued from p. 26
Chicago Reader’s new biweekly column from Chicago historian
Dilla’s Chicago is sponsored by Clayco,
Strichka Festival, May 2024 COURTESY SERGEY YATSENKO
fight. “So no Red Cross, no like this peaceful charity,” Stepanenko says, referring to the $3.7 billion in humanitarian aid the U.S. has given Ukraine since 2022. “We help with relatively small donations that help our friends who are on the front line.”
Ukrainians make these pleas for donations using QR codes on concert flyers and social media, much like Chicagoans running their own fundraisers for friends. But instead of paying rent or a hospital bill, Ukrainians will be trying to repair a broken-down tank or upgrade a drone-detection system. K41 has raised almost a million dollars this way, much of it for the 72nd Mechanized Brigade, one of the infantry units that defended Kyiv during Russia’s initial invasion. The brigade bears the honorific “Black Zaporozhians,” after a cavalry unit active during the Ukrainian–Soviet War more than a century ago.
Despite efforts to continue as usual, the Ukrainian scene has hemorrhaged talent. Since Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea (and especially since 2022), many top DJs have left Ukraine—some to preserve their careers, which depend on being able to tour internationally, and some to protect their lives.
In her Ukrainian performances, DJ Alinka aims to raise morale. “I feel more connected and free in Kyiv, so I feel like I play my best and most emotional sets there,” she says. “The important thing was to make people really happy and even play nostalgic stuff that I played before the full-scale, just to create that joy because I know that it’s necessary.”
Yatsenko estimates his events are now a third of their prewar size. Ever-evolving draft laws, which now apply to Ukrainian men ages 25 to 60, have scared many fans into hiding. At this point, men of draft age are also forbidden from leaving the country. “Conscription patrols” of police and military officers roam the streets of Kyiv, checking the status of passersby at metro entrances, nightclubs, and even weddings. If your draft registration isn’t up-to-date, you can be heavily fined. Between January and June, the o ce of the Ukrainian human rights ombudsman received more than 2,000 complaints about the use of force by these patrols—they’ve been accused of forcing unwilling men to mobilize by using beatings, tear gas, and detention. Yatsenko says Closer once had 300 no-shows who’d already bought tickets after a new law required all men to carry updated military documents.
Not all electronic-music enthusiasts prefer to avoid full-time military service, though. When the war started, the staff of a venue
Yatsenko frequented in Dnipro went to fight on the front lines. “So the whole team—like, the owner, the art director, and bartenders— six people [went], and one of them died,” he says. “The others are still in the war.”
Even among committed soldiers, some use their precious time o (30 days per year) to go clubbing at their old haunts—including Closer.
“I saw even two of our regular visitors, but now one of them without a leg,” says Yatsenko.
“He came for the party every time when he returned from the front line.”
At 9 PM on that April Saturday at K41, Dutch DJ Albert van Abbe was building his set to a climax. The trendy beats were fast and minimal, aligned with the club’s hard techno aesthetic.
Tetiana was nowhere to be seen. I’m sure she was mingling with industry people she knew from her former life as a party planner, before she became a video producer for foreign media organizations (NPR, the Washington Post ) that needed a “fixer” on the front lines. Tomorrow morning, I’ll be driven seven hours to Dnipro, about 60 miles from Russiancontrolled territory. I try to forget my anxiety about the day to come while swaying to avoid the six-foot-four shirtless guy who’d already spilled his beer on me. I was also ignoring the countdown in my head—60 minutes till this hypnotic, soothing trance ends. But I knew I was privileged to be heading home to Chicago at the end of the week—most Ukrainians who want to leave either can’t a ord it or can’t do it legally.
The stubborn refusal to fold under attack, says DJ Alinka, is the most inspiring thing about the Ukrainian scene. “It reminded me what it all can be—the need for community and the power of electronic music as a force of resistance and celebration of resilience in such a di cult time,” she explains. “Because, you know, how many places are having this insane club scene during a full-scale invasion?”
When air-raid sirens soundtrack every day and night, when friends return from combat with missing limbs if at all, when tomorrow isn’t guaranteed, sometimes you need a few hours to forget it all. The commitment to safety and inclusion that made Chicago house revolutionary has found expression at Closer and in clubs across Ukraine, even the ones that aren’t playing house music. When the outside world is dangerous, the dance floor remains sacred ground. v
Play!
MUSIC
Pioneering Japanese techno
DJ Wata Igarashi brings his cerebral sounds to Smart
Bar
Sat
PM, Smart Bar, 3730 N. Clark, $25, $19.75 in advance. 21+
GOOD DJS ARE DEFT VIBE CURATORS, but the best DJs—including stalwart Japanese techno producer Wata Igarashi—are also gifted storytellers. Now based in Amsterdam, Igarashi creates cerebral sets that combine the melty free-jazz spirit of Japanese psych rock with the journey-oriented narrative qualities in the vivid soundscapes of early video-game composers such as Koji Kondo. The result is a singular sense of world-building that’s dark and atmospheric without brutality or chaos. No matter the quest, Igarashi guides his listeners through the lows and highs of a moody, liquid universe filled equally with existential tension and buoyant relief.
Igarashi painstakingly considers his work from start to finish. Many DJs treat their albums like collections of ideas or attitudes to be remixed, but Igarashi approaches his like adventure arcs. On his first full-
length, 2023’s Agartha (Kompakt), he considers the fabled kingdom hidden at the Earth’s core—long a subject of fascination for occultists and esotericists. The track list alone—“Searching,” “Subterranean Life,” “Floating Against Time”—hints that the record is about something otherworldly. It opens with “Abyss,” a foggy wind sound that evaporates into an accelerating free fall, then drops you to the ground and sets you to traveling at a steady rhythm that’s as cautious as it is curious. Nine tracks later, Agartha concludes with “Eternally,” which rolls like waves undulating beneath a night sky. It’s punctuated with electronic flickers, as though ambient light from stars were grazing the water, and it carries a wistful, resolute melody. There’s a sense of closure—not just an ending but a feeling of having been through something and changed as a result. —MICCO CAPORALE
THURSDAY21
Chicago House Music Festival & Conference See also Fri 8/22, Sat 8/23, and Sun 8/24. Today’s program includes the House Dance Summit Spotlight in GAR Hall and panel discussions in Preston Bradley Hall, the Millennium Park Room, and the Washington Room. Full schedule at ChicagoHouseMusicFestival.us. 4–10 PM, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington. F b
The Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) presents several free downtown fests that celebrate distinctly Chicagoan styles of music with long local histories—Blues Fest, Jazz Fest, Gospel Music Fest—and the newest is the Chicago House Music Festival & Conference. DCASE launched the Chicago House Music Fest at Pritzker Pavilion on Memorial Day weekend in 2018, a er several years of hosting annual house-music gatherings in Millennium Park at around the same time. But ever since the COVID pandemic scuttled DCASE’s 2020 live music programming, it’s sure seemed like the Chicago House Music Festival has gotten the short end of the stick when it comes to scheduling. The event has yet to return to that plum Memorial Day spot, for one thing. In 2022, Lollapalooza producer C3 Presents helped launch Latine music fest Sueños in Grant Park on Memorial Day weekend, and it’s kept that position ever since. DCASE’s outdoor house-music programming has been bouncing around: It took the form of a couple single-day events at Pritzker Pavilion in September 2021 and 2022, a single-day Humboldt Park event (in conjunction with a Taste of Chicago satellite program) in June 2023, and a multiday festival spread around downtown in June 2024.
This year, when DCASE scheduled the Chicago House Music Festival & Conference for four days in late August, I was relieved—sure, it was yet another schedule change, but considering the devastating cuts to federal funding for anything that isn’t a scam, a cop, a gun, or a jail, I was glad to see the beloved event continue. But I didn’t expect DCASE to wait till 16 days before the event’s kickoff to announce the actual programming. What message does that send to the people who (quite reasonably) made plans for this August weekend in July? Recommended and
WATA IGARASHI, BRENDA, JOSH TONG
8/23, 10
PICK
From le : The Chicago House Music Festival &
What does it say to the performers, who could see smaller crowds? House heads can’t be happy that the city department tasked with celebrating this thriving local culture got the word out so late this year. This festival deserves to be even bigger, and it could be—but not without giving earlier notice to the fans who turn it into a party.
Fortunately, the lineup for the main event—on Saturday, August 23, in Millennium Park—is worth changing whatever plans you may already have for that day. The main stage at Pritzker Pavilion has a pantheon of historically important Chicago house figures. The schedule begins with a joint set by brothers Tony and Andre Hatchett of foundational house crew the Chosen Few (1 PM) and closes with original Hot Mix 5 member Ralphi Rosario (8 PM). In between, you can hear Power 92 star DJ Pharris Thomas (2:30 PM), ghetto-house veteran Waxmaster Maurice (4:30 PM), hip-house star Tyree Cooper (5:30 PM), and more. The fest also has three other stages, each stacked with talented DJs and producers you’ll rarely get a chance to see on a summer day (or at any other time when the sun is up). Tommaso , who often spins northwest-side clubs such as California Clipper, Masada, and Podlasie, will appear on the North Promenade’s Soulful
House Stage at 4 PM; Texture Recordings founder CZR hits the South Promenade’s Chicago House Stage at 6 PM; and deep-house veteran Specter , whose 2023 album Brutus (2009–2020) is perhaps the best dance-music homage to a beloved pet I’ve ever heard, headlines the Double Clutch Beer Garden’s Groove Garden Stage at 8 PM. —LEOR GALIL
Ben LaMar Gay, Ugochi & A.S.E. Part of the ongoing Future Folk Festival, which concludes with Laruni Hati and Shon Dervis on Wed 9/24 at Hamilton Park. 4:30–6:30 PM, Austin Town Hall, 5610 W. Lake. F b
Folk music typically sticks to traditional instruments, sounds, and themes, but it also has room for boundary-pushing artists—they’re often the ones who shaped the music in the first place, and they’ll introduce the innovations yet to come. Future Folk Festival spotlights forward-looking homegrown talent in a free series of three genre-bending outdoor performances that center the city’s Black, Caribbean, Latine, African, and Indigenous communities. It’s presented by the Old Town School of Folk Music (in partnership with the Chicago Park District’s Night
Out in the Parks) as part of an Arts & Community Wellness Initiative called Music Moves Chicago. It began last month with Cuatro Vientos Mariachi and Ecos del Pacífico Afrocolombia in Little Village’s Piotrowski Park.
For its second installment, Future Folk Festival heads to Austin Town Hall for an evening of music led by two latter-day members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, a crucial institution of the Black avant-garde. South-side
native Ben LaMar Gay is an improviser and composer who keeps an ear to the ground, no matter how far he travels, and pours his boundless musical imagination into cornet, vocals, flute, electronics, diddley bow, synthesizers, percussion, and more. He’s a prodigious shape-shifter, able to fit into nearly any setting and incorporate almost any influence—jazz, funk, gospel, Brazilian music, blues, sound art—while maintaining a consistent focus on challenging the unjust power structures that mani-
Ben LaMar Gay and Ugochi Nwaogwugwu share a bill on Thursday. ALEJANDRO AYALA, COURTESY THE ARTIST
Conference features Ralphi Rosario, DJ Pharris Thomas, and CZR as part of its Saturday lineup. WALTER S. MITCHELL III (CROWD PHOTO), OTHERS COURTESY THE ARTISTS
MUSIC
fest in our everyday lives. He’s an in-demand collaborator, appearing on releases by the likes of Jaimie Branch, the Notwist, Damon Locks, Circuit des Yeux, Dos Santos, and Makaya McCraven. In June, Gay dropped Yowzers (International Anthem), where he leads his working quartet with percussionist Tommaso Moretti, tuba player and pianist Matthew Davis, and guitarist and ngoni player Will Faber. They weave vivid tunes into a loose, playful improvisational fabric, tell immersive tales, and bathe in the glow of a small chorus of vocalists.
One of those vocalists is Ugochi Nwaogwugwu, who’s also a multidisciplinary artist in her own right, working under her first name. She’ll open this show with a set by her band A.S.E., short for African Soul Ensemble . Since breaking out of the city’s poetry scene in the late 90s, Nwaogwugwu has toured the world and released three soul-stirring albums— African Buttafly, A.S.E. (Afro Soul Effect), and Love Shot—that combine smooth, powerful singing with spoken word. Her lyrics honor her Nigerian roots and Chicago upbringing and confront racial dynamics in a quest for healing. —JAMIE LUDWIG
Wheelhouse 9 PM, Hungry Brain, 2319 W. Belmont, $20.72. 21+
The name of Wheelhouse’s second long-player, last month’s House and Home (Aerophonic), acknowledges the domestic circumstances and priorities that have shaped the band’s existence. Formed in 2005, the free-improvising trio—Jason Adasiewicz on vibraphone, Nate McBride on double bass, and Dave Rempis on soprano, alto, tenor, and baritone saxophones—initially rehearsed regularly in the vibraphonist’s attic, even when they had no gigs planned. That’s also where they recorded their first album, Boss of the Plains , which finally came out in 2013, just in time for the band to stop playing. McBride moved to Boston due to family obligations and built a business as a contractor.
Over the next decade, Rempis sustained musical relationships with both of the other members, even during the years when Adasiewicz wiped his own performing schedule clean in order to stay close
to home and begin his own contracting business. In June 2024, when Wheelhouse finally reunited for the weekend of concerts that produced House and Home, they certainly didn’t sound like strangers. Though each of the album’s six tracks was created onstage in real time, they’re not just improvisations—they’re spontaneous mutual compositions in which each questing bass figure, spiraling reed line, and swelling metallic resonance is an integral part of the whole. For this concert, which celebrates the release of House and Home, Wheelhouse are testing that established chemistry: Drummer Mike Reed will join the band for the second set. Tonight’s event is part of a monthlong Rempis residency at the Hungry Brain where he’s bringing in a different group every Thursday—it concludes on August 28 with a show by Kuzu, his trio with guitarist Tashi Dorji and drummer Tyler Damon. —BILL MEYER
FRIDAY22
Chicago House Music Festival & Conference See Thu 8/21. Today’s program, titled Chicago House Music Festival at SummerDance, takes place in the Dance Studio at the Cultural Center and in the Spirit of Music Garden (where DJs Vince Adams and Lil’ John will spin). Full schedule at ChicagoHouseMusicFestival.us. 2–5:30 PM, Dance Studio, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington; also 6–9 PM, Spirit of Music Garden, Grant Park, 601 S. Michigan. F b
Conan Mares of Thrace and Blunt open. 8 PM, Reggies Rock Club, 2105 S. State, $27.24. 17+
If I didn’t already know Chicago was a metal town, its response to Ozzy Osbourne’s death would’ve convinced me. In the days after July 22, I heard Black Sabbath and Ozzy blasting from storefronts and car stereos across the city—and it wasn’t just the usual suspects in black band shirts cranking up the tunes. I hope some of the folks who’ve seized on the passing of the Prince of Darkness as a way
to remind themselves that they love metal will hold fast to the feeling and bring it into Chicago’s live music scene. One great place to do that is this show by UK trio Conan. Formed in Liverpool in 2006, the band called their slow-moving, sludgy style “caveman battle doom,” and its colossal down-tuned guitars hit with the subtlety of the Chicxulub impactor. Conan’s seventh full-length, April’s Violence Dimension, is riffier than their early releases, with a higher rate of notes per minute, but it’s no less heavy. The raw, bulldozing sound reinforces the lyrics, which guitarist and front man Jon Davis delivers in a clotted growl or an almost forlorn howl: They address humanity’s inescapable micro- and macro-level violence and reject as absurd the notion that any single code can govern such a society. Given the state of the world, the album feels more cathartic than fatalistic. The record is also Conan’s first full-length with bassist David Ryley, previously of UK noiserock outfit Fudge Tunnel, who brings new attitude and aggression to the band’s cavernous low end on the murky plod of “Desolation Hexx” and the filthy grooves and cosmic atmospheres of “Total Bicep.” (Previous bassist Chris Fielding remains Conan’s producer, providing continuity in sound.) If Conan want to embody the feeling of violence as well as dramatize its tragic futility, they succeed: “Warpsword” is 45 seconds of face-peeling thrashy chaos, while the somber, slow-burning title track is one of their most gripping and poignant recordings yet.
—JAMIE LUDWIG
SATURDAY23
Chicago House Music Festival & Conference See Thu 8/21. Today’s program takes place on four stages in Millennium Park. The Legacy Stage (Pritzker Pavilion) features Ralphi Rosario, Tyree Cooper, Waxmaster Maurice, and more. The bill at the Soulful House Stage (on the North Promenade) includes the Chicago House Dance Summit (1–4 PM), Tommaso, CtrlZora, and Shaun J. Wright. The Chicago House Stage (on the South Promenade) features DJ Threejay x
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Patrick Wayne, CZR, Stacy Kidd, and others. The lineup on the Groove Garden Stage (in the Double Clutch Beer Garden) includes Specter, Lovebug, and Randall Dean. Full schedule at ChicagoHouseMusicFestival.us. 1–9 PM, Millennium Park, 201 E. Randolph. F b
Wata Igarashi See Pick of the Week on page 30. Brenda and Josh Tong open. 10 PM, Smart Bar, 3730 N. Clark, $25, $19.75 in advance. 21+
Milou Moon Lane Beckstrom opens. 8:30 PM, Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, $21.25. 21+
Milou Moon is the project of Emily McGill, a French American originally from Chicago who has lived partly in Melbourne, Australia, since 2016. By moving among her homes, she can stay in perpetual summer, though she made an exception when she played her official local debut at Gman Tavern this past December. McGill has released two haunting, seductive EPs with lyrics in English and French, layers of guitars and drums that converge in slowrising waves of melody and texture, and a dreamily romantic sound that recalls the lush psychedelic pop of the 60s. Her latest, July’s Rêverie, consists of four songs that navigate bilingualism, bihemispherism, and the sense of liminality that comes from moving between two different continents. Its first single, “Circles,” has a languid pulse and inviting atmosphere that doesn’t feel pinned to any specific place or era; it’s so engrossing that when it’s over you feel like you’ve been listening for much longer than five and a half minutes. “Suberosa” and “Mon Ami Interne” sell their French pop moods seamlessly to an Anglophone audience, and “Acid Based Accounting” lifts McGill’s voice over tripped-out, phase-shifted guitars to convey a slightly frightening dream state—it sounds like having a sleepparalysis demon whose presence is almost comforting. As McGill explained on Instagram, “I wrote ‘Acid Based Accounting’ about how weird it feels when you totally lose touch with your creativity, even for a little while. It kind of feels like you’re fumbling around in a dark and confusing place.” We’ve all been there, but disorientation rarely sounds this alluring.
McGill is currently working on her first fulllength as Milou Moon, collaborating with percussionist Leigh Fisher (a studio and touring musician for Dope Lemon) and keyboardist Simon Mavin (from Hiatus Kaiyote), and I expect it will be a complete gem. Opener Lane Beckstrom, who accompanied McGill at her Gman show, will present new material from his still-in-progress second solo album.
—MONICA KENDRICK
SUNDAY24
Chicago House Music Festival & Conference See Thu 8/21. Today’s program, Wind Down: House on the Riverwalk, features Julio Bishop and DJ Jerome Baker spinning at the west end of the Chicago Riverwalk. Full schedule at ChicagoHouseMusicFestival.us. 1–5 PM, Chicago Riverwalk, 306–370 W. Wacker. F b v
continued from p. 31
Conan COURTESY THE ARTIST
Emily McGill of Milou Moon IAN LAIDLAW
CLASSIFIEDS
JOBS SERVICES
SAP RTR Architect:
Product Costing and Margin Accounting, AbbVie Inc., Waukegan, IL: Conceive, design, engineer, & implement data and SAP software solutions that solve significant business problems. Investigate, identify, & implement state-of-theart technology platforms that drive productivity & efficiency gains in own function & throughout multiple business areas. Work closely with other SAP Enterprise Architects, Technical Architects in resolving complex enterprise IT architectural issues, mitigate risks, and optimize cost savings & efficiencies. Manage SAP systems development life cycle, client area’s functions & systems. Using knowledge in SAP Finance & Controlling, recommend technological alternatives for Application program development. Support Material Ledger, Actual Costing, Group costing & Standard costing in SAP. Provide Parallel Valuation, Multi-currency Valuation & Actual Costing & COGS.
Integrate Product Costing & Material Ledger to SAP Profitability Analysis (COPA). Intercompany profit tracking through product supply chain, Group costing, transfer pricing, margin consolidation & reporting solutions with SAP S/4 HANA experience. Must have a Bachelors Degree in finance, accounting, computer science, information technology, engineering, or related field of study. Must have 5 years of progressively responsible work experience in end-toend SAP implementation in controlling & finance. Of experience required, must have 5 years of experience: (i) configuring SAP Controlling & Finance submodules including General Ledger, Product Costing, Group costing, Material Ledger, Actual costing, Intercompany Reinvoicing, Profitability Analysis, Order & Overhead management, Cost center accounting, Profit Center Accounting, Inventory management & reporting; (ii) developing & directing software system testing & validation procedures, programming, & documentation SAP testing & end user training; (iii) leading SAP project implementations of the Finance & Controlling modules, including integration of Finance & Controlling modules with SAP Materials Management, Production planning, customer service & Sales & Distribution Modules; (iv) consulting with end users on designing the SAP systems to support following business processes: material & order cost calculation, product variance analysis & reporting, cost center variance analysis &
reporting, & product & customer profitability analysis & reporting; (v) partnering with business unit IT to gather business requirements in the areas of finance, accounting, & controlling & facilitating blueprint workshops; (vi) resolving complex issues in high stress & high-pressure situations & recommending technical solutions to business problems; & (vii) building optimized solutions for Life Science process, supported by consultants, to formulate application strategies & roadmaps, define templates, standards, & patterns to be used across project teams. Alternatively, would accept a Master’s Degree in finance, accounting, computer science, information technology, engineering, or related field of study & 3 years of progressively responsible work experience in end-toend SAP implementation in controlling & finance. Of experience required, must have 3 years of experience in (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi) & (vii). Experience may be gained concurrently. Will accept any reasonable combination of education, work experience & training. Hybrid (onsite 3 days a week/ 2 days WFH). Salary Range: $179,827.70$230,000.00 per year. Apply online at https:// careers.abbvie.com/en or send resume to Job. opportunity.abbvie@ abbvie.com. Refer to Req ID: REF41635U.
Accountant (Chicago, IL): Serve as an associate member of multiple client engagement teams to be involved in the handling of all aspects of federal, international, state and local taxation for clients in various industries. Job requires a bachelor’s degree in Accounting, Business Administration, Finance, Economics, or related field. Must be fluent in the Korean (must be able to read, write and speak) language required. To apply, email resume to ac3318@ gmail.com and reference job code: SHD-25.
Licensed Practical Nurses sought by Global Heritage Home Healthcare in Chicago, IL to assess and care for patients. Reqs LPN license. Benefits: Simple IRA & 5 days PTO. $72,240/ yr. Mst hv perm auth to wrk in US. Snd rsm & cvr lttr to 5875 N Lincoln Ave, Ste 226, Chicago, IL 60659.
German International School Chicago seeks Physical Education Teacher (Chicago, IL): Teach physical fitness & health ed. to elementary & middle school students in a rigorous bilingual German and English program. Reqs. bachelor’s (or foreign equiv.) in physical ed., health ed., education or closely rltd field & 1-yr exp. teaching physical ed.
at primary, middle, or HS level. Must speak, read & write German fluently at native or near-native level. Pay: $62,297/yr. Ben: med., dntl, vision, life & disability insurance, sick & PTO. Send resume to Dep. Head of School: ikirchenbuechler @germanschoolchicago. com
Chime’s Chicago, IL office has multiple openings for the following positions (various types/levels):
- DATA ANALYST [Job Code: JS0095] Analyze & measure exposure to credit & market risk threatening assets, earning capacity/economic state of an org. Some telecommuting permitted $130,000-$150,000* - ANALYST [Job Code: JS0103] Analyze & measure exposure to credit & market risk threatening assets, earning capacity/ economic state of an org. Must be available to work on projects at various, unanticipated sites throughout U.S. Telecommuting permitted $160,000-$180,000 *
*Starting base salary range for each role reflected above; salary is one part of competitive package; offers based on candidate exp & geographic location. TO APPLY: Email resume to apply@chime.com & indicate appropriate job code. Proof of U.S. work authorization req’d if hired. Chime is an Equal Opportunity Employer & fully supports affirmative action practices.
Lead Access and Reimbursement Systems Consultant (Care Model & Patient Engagement Solutions), AbbVie Inc., Mettawa, IL. Hybrid (onsite 3 days a week/ 2 days WFH). Understand company’s Patient services landscape & business process flows, data flow & application functionalities under their area. Meet with customers to gather requirements for new systems/interfaces or enhancements to existing systems & translate them into solutions partnering with technical teams, vendors, or consultants. Work with respective product owners & solution architects to develop solutions for Patient Services business needs. Coordinate research, planning,& implementation new integrations in company’s care model systems. Manage team of business analysts to manage tasks, review work product & coach junior business analysts on the team. Must have a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Systems, Information Systems or Management Science/ Project Management or related field & 5 years of experience in a lead business analyst role. Of experience required, must have 5 years of experience: (i) working in
access & reimbursement services in Life Sciences; (ii) developing solutions for HCPs to manage the patient enrollment & prescription services, (iii) working in patient copay assistance, benefit verification, prior authorization, free drug program & patient assistance foundation business processes & custom technical solutions; (iv) utilizing data management disciplines including data warehousing, data integration, data visualization, advanced analytics, big data platforms & other data centric technologies; (v) leading projects which impact at least 4000+ end users, spanning & 5 cross-functional teams as single point of contact for program management, risk mitigation & tracking milestones; (vi) managing the demand intake process, SLC documentation & user story creation & management in JIRA; & (vii) creating functional & validation test scripts & execution of UAT scripts. Alternatively, would accept a Masters in Computer Science, Computer Systems, Information Systems or Management Science/Project Management or related field & 3 years of experience in a lead business analyst role. Of experience required, must have 3 years of (i) through (vii). Experience may be gained concurrently. Will accept any suitable combination or education, training or experience. Pay Rate: $197,000 per year. Apply online at https://careers. abbvie.com/en or send resume to Job.opportunity. abbvie@abbvie.com. Refer to Req ID: REF42964Z. Manager, Data Management & Operations, AbbVie US LLC, Mettawa, Illinois. Hybrid (onsite 3 days a week/ 2 days WFH/ remote). Data Operations lead role to implement data management processes namely standardizing business rules, documenting data metric requirements, data lineage & ETL pipelines. Demonstrate high proficiency in data analytics & business intelligence tools, data integration, data strategy for continuous improvements, project management, data quality management & data visualization tools by collaboration with cross functional teams. Must possess a Bachelor’s degree or foreign academic equivalent in Management Information Systems, Computer Science, Engineering, or a highly related statistical field of study & 5 years of Data Management work experience using Structured Query Language(SQL) & leveraging Cloud-based architectures. Of the exp req, must have 2 years
in each of the following: (i) tracking & reporting KPIs data & analytics environment; (ii) translating business performance management needs into specific performance indicators & the required technical solution; (iii) distilling complex information synthesized into concise messages & communications; (iv) designing & implementing BI solutions in Informatica, IBM Cognos or Power BI; (v) developing dimensional data models, performing data integration, & generating data visualization; & (vi) working in a matrixed environment across stakeholder teams. Experience may be gained concurrently.Salary Range: $160,367.15 - $202,500.00 per year Apply online at https://careers.abbvie. com/en or send resume to Job.opportunity.abbvie@ abbvie.com. Refer to Req ID: REF43018N.
Market Research AnalystTLJ Chicago LLC (Chicago, IL). Collect & analyze customer data, create mrkt reports, forecast demand. Req. Master’s in market research, mathematical finance, or rltd. 6-mo mrkt exp (part-time accept.). Salary: $66,290/yr. Send resume: 2144 S Archer Ave, Chicago, IL 60616.
Morningstar, Inc. seeks a Senior Quant Analyst (multiple positions) in Chicago, IL to analyze large data sets and condense complex information into concise, relevant, and easy to communicate results (10%). BS deg in Finance, Comp Engg, Comp Sci, or relevant quant or financial discipline & 3 yrs of Quant Analyst role or rltd exp in soft engg, comp engg, or financial discipline or foreign equivalent req’d. MS deg in Finance, Comp Engg, Comp Sci, or relevant quant or financial discipline & 1 yr of Quant Analyst role or rltd exp in soft engg, comp engg, or financial discipline or foreign equivalent req’d. Will accept any suitable combination of education, training, and experience. Add’l specific skills req’d. Base salary: $97,760.00 - $110,000/ year. For position details & to apply, visit: https://www. morningstar.com/careers; ref. job ID REQ-051700.
Senior Data Delivery Expert (US Commercial Business Technology Solutions), AbbVie Inc., Mettawa, Illinois. Hybrid (onsite 3 days a week/ 2 days WFH/remote) Design & develop data, software, & tech solutions to business questions. Pressure-test requirements for accurate delivery. Present & lead status to business stakeholders. Prepare & present data distributions to non-tech audiences. Compile & deliver accurate solution estimates. Define scope by understanding business needs w/
technology capabilities. Elicit requirements from ambiguous business needs. Challenge where needed. Execute the software development lifecycle for new builds/ changes. Must possess a Bachelor’s degree in computer science, management information systems, analytics or related field & 5 years of work experience in a combination of data analyst, business systems analyst &/or data engineering roles. Of experience required, must have: (i) 4 years analyzing or engineering data w/ Structured Query Language (SQL); (ii) 3 years gathering business requirements & preparing & presenting orally & in writing to supervisor, nontechnology stakeholders, & peers in a matrixed organization; (iii) 1 year analyzing or transforming data w/ Python; & (iv) 1 year storing, processing, or analyzing data on cloud-based solutions. Alternatively, would accept Master’s degree in computer science, management information systems, analytics or related field & 1 year of work experience in a combination of data analyst, business systems analyst &/or data engineering roles. Of experience required, must have 1 year of each of (i), (ii), (iii) & (iv). Experience may be gained concurrently. Would accept a combination of education, training & work experience. Salary Range: $148,949$157,500 per year . Apply online at https://careers. abbvie.com/en or send resume to Job.opportunity. abbvie@abbvie.com. Refer to Req ID: REF43014H.
Senior Specialist - IT Systems EngineeringMarsh & McLennan Shared Services LLC (FT; Chicago, IL-- telecommuting/ hybrid work schedule may be permitted w/in a commutable dist from worksite, in accordance w/ co policies.) Work w/ infrastructure, architecture & software development teams to implement CI/CD automation on-prem & in Azure cloud. RQTS: Must have Bach deg or frgn equiv in IS or rel & 9 yrs of exp in the position offrd, or rel. 6 yrs of exp must include: Using Azure cloud Services incl. Azure Virtual Machines, Entra ID, AKS, Docker, Azure Networking, & Azure Storage Solutions to implement CI/CD automation. Using automation & IaC toolsTerraform, ARM Templates, Powershell, Python & Azure CLI. 10% domestic & international travel is required to various & unanticipated company & client sites. Base salary range: $157,500.00 to $224,400/year. Determined on a case-by-case basis by factors such as exp, skills, training & edu. Role may also be eligible for perf-
based incentives. We offer a competitive total rwds pkg incl health & welfare benefits, tuition assist, 401K, other retirement progs & employee assistance progs. APPLY: https://careers. marshmclennan.com using Keyword R_318422. EOE Traffic Engineer, Atlas Technical Consultants, LLC, Chicago, IL: Conduct traffic studies & analyze traffic data; develop transportation plans & design transport. systems. 10% domestic travel to field sites. Bach. in Civil Eng’g. Must have 1 yr exp. with: traffic eng.; tech. or report writing; Fed. Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Dev.; Microstation, Vissim, HCS, or Synchro; Valid DL req. Salary: $81,000$107,000 p/y. Benefits: health, dental, vision, life, AD&D, voluntary life/AD&D, disability benefits, LOA, 401k, PTO, paid holidays, EAP, edu. assist. progr. Apply at: https://www. oneatlas.com/careers/ Zurich (Chicago, IL) seeks Business Practices & Project Consultant to lead projects that supp. global strategic & operations priorities & support the intl. community through solving for rework & issuance speed/removing manual processes. Must have IPZ Cert. Occ. travel w/in the U.S. req. Remote work option w/req. travel to the Chicago, IL office once a wk. Salary: $98,946/yr. Apply at Zurichna.com/en/ careers, Job ID: 126099
Operation Manager: IL FAN TUAN LTD, in Chicago, IL. Collect data, complete analysis, and formulate long-term and short-term development strategies. MS in Business Analytics, Finance, or related. $93,974 per year. Res to 3500 S Morgan St, Unit 403, Chicago, IL 60609.
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GOSSIP WOLF
CASEY GOMEZ WALKER hasn’t gotten comfortable calling herself a musician, even though storied North Carolina indie label Merge is releasing Last Missouri Exit, the debut album by her alt-country group Case Oats . “I have this skewed idea of what it means to be a musician,” she says. “Once the album is out—and once we get on the road and I’m truly playing it every night—I think I’ll be like, ‘I can say I’m a musician now.’”
Walker traces the beginnings of Case Oats back to 2018, when she visited drummer Spencer Tweedy in Appleton, Wisconsin, where he was going to school. She brought along a song she’d just written, “Bluff,” which is brisk and breezy but also wistful and sad. She released it online at the time, and a new version closes Last Missouri Exit
A furry ear to the ground of the local music scene
summer; aside from “Seventeen” and “Bluff,” which are Walker’s work alone, they wrote the whole album together.
“We recorded that track super easy one a ernoon,” Walker says. “I didn’t have a band name or anything. Case Oats was my Internet screen name for a long time. I was like, ‘I’ll just upload it to Bandcamp under that [name],’ and it never changed.”
Walker had long thought of herself as a writer. When she moved to Chicago from Saint Louis in 2013, it was to major in creative writing at Columbia College. Throughout her years in college and well after graduation, she sporadically worked on a novel. But a er her best friend suggested she give the electric guitar a try, her creative priorities began to shi . “I bought my electric guitar, and I was like, ‘This is actually fun,’” Walker says. “Then I started putting the words that were in this barely started novel into songs.”
When Walker was invited to play a Crown Liquors show scheduled for March 2019, she said yes, though at that point she’d only fi nished one song. “That was really the catalyst for putting pedal to the metal and finishing stuff,” she says. “From there I was like, ‘OK, this is doable.’”
In three weeks, Case Oats had a full set worked up. Some of the songs from that first concert appear on Last Missouri Exit, among them the album’s first single, “Seventeen,” a besotted elegy for the intense, confused emotions of youth. Walker and Tweedy have been dating since before the beginning of Case Oats, and they got engaged earlier this
Shortly a er the Crown Liquors date, Walker and Tweedy filled out Case Oats’ live lineup with bassist Jason Ashworth and guitarist Max Subar . “They luckily understand the vision and what the sound is,” Walker says, “and just have always been able to wholeheartedly bring that to the table.”
Recording on Last Missouri Exit (which also involved fiddler Scott Daniel and pianist and organist Nolan Chin) has been finished for a couple years. The band cold-emailed a list of labels until Merge finally came through. The album comes out on Friday, August 22, and Case Oats headline a release show that night at the Hideout. TV Buddha open; tickets cost $23.65, and the music starts at 8:30 PM.
YOU MIGHT RECOGNIZE Peter Cimbalo as the live drummer for Kai Slater’s solo project, Sharp Pins, one of the busiest indie-rock bands in town. Cimbalo also records his own material as Alga, and he dropped a self-titled album under that name last month. On Alga , Cimbalo stretches his tightly arranged power pop into whimsical songs whose almost psychedelic lushness and euphonious grandeur would’ve made Brian Wilson smile. Cimbalo is assembling a live band to play Alga songs at a record-release show at Fallen Log on Friday, August 22. Current Union, Laurie Duo, and Riddle M open. Tickets are $10, and the show’s at 8 PM.
THIS WOLF MUST BE GETTING older, because the years sure seem to be flying by— somehow Pilsen vinyl shop Pinwheel Records
is already celebrating its tenth birthday. It’s throwing a party on Saturday, August 23, and there will of course be live music: Lizard in the Spring , Apiaries , and a special set of Huey Lewis covers by Ryan Powers & the Newsboys (Pinwheel has a whole bin stocked with copies of the 1983 Huey Lewis & the News album Sports .) The free party also promises sales, snacks, and more, and it runs all day, from 10 AM till 7 PM.
ON SUNDAY, AUGUST 17 , Chicago indie rockers Sick Day dropped the album Olivia’s Dead-End Solo Career , where they adorn their homespun sound with fl ourishes reminiscent of choral singing and chamber music. Front woman Olivia Wallace recorded with nine instrumentalists and singers, who helped elevate her heart-wrenching songs without stepping on their scrappy charm.
IF YOU WERE PART of the Chicago house scene in the 2000s, you probably have fond memories of Monday nights at the Boom Boom Room, a long-running party that spent more years at Green Dolphin Street (2200 N. Ashland) than anywhere else. If you were part of Chicago nightlife in the 2010s, though, your memories of the club may be less fond—it was plagued by fights and gun violence, sometimes fatal, and a er a 2015 shooting that le two dead, the city asked it to close for 60 days. It reopened briefly as Rio, but violence connected to the club continued, and the building has largely been vacant since 2017. This weekend, though, the space is reopening as an outpost of Dr. Greenthumb’s, a cannabis dispensary founded by Cypress Hill rapper B-Real . To celebrate its grand opening on Saturday, August 23, the store will host a full day of music featuring Green Dolphin veterans, among them Boom Boom Room DJs Derrick Carter and Just Joey, Power 92 personality DJ Pharris, and drill icon King Louie. The party runs from 9 AM till 9 PM, and it’s 21 and up. —LEOR GALIL
Casey Gomez Walker of Case Oats BRAEDEN LONG
SEX AND RELATIONSHIPS
Four options
Raised Catholic and missed out. Plus: Did I offend the guy who was flirting with me at the nudist club?
By DAN SAVAGE
Q : I’m a 31-year-old heterosexual woman who has been married for nine years. The math: My husband and I got married right a er university. Like you, I grew up Catholic, and as a girl/woman, all of the purity culture bullshit was foisted upon me. Over the years, I’ve come to reject everything I was brought up to believe. I never stepped out of line, and now I grieve for my younger self because I missed out on formative experiences— sexual and otherwise—that I should’ve had in my teens and 20s. I feel stunted. It was pounded into me (sadly, only figuratively) that I would deeply regret having sex before marriage. Ironically, what I actually regret is not having sex with the kind, loving guys I dated before my husband.
In the last year or so, I’ve developed a curiosity to experience more and some very ambiguous desires. I wonder what it would be like to have other sexual partners and what it would be like to date now. I’ve talked about this with my husband, and he validates that my feelings are normal given my (our) strict upbringing and lack of experience, but ultimately he shrugs it off. After all, he says, we can’t go back in time and get married later, or have different partners, etc. I cannot imagine him being open to any arrangement other than what we have now: garden-variety monogamy. My ambiguous desire had no outlet until recently, when I developed a huge crush on a coworker.
While we’re flirtatious together, he’s also unavailable, so there is nowhere for this attraction to “go.” I have not felt like this for as long as I’ve been married. The alchemy of this crush is staggering.
Dan, what do I do if I want to experience more, but I can’t put my finger on what that means exactly? If I want experiences that aren’t possible within my marriage, are my only options to suppress those desires or leave, when leaving could mean I would lose a mostly solid relationship for potentially nothing?
—GRASS IS GETTING GREENER EVERY DAY
a : You have four options, GIGGED, not two.
Option one: Ask. You may think you already asked your husband for permission to fuck some other men, GIGGED, but if your husband was able to shrug your concerns off—come on—you failed to communicate to him exactly what it was you were asking him for. And if you can’t imagine him being open to “any arrangement” other than the one you agreed to when you married, that’s because you didn’t ask him a direct question about other possible arrangements. If you had, you wouldn’t have to imagine. You would know. Like a lot of married people who want to open their marriages, you kept the ask vague and plausibly deniable in case he reacted with shock or anger, and you wanted to deny having made the ask at all. So, ask him directly: Can we open our marriage? If he surprises you and says yes,
you get the freedom you want without having to give up the husband you love. If he says no . . .
Option two: Leave. This means losing your marriage— and just asking about openness has cost some people their marriages—but even if you lose him, GIGGED, you won’t be left with nothing. You will have your freedom Freedom isn’t a guarantee of current or future happiness, of course, but freedom isn’t nothing. You don’t mention children—which would radically change the math here— and divorce is painful and messy with or without kids, but you’re still young. And if you suddenly found yourself young and single, you could go out there and make up for all that lost time and all those lost dicks.
Option three: Cheat. This is the advice that will piss everyone off, but it belongs on the table because people do it, and because in some instances—not yours, from the sound of things, but some—cheating is the least worst option for all involved, including the person who got cheated on. But it’s a high-risk gamble: you could get caught right away and blow your marriage up and be seen as a villain, or you could get away with it but then spend the rest of your life with the sword of Damocles hanging over your head. Some people manage to have affairs and get away with them, some don’t. Some people learn to live with the stress of a secret, some crack under it.
Option four: Suppress. Basically, suck it up. Tell
yourself your marriage is good enough, your husband is good enough, and you’re willing and able to go to your grave 50 years from now without ever having sex with anyone else. This is the path of least resistance—it’s the path most monogamously married but sexually miserable people choose to walk; it’s also the path lots of cheaters who are getting away with it pretend to walk. (For the record: Not all monogamously married people are sexually miserable.) But it’s also the path most likely to rot your marriage from the inside out—very slowly—as your feelings of resentment build over time. Most people who wind up cheating were attempting to suck it up.
None of these options are perfect. All of them come with costs. But pretending you only have two choices— suppress or leave—isn’t true.
Q : I’m a 40-year-old straight married guy. This past weekend, I got a day pass to a nearby nudist club—you know, the kind with families, a lake, kayaks, tennis courts, that sort of thing. I was basically on a scouting mission to see if it was the kind of place my wife might like to spend some time. (It was fun!) Everyone was super nice and welcoming, but I always made sure to drop a reference to my wife and kids in conversation, especially with women—it just seemed to make things go smoother, given I was a single, unaccompanied male. At one point, though, another unaccompanied male, around age 50, approached me and started talking. It became clear pretty quickly that he was flirting. Totally fine, all good, people do that! But I then dropped in a reference to my wife, almost without thinking about it, because that’s what I’d been doing all day, and he ended our conversation
abruptly and walked away. I felt bad about it afterward. I think he read it as me trying to communicate my straightness to him, which I wasn’t really trying to do. Or at least, I wasn’t communicating anything I hadn’t been communicating to everyone else all day. Is there a good way to subtly let a guy know I’m straight and not interested without making it sound like I’m trying to get out of the conversation because he’s gay and I’m not? And is that advice any different when we are both standing naked in front of each other?
—NEEDS UNDERSTANDING DAN’S EVALUATION
don’t do well in (and aren’t welcome at) nudist resorts—I doubt he took it personally when you mentioned the wife. He hoped you might be gay, he realized you weren’t, and he moved on. You most likely talked with other men that day you didn’t realize were gay because they were just making conversation and weren’t trying to get into your invisible pants (and so they kept chatting with you even after you dropped the “wife” bomb), or they were trying to get into your invisible pants but stuck around after they realized you were straight because they were enjoying the conversation.
a : You’re overthinking this. In a mixed nudist environment—a mix of queers and straights, old people and young, folks there for the naked tennis and folks there for naked kayaking—you will occasionally be approached by men who are interested in your dick. So, unless you get “STRAIGHT” tattooed across your forehead (Pete Hegseth knows a tattoo artist who would be happy to do it), you’re gonna have brief interactions with gay men drawn to your dick.
Now, you only had one conversation that ended abruptly, NUDE, and unless that guy was the kind of pushy jerk who felt entitled to your dick because he could see it—and pushy jerks
All that said, you don’t need a secret handshake, a subtle wink, or an appalling tattoo to let people know who you are. All you need is a willingness to make conversation and the ability to slip relevant details about yourself into the conversational flow. This advice applies whether you’re wearing nothing at the nudist resort, a full gimp suit at the fetish club, or a tux at your best friend’s wedding. v
Read the rest of this column, email your questions for Dan, record a question to be included in Savage Lovecast , and more at the URL savage.love. m mailbox@savage.love
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