Chicago Reader print issue of July 3, 2025 (Vol. 54, No. 39)

F R E E A N D F R E A K Y S I N C E 1 9 7 1 | J U LY 3 , 2 0 2 5

Jobs, block clubs, investments How Chicagoans are interrupting violence at its roots

by Jim Daley, Illinois Answers Project, p. 6

THIS WEEK

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IN THIS ISSUE

FOOD & DRINK

03 Reader Bites | Sula Shakshuka bun at Cafe Yaya

PUBLISHER AMBER NETTLES CHIEF OF STAFF ELLEN KAULIG ----------------------------------------------------------------

CITY LIFE

EDITOR IN CHIEF SALEM COLLO-JULIN ASSISTANT MANAGING EDITOR SAVANNAH RAY HUGUELEY PRODUCTION MANAGER AND STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER KIRK WILLIAMSON SENIOR GRAPHIC DESIGNER AMBER HUFF GRAPHIC DESIGNER AND PHOTO RESEARCHER SHIRA FRIEDMAN-PARKS THEATER AND DANCE EDITOR KERRY REID MUSIC EDITOR PHILIP MONTORO CULTURE EDITOR: FILM, MEDIA, FOOD AND DRINK TARYN MCFADDEN CULTURE EDITOR: ART, ARCHITECTURE, BOOKS KERRY CARDOZA NEWS EDITOR SHAWN MULCAHY PROJECTS EDITOR JAMIE LUDWIG DIGITAL EDITOR TYRA NICOLE TRICHE SENIOR WRITERS LEOR GALIL, DEANNA ISAACS, BEN JORAVSKY, MIKE SULA FEATURES WRITER KATIE PROUT SOCIAL JUSTICE REPORTER DEVYN-MARSHALL BROWN (DMB) STAFF WRITER MICCO CAPORALE MULTIMEDIA CONTENT PRODUCER SHAWNEE DAY SOCIAL MEDIA ENGAGEMENT ASSOCIATE CHARLI RENKEN

04 Street View Fashion showed up at a recent gallery event.

NEWS & POLITICS

06 Making It in Chicago How Chicagoans are interrupting violence at its roots

ARTS & CULTURE

12 Art of Note Recommended solo shows at South Asia Institute and ACRE Projects, plus the latest 60wrd/min column

THEATER

16 Rhinestone Digest | Renken Rest is part of revolution for draglesque performers.

17 Review Invictus’s Angels in America resonates with our times.

---------------------------------------------------------------VICE PRESIDENT OF PEOPLE AND CULTURE ALIA GRAHAM

FILM

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18 Moviegoer This woman’s work 19 Movies of Note The stakes couldn’t be lower in Jurassic World: Rebirth; M3GAN 2.0 feels like a cash grab on a meme.

DEVELOPMENT MANAGER JOEY MANDEVILLE DATA ASSOCIATE TATIANA PEREZ ---------------------------------------------------------------MARKETING ASSOCIATE MAJA STACHNIK MARKETING ASSOCIATE MICHAEL THOMPSON

MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE

20 Feature | Brown Boundary Waters commit to DIY music as a lifelong pursuit.

22 Chicagoans of Note | Montoro Greg Obis, new owner of Chicago Mastering Service 24 Shows of Note Previews of concerts including Fred Wesley & the new J.B.’s, Lily Finnegan’s Heat On, and the South Side Big Band 26 Gossip Wolf | Galil Aria Pedraza throws a launch party for the Midwest Rave Culture Archive, Elastic Arts executive director Adam Zanolini steps down, and more.

CLASSIFIEDS 27 Jobs 27 Services

---------------------------------------------------------------SALES REPRESENTATIVE WILL ROGERS SALES REPRESENTATIVE KELLY BRAUN MEDIA SALES ASSOCIATE JILLIAN MUELLER ADVERTISING ADS@CHICAGOREADER.COM, 312-392-2970 CREATE A CLASSIFIED AD LISTING AT CLASSIFIEDS.CHICAGOREADER.COM ---------------------------------------------------------------DISTRIBUTION CONCERNS DISTRIBUTIONISSUES@CHICAGOREADER.COM P. 6 Bryan Ramson Jr. AKILAH TOWNSEND FOR ILLINOIS ANSWERS PROJECT

ON THE COVER Physicist Bryan Ramson Jr., 37, purchased a four-flat in Garfield Park in 2019. When he witnessed illicit activity disrupting the block, he took action. Now he runs the local block club and was elected to the Chicago Police District Council for District 11. See page six for the story.

Photo by Akilah Townsend for Illinois Answers project. For more of Townsend’s work, go to the URL killls.com. For more about the Illinois Answers Project, go to illinoisanswers.org.

2 CHICAGO READER - JULY 3, 2025

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FOOD & DRINK come up with something seductive.

Chef Zach Engel’s own shakshuka is on Cafe Yaya’s brunch menu, but for the buns, Eder-McClure makes her own base in 12-quart batches—caramelizing onions, peppers, garlic, cumin, paprika, ginger, and tomato paste, before adding crushed tomaShakshuka bun at Cafe Yaya toes and reducing for two to three hours until it achieves a thick, jammy consistency.

From there, she shapes her challah dough he spicy North African dish of into ring molds, letting them proof, before tomato poached eggs is one of the depositing a heap of the shakshuka world’s greatest hangover base on top. Then comes a remedies. And like its southern fresh, whole egg, and into Italian cousin—eggs in purthe oven they go. gatory—it’s fairly simple The warmly spiced to prepare. Even so, first layers of molten metathing in the morning, bolic restoration subone doesn’t always merge into the spongy, have the steady hands subtly sweet womb re q u i re d to s a u te of the challah. When onions and peppers finished, the buns are with spices and tomato burnished, blistered, and sauce, then drop in eggs etched with crispy-sticky and coddle them until cori nakamura lin | onibaba studio textural formations. They’re jiggly, before sopping it all up brushed with garlic-rosemary oil with good fresh bread and going and then showered with fresh parsley back to bed. and dill.

And sometimes, if you’re struggling to If you can sit and wait, they’ll heat it address whatever daytime responsibilities up for you on the spot. Or you can take it extort your soul—with your head thumping to go and wolf it before your fur-tongued and your stomach whimpering—you don’t katzenjammer hijacks your entire morning. have time to sit and eat in peace.

Just let Mary Eder-McClure handle it —MIKE SULA CAFE YAYA 2431 N. Lincoln, $9, for you. cafeyaya.com v As Galit’s pastry chef was grinding to get its neighboring all-day cafe open, she Reader Bites celebrates dishes, drinks, and needed to eighty-six a labor-intensive atmospheres from the Chicagoland food spinach–feta egg tart and come up with a scene. Have you had a recent food or drink replacement—stat. If you’d ever seen the experience that you can’t stop thinking stuffed challah kitchen snacks she makes about? Share it with us at fooddrink@ chicagoreader.com. with leftover dough, you would know she’d

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CITY LIFE STREET VIEW

Material world When the gallery meets the runway

BY ISA GIALLORENZO

S

Clockwise from top left : Artist Nina Murashkina; designer Bruce Woods wearing one of his eponymous sweaters; Murashkina’s brooches; fashion by Isaac Couch hangs on a wooden rack ISA GIALLORENZO

4 CHICAGO READER - JULY 3, 2025

ome of the most compelling independent design talents from Chicago and beyond came together in June for “We are MATERIAL,” a three-day fashion event hosted at Alma Gallery in Bridgeport. The gathering, organized by We are MATERIAL collective founders Andrea Reynders and Gillion Carrara, showcased an impressive selection of designers whose work sits at the intersection of fashion and art.

The opening evening featured live music that echoed throughout the space and thoughtfully constructed garments draped across racks and guests alike. The warm, creative celebration of slow fashion was framed by the gallery’s striking collection of modern art and decorative objects.

One of the standout looks in the crowd of stylish attendees belonged to Jayie Chou, a 21-year-old fashion and photography student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). Dressed in what she called a “collaborative skirt,” Chou’s outfit was an ode to the process of making. Her item was pieced together from a discarded tablecloth salvaged from the SAIC fiber department, bearing visible ink stains, screen prints, and evidence of student hands.

“I don’t know whose work is on me right now,” Chou said, smiling. “But there’s a lot of different artists that went into making the skirt.”

Chou’s corset was a gifted piece, made to fit with strategic safety pin adjustments.

She turned children’s tights into compression-style arm warmers and layered everything over a simple tank and jeans—the perfect blank canvas for her more theatrical elements. Even her earrings were handmade.

“It’s hard to part with my pieces,” she admitted. “They’re often one of a kind.”

Chou is most excited by collaboration, both in fashion and her chosen path of fashion photography. “There’s so much passion in Chicago,” she said. “We just need to take it one step further, and keep building community. I love

CITY LIFE

Clockwise from top left : the legendary Robin Richman; Gillion Carrara and Isaac Couch; Jayie Chou near art by Caren Helene; wood and crystal bracelets by Carrara; Sevil Acar’s hand-dyed silk garments ISA GIALLORENZO

coming to events like this and seeing people I know doing what they love.”

Another captivating presence was Ukrainian artist and jewelry designer Nina Murashkina, whose style is steeped in symbolism. She wore vintage rings meant to ward off the evil eye and a red hat inspired by Little Red Riding Hood.

“For me, to [enter] the street from my cozy apartment or studio is like going through the forest with wolves,” she said.

Murashkina, currently based in Barcelona, was recently an artist-in-residence at River North’s John David Mooney Foundation. Her residency culminated in “Her Beasts,” a solo exhibition that blended feminism, humor, and

mythology. She celebrates the female form as a central force in her work. The statement brooches she wore the day I photographed her doubled as miniature canvases, adorned with her own imagery.

Radiating elegance and Mediterranean ease, Turkish artist Sevil Acar stood out in a serene, all-white ensemble, adorned by one of her hand-painted silk scarves worn as a belt. It was a subtle yet striking gesture that underscored her philosophy: simplicity elevated by craft and color.

“I really like to wear one color,” Acar said.

“With a colorful scarf, it just pops.”

Acar moved to Chicago from Istanbul seven years ago. She draws inspiration from the

rich visual traditions of ancient civilizations.

Her unique scarves and tops are painted on stretched silk using a resist-dye technique, where dyes bond with the fabric’s fibers, producing vibrant, luminous hues.

“Painting on silk is like dancing,” she explained. “The dye moves with you. You have to be quick—anything can happen.” For Acar, silk painting is both meditative and expressive. “It’s different from painting on paper,” she said. “On silk, the dye becomes part of the fabric—it’s alive.”

We are MATERIAL also displayed Carrara’s bold accessories, fiber artist Bruce Woods’s sleek crocheted garments, and designer and SAIC fashion design chair Katrin Schnabl’s

wearable art. Local labels were on display as well, via boutique owner Robin Richman’s expert selections, the cool luxury of upcycled vintage outerwear by 74 the Jacket, intriguing leather “paper” bags by Bukuro, and more.

Another installment of the event is planned for November. While the price points for most goods may be on the higher side, they’re still commensurate with the quality of the work.

We are MATERIAL’s fashion events may prove to be Chicago’s most inspired shopping experiences for those who can afford it, and quality viewing for those interested in local design. v

m letters@chicagoreader.com JULY 3, 2025 - CHICAGO READER 5

NEWS & POLITICS O Jobs, block clubs, investments: interrupting violence at its roots MAKING IT IN CHICAGO

Organizers in communities hit hardest by gun violence say tackling poverty is the only way to create lasting change.

By JIM DALEY, ILLINOIS ANSWERS PROJECT

Physicist Bryan Ramson Jr., 37, owns a four-flat in Garfield Park. AKILAH TOWNSEND FOR ILLINOIS ANSWERS PROJECT

6 CHICAGO READER - JULY 3, 2025

n a recent Tuesday, dozens of people lined the block waiting their turn at a food pantry that shares a building with the Institute for Nonviolence Chicago (INVC). The long line was a stark reminder of the connections between poverty and violence cited by researchers and advocates, and a major part of why INVC and similar organizations include workforce development in their programming.

Inside INVC that afternoon, a dozen young Black men tumbled out of an elevator on their way home from a jobs training program, joking with one another and offering polite greetings to visitors. The program is unique in that it combines workforce development with behavioral health training to address trauma, which many of these young men have experienced firsthand due to the high rates of violence in their west-side neighborhood. Since 2016, nearly 3,500 people have gone through the paid 12-week program, where they learn relationship building and social skills along with résumé writing and interviewing.

Some program participants have even been hired by INVC as community violence intervention (CVI) workers. One of the nonprofit’s staffers was in its orbit for years even as he remained in the streets, where he narrowly survived after being shot. Now, he’s among a legion of CVI workers who come to the streets, alleys, and hospital rooms night after night to talk people down from committing violent acts.

Mayor Brandon Johnson is taking a cue from organizations like INVC. The mayor’s ambitious plan to tackle gun violence emphasizes “root causes” such as poverty, institutional divestment, and unemployment in neighborhoods hardest hit by shootings. Last year, his administration began addressing them with a combination of place-based outreach efforts, jobs programs, and violence interruption techniques long used by nonprofits. Along with these approaches, Johnson and Governor J.B. Pritzker have pledged millions to more direct violence-prevention and victim-services programs.

While Johnson has attributed recent declines in shootings to these efforts, the true impact of anti-violence work is hard to measure. Gun violence in Chicago ebbs and flows as a result of myriad factors, many of which are impossible to quantify—or control, such as predictable upticks that come with warmer weather each summer. In the hardest-hit communities, such as Garfield Park, shootings remain above average even when violence declines citywide. The approaches of Johnson’s

administration and west-side organizers aim to permanently reduce violence by tackling both its immediate causes and addressing the entrenched poverty they say is the only way to create a sustainable impact.

The west side has grappled with gangs, drugs, and violence for decades. The Eisenhower Expressway, which runs through it, has long been known as the “Heroin Highway” because of the volume of narcotics sold along it. Decades of divestment following the 1968 riots, coupled with the spread of heroin and the crack epidemic in the 1980s, cratered the local economy.

The confluence of such factors can make the promise of a better life seem out of reach.

Cycles of poverty, trauma, and violence are deeply enmeshed. While violence interrupters and elected officials in Chicago have taken different approaches to the problem—from direct outreach that addresses violence head-on to place-based strategies like block clubs—they all agree that the lack of economic opportunity is a root cause.

“When all of those things combine together, you build the perfect recipe for hopelessness,” said 11th Police District councillor Alees Edwards. “And then people will begin to think differently about themselves, what they can accomplish, what is possible for them.”

While it’s hard to measure the effectiveness of any of these efforts, violence has declined across the city in recent years (and has seen a downward trend nationwide since the 1990s).

Poverty on the west side, however, has persisted. Whether gang-related or due to interpersonal conflicts, myriad factors influence every shooting.

One thing is clear: Gun violence is highest in Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods.

Decades of divestment Divestment and poverty have gripped the west side for decades. But the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. marked a major turning point for the area.

On April 5, 1968, the community exploded in grief and rage as uprisings plunged the west side into two nights of looting and arson in the wake of Dr. King’s assassination in Memphis the previous day. Firefighters, protected by phalanxes of police, battled blazes that would consume 28 blocks and destroy hundreds of buildings. Before the rioting abated, eleven people were killed and thousands more were injured. Garfield Park’s business district never fully recovered.

NEWS & POLITICS

Block club volunteers clean up the 1100 block of S. Monticello in May. JIM DALEY FOR ILLINOIS ANSWERS PROJECT

Martin Coffer, the director of community relations and violence prevention at the faithbased nonprofit Breakthrough, grew up in Garfield Park. “When I was younger, we played outside,” said Coffer, who was born in 1965.

“We knew everyone; there was a community connectedness.”

The crack epidemic in the 1980s and the proliferation of heroin that followed shattered that, he added. Parents grew fearful of letting their kids off the front stoop; the local playground became a no-man’s-land. Jobs grew scarce.

As a youth, Coffer worked at a shoe store on Madison and Pulaski. Now, young people don’t see such jobs in the community, he said.

“If we could change those opportunities, increase those opportunities, and increase the investments in our community, I think that would definitely be a turn in the right direction,” he said, “because lack of opportunity, unemployment, those are root causes of violence.”

Research tends to agree. Studies have long shown strong links between poverty, joblessness, and violence. A 2022 University of Chicago Law Review analysis that looked at nearly

a half century of data in Chicago found that when violent crime increased overall between the 1960s and 1990s, the poorest parts of the city saw the highest jumps.

Like other violence-prevention organizations, Breakthrough incorporates job development into its programming; last year it provided employment services to 220 people, 54 of whom were placed in jobs.

The west side has some of the most enduring and extreme poverty in the United States.

Areas in which more than 20 percent of residents are below the federal poverty line for more than three decades are considered to have “persistent poverty” by the U.S. Census.

Nearly all the census tracts in Garfield Park have poverty rates above 20 percent. In some cases, more than half of residents are below the poverty line.

Unemployment has also been linked to gang affiliation and violence, and young people in impoverished communities face a catch-22: the lack of viable jobs drives some to join gangs and participate in illicit economies, which in turn heightens their exposure to violence and arrest, making jobs even harder to get.

In the Chicago area, unemployment is about 5 percent overall, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Unemployment disproportionately impacts Black and Latino communities like those on the west side; in the first quarter of 2025, Black men were nearly 1.7 times as likely to be unemployed as Latino men (up from 1.5 in 2024) and almost twice as likely as white men.

For those who can find entry-level employment, Chicago’s $16.60 minimum wage is not quite enough to keep up with average monthly expenses, according to the data aggregator LivingCost.org. “The jobs [don’t pay] enough money, especially right now,” said Patty Carrillo, a West Humboldt Park block club captain.

“We go to the grocery store and [buy] nothing and it’s $100 already.”

On the front lines Breakthrough, INVC, Chicago CRED (Create Real Economic Destiny), and other violence interruption organizers include workforce development, behavioral health counseling, and job placement to enhance their direct outreach to people involved in violent alter-

cations. That outreach attempts to prevent retaliatory shootings, set up nonaggression agreements among gangs, and pull people off the street. By combining these approaches with workforce development, they hope to break cycles of violence, one person at a time, for good.

Like Breakthrough, which is staffed by neighborhood residents, INVC provides paid training to people who have been enmeshed in violence to become outreach workers and break those cycles as outreach workers.

“There’s a measure of accountability, a measure of wanting to restore what you might have been contributing to in the past,” said Shunda Collins, INVC’s vice president of development and communications.

The direct-outreach model, now called “community violence intervention” or “CVI” by practitioners, was invented in the 1990s in Boston as Operation Ceasefire. It came to Chicago in 2000, originally as an initiative called CeaseFire Chicago, and has since been renamed Cure Violence. Cure Violence outreach workers have often been involved in violence themselves, are embedded in the communities they serve, and strictly refuse to share incriminating information with police even as they coordinate their efforts. The techniques developed by its creators have since been adopted by dozens of organizations in Chicago and across the country.

Samuel Castro, INVC’s director of strategic initiatives and partnerships, started out as an outreach worker. Castro, who spent a dozen years in prison on federal charges, was told about community violence intervention by his codefendant. Outgoing and charismatic, he was a natural for the work.

“I think for most of us that’s in this space, sad to say that we were the ones who messed up these places, and then we see the outcomes now,” he said. “So that’s my personal fight.”

Castro’s 19-year-old son “lives that life” currently, he said, making his work doubly personal.

Frederick Seaton, an outreach supervisor at INVC, has done this work for 18 years, beginning at CeaseFire. Keeping his four sons out of violence was part of what has made Seaton passionate about his work. “So I go out there on a daily basis, and me and my team continue to build relationships with individuals within the community,” he said.

Exposure to violence and other forms of trauma at a young age doesn’t always predict later involvement with gangs, but some studies have found links between them. When

JULY 3, 2025 - CHICAGO READER 7

NEWS & POLITICS continued from p. 7

people are exposed to violence in their youth, there can be adverse impacts on their mental health. To combat this, INVC offers behavioral health services to both clients and outreach workers.

Understanding those impacts is part of what makes those who were formerly perpetrators of violence well-suited to reach those still embroiled in violent activities.

Antonio Daniels, a former gang member who got involved in violence prevention after finding God, is now the director of volunteer and church engagement at Breakthrough.

He said building relationships is key. “I got a neighbor on my block that says, ‘Before you correct, you must connect,’” he said. “Really just getting to know people on their own terms.”

Chicago’s block clubs Since 2008, nearly 700 block clubs have registered with the city. The vast majority are in neighborhoods on the South and West Sides.

Block clubs per 10,000 residents 0

10

Block clubs connect neighbors Block clubs, a staple of Black communities in Chicago since the Great Migration, are one way neighbors connect. They’re free to organize and register with the city, giving residents a way to interface with city departments. They often beautify their blocks and can even push illicit activity away. Since 2008, Chicagoans have founded nearly 700 block clubs—a quarter of them on the west side.

In 2019, Bryan Ramson Jr. purchased a four-flat in Garfield Park. The building needed significant renovations, and he rehabbed it himself; renters moved in the following year.

Ramson, a 37-year-old neutrino physicist at Fermilab, grew up in “grinding poverty” in New Orleans’ Ninth and Seventh Wards and has lived in Washington, D.C., and Detroit.

The neighborhood was one of the few places he could afford property. “Because of how wealth inequality works, it’s harder and harder to afford a house,” he said. “Neighborhoods like Garfield Park are going to be extremely valuable and extremely relevant towards the young people who are trying to find ways to grab their version of the American Dream.”

Before he closed on the property, Ramson saw a couple of young men standing outside of it, but didn’t immediately realize they were selling drugs.

“What we found is that there was basically lawlessness in front of our house,” he said.

“The owners of this overnight drug market were just uninterested in trying to work with the people who lived on the block.” Ramson, who was elected to the 11th Police District Council in 2023, organized a block club to

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Data source: Chicago Police Department via FOIA JIM DALEY FOR ILLINOIS ANSWERS PROJECT

reclaim the street. It took months of work and a confrontation that sent Ramson to the hospital—but they saw success. The block has been clear for the last couple of years.

Recently, “there seems to be folks trying to come back in and sort of reclaim the space for open-air drug markets,” Ramson said. But thanks to the block club, “we already have a game plan and a playbook by which to start really trying to prevent that from happening.”

Nonprofits take similar place-based approaches to curbing violence. In 2010, Break-

through workers began reclaiming a playground a few blocks east of the Garfield Park Conservatory from gang members.

“Families couldn’t go to the playground,” Coffer said. “What we did was institute what we call a ‘home court.’ It’s like a block club on steroids.”

Every summer Friday, Breakthrough workers host a basketball tournament, bring in a bounce house, and pass out food. “With that consistency, right now, if you go over there, the park is clear,” Coffer said.

“Consistency has been one of those things that our community struggles with,” added Damien Morris, Breakthrough’s chief program officer for violence prevention. “You get temporary funding; you start to gain momentum.

And then next year, the funding isn’t there.”

Coffer lives near the intersection of Pulaski and Jackson in West Garfield Park.

“At one time, we just thought we were all alone,” he said. “But when you’re able to engage in a block club or something like that, we find out that you’re not by yourself. There’s organizations; there’s other neighbors who want a safe space. So then they feel empowered.”

Ramson said making his street safer wasn’t easy. It took communication with 28th Ward alderperson Jason Ervin and Westside Block Club Association founder Talei Thompson to make something happen, but the block club eventually got the city to install speed bumps and surveillance cameras. Tensions between Ramson and the dealers came to a head when he decided to sit in the street in a lawn chair to interrupt their activity.

“Eventually one of them assaulted me,” he said. He was left bloodied, but came back.

The confrontation changed the dynamic on the block: the men saw that Ramson wasn’t going to back down, and the attack got the attention of the police. By working with Thompson, violence interrupters, police, and the community, the block club saw results.

As a police district councillor, “I have a much better understanding of how to apply pressure to the situation without putting myself directly in harm’s way,” he said. “It really is paying attention, being active, and being consistent in the application of pressure to your goals. And then having a group of people to do that with you, that’s going to be the main strategy.”

Carrillo, the block club captain in West Humboldt Park, took a similar approach. She has lived on Monticello near Grand Avenue for 22 years, and founded the block club in 2019 after a group of young men took over the corner to sell drugs. In its first year, her club organized a block party that was so successful, she said the dealers called the cops to complain that the club had shut down the block.

“We stopped, literally, we stopped business for them,” she said.

On a recent Sunday morning in May, a half dozen volunteers in bright pink vests walked down both sides of Monticello, pausing here and there to pick up trash. At the end of the block, they chatted in a garden, one of three the local block club had planted in vacant lots.

NEWS & POLITICS The gardens, along with community events like this and block parties, are all strategies the block club has used to build connections with one another and to push drug dealing off the block.

A few high-end new homes stick out from the block’s otherwise modest midcentury twoflats. Carrillo said they’d been built on vacant lots since the block club began beautifying the street. With them came higher property values—part of a citywide trend, and also driven by gentrification in Humboldt Park pushing farther west—but the increase has squeezed longtime homeowners like her.

“We don’t like these kinds of houses here, because, yes, it’s getting expensive,” Carrillo said. “I just, I don’t know. I mean, it’s good and not.”

Crime has also recently returned. Carrillo shared a video of two men, one of whom held what looked like a gun, stealing a catalytic converter from a car on Monticello earlier that morning. She said the block club planned to attend an upcoming community meeting with the police commander to try to get answers.

The People’s Plan Johnson’s People’s Plan for Community Safety, which triages communities most impacted by violence and aims to address root causes such as poverty, food insecurity, and unemployment, is novel on a citywide level. His administration is the first to have an Office for Community Safety, and Garien Gatewood, Johnson’s first-ever deputy mayor for community safety, comes from the nonprofit sector.

Like Gatewood, the approaches of the People’s Plan are rooted in nonprofits. Its centerpiece is a massive summer jobs program, which is set to hire 29,000 youth ages 14 to 24 for seven weeks this summer—an increase of 1,000 from 2024. Johnson’s administration is also piloting a hiring program that places high school graduates in jobs with the Department of Streets and Sanitation. Together, the state, county, and city have committed more than $100 million to violence-prevention initiatives in 2025.

In a recent midterm interview with South Side Weekly, Johnson wouldn’t take direct credit for this year’s drop in violent crime (shootings citywide are thus far down 25 percent from last year). But it’s clear that he thinks the People’s Plan is working.

“One of the things that we did, we looked at 35 of the most violent beats in Chicago,” he said. “We saw some similarities within those

beats. These are places where schools were closed, where public housing was shuttered, where disinvestment was the prevailing form of governance. And what my theory was: if we can reduce violence in the most violent sections of the city of Chicago, we could take that citywide. And that is starting to play out.”

Separately, the mayor’s Take Back the Block program is similar to Breakthrough’s placebased “home court” approach. The program targeted half a dozen violence-prone spots on the south and west sides last year, flooded them with resources from multiple city agencies, and held three-day events at each.

“I think the work that we did with Take Back the Block, if you really broke it down, would be a mini-version of the People’s Plan for Community Safety, where you flood this area with resources and support and you literally have the entire [mayoral] cabinet coming out,” Gatewood said.

At the events, city officials listened to residents’ concerns. The primary resource neighborhood residents said they needed? Jobs.

To meet that need, the mayor’s office brought in the Chicago Cook Workforce Partnership, which administers federal funding for jobs training. At one Take Back the Block event, more than 40 people were hired on the spot.

It’s too early to tell if the events will have the same lasting impact that Breakthrough achieved at west-side playgrounds, but an Illinois Answers Project/South Side Weekly analysis found four of the six police beats Take Back the Block targeted had fewer shootings in 2024 than the previous year, while one had the same number in both years. Only one, in Roosevelt Square, a public housing development near Little Italy, had more. That beat is in a census tract where more than half of the residents are below the poverty line.

The uneven results present “an opportunity for growth,” Gatewood said.

Edwards said she appreciated that the mayor’s office reached out to community members to shape the plan. But she added that it’s not nearly enough to address the centuries of systemic harm wrought on Black communities.

“There is zero reason that the government is not looking into an immediate strategy and coming up with reparations,” she said.

The challenge of tracking impact Violence prevention is challenging work.

There are more than 100 gang-affiliated cliques on the west side, and navigating that landscape makes outreach efforts and non-

aggression pacts a complex and difficult task.

Furthermore, not all gun violence stems from gangs, and it’s harder to prevent shootings that arise from organic interpersonal conflict, robberies, and other unknown factors. Seaton and Castro described incredulously watching a recent news report about a shooting that was tagged as gang-related; the outreach workers knew full well it hadn’t been.

Measuring the impact of outreach, job training, and other interventions is even more difficult. The causes of violence are myriad, and even harder to grasp are the factors influencing recent declines in violence.

“Data shows how many people got shot, how many people were killed. There’s no way for me to capture how many lives were saved by de-escalating,” Castro said. “When we are in those gangways and the alleys at night, and calming people down from going to retaliate, there’s no number on that. I can’t tell you how many lives were affected because we have that relationship.”

INVC’s Shunda Collins noted that last year, INVC had hundreds of conflict mediations.

“We likely prevented a shooting, at least from what we know, 955 times,” Collins said. “And then [with] the skills and training people are getting . . . the number’s even higher.”

It’s also unclear how best to measure impact. Part of the problem is trying to measure outreach efforts with traditional criminal justice metrics, said Chicago CRED staffer Jalon Arthur at an event with the City Club of Chicago in April.

“When you think about metrics to actually gauge success for CVI [community violence interruption], we’re talking about things like mediations, nonaggression agreements, the number of individuals and groups receiving services,” he said.

Conversely, police gauge success by looking at gun recoveries, arrests, and clearance rates.

“You will always run into problems when you look at CVI through a criminal justice lens,” he added. “It needs to be looked at through a public health lens.”

Outreach workers are certainly having an impact, however, and research is starting to catch on. A study published in April by researchers at Northwestern University found that outreach efforts are contributing to recent declines in gun violence in dozens of “hotspots” across Chicago’s south and west sides. The study found a 41 percent drop in shootings at locations where outreach workers with the Peacekeepers Program maintained a presence.

I got a neighbor on my block that says, ‘‘Before you correct, you must connect.’’

By comparing years when the program operated only in the summer to those where it was year-round, the study was able to more directly correlate Peacekeepers activity to shooting declines. Importantly, the study also assessed how long “peace intervals,” or periods without shootings, persisted, in addition to the average shooting victimization rates.

Still, the study acknowledges that declines in hotspots “align with broader citywide reductions in gun violence.”

The Peacekeepers Program, like other outreach programs, uses a variety of interventions in its work, but its primary function is to, quite literally, have people on the streets ready to safely de-escalate conflict. The state has invested $34.5 million in the Peacekeepers this year.

In a recent WTTW interview, Gatewood pointed to April’s historic low in homicides citywide. In the next breath, he noted that at the time of the interview, 13 people had been fatally shot (seven more would be killed before the month ended). “Those are . . . at least 13 families whose lives have been changed drastically forever,” he said. “So how do we, on one hand, celebrate the lives that we’re saving, hold people accountable for the lives that are being taken, and make sure we support the families who are struggling through some of the worst times of their lives?”

For violence-prevention workers like Castro, it’s done one person at a time.

When the young man who’d been shot told him he was ready for a job, Castro asked him why. “‘Well, you stood in my life no matter what,’” he recalled the man saying. “‘You didn’t let me down, no judgment. And now I have a son—I have to make a change.’” He’s now a staff member at INVC. Castro attended the baby shower.

This report was produced as part of Making It in Chicago, a series produced by Illinois Answers Project about detours on the path to opportunity. Illinois Answers Project is a nonpartisan investigations and solutions journalism news outlet published by the Better Government Association. v

m letters@chicagoreader.com JULY 3, 2025 - CHICAGO READER 9

Paid Sponsored Content

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In collaboration with the Illinois Department of Human Services (IDHS), a portion of every dollar raised by this ticket directly contributes to organizations that support Illinois residents experiencing homelessness or housing insecurity. This year’s joint ticket—the 7X Bingo Multiplier—costs $5 and is available for purchase at more than 7,000 Illinois Lottery retailers throughout the state. With its fun, eye-catching design, 7X Bingo Multiplier makes a great present for friends, family members, neighbors, and colleagues 18 and over— or you can treat yourself and play for a chance to win up to $200,000. Visit the Illinois Lottery website for more information about 7X Bingo Multiplier and the many good causes it supports each year. Read on to learn more about the homeless support services of Regional Office of Education #17 (ROE #17), which partners with the Illinois State Board of Education and local school districts to support Illinois students and their families, and learn how your purchase of a 7X Bingo Multiplier ticket can help local students experiencing housing crises while empowering them to achieve academic and personal success.

School should be a place where every student has an equal opportunity to succeed. But children and adolescents experiencing homelessness or housing instability face a number of obstacles—such as missed classes, difficulty establishing friendships, and lack of focus—that can impact their academic performance, emotional well-being, and long-term educational journey.

In Illinois, homelessness among school-age children is an omnipresent and growing concern; the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) reported 73,119 students experiencing homelessness during the 2023-24 school year—a 20% increase from the 2022-23 school year. “[Students] can’t get into higher-order thinking if they haven’t slept and eaten,” says Kayla Arnolts, regional homeless services and program support specialist of Regional Office of Education #17 (ROE #17).

Regional Offices of Education (ROEs) act as programmatic and fiscal intermediaries between the Illinois State Board of Education and local school districts. Under the oversight of locally elected regional superintendents, they coordinate and deliver state and local services (such as bus driver licensing and support for children living with disabilities), advocate for education, and provide leadership and information to educators, school districts, and the public. Three Intermediate Service Centers (ISCs) fill the same role in Cook County.

Kayla Arnolts, regional homeless services and program support specialist of Regional Office of Education #17 (ROE #17). Photo courtesy ROE #17

For Illinois students experiencing homelessness, ROEs serve as a vital lifeline. Through funds raised by the Illinois Lottery’s joint specialty ticket, ROE #17 receives a grant through the Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) that supports their homeless services programs throughout McLean, Livingston, Logan, and Dewitt counties—and this year they are expanding into Ford, Iroquois, Kankakee, Mason, Menard, Piatt, and Vermillion counties too.

That includes supporting students’ rights under the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act of 1987—a federal law designed to ensure that homeless children and youth have equal access to the same free, appropriate, public education as nonhomeless students. “[Housing insecurity] could impact anyone at any time,” Arnolts says. “It’s just very immediate. It’s very local. . . Just knowing how critical having a place to stay at night is to education and to success in school—we’re so grateful that [the Lottery] provides this funding.”

Data: America’s Health Rankings. Infographic by Amber Huff

While some students and families directly reach out to schools for support during a housing crisis, others do not openly disclose their housing status.

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10 CHICAGO READER - JULY 3, 2025

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Data: National Center for Homeless Education. Infographic by Amber Huff

Once a student is identified, the liaison can assist them in enrolling in the McKinney-Vento program, which provides access to much-needed resources, including tutoring, clothing, and personal essentials, healthcare referrals, and more. They can also assist families in enrolling in IDHS’s Homeless Prevention Program (HPP), where they can apply for emergency rent or mortgage relief, utility payments, and more. “I can definitely say that for the majority of the funding, the use is for rent,” Arnolts says.

While ROEs receive funding from federal, state, and local sources, the need for homeless support services is far greater than their current resources, especially as they become better at identifying eligible students and families. “We had HPP money on July 1 of 2024, and it should have lasted me through June 30 of this month,” Arnolts says. “That money was spent in 100 days. So it goes really fast.”

That means that with every purchase of a 7X Bingo Multiplier from the Illinois Lottery, you can play a vital role in supporting Illinois students experiencing homelessness and make a difference in their future.

That makes properly identifying eligible students an important first step in carrying out McKinney-Vento’s mission. To do so, ROE #17 provides training for district level homelessness liaisons, and works with families and educators to help identify students experiencing homelessness—which the act defines as students who lack a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence.

ing homelessness can be challenging due to stigmas around poverty and homelessness, and a lack of trust in educational institutions and government agencies. “Anyone who works with schools and families will tell you that the barrier is that families do not want to tell anyone about their housing instability or their lack of housing, and so this program exists to build trust,” Arnolts says.

“When teachers, staff, and McKinney-Vento liaisons can identify students who may be experiencing housing instability, and have access to and knowledge of available resources, they can more quickly intervene to keep students housed and support their success in school,” says Katie Eighan, continuum of care planning director at the Alliance to End Homelessness in Suburban Cook County.

In some school districts, McKinney-Vento status is protected under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (FERPA), which means that teachers aren’t permitted to know a student’s housing status. To address that, ROE #17 trains educators to recognize potential signs that a student might be experiencing homelessness—for example, if a student seems more tired or hungry than usual—and communicate their concerns with district liaisons, who are permitted to step in. “It’s a tough message to get to teachers, because it’s really not their business, but they

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JULY 3, 2025 - CHICAGO READER 11

ARTS & CULTURE EXHIBITIONS

R Queering sound

Tess Oldfield turns her voice into a mechanized choir at ACRE Projects.

Every 30 minutes from 9 AM to 5 PM on opening days, visitors to ACRE Projects are greeted with the song of a mechanized choir in Tess Oldfield’s “hiccup.” The central work of “hiccup” is Pitch Pipe Choir, a bafflingly complex combination of air compression tubes, electromagnetic valves, pitch pipes, Arduino software, motors, and lots of cables. All of this stuff coalesces into the titular sonic composition heard through four glass-blown semispherical sound domes. While Pitch Pipe Choir is a striking visual assemblage in its own right, and no doubt a treat for the “how does it work?” sect, the sounding composition deserves its own special attention. Turning on at around 15 minutes into my visit (startling myself and ACRE’s gallery attendant), Pitch Pipe Choir came to life with a hissing mechanical polyphonic drone, emitting a sound palette that recalled something between the whir of an electric saw, a run-down chord organ, and the hiss of cicadas. There is something enchanting about the slightness of the sound from this particular pipe organ and its seeming suggestion of knocking the pipe organ’s austere position down a few rungs. This is not to say the composition and its sounding device were lacking; rather, it elucidated to me the exquisiteness of queering sound, of evoking the sonic in ways unexpected. While I am unsure of Oldfield’s attendant

L-R: Installation view, “hiccups,” “Living Without the Gods” L-R: LEVI SHAND; LUDVIG PERÉS written metaphor of this work surrogating a human vocal choir, there is plenty to contend with around what it immediately evokes in its rich and subtle request to

Find a Reader!

New dropoffs and boxes on the South and West sides!

12 CHICAGO READER - JULY 3, 2025

listen differently. —CHRIS REEVES “HICCUP” Through 7/28: Mon and Wed 11 AM–3 PM, Sat 11 AM-4 PM, or by appointment, exhibitions@acreresidency.org, ACRE Projects, 2921 N. Clark, acreresidency.org/ exhibition/hiccup

THE GODS” Through 8/16: Thu–Sat 11 AM–6 PM,

R There is no God in the temple

60 WRD/MIN

“Living Without the Gods” is a meditation on the loss of identity and cultural sovereignty.

A handwoven chausar board sits on a pedestal, with 3D-printed sacred statues placed on top. Two rectangular dice lay next to each other in one corner of the pedestal with words engraved on each side. These phrases form the title of this piece: It’s Mine, No It’s Mine, Now It’s Yours, No It’s Ours, Now It’s Missing!

In “Living Without the Gods,” Chicago-based Indian artist Shaurya Kumar examines the brutal removal of spiritual artifacts under colonial occupation, the emotional displacement resulting from cultural destruction, and the resistance against capitalism’s commoditization of Indian spirituality and mass reproduction of sacred objects.

Through the exhibition, visitors will encounter broken statue hands in glass display cases, photos of temple remains “where Yoginis once danced,” and an empty bronze stand “where the goddess once stood,” until they reach a wall where soot and graphite ink vaguely outline three massive trees, adorned with more than six hundred white porcelain knots.

In India, people would tie fabric knots on branches to pray for divine intervention. But porcelain is fragile.

If placed upon real trees, they’d easily shatter, similar to how faith shatters if not actively practiced and preserved.

As visitors exit, they will pass Oi mandire kono debata nei by the entrance, making this installation the first and last one they see. The texts—made with porcelain, asphalt, and gold leaf—reveal a solemn conclusion: There is no God in the temple.

Colonialists stripped the Indian people of what was theirs. Now, Indian diasporas rebuild upon empty altars and deserted temples, amidst 3D-printed mini

Buddhas and pop spirituality, restoring and re-creating shattered faith. —XIAO DACUNHA “LIVING WITHOUT

South Asia Institute, 1925 S. Michigan, saichicago. org/exhibition/living-without-the-gods, free

In the project 60 wrd/min art critic, writer Lori Waxman explores how art writing can serve an expanded field of artists—including those incarcerated, trying to gain visas, working to establish themselves professionally, or just wanting feedback for a secret hobby. For this iteration, Waxman reviewed a work

by Chicago-based artist Tianjiao Wang.

R An intimate look at Beijing

An experimental film by Tianjiao Wang offers a glimpse of the artist’s hometown.

Subjects that appear repeatedly in Tianjiao Wang’s 24-minute experimental film red bean (2025) include ducks swimming in open water, a pine forest illuminated by a low sun, busy motorways, landmark buildings and bridges built in traditional styles, and a pair of middleaged women’s hands poking out of orange sleeves. The woman is always busy doing something with great care and patience: peeling tomatoes, chopping cabbage, mending clothing, stuffing bao. Though the rest of her is never seen, she is the heart of red bean, shot in Wang’s hometown of Beijing, a place from which the artist has lived apart during many years of schooling abroad. Wang’s gaze, tempered by the nostalgic lens of a 16-mm camera, observes much, judges little, but always returns to the woman in the orange sweater, who seems to live in a gentler, simpler, more natural world than the real Beijing of today. Sure, there is plentiful nighttime auto traffic, but it is silent, just a flow of lights that speeds up and slows down and speeds up again, like a beautiful memory. —LORI WAXMAN 202506-26 5:20 PM TIANJIAO WANG angelatianjiao.com,

instagram.com/angelatianjiao v

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JULY 3, 2025 - CHICAGO READER 13

14 CHICAGO READER - JULY 3, 2025 JULY 3, 2025 - CHICAGO READER 15

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fictional nature weaves a strong, positive, and factual thread of the city’s reality, shifting the external collective perception of what’s possible in Chicago. Keep your eyes peeled for Max’s vibrant, energizing murals all over Chicago and around the world.

Ironheart now streaming on Disney+

Max Sansing grew up in Avalon Park and used his friends and neighbors as models for this inspiring mural on 79th and East End. This shows up a few times in Ironheart.

Surely showcasing his skills was no issue; Sansing is more attentive to how his work can impact and uplift his community. The MCU and real-world Max Sansing, along with the titular character, Ironheart is further proof that Chicago’s South Side is more than what traditional media portrays it to be.

Strategically, yet honestly, the show’s

As a self-proclaimed comic book nerd, inclusion in the MCU is a dream come true; it also provides a certain level of institutional support and validation. It was crucial that Sansing remained grounded as part of Marvel’s new series, Ironheart.

When he arrived, seeing a replica White Castle on set put a smile on his face; it settled in that his artwork and murals have become a part of feeling like home on the South Side, a point of legacy building for Sansing and authenticit authenticity for Marvel’s commitment to “if you know, you know” easte easter eggs.

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Riri’s crash landing on 79th outside the Regal Avalon kicks of Episode 1

Max Sansing and Frankye Payne in front of the Unity Mural featured in Episode 3

A South Side superhero has officially joined the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Max Sansing, born and raised by artistic parents on Chicago’s South Side, has creativity woven into his DNA; he carries this legacy, the one of AfriCOBRA and graffiti artists, with an acute awareness that he, too, is inspiring future creatives and communal placekeepers.

by Cortlyn Kelly

A Southeast Spotlight

MARVEL ON THE SOUTH SIDE

THEATER COLUMN

Rest is part of the revolution Drag and burlesque performers share their tips for recharging after Pride.

By CHARLI RENKEN

J

une has come and gone, and with it, one of the busiest times of year for drag and burlesque performers. Between Pride events and summer kickoff parties, my peers and I have been bustling the past month.

I can’t count the number of times I bumped into a friend at a show who could only give me a quick hug before rushing to another event, while sweating and trying to catch their breath.

Before June even started, I had the pleasure of attending Notes on Masculinity at Links Hall. I teared up a few times during it. That’s something that happened to me a lot last month from seeing such amazing performers and being overwhelmed by how much I love queer people and how inspired I feel watching those in my community express themselves, especially when our right to do so is being threatened across the country.

One number that made me emotional from Notes on Masculinity was by the show’s coproducer, Switch the Boi Wonder. When they pulled a chair out to the middle of the stage and told us they’d been “working on this one for a while,” I assumed they were about to give

Shows of note

See venue website for complete information.

GLAMORAMA: A COMEDY AND GLAMOR VARIETY SHOW Sat 7/5 9 PM, My Buddy’s, $10

QUEERIOD: AN OPEN STAGE DRAG SHOW

First and third Sunday of every month, 5 PM, Charlie’s Chicago, free

16 CHICAGO READER - JULY 3, 2025

After Pride, drag and burlesque performers practice rest and reflection. SHIRA FRIEDMAN-PARKS

us a more typical chair routine; after all, their spouse, Tila Von Twirl, produced a whole chair show, Sit Down & Shut Up, in February that Switch was also part of. That’s not what we got, though.

At the insistence of their friend and coproducer, Po’Chop, Switch took a seat and faced the audience, then Po’Chop started a three-minute timer. Switch silently sat there for the duration of the timer. Breathing. Taking a break. One by one, people came up and handed them their dollar tips. It felt like a procession, recognizing all the hard work Switch does for the scene (and they do a lot, especially for the drag king community), telling them, “You are worthy of our love just sitting here, just resting, just as you are.”

Rest does not come easily to drag and burlesque entertainers. There’s a hustle mentality to a lot of the scene: always be looking for your next gig, go to every show you can, get noticed, never stop. As Lady Gaga puts it, “No sleep, bus, club, another club, another club, another club. . . .”

That’s not sustainable, though. I’ve seen people drop out of shows because they’ve overbooked themselves or their bodies forced them to take a break. I’ve seen many people get burned out and take anxious hiatuses, worried whether the scene will welcome them back if they’re not in the spotlight for a while. I myself had a bit of a breakdown after my producing debut in April. I’d told myself that I’d take a month off of performing and

THE FLY HONEY SHOW: FINAL RUN

PASTIES FOR THE PEOPLE: A BURLESQUE AND VARIETY SHOW BENEFITTING THE NATIONAL IMMIGRANT JUSTICE CENTER

7/10-7/11, 7/18-7/19, and 7/24-7/25; doors 8 PM, preshow 8:30 PM, show 9 PM, Thalia Hall, $45-$100, 17+

RATED Q: A DRAG SHOW AND MOVIE SCREENING OF BURLESQUE

Thu 7/17 7:30 PM, Newport Theater, $20-$30

LUST FOR LIFE: A ROCK-OUT BURLYQ REVUE

Thu 7/10 9:45 PM, cocktail hour 9 PM with DJ Stasney, Music Box Theater, $15

Sat 7/19, doors 10 PM, show 11 PM, Lemon, $15, 21+

STRANGE BEDFELLOWS: AN EVENING OF ODD AND EROTIC COMBINATIONS

DOLLY POSTPARTUM’S “NUTS”

Sat 7/12 9:30 PM, Newport Theater, $25, 18+

F.A.B. LAB: SEASON 7 FINALE Tue 7/8, Lost Never Found, $5

Fri 7/25 9:30 PM, Newport Theater, $15-$25

RISQUÉ REVIEW: WET HOT RETRO SPECIAL

Sun 7/27 7:30 PM, Rogers Park Social, free

then return with a goal of one show a month.

Instead, I found myself immediately booked in three shows and crying to my therapist about wanting to perform but not wanting anyone to perceive me.

I asked some of my peers how they take care of themselves in such a busy industry. Many people told me to take a break from being online; doomscrolling certainly doesn’t help you get any sort of rest. Zenon TeaVee often gives people the advice to delete Facebook from their phones.

“You can always redownload it, but if you need to disconnect, do it. You won’t be able to fight for what you believe in if you don’t take care of yourself first,” she has said to many audiences at her show Glamorama.

Wes Andy Sins takes time to disconnect from the scene by going on day trips or attending events that center his other interests.

“Since I am older and sober from alcohol, it helps to remind myself that life exists outside of our (admittedly wonderful and complex) queer nightlife in Chicago,” he told me over Discord.

Another important thing to remind yourself when you’re feeling burnt out is that this is all supposed to be fun. Monsieur Bombastic shared with me that he recently felt so burnt out that he was on the verge of quitting.

“A friend broke through my skull two Fridays ago when plans went awry for Fresh Faces. He held me by both of my shoulders, saying, ‘Let’s have fun!’ And I thought, ‘Oh, oh right. This is fun. Drag is fun,’” he said. That night, the two friends had a blast, and now Monsieur Bombastic said he’s fallen in love with performing all over again.

It’s also important to have the courage to say no to gigs sometimes and know that other opportunities will come. Bubba Boom told me he doesn’t take every gig that comes his way because, as a disabled performer, he has to conserve his energy to avoid injury and burnout. I’m trying to learn that lesson myself.

Now that it’s July, I hope those of you in the industry are taking a minute to breathe.

I know many of you aren’t and are booked to high heaven, but hopefully between shows you find time to unwind. Remember, you are worthy of love on or offstage—just resting, just as you are. v

m crenken@chicagoreader.com

ANGELS IN AMERICA R Through 9/7: Part One: Millennium Approaches Fri 7 PM, Sat noon, every other Mon 7 PM, Sun 7/6 noon, and Thu 8/28 and 9/4 7 PM, final performance Sat 9/6 noon; Part Two: Perestroika Sat 7 PM, Sun noon, every other Mon 7 PM (starting 7/7), Thu 7/3 and Fri 8/29 7 PM, Fri 9/5 7 PM, final performance

Sun 9/7 noon; no performances 7/4, 7/5, 8/30, 8/31, or 9/1; Windy City Playhouse, 3014 W. Irving Park, invictustheatreco.com, $38 ($25 Mon)

Ryan Hake as Prior Walter in Angels in America at Invictus Theatre AARON REESE BOSEMAN PHOTOGRAPHY

REVIEW

Angels in America resonates with our times Tony Kushner’s “Gay Fantasia on National Themes” returns with Invictus.

By ALBERT WILLIAMS

W

ith pitch-perfect performances and top-drawer design, Invictus Theatre Company’s production of Angels in America is bold, vivid theatrical storytelling.

Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play is one of the great works of 20th-century American drama, and director Charles Askenaizer and his cast and creative team meet the play’s enormous demands with impressive technique and compelling passion.

First produced in the early 1990s, Angels was written as a white-hot response to some of the world-changing tragedies of the 1980s—in particular the AIDS epidemic and the Chernobyl disaster. When I saw the play’s 1993 Broadway premiere, those events were still painfully fresh, while speculation about what the new millennium might bring added a sense of apocalyptic urgency. Now, 25 years into the 21st century, Angels resonates as a history play that offers enlightening—sometimes hopeful, sometimes chilling—perspective on the present.

Set in New York City between October 1985 and August 1986 (with an epilogue set in 1990), Angels in America consists of two independent but connected three-act plays, Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, performed in repertory (with both plays presented back-to-back with a dinner break on Saturdays).

The sprawling story focuses on two couples in crisis: gay lovers Prior Walter and Louis Ironson, and Mormon attorney Joe Pitt and his wife, Harper. Prior (Ryan Hake) has just been diagnosed with Kaposi’s sarcoma, a rare, deadly cancer associated with acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, or AIDS, which in 1985 was considered an automatic death sentence; Louis (Grant Carriker), terrified of coping with his partner’s illness, abandons Prior. Harper (Anne Trodden), meanwhile, suffers from acute anxiety disorder, which she self-medicates with Valium, while her husband, Joe (Joe Bushell), an attorney seen as a rising star in Republican circles, secretly struggles with his own homosexuality. Joe and

Louis, who work in the same office building, begin a sexual affair grounded as much in mutual guilt as in physical attraction, while Prior and Harper encounter each other on an astral plane as Harper’s drug-induced hallucinations collide with Prior’s fever dreams.

As the story unfolds, the lines separating reality, fantasy, and the supernatural dissolve.

Prior receives nighttime visitations from the spirits of his Anglo-Norman ancestors and then from a multigendered Angel (Nicki Rossi), who declares him to be a divine prophet. Echoing the Old Testament tale of Jacob, Prior ultimately does combat with the Angel to win a blessing: more life, thanks in part to the antiretroviral medication azidothymidine (AZT) provided illegally by his friend Belize (Miguel Long), a registered nurse and onetime drag queen. Prior is also ministered to by Joe’s flinty Mormon mother, Hannah (Renae Stone), who comes to New York from Salt Lake City to straighten out her son but ends up bonding with Prior instead.

And then there’s Roy Cohn (Michael D. Graham), a historical personage whom Kushner integrates into his fictional narrative. A wellknown and much-feared right-wing lawyer, Cohn rose to prominence in the 1950s when he prosecuted Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on charges of spying for the Soviet Union, resulting in their execution. From there, Cohn served as chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy on the Wisconsin Republican’s fear-and-smear crusade against suspected communists and homosexuals in government. By the 1980s, Cohn—himself a closeted homosexual—was in private practice as a mob lawyer and political fixer who helped media baron Rupert Murdoch achieve political influence and worked on Ronald Reagan’s first presidential campaign.

At one point in the play, Cohn introduces Joe to a justice department bureaucrat who exults over Reagan’s reelection: “It’s a revolution in Washington, Joe,” says the bureaucrat.

“We have a new agenda and finally a real leader. . . . By the 90s, the Supreme Court will be block-solid Republican appointees, and the federal bench—Republican judges like land mines, everywhere, everywhere they turn.

Affirmative action? Take it to court. Boom!

Land mine. And we’ll get our way on just about everything: abortion, defense, Central America, family values, a live investment climate.

We have the White House locked till the year 2000. And beyond. A permanent fix on the Oval Office? It’s possible. . . . It’s really the end of Liberalism. The end of New Deal socialism.

The end of ipso facto secular humanism. The

THEATER

dawning of a genuinely American political personality. Modeled on Ronald Wilson Reagan.”

Though Cohn secretly received experimental AZT treatment for AIDS, until his death in 1986 he insisted he had liver cancer. Watching Angels in America today, one can’t help but note Cohn’s relevance to contemporary politics: he was an attorney for and mentor to real estate developer—now president—Donald Trump, as dramatized in the recent motion picture The Apprentice. In Kushner’s play, Cohn serves as a mentor to the earnestly conservative Joe, which infuriates Louis. Cohn embodies everything that Louis despises, with his reactionary politics, racism, corruption, hypocrisy, vulgarity, and naked lust for power.

Described by Kushner as a “Gay Fantasia on National Themes,” Angels in America is a dense, symbol-rich work of theatrical poetry whose influences range from the magical late romances of Shakespeare to the freewheeling genderfuck fables of Charles Ludlam and his “theater of the ridiculous” (note: the production includes nudity and simulated sex and violence). Kushner’s dialogue sings with the rhapsodic, heroic mix of earthiness and spirituality associated with poets Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg, and often bristles with the waspish wit that’s been a hallmark of “gay plays” since the early work of Lanford Wilson, William M. Hoffman, and Robert Patrick at the off-off-Broadway Caffe Cino in the 1960s. Heightened language is the foundation of Angels’ impact, and the Invictus cast delivers their highly charged speeches with power and delicacy. In addition to the central characters cited above, the eight actors take on a panoply of smaller roles, making the ensemble appear much larger than it is.

Similarly, the extraordinary design work by Kevin Rolfs (set), Brandon Wardell (lights), Petter Wahlbäck (sound), Jessie Gowens (costumes), Hannah Andruss (wigs and makeup), Rachel Livingston (props), and G. “Max” Maxin IV (projections) makes Invictus’s Angels feel both epic and intimate in the 90-seat Windy City Playhouse.

Make no mistake: Angels in America is a long show. Millennium Approaches runs about three and a quarter hours; Perestroika runs almost four. But Invictus’s imaginatively staged, crisply paced, and beautifully performed and designed realization of this durable American masterpiece is genuinely entertaining and moving, as well as intellectually stimulating. v

m letters@chicagoreader.com JULY 3, 2025 - CHICAGO READER 17

FILM

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t’s the summer of Naruse. There was a Mikio Naruse film, Wife! Be Like a Rose! (1935), at the Nitrate Picture Show earlier this month, and then the Chicago Film Society just recently brought two here, When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960) and Lightning (1952), at the Music Box Theatre and the Gene Siskel Film Center, respectively, both on 35-millimeter prints imported from Japan.

Where another Japanese auteur, Kenji Mizoguchi, focused on the plight of women to melodramatic (but still masterful) effect, Naruse did so more realistically with the struggles of lowerand middle-class women’s day-to-day lives. In When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, for example, a 30-year-old widow and bar hostess (Hideko Takamine, who stars also in Lightning and many other Naruse films) grapples with her future as she aspires to open her own bar and debates whether or not to remarry, the latter perhaps a necessity to achieving financial security otherwise unattainable for single women.

This week, I also saw Celine Song’s Materialists (2025) at AMC Block 37. It absolutely feels like an approximation of a romantic comedy by way of Past Lives (2023), Song’s acclaimed feature debut. Though I didn’t care much for the earlier film, I found Materialists to be interesting, if not entirely successful, as a consideration of marriage along both romantic and practical lines, echoing the Naruse films in its indictment of the latter. Ironically, what I didn’t like about Past Lives—the arrant pensiveness that masqueraded as substance—is what intrigued me about her follow-up. I’m still qualifying my thoughts on the film, but it feels akin to Whit

Stillman at his peak—something like Jane Austen for millennials, let’s say. I’ve seen a lot of reviews say that it subverts the rom-com, but I don’t think it necessarily does that so much as it says the quiet part out loud.

I’ll confess here to having found Gerard Johnstone’s 2022 film M3GAN entertaining— self-aware camp at its best, in my opinion. So, naturally, I felt compelled to see M3GAN 2.0 at 9:45 AM on Saturday at AMC River East. I’m pretty sure I was the only one in the theater, but I had a blast. Surprisingly, the film encompasses my current thoughts on artificial intelligence, which is that it could be a net positive for humanity if used ethically. The keyword “ethically,” however, is a near impossibility, no matter how many ways policymakers attempt to regulate it.

The film considers both extremes—not enough regulation or a potentially inhibiting amount of it—and then, ultimately (spoiler alert), finds this nice middle ground. Most likely, though, it will be the extremely bad version—AI either becoming sentient or being wielded by bad operators—that befalls us. Though, just like we can hope that people are good at heart, maybe it’ll be possible that, like M3GAN, some will grow artificial consciences to temper their artificial intelligence and corresponding sassy attitudes.

If any filmmaker could be said to portray the existential catch-22 that is being human in a world becoming increasingly unhuman, it might be Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki; this is best exemplified by his 2013 film The Wind Rises, which I saw on Sunday at the Music Box as part of the Destination Ghibli festival. If this had indeed been Miyazaki’s final film as he claimed back then, it would have been a perfect note to end on. It’s a stunningly beautiful film but more so a stunningly beautiful feeling, that of sadness and awe, regret and hope, embodied by the story of a man who yearned to fly but whose imagination couldn’t save him, or anyone else, from reality.

Also as part of the festival, I saw Isao Takahata’s Pom Poko (1994), introduced by my friend and Music Box programmer Kyle Westphal, whose emphasis on the role of raccoon scrotums in the film was not overstated. Lastly, I saw Miyazaki’s Porco Rosso (1992). As they say: Better a pig than a fascist!

Until next time, moviegoers. —KAT SACHS v

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Jurassic World: Rebirth The secret to Jurassic Park (1993) isn’t just the CGI; it’s the way the film pauses to let you sit in the thrill of witnessing something impossible. That first glimpse of the Brachiosaurus feels like a miracle. The camera drifts across the field, John Williams’s score swells, and as Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, and Sam Neill look up, so do you. The scale is breathtaking, but what makes the moment unforgettable is the perspective. We don’t just see the Brachiosaurus—we experience it through the stunned reactions of the scientists. Their awe becomes ours. It’s movie magic at full force.

Jurassic World: Rebirth wants to capture that feeling—badly. About halfway through the movie, director Gareth Edwards pays homage to this scene. Our latest ragtag group of potential dino fodder stumbles upon a field of Titanosaurs. The music cues up, and our one sprightly scientist steps toward the colossus. But it plays like a hazy memory. It doesn’t build awe so much as borrow it. Seven iterations into a franchise, the spectacle means less now because we’ve seen it all before.

That’s sort of the point of the film. Five years after the events of Jurassic World: Dominion (2022), people have stopped caring about dinosaurs, which are dying again, everywhere except near the equator, where stragglers roam. But some people still see dollar signs.

Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend), a slimy pharmaceutical jockey, wants to travel to the no-go zone to extract DNA from living dinosaurs to develop heart medicine that will make a small group of people a lot of money. Some of those people include mercenaries Zora (Scarlett Johansson) and Duncan (Mahershala Ali), and a young, bright-eyed paleontologist, Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey). To access the dino DNA, they must travel to an island where scientists once genetically experimented on dinosaurs to create even scarier dinosaurs. Sounds like a great plan.

In an attempt to inject some heart into the story, the film introduces the Delgado family—a father (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) sailing across the ocean with his daughters (Luna Blaise, Audrina Miranda) and the eldest’s boyfriend (David Iacono). Their ship topples over, and they are saved by the aforementioned motley crew.

But, from here on out, Edwards plays everything safe. There are lukewarm plotlines about the wrongness of making money off of medicine, as well as moments of grief (mercenaries have feelings, too!). We systematically watch a few of the less important characters get chomped by big dinosaurs. However, the plot armor is ironclad for anyone the movie wants us to care about.

The stakes couldn’t be lower.

This is the problem with most franchises. Many movies in, it’s not enough to just show us big dinos and expect the same awestruck audience. When the six-limbed megadinosaur arrives, it’s a boring punch line. As the protagonists sail into the sunset, the film has

an unfortunate irony, for the perils of pushing genetic manipulation too far, and for a franchise that’s done the same with its own DNA. —MAXWELL RABB PG-13, 134

min. Wide release in theaters

M3GAN 2.0 Three years after the original film became a surprise hit, M3GAN 2.0 picks the story up exactly where you expect it to: somewhere near the border of Turkey and Iran, where a new and improved Gen Z robot named AMELIA has been built to serve (in the U.S. military) but reprogrammed to slay (the scientists who work in her top-secret research facility). Who can stop AMELIA’s mysterious hacker from taking over the world? Well . . . yes, it’s M3GAN, the eponymous killer girlboss from the first movie, now rebuilt by ethical AI advocate Gemma (Allison Williams) to be less psychotic and a couple inches taller. If that all sounds familiar, it’s because it’s virtually indistinguishable from the premise of Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), a movie writer–director Gerard Johnstone has insisted he wasn’t trying to riff on, to which I respond: Let’s not play games, Gerard.

I’m less bothered by the obvious inspiration and the curiously pro-AI stance M3GAN 2.0 takes (which is a different thinkpiece for a different writer) than I am by the fact that it feels like a cash grab on a meme instead of

a sequel to a movie. With several years of M3GAN Halloween costumes in the rearview, the filmmakers have leaned even harder into self-aware campiness this time around. The problem is that every joke feels written with the express purpose of going viral, so most of the humor amounts to the title character doing another Addison Rae TikTok dance to diminishing returns or dropping some mild swear words with a “Did I say that?” cheekiness. Thank god for the inclusion of a left-field musical number that I wouldn’t spoil if you paid me, except to say it’s even more of a showstopper than the first movie’s Sia cover. Otherwise, the script’s frequent Steven Seagal name-drops are apropos, in that for two solid hours we are victim to a barrage of clunky one-liners that never get more clever than “Hold onto your vaginas.”

Like M3GAN (2022), this is an R-rated movie chopped up and watered down in postproduction to earn a PG-13 rating, thus raking in cold hard cash from viewers born after the Iraq War ended. There are enough glimpses of snapped arms and projectile vomiting to suggest a more fun movie buried underneath the labored humor and iPad-baby pandering, but until what will inevitably be marketed as the “unrated cut” is available to stream, we’ll have to settle for what this is: Cocomelon James Cameron. —JOEY SHAPIRO PG-13,

120 min. Wide release in theaters v

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MUSIC

BOUNDARY WATERS, DISASTER KID, OUX

Thu 7/3, 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 2100 W. Belmont, beatkitchen.com, $18, $15 in advance ($21.80 with fees), 17+

Boundary Waters commit to DIY music as a lifelong pursuit With a new EP of meticulous, melodramatic emo, this Chicago five-piece prove you don’t have to quit your basement band by 30.

By DEVYN-MARSHALL BROWN (DMB)

A

ndy Brommel feels like he lives a double life. By day, he’s a 43-year-old communications consultant for a national firm working with midsize and large nonprofits. By night, he’s an emo indie rocker and a cheerleader for the Chicago DIY scene. “I’ll be presenting to a board of directors in the morning and at a DIY show in somebody’s basement at night,” he says. “But honestly, maintaining an active creative life and community gives you all the energy and spark that an adult professional life is not positioned to give you.”

Brommel and his four bandmates in Boundary Waters released the EP Longlost on June 27, and it’s an ode to sustaining a lifelong creative practice. He’s the group’s lead singer and songwriter, and each of the EP’s five tunes is a character study about one of his friends. Brommel says Boundary Waters have a tendency toward big, melodramatic arrangements with epic rises and falls—postrockstyle instrumental builds bolted onto relatively traditional pop-rock songwriting.

The group released the first single from Longlost on April 11. Brommel wrote “Last Seen” at the end of a relationship that had been central to his adult life—he found himself on his own, trying to take stock of all the friendships he’d lost track of or let wither away. “Last Seen” is about how you remember someone when you haven’t seen them in a long time. It’s a collection of snapshots from memory, an effort to spool out the story of a person from the images that appear when you think of them. “You were last seen wielding the poison pen / At all of history’s awful men / They’ve got it coming once again,” he sings. “I see you picking an ancient scar / Or an out-of-tune guitar / Now no one knows just where you are.”

“What I remember of this person is his critical voice,” Brommel says. “His critical eye for the world, the fact that he saw through all the bullshit, the fact that he was always writing and thinking and that was his mode of engaging with the world.”

The new EP is a significant departure from Boundary Waters’ most recent full-length album, 2020’s Atalanta, with its brooding, haunting tracks. The songs on Longlost are brighter, shorter, and more explosive, Brom-

20 CHICAGO READER - JULY 3, 2025

mel says. “The subject matter has moved away from me reflecting on this epic relationship story, and they’re much more outward facing now. . . . They’re little invitations, reckonings, and love letters to friends.”

Duncan Reilly is the bass player for Boundary Waters, a gig he’s had for four years. Even before he joined, he went to hear the band play every chance he could, so he was thrilled to step in. Reilly says the new EP is a labor of love, where someone—often Brommel—has thought about every detail.

not white-hot and raw. “It’s so refreshing to play in a band that’s all about the ‘you’ voice, that’s all speaking to other people through the music and trying to tell people something specific,” Reilly explains. “‘You did this.’ ‘You thought this.’ ‘You responded in these ways.’”

Boundary Waters began in 2010 as a solo project, with Brommel working in his home studio. Around 2017, he started meeting the kind of people he’d been waiting to build a band around. “Over the last seven or eight years in particular,” Brommel says, “I really

his ideas. Every member brings something distinct.

Brommel says Boundary Waters don’t truly have a song until there’s a drum part, so his first stop when he’s dressing the skeleton of a new tune is usually drummer Clint Bergin.

He says Bergin has an encyclopedic memory for any drum part he’s heard, no matter who played it. “He will not repeat himself,” Brommel says. “If he did a fill on something else ten years ago, he will not reuse that fill.”

Then there’s multi-instrumentalist Jon

Boundary Waters, clockwise from top left : Duncan Reilly, Tim Tsurutani, Jon Monteverde, Andy Brommel, and Clint Bergin VICKI HOLDA

“Andy is somebody who is very interested in getting everything right,” he says. Boundary Waters, being an emo band, are full of feelings.

But Brommel’s approach, Reilly says, helps those feelings come across as “considered,”

connected with the local music community in a way that I feel like I had been looking for all my life.” Now that he has bandmates, Brommel starts by sketching out the initial structure of a song, then lets everybody else develop

Monteverde, who’s been with the band the longest. He was Brommel’s first collaborator in Boundary Waters, back in 2010. Monteverde’s main role onstage is to play synthesizer and other keyboards, but he’s a Swiss Army knife

MUSIC in the studio. Whatever the song needs, he’ll find it. “He knows how to arrange strings,” Brommel says. “I went over to his house once, and he had a basket of wooden recorders—like the little flutes they play in elementary school.

And I asked him about it, and he was like, ‘Oh yeah. I was just learning some medieval recorder music.’”

time as the bassist in a band—and he navigates his playing through the lens of jazz, rock, and experimental music. He also knows the most music theory of the crew. He can articulate what they’re doing harmonically and in terms of chords, while everyone else operates on instinct. “What I love about these guys is that they’re all brilliant,” Brommel says. “They

When Brommel found the Chicago DIY scene, he was already in his mid-30s, and he’d spent his adult life up till that point missing exactly the kind of community it offers.

Lead guitarist Tim Tsurutani, Brommel says, is fun to play with because their musical instincts run perpendicular to each other.

Whatever Brommel comes up with, Tsurutani will write something that adds a whole new aspect to the music—like a z-axis leaping out of a flat plane to turn it into a three-dimensional space.

Reilly is usually a guitarist—this is his first

all do their own thing, and none of us listen to the same music.”

When Brommel found the Chicago DIY scene, he was already in his mid-30s, and he’d spent his adult life up till that point missing exactly the kind of community it offers. That experience primed him to appreciate the scene, not take it for granted. Scenes are fragile, he points out, always coming together and

falling apart—the cohort of active bands turns over every 18 months or so. So when he found himself in a group surrounded by good people and good music, he wanted to make it last.

“You want to encourage them,” he says. “You want to lift everyone up.”

Brommel has been going to shows every week for seven or eight years now. It blows his mind that he still stumbles onto new subscenes and subgenres he didn’t know existed.

They’re people he’s never seen before, he says, “But they all know each other, and they’re all playing together.” Many people give up on music by the time they’re 30, and he wants to cheer them on till they’re way past that imaginary “finish” line. You never have to finish making music, and everyone should embrace it as a lifelong creative practice. “A vibrant scene is such a life-giving thing,” he says. “It can be a home for people. It can help people feel OK in the world.”

Brok Mende, who cofounded Friends of Friends Recording in 2020, met Boundary Waters in 2017, while working as a rideshare driver—he picked them up from their re-

hearsal space at Fort Knox Studios. None of them could’ve known at the time, but Mende would later mix and master Atalanta and then Longlost. Even the way the band went about that process demonstrates how meticulous Brommel is about their sound.

Mende remembers Brommel telling him that Boundary Waters would do all the recording for Longlost on their own. But even though Mende wouldn’t be getting involved till they were ready to mix, they still enlisted him to help build out the space where they planned to record and make sure it had the proper equipment and sound treatments.

When Mende considers the legacy Boundary Waters are building, he sees five people advocating fiercely for DIY culture in Chicago—and for artists creating the music that they want and need to create. “I just hope that people listen to [Longlost],” he says. “It’s art for art’s sake, and I think that is one of the most important, holy, radical things that we have right now, as DIY musicians in Chicago.” v

m dmbrown@chicagoreader.com

JULY 3, 2025 - CHICAGO READER 21

MUSIC CHICAGOANS OF NOTE

Greg Obis, new owner of Chicago Mastering Service “This room is totally nuts—it’s like listening to music underneath a microscope. And we have all the latest tools in order to get music to where it needs to be.”

As told to PHILIP MONTORO

This month Greg Obis formally becomes the sole owner of Chicago Mastering Service (CMS), founded in 2007 by Bob Weston and Jason Ward. Weston, best known as the bassist in Shellac, moved to Portugal in May with his wife, Carrie.

Originally from Oak Park, Obis attended Bennington College in Vermont. In 2011, during his junior year, he interned at Electrical Audio, and upon graduating in 2012 he moved to Chicago and started at CMS. The studio also employs mastering engineer Matthew Barnhart and assistant engineer Manae Solara Vaughn (cofounder of the band Oux).

Outside Chicago Mastering, Obis works as a tour manager and live sound engineer (notably for Protomartyr, La Luz, and Jessica Pratt) and picks up occasional gigs mixing or recording at other studios. His record label, Born Yesterday, folded in 2024, but he still plays guitar and sings for local postpunk band Stuck, who open for the Jesus Lizard at Metro on Wednesday, November 19. In this interview, Obis attempts to demystify mastering—while explaining why it might still be a good idea to let a professional handle it.

22 CHICAGO READER - JULY 3, 2025

M

astering is the last creative step of finishing an album and the first manufacturing step of finishing an album. It’s really to make the mixes sound more like themselves, in the same way that salt makes food taste more like itself. So if your mixes are there—you’re hearing the guitar, the bass, the vocals, the drums, et cetera—but it’s not quite sounding like you wanted it to in your head, we’re the part that brings a sort of cohesion to the mix elements.

The more manufacturing side is, we’re the last stop before an album is going to be made into CDs or sent to Spotify or pressed to vinyl or made into a cassette. So making sure there’s no problems with the audio, no song titles that are misspelled that are going to show up on the CD. And then also just knowing the specific needs of each production master: knowing

Greg Obis at Chicago Mastering Service GREG OBIS

what the CD plant is going to want, knowing how vinyl works and knowing what specific things that the pressing plant is going to need, or what Spotify is going to need.

One thing that Chicago Mastering has done is cut lacquers, which is the first step of the vinyl-manufacturing process. We cut the lacquers, and we send them out to get plated and made into metal parts. And then those metal parts get sent to a place like Smashed Plastic here in Chicago to be actually pressed into the final records.

Bob has taken the lathe with him. He’s opening another room in Portugal, where he will continue cutting lacquers. It’s something that we have historically done, and I’m intimately familiar with the workings of vinyl. It is a very highly specialized skill, for sure. It’s cool to feel like I have some sort of arcane knowledge.

The biggest difference, in terms of what vinyl specifically needs on the mastering end, is that a vinyl record can only be so loud—or rather, you can only cut music onto a lacquer disc at a certain level before it starts to distort. The level at which digital audio distorts is way, way higher, and so when digital audio came along, you had these “loudness wars” in the 80s, 90s, 2000s, where people were making stuff as loud as you possibly could. There’s always been this perception that music that is louder is going to get more commercial success.

The overall level of the audio that is going to get cut onto [vinyl] is quite a bit quieter.

And certain high frequencies can get you

“You can really make beautiful, wonderful-sounding stuff recording at home and mixing at home. But I think mastering, because it’s this highly, highly technical thing, it’s really good to trust that to a professional.”

MUSIC into trouble. Or if there’s too much high-end information, if there’s too much stereo low information, that can create problems. Ideally, a good cutting engineer, what they’re trying to do is make it so that when you play back something on your turntable, it sounds similar to the digital version—because the digital version is what the client approved.

I have no immediate plans to replace the lathe. They stopped making cutting lathes in the 1980s, I believe. And those machines are archaic, often, like Frankensteined things that are fragile and expensive and wild. It’s really cool getting to cut lacquers, and it’s been really cool getting to learn about that process. But for the time being, I think we’re just concentrating on keeping the ship afloat on the digital end.

If I’m working on your record, and you need a production master to get sent to a vinyl pressing plant, that still requires some know-how and expertise on our end, and we can totally provide that. But we’re not cutting lacquers specifically. We could send those files out to somebody like Bob, or to Carl Saff here in Chicago, who has a cutting lathe, or just send it to Smashed Plastic and let them figure it out. Many pressing plants in the U.S. work like that, where they don’t have a cutting lathe in-house, but they contract that out.

Mastering daddy Bob Katz—he’s kind of the GOAT of mastering and mastering education—declared the loudness wars over some years ago. I don’t know if I’d say that’s totally true. The reason why he declared them over is because, with streaming becoming the dominant mode of music consumption, they have systems and policies about loudness that basically incentivize artists and producers to make their music at a reasonable level so that it’s more dynamic. What that usually is is loudness normalization.

With the loudness wars, you had everybody trying to squeeze every possible bit of loudness out of it. And because there is a ceiling for how loud digital audio can be (it’s higher than vinyl, but there’s still a ceiling), in order to keep getting louder you have to start limiting the music more and more and compressing the dynamics more and more. On vinyl, before digital, you would want the loud to be loud and the quiet to be quiet and for there to be this dynamic range. When you’re doing this constant compression and limiting, you’re making the louds loud, you’re making the mediums loud, you’re making the quiets loud. And everything sounds smushed together and bad.

And so with streaming companies employing loudness normalization, what that means

is that they have a target loudness that all the music on their platform has to hit at. Loudness normalization is not compressing or limiting the music at all in order to get it quieter.

They’re just turning the volume knob down.

The reason they do this is because—I’m sure you’ve received a mix tape or a mix CD when you were in high school where you went from, like, an acoustic ballad to a heavy metal song, and suddenly it just gets way louder and you jump out of your seat. They don’t want their platform to work like that. The result is that music that’s ultraloud and ultralimited and ultra compressed gets turned down. Your music sounds a lot dinkier. And so we’re at a stage where there’s a much broader awareness that there’s only so far you can go. You don’t really get a lot out of making stuff as loud as you possibly can.

Chicago Mastering Service was very ahead of the curve on that. If you go on the website now, there’s a whole page on loudness, which I think was probably written in 2008. But it’s still quite informative, making people aware that there are incentives to having quieter

it when people can be recording and mixing and mastering at home. That sort of scarcity certainly does put pressure on an engineer to broaden the scope of what they’re doing.

Business here generally is going strong and feeling solid. Obviously not having Bob is going to be a challenge, just because he’s the engineer the business charges the most to work with. But I think we’ll be fine. I hope everybody wants to have me master their record and have Matthew master their record! Any support is greatly appreciated as I step into this new role.

At Chicago Mastering, we do stuff at a pretty high level. In Chicago at least, there’s probably us and Carl Saff that are doing this. This room is totally nuts—it’s like listening to music underneath a microscope. And we have all the latest tools in order to get music to where it needs to be. But frankly, not everybody has a budget for that, and it’s going to continue to be a challenge in the future to convince people that doing it at this level is worthwhile.

You can really make beautiful, wonderfulsounding stuff recording at home and mixing at home. But I think mastering, because it’s

“I can hear that stuff really accurately and know: OK, there was a node in this person’s mixing environment, like a hole at 80 hertz. And so they made 80 hertz really loud. And I’m hearing it, and I know that this is gonna fart out a car stereo.” music that has a larger dynamic range. They have a waveform of a My Bloody Valentine song, which looks super dynamic—it isn’t totally bricked out and has high highs and low lows. And that’s My Bloody Valentine, one of the loudest bands of all time. That’s how people think of them—like, they’re massive. So it goes to show.

I

t behooves you as an audio engineer to remain open, because it’s a freelance lifestyle—like, you eat what you kill. It’s very rare for somebody to just step into being a mixing engineer or being a mastering engineer and have that be the only thing they do for the rest of their life. Starting out, most people wind up getting into a position where they have to be prepared to—like, if somebody asks me, “Hey, can you mix my band on tour,” I’m like, “Oh yeah, sure, I can do that.” And sort of learn how to step into these different roles.

Not to say that it was easy to own and operate a studio before, but it is a challenge to do

this highly, highly technical thing, it’s really good to trust that to a professional. This room is a pristine, hyperaccurate listening environment where I can hear issues. I can hear stuff that I know is going to cause a problem on different playback systems.

Probably the most obvious example is bass. Low-end frequencies are really hard to reproduce accurately—especially when you’re talking about people who are mixing at home on headphones. And here we have it so dialed in, I can hear that stuff really accurately and know: OK, there was a node in this person’s mixing environment, like a hole at 80 hertz.

And so they made 80 hertz really loud. And I’m hearing it, and I know that this is gonna fart out a car stereo. That’s a problem. And now I need to back it down.

Especially in the last few years, I feel like I’ve been doing a lot of indie rock and punk and shoegaze-adjacent projects, like MJ Lenderman or Slow Pulp or Wishy. But it’s really fun when I get thrown something that I don’t get to work on as much and I feel like it really hits

for me creatively. One thing that I got to do recently was this record by this band Caustic Wound that my friend Andrew Oswald in LA produced, which is a deathgrind record—it’s a full-spectrum hammer of audio, bonking you on the head. It’s super fun to get to flex some different skills and learn some new things.

Mastering is similar to the coloring stage of making a movie—it’s probably about as exciting as that. You can tell that it’s doing something, but maybe it’s a little bit hard to tell in the moment. And it’s probably not as exciting as being on set, which would be like being in a recording studio—that’s the really exciting stuff to be a fly on the wall for. But this part, not as much.

In a mix, if you take, like, 0.25 decibels out of the vocal at a certain frequency, probably nobody can hear that. But if I do that on a master, where I’m taking that same frequency cut from the top down across the board to all the instruments, that might make a big difference.

The most difficult part of communicating with clients is people will be like, “Oh, can you make the background vocal in the second chorus quieter?” And it’s like, I kinda can’t. It’s sort of after the fact. If you want to make a new mix and turn that down and send it back to me, that’s fine, but I probably can’t do it.

I mean, there’s some stuff I can do. I always encourage people to ask, because they might not know what’s possible. Like, making a lead vocal quieter or louder is actually pretty simple for me. There’s some really wacky technical stuff that I can do to really reshape a mix.

And so I want people to ask, because I want them to get what they want in the end.

Sometimes I just like giving the artist space.

I send them two songs; they spend some time with it. They give me an approval. Then I go back and work on the rest of the record. Having that long gestation period for the audio, especially because it’s such an important part at the end—sometimes that helps, to have a little bit of distance there.

You want to have a clear and accurate room.

You want to have an engineer with a lot of experience and, if nothing else, just a second set of ears. Just to hand somebody this thing that you’ve been working on that you probably don’t have a lot of perspective on, because you’ve been working on it for six months and saying “Big things coming!” on Instagram for three of those months. It’s good to just hand that off to somebody else and be like, “Here, what are you hearing?” v

m pmontoro@chicagoreader.com JULY 3, 2025 - CHICAGO READER 23

Recommended and notable shows with critics’ insights for the week of July 3

MUSIC

b ALL AGES F

HEINRICH BUTTLER

SATURDAY5 Coffin Prick See also Sun 7/6. Cap’n Jazz headline; Jenny Pulse opens with a DJ set. 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport, advance tickets sold out. 17+

PICK OF THE WEEK

Fred Wesley & the New J.B.’s bring the funk to Pritzker Pavilion FRED WESLEY & THE NEW J.B.’S, BUMPUS, AYANA CONTRERAS (DJ SET) Mon 7/7, 6:30 PM, Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park, 201 E. Randolph. F b

TROMBONIST FRED WESLEY might as well have copyrighted the term “horny horn.” He and bass superhero Bootsy Collins not only share a superhuman ability to evoke sweaty, funky palpitations—they’re also both in a very small club whose members can claim the heavy pedigree of playing with two of the godliest groove outfits of all time, James Brown & the J.B.’s and Parliament-Funkadelic. Born in Columbus, Georgia, and raised in Mobile, Alabama, Wesley got his start on piano and trumpet, but after his father brought home a trombone when he was 12, he got hooked. Wesley’s sharp, fluid lines drive some of the J.B.’s most beloved and righteous 60s hits, including 1968’s “Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud” and 1969’s “Mother Popcorn.” He also proved himself as a writer and arranger on classics such as “Sex Machine,” “Super Bad,” and “Talking Loud and Saying Nothing” (which featured a dream band with Collins and original Brown backers from the Famous Flames, Bobby Byrd and John “Jabo” Starks). Wesley became bandleader of the J.B.’s in the early 1970s, and by 1973, he was getting top billing on smash singles like “Doing It to Death” (now a staple of my DJ sets).

Two years later, Wesley defected from the J.B.’s to P-Funk, playing on classic Parliament albums such as 1975’s Mothership Connection and 1976’s The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein (where he also arranged horns). At

24 CHICAGO READER - JULY 3, 2025

the same time, he recorded with his spin-off group, the Horny Horns, and with jazz great Count Basie. Wesley never ended his association with the Godfather of Soul or his famed sidemen, though—he played in Collins’s Rubber Band, with saxophonist Maceo Parker, and in the J.B. Horns with saxophonist Pee Wee Ellis. Outside the world of funk, the mind-bogglingly diverse list of artists he’s worked with includes Ray Charles, Lionel Hampton, Van Morrison, 10,000 Maniacs, Color Me Badd, and De La Soul.

In 1996, Wesley started the Fred Wesley Band, which soon became Fred Wesley & the new J.B.’s. That unit currently includes drummer Bruce Cox, bassist Dwayne Dolphin, guitarist Reggie Ward, trumpet player Gary Winters, saxophonist Phillip Whack, and keyboardist Peter Madsen. On a 2024 session the group recorded for Tacoma public radio station KNKX, Cox (who’s played with Sonny Rollins, Stanley Turrentine, and Ravi Coltrane) and Dolphin (who’s played with Ellis, Turrentine, and Nancy Wilson) rule their rhythm-section pocket, expertly supporting Wesley’s laser-focused solos and riffs. The New J.B.’s don’t perform live all that often, and the Windy City is fortunate to host this free gig. Come prepared for the funk, but expect the unexpected.

—STEVE KRAKOW

Ryan Weinstein is Coffin Prick, the remaining prick of Coffin Pricks. In the early 2010s, four Chicago punk stalwarts came together in that short-lived band. Their music leaned heavily on the strippeddown, aggressive postpunk of the late 70s, inflected by midwestern Dada sensibilities that showed themselves in flourishes of electronics and melodies reminiscent of Devo. In 2012, the group parted ways, and in 2017, guitarist Ryan Weinstein relocated to Los Angeles, where he subsequently reimagined the group’s heartland postpunk as a solo adventure in spaced-out psychedelic rock.

Weinstein released his debut album as Coffin Prick, Laughing, in 2023, and in May he followed it with Loose Enchantment (Temporal Drift). The new record combines his crate-digging passion for late70s and early-80s avant-garde rock with a proggy expansiveness that evokes the geography of Southern California and the music it’s inspired, including the ambient soundscapes of Steve Roach. At times, his vocals channel the moody baritones of David Bowie and Iggy Pop in their Berlin era or Peter Murphy throughout his discography. Weinstein builds energy in simple ways, such as surfy bass lines and new-wave scale progressions, but he layers them with production elements that add sophistication— sometimes they’re electrifyingly angular, at other times esoterically open. In a 2012 interview with Tim Kinsella for Kinsella’s music blog, Weinstein described being a punk over 30, saying that he had as much energy and passion as ever but way more experience and better taste to drive his ideas. Now a punk over 40, he brings a wisdom born of longtime dedication to his eclectic audio interests and singular vision.

Coffin Prick began as a home-recording project, but Weinstein put together a live band when Laughing came out—and now he’s on tour opening for Chicago emo elders Cap’n Jazz, who are reuniting for the 30th anniversary of their sole studio fulllength, 1995’s Burritos, Inspiration Point, Fork Balloon Sports, Cards in the Spokes, Automatic Biographies, Kites, Kung Fu, Trophies, Banana Peels We’ve Slipped on, and Egg Shells We’ve Tippy Toed Over (aka Shmap’n Shmazz). Coffin Prick appears on both shows of this two-night stand at Thalia Hall, which is sure to be awash in hometown love.

—MICCO CAPORALE

SUNDAY6 Coffin Prick See Sat 7/5. Cap’n Jazz headline; Jenny Pulse opens with a DJ set. 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport, $45.77 GA, $65.08 seated balcony, $421.77 six-person opera box. 17+ Heat On Drummer Lily Finnegan leads this quartet with saxophonists Edward Wilkerson Jr. and Fred Jackson Jr. and bassist Nick Macri.

9 PM, Hungry Brain, 2319 W. Belmont, $20.72. 21+

MUSIC Heat On is a jazz quartet led

by Chicago-born drummer and organizer Lily Finnegan. She returned to her hometown in 2022 after completing a master’s degree at the Berklee College of Music, and she’s been on a nonstop ascending path ever since. This is her third year cocurating the Option Series, a concert and salon that takes place in the backyard of Experimental Sound Studio on most summer Sunday afternoons.

She has been a member of Edition Redux (Ken Vandermark’s main touring ensemble) for the past couple years, and she’s also performed with electronic musician Christof Kurzmann, violinist gabby fluke-mogul, James Brandon Lewis’s Red Lily Quintet, punk combo Cucuy, and a small legion of local improvisers. Heat On isn’t the first group she’s led, but because it released its selftitled debut album this month on Cuneiform, she can now formally add composer and bandleader to her résumé.

Coffin Prick, aka Ryan Weinstein KATE O’NEILL The South Side Big Band COURTESY THE ARTIST Finnegan first convened the and too many other combos to list here. Alto saxoof experience on Finnegan—she’s set herself up ensemble in July 2023 as the Lily Finnegan Quartet. phonist Fred Jackson Jr., like Wilkerson a member to learn on the bandstand at every gig. Between After a single completely improvised gig at Elastic of the Association for the Advancement of Creative the 1970s and 2010, tenor saxophonist and multiArts, she wrote a set of compositions that capitalMusicians (AACM), moved to Chicago from Texas instrumentalist Edward Wilkerson Jr. led the muchizes on the strengths of the band’s two horn playat the turn of the century. He leads his own quarmissed ensembles Shadow Vignettes and Eight ers, whose contrasting styles encompass adroit lyrtet, Double Helix, and plays with the AACM Great Bold Souls; he’s also been a member of Ethnic Hericism and gruff causticity. Her bandmates in Heat Black Music Ensemble and in combos led by Adam itage Ensemble, Extraordinary Popular Delusions, On are all Chicago jazz veterans who have decades Zanolini, Mai Sugimoto, and Shanta Nurullah. And bassist Nick Macri, who first recorded with Champaign math-rockers C-Clamp in the mid90s and frequently collaborates with Vandermark and James Elkington, shares Finnegan’s affinity for both rock and jazz. On Heat On, Finnegan’s forthright grooves and springy unison riffs anchor the ensemble’s layered improvisations and exploratory solos.

—BILL MEYER

MONDAY7 The South Side Big Band Part of First Monday Jazz, a series presented by University of Chicago cultural platform Arts + Public Life. 7 PM, Arts Lawn, 337 E. Garfield. 12+ F

Heat On: Fred Jackson Jr., Edward Wilkerson Jr., Nick Macri, and Lily Finnegan LEAH WENDZINSKI

Pi a n i s t , a r ra n g e r, p ro d u c e r, and bandleader Thomas “Tom Tom” Washington grew up in Bronzeville’s Ida B. Wells Homes and studied under legendary composer and musician James Mack, best known for arranging music for the likes of Curtis May-

field and Tyrone Davis for labels such as Brunswick and Chess. Washington went on to develop an impressively lengthy discography of his own, which includes arrangements on recordings by Davis, the Chi-Lites, Gene Chandler, the Jacksons, and Earth, Wind & Fire. In the early 1990s, Washington began gathering musicians he’d worked with over the decades to play jazz and R&B from the 1950s through the ’70s, eventually developing the project into the South Side Big Band. The group has become an outlet for Washington (now 81) and his crew of collaborators to play big-band standards and work out larger arrangements of bop, soul, or really whatever they want. Its ranks have included many Chicago luminaries, among them the late jazz and R&B saxophonist Gene “Daddy G” Barge (whose credits include Fontella Bass’s 1965 hit “Rescue Me” and recordings with Jackie Wilson) and jazz trumpeter Art Hoyle (whose versatility let him play with countless ensembles, including the Sun Ra Arkestra). The South Side Big Band isn’t just a collection of seasoned session musicians, though— Washington often invites younger or up-and-coming players to join the band at its regular Monday-night rehearsals. In recent years its performances have featured around 20 members, including trombonist Tracy Kirk (Chicago Jazz Philharmonic) and trumpeter Pharez Whitted. This outdoor concert is part of a series presented by the University of Chicago’s Arts + Public Life organization as part of a summer tribute to big bands. Fans can expect a diverse program of swing, contemporary soul, and more played by some of Chicago’s best. —SALEM COLLO-JULIN

Fred Wesley & the New J.B.’s See Pick of the Week on page 24. Bumpus and Ayana Contreras (DJ set) open. 6:30 PM, Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park, 201 E. Randolph. F b v

JULY 3, 2025 - CHICAGO READER 25

Let’s Play!

Make time to learn something new with music and dance classes at Old Town School! We offer flexible schedules for all skill levels both in-person and online.

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oldtownschool.org MUSIC CLASSES FOR ADULTS & KIDS LINCOLN SQUARE LINCOLN PARK SOUTH LOOP & ONLINE 1 26OTS_1_2V_ClassAd_072921.indd CHICAGO READER - JULY 3, 2025

7/23/21 2:21 PM

GOSSIP WOLF ON SATURDAY, JULY 5, THE BRAND-NEW Midwest Rave Culture Archive will host a launch party and fundraiser in Chinatown’s Ping Tom Memorial Park. The daylong event, called Hometown Heroes, features a wild array of dance DJs, including Redline regular Kula, U.S. drum ’n’ bass pioneer RP Smack, Teklife members DJ Manny and DJ Phil, and experimental house producer Hieroglyphic Being. MWRCA founder Aria Pedraza hopes to raise $5,500 to begin its efforts to digitize midwest rave recordings and ephemera, which will be cataloged and stored in the cloud by the Internet Archive as well as backed up locally. Pedraza envisions the MWRCA as a collective endeavor. “This project is really about mass participatory efforts,” she says. “It’s not from one perspective, and that’s something that’s different for this subculture. It’s not a blog; it’s not an opinion.”

Pedraza grew up in Pilsen with parents deeply involved in dance music. RP Smack is her father, and she says he helped plant the flag for drum ’n’ bass stateside in the early 90s. Her mother, Lori Riegler, cofounded house label Gourmet Recordings and sublabel Fresh Meat in the 2000s; according to Pedraza, Riegler was also the first person to manage legendary house producer and DJ Paul Johnson. Her parents’ histories predisposed Pedraza toward the dance-music culture from an early age—she’d dig through boxes of rave flyers the way other kids might study family photo albums. “I remember connecting with those boxes and thinking they were really cool and hearing my parents’ stories going through them,” she says. After Johnson died from COVID-19 in August 2021, Pedraza felt compelled to do more to study and document that history.

She came up with the idea for the MWRCA after seeing Tommie Sunshine when he was in town for a gig a couple years ago. He’d been close with Riegler since they were teens, and while Pedraza was growing up she’d always seen him as an uncle. They did some catching up, and she learned that Tommie had a collection of vintage dance flyers. “He said, ‘I still have all those flyers,’” Pedraza recalls. “‘They’re just in a box somewhere. I tried giving them to the Chicago History Museum, but they didn’t want them.’ I was like, ‘What?

That’s crazy—that’s so valuable.’” Pedraza began to shape her idea for the MWRCA in conversations with mentors, including DJ Lady D and Viva Acid founder Luis Baro; she also sought advice from professional archivists and preservationists involved in the National Public Housing Museum and Maxwell Street Foundation.

Because Pedraza and RP Smack had helped throw summer dance events at Ping Tom Park in 2023 and ’24, they had no trouble securing a permit for another rave this year—

From top: DJ Manny, DJ Phil, and Hieroglyphic Being will be among the DJs at the launch party for the Midwest Rave Culture Archive. COURTESY MOVELTRAXX (DJ MANNY, DJ PHIL); FOTOSCHIKO (HIEROGLYPHIC BEING)

and Pedraza’s dad encouraged her to treat it as an MWRCA kickoff. On June 14, Pedraza announced the MWRCA and launched a GoFundMe to collect donations digitally.

Hometown Heroes doubles as a release party for a new zine Pedraza has been working on, also called Hometown Heroes, and Gossip Wolf has high expectations—last year she published the excellent 1438: Midwest Jungle, Techno, & Rave Culture.

Hometown Heroes is free (though of course donations to the MWRCA are encouraged) and open to all ages. It runs from noon till 9 PM, and attendees are encouraged to

bring food, beverages, chairs, and blankets.

Organizers will provide free water, earplugs, and Narcan.

COMPOSER, MULTI-INSTRUMENTALIST, and arts organizer Adam Zanolini stepped down from his role as the executive director of nonprofit venue and presenter Elastic Arts on Monday, June 30. Zanolini had held the position since 2017, and he oversaw the development of several new Elastic programs— including the 2019 addition of a residency component to the experimental Dark Matter series and the 2021 launch of the monthly Pleiades Series for femme, trans, and nonbinary improvising artists. Zanolini is moving to Massachusetts to work at Smith College.

Elastic Arts assistant director Ben Billington (who also stays busy as a drummer and synthesizer player) stepped into the role of interim executive director on July 1. “It’s been the honor of a lifetime working for the artists in the Elastic Arts community this past tenplus years, and I look forward to continuing this journey,” Billington says. “With Adam’s mentorship and heart-forward leadership during his tenure, we are left in the perfect position to continue expanding our support for our artists and maintaining Elastic’s welcoming and loving spirit for adventurous arts in Chicago.”

VETERAN MUSIC-INDUSTRY PUBLICIST and writer Cary Baker began his career in the biz when the Chicago Reader published his first piece in January 1972. The teenage Baker wrote about Blind Arvella Gray, a bluesman who played regularly at Chicago’s storied Maxwell Street Market. Baker’s lifelong love of buskers also inspired his first book, Down on the Corner, which Jawbone Press published in November. On Tuesday, July 8, Baker will talk about Down on the Corner with Caropop podcast host Mark Caro at the Book Cellar (4736 N. Lincoln); the event begins at 6:30 PM. LAST MONTH, UK label Phantom Limb issued Wanted to Show You, a dreamlike pop album from Chicago singer-songwriter Alana Schachtel, better known as Lipsticism. Schachtel belatedly celebrates Wanted to Show You with an Empty Bottle show on Thursday, July 3. It’s been even longer (three months, to be exact) since cheeky Chicago math-rock group Snooze released I Know How You Will Die, but it’s never too late to celebrate it—it’s one of the best albums this wolf heard all spring. Snooze headline Beat Kitchen on Wednesday, July 9. —LEOR GALIL Got a tip? Email your Chicago music news to gossipwolf@chicagoreader.com.

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JOBS We are seeking for a loyal and experienced Driver for my Elderly Parents We are seeking for a loyal and experienced Driver for my Elderly Parents on a parttime basis (Mondays & Fridays) weekly pay $437 must Have a valid state-issued driver’s license Must b e p ro f e s s i o n a l , safe and patient at all time email: l64194814@gmail. com 7739049407 Accountant w/ Bachelors + 12 months exp in job or closely related openings. Send resume to: Phoenix Bean LLC, 5438 N. Broadway St, Chicago, IL 60640.

Architectural Staff I (Chicago, IL) Full-time, entrylevel professional performing architectural assignments.

Plan & design structures, such as private residences, office buildings, institutional facilities, and other structural property. Undertakes a variety of assignments requiring the application of standard architectural techniques for small projects or selected segments of a larger project. Performs design layouts & features, which require researching, compiling, & recording information for project work. 5-year Bachelor of Architecture Professional Degree. Required skills: AutoCAD, SketchUp Pro, Rhinoceros 3D, Adobe Creative Suite, building design + building technology skills as demonstrated in an architecture portfolio.

Mail resume to von Weise Associates, 1049 North Ashland Ave, Chicago, IL, 60622.

A s s o c i a t e M a n a g e r, Payer Contract Analytics (Market Access Insights) (National Payer), AbbVie US LLC, Mettawa, IL. Responsible for performing analytics related to contracting for key products & therapeutic areas (Migraine, Antipsychotic, GI, Women’s Health, HCV) to assess qualitative & financial impacts of contracting with a National payer. Provide insights into the Payer customer contracting dynamics across Commercial & Medicare channels & businesses. Collaborate with stakeholders including Finance, Marketing & Fieldbased Account Managers to ensure optimized decision making on contracting for access. Ensure company has appropriate pricing & contracting analytics for current (in-line) & new

(pipeline) products, for this payer. Responsible for performing analysis deal/ no-deal analysis inclusive of gross-to-net assessment of any proposed payer contract, ensuring accuracy of analysis, & communicating results & recommendations from analysis to cross-functional stakeholders. Contribute to internal presentations for approval of strategy & readouts with key stakeholders, & independently address contracting analysis questions. Conduct retrospective analysis of payer contract to ensure Actuals align with forecasted financials & adjust contract models, as needed. Supervise work of junior team members, as required. Must have a Bachelor’s degree or foreign academic equivalent in Statistics, Economics, Actuarial Science, Business Analytics or a highly related field of study, & 5 years of work experience in financial modeling &/ or data analytics in the pharmaceutical, health care or other industry that requires in-depth business/ data analytics. Alternatively, would accept a Masters in the same disciplines & 2 years of work experience in financial modeling &/ or data analytics in the pharmaceutical, health care or other industry that requires in-depth business/ data analytics. With either combination of education and work experience, must have: 1 year programming in SAS, SQL, &/or Python performing data analysis & modeling, & 2 years in each of the following: (i) managing complex data sets in Excel, using intermediate and advanced Excel skills including building & manipulating pivot tables, macros, & index match functions, & (ii) evaluating complex data sets, synthesizing outcomes, succinctly summarizing the analytical findings, preparing presentation decks using PowerPoint & orally delivering analysis and reporting for cross-functional teams & leadership. Work experience may be gained concurrently. Any suitable combination of education & work experience is acceptable. Onsite position/5 days a week.

Salary Range: $138,715.00 $178,500.00 per year Apply online at https://careers. abbvie.com/en or send resume to Job.opportunity. abbvie@abbvie.com. Refer to Req ID: REF41155L. Sr. DevOps Engineer (Wargaming (USA), Inc.; Chicago, IL): Deploy, configure, & maintain multiple web servers containing numerous g a m e i n f r a s t r u c t u re services.

Salary: $148,949 to $160,000/yr.

Send resumes to: u s a j o b s @ w a rg a m i n g . net.

An EOE.

Baldridge & Associates Structural Engineering, Inc. seeks Senior Structural Designer in Chicago, IL to perform routine design tasks such as member design, load calculation, and some shop drawing review (10%). BS in Civil or Structural Engg, or rltd field, or foreign equivalent & 3 yrs of rltd structural design exp req’d. WFH 2 days/week.

Base salary: $102,699/ year. For position details & to apply, visit: https:// baseengr.com/careers/.

UBS Business Solutions US LLC has the following positions in Chicago, IL. Associate Director, Software Engineer to develop and implement application solutions that address business needs by improving existing systems or creating new ones.

Requires B+5yrs. exp or M+3yrs. exp as an equivalent alternative.

Can work hybrid (In-office/remote). (ref. code(s) 001915: $148,949 - $170,000).

Qualified Applicants apply through SH-ProfRecruitingcc @ubs.com. Please reference 001915. NO CALLS PLEASE. EOE/ M/F/D/V. #LI-DNP. Blackwood Group LLC seeks Construction Site Manager in Chicago, IL (and/or any unanticipated worksite locations) to oversee/coordinate all on-site construction activities. 80% short- & long-term travel to client worksites in Chicagoland area (approx. 10-50 miles from co. headquarters).

Degree & commensurate exp. req’d. Visit https:// recruiting.paylocity.com /Recruiting/Jobs/ Details/3337206 to apply & see info on role, pay & benefits.

Deutsche Leasing USA Inc. in Chicago IL seeks Senior Credit Analyst, Expert German Desk & Risk Controller to fully underwrite (English and German) of customer creditworthiness (Rating, Exposure, Relationship, Investment, financial analysis including Paynet, D&B-Reports, business/industry sector, liquidity analysis, cash flow projections, debts service coverage, outlook, peer analysis propriety software, etc.) both USA based customer and German subsidiaries including customer/vendor visit.

Up to 10% domestic and international travel required.

Offered salary: $125,008 / year. Submit resume to Deutsche Leasing USA Inc. attn: Human Resources, 190 S LaSalle St, Ste. 2150, Chicago IL, 60603.

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

fairlife, LLC, headquartered in Chicago, IL, seeks Sr. Scientist to develop innovative dairy products & processing techniques.

Requires M.S. in Food or Dairy Science. Req. 20 - 30% nat’l or int’l travel. Salary: $112,632 to $160,000/yr. Resumes to Christine Chakmakjian at christiner@fairlife.com.

Finance, IT, Soft. Eng. or rltd field (or foreign equiv) & 3 yrs. relevant exp. Position allows for telecommuting within commuting distance of reporting office in Chicago, IL. Apply via the company website: https://mxns.csod.com/ ux/ats/careersite/5/home/ requisition/7407?c=mxns & s q = r e q 7 4 0 7

Janus Henderson Investors seeks a Research Analyst in Chicago, IL to provide in depth analysis of a universe of listed REIT stocks in the following property types in North America: Retail, Industrial, Cold Storage, Lodging. Generate trade ideas working closely with lead portfolio manager.

Develop and maintain a wide network of industry contacts including sell side, corporate management, and private company contacts in covered property types, liaise with Janus Henderson REIT personnel in Europe and Asia to facilitate coordinated portfolio construction and analysis; liaise as required with Janus Henderson investment personnel outside the REIT team, trading, operations, client service, marketing.

Aid in the completion of marketing collateral, RFP’s, etc. Place trades on behalf of portfolio managers and work with traders to monitor these orders through completion. Remote work permitted 1 day a week.

Requirements: Bachelor’s d e g re e i n F i n a n c e , Accounting, Economics, Mathematics, or a related field plus eight years of progressively responsible experience in the following: financial modeling, accounting principles, economic and statistical analysis, Bloomberg, Excel, Charles River, maintenance of industry network in the property types of Retail, Industrial, Cold Storage, and Lodging.

CFA Charter. The pay for the position is $155,000 - $180,000. To apply, please visit https://career8. successfactors .com/career?company=Janus and enter requisition #30744.

Janus Henderson is committed to offering a comprehensive total rewards package to eligible employees that includes competitive compensation, pension/ retirement plans, and various health, wellbeing, and lifestyle benefits. To learn more about our offerings please visit https://www. janushenderson.com /corporate/careers/.

Weber-Stephen Products, LLC seeks an Embedded Software Engineer in Palatine, IL resp for BSP & MTP develop for current & new product lines. Reqs Master’s in Elec Engr., Elecs Engr., Comp Engr., or rel’d + 2 yrs exp in Embedded Sys/ Software Engr., Software Engr., Develop, Design Engr., QA Engr. Or any other occupation in which the required skills were gained.

May work remote from any loc’n. $106,245. Summ’ry of benefits: careers.weber. com. Applicants are directed to send their resumes to Carrie Storino at cstorino@ weberstephen.com. Include Ref DS25 in the subject line.

Senior JDE Functional Analyst - Finance position at Silliker Inc. Position located in Chicago, IL. Responsible for implementing, customizing, developing, testing and supporting of various financial processes and business scenarios in the Oracle JDE platform.

Salary: $125,000. Benefits: Med., Dent. Vis., 401k.

Position requires Bachelor’s degree (3 or 4-year degree accepted) in Commerce,

Weber-Stephen Products, LLC seeks an Software Engineer in Palatine, IL to dev software for test &/or integration in Weber smart grills, access, & mobile apps, w/ a focus on Android, QA, or embedded sys software.

Reqs Master’s in Comp Engr., Elec Engr., Elecs Engr., Info Sys Sec, or rel’d + 3 yrs exp in Software Engr., Develop, Embedded Systems Engr., QA Engr. or any other occupation in which the req skills were gained. A Bach + 5 yrs also accepted. May work remote from any loc’n. $187,461. Summ’ry of benefits: careers.weber. com. Applicants are directed to send their resumes to Carrie Storino at cstorino@ weberstephen.com. Include Ref VM25 in the subject line.

SERVICES C H E S T N U T ORGANIZING AND CLEANING SERVICES: especially for people who need an organizing service because of depression, elderly, physical or mental challenges or other causes for your home’s clutter, disorganization, dysfunction, etc. We can organize for the downsizing of your current possessions to more easily move into a smaller home. With your help, we can help to organize your move. We can organize and clean for the deceased in lieu of having the bereaved needing to do the preparation to sell or rent the deceased’s home. We are absolutely not judgmental; we’ve seen and done “worse” than your job assignment.

With your help, can we please help you?

Chestnut Cleaning Service: 312-332-5575. www.ChestnutCleaning. c o m w w w .

ChestnutCleaning.com

JULY 3, 2025 - CHICAGO READER 27

COMING SOON TO THALIA HALL

07.05 07.06

SINCE 1892

CAP’N JAZZ

+ COFFIN PRICK / JENNY PULSE DJ SET

07.08

EZRA FURMAN

07.09

SON ROMPE PERA

+ THE OPHELIAS

+ CABEZA DE CHIVO / DJ CHARLY DE CHICAGO

07.10 07.11

THE FLY HONEY SHOW

07.15

HUNG UP ON A DREAM

07.16 07.17

07.30

ROYEL OTIS

07.31

AMAARAE

08.01 08.02

LOLLA

LOLLA

LOLLA

LOLLA

09.04

THE STEELDRIVERS

09.05

TWRP

ROLE MODEL

09.07

BNXN

WAVE TO EARTH

09.09

WHAT WE SAID

+ DANCER

+ BLACK PARTY

+ JADE LEMAC

+ J.Y.N.

LOW TIX

LIVE

09.10

MOLLY TUTTLE

09.11

NIGHT MOVES

THE ZOMBIES DOCUMENTARY

08.05

KOKOROKO

MURDER BY DEATH

08.08

CLUB 1BD CHICAGO

08.09

BRONCHO

09.12

THE BUDOS BAND

08.10

THE ROCK & ROLL PLAYHOUSE

09.13

FRANKIE COSMOS

09.14

HAMZA NAMIRA

09.16

THE WATERBOYS

09.17

FOXWARREN

09.18

THE BASEBALL PROJECT

09.19

COLONY HOUSE

09.23

BANDALOS CHINOS

09.24

NATION OF LANGUAGE

09.25

PANDA BEAR

FAREWELL TOUR + LAURA JANE GRACE

THE FLY HONEY SHOW

07.20

SCENE QUEEN

WEEKEND TWO

HOT SHOWS IN YOUR AREA + GIRLI / DEADLANDS × KICKSTAND PRODUCTIONS

LOLLA

NATURAL PLEASURE TOUR

PLAYS GRATEFUL DEAD & JERRY GARCIA + MORE FOR KIDS

08.12

PLAGUE OF CARCOSA DEAD FEATHERS

07.23

KIM DEAL

07.24 07.25

THE FLY HONEY SHOW WEEKEND THREE

08.13

SILVERADA

07.26

PELICAN

08.14

DESSA AND THE 29:11

07.27

THE ROCK & ROLL PLAYHOUSE

08.23

THALIA HALL FREE FOR ALL

08.24

ALEXANDER NATE

08.27

PILE IN THE ROUND

LOW TIX

CAPTAIN N.A.TOUR 2025

BÔA

07.18 07.19

07.29

THE LONGEST WEEKEND 2025 + LOS ANGELES POWER DISCO

08.03

WEEKEND ONE

+ BNNY

+ COALESCE / PORCELAIN

PLAYS TAYLOR SWIFT + MORE FOR KIDS

1807 S ALLPORT ST CHICAGO 60608

2025

IN THE ROUND + SHRINEBURNER

OF MONTREAL

THE SUNLANDIC TWINS 20TH ANNIVERSARY TOUR + BIJOUX CONE

SOUTH AFRICAN ENSEMBLE

TNSITM DELUXE LIVE IN TECHNICOLOR

+ NNAMDÏ

SIGN UP FOR OUR NEWSLETTER AT THALIAHALLCHICAGO.COM

THE HIGHWAY KNOWS TOUR + CECILIA CASTLEMAN

+ RACHEL BOBBITT

+ DANIEL VILLARREA

+ FANTASY OF A BROKEN HEART / MOONTYPE

+ ANNA TIVEL

THE 2ER

FT. MEMBERS OF R.E.M. AND THE DREAM SYNDICATE + THE MINUS 5

THE 77 TOUR