Chicagoans
Bridgeview’s Al Manakeesh bakes Arabic flatbread and ‘bagels’ 1,001 ways
Before there were pizza and bagels, Arabs ate manakeesh and ka’ak. by
04 The To-Do IML, Chicago Sky, Randolph Street Market, and more
05 Dilla’s Chicago Area Catholics made history before the new pope.
06 Cover Story | Sula The breads at Al Manakeesh “flash back to memories of Palestine.”
08 Surveillance Aesthetics | Caporale A fight over face masks is brewing in the state legislature.
09 Politics The GOP’s proposals to cut SNAP will only benefit the wealthy.
10 Review | Reid Theatre Y brings Richard Maxwell back to Chicago with The End of Reality 11 Shows of Note Fleetwood-Jourdain celebrates “Black southern women who love women” in Honeypot; Pegasus Theatre Chicago revives Shakin’ the Mess Outta Misery; Blank Theatre Company gives a “goofy and gutsy” makeover to Sweet Charity
12 Moviegoer Clowning around 13 Movies of Note Final Destination: Bloodlines is a cliche family drama, and Friendship has a quietly devastating question lying just beneath the laughs.
14 Chicagoans of Note| Caporale Grizzy Mack, rapper and half of pop promoters Citypill 16 City of Win Golden Street creates a sanctuary for creatives in its Pedway space.
20 Shows of Note Previews of concerts including Justice Hill, Young Widows, and the two-day Mars Williams memorial celebration Music From Mars
21 Savage Love He watches porn when I’m not there, and it makes me upset.
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Upcoming events and activities you should know about
By SALEM COLLO-JULIN
Thu 5/22
If you spot a lot more black motorcycle vests, tall leather boots, and harnesses on gorgeous people in various neighborhoods, including the Loop and Rogers Park, it’s because Chicago is hell-bent on leather and ready for this year’s International Mr. Leather (IML) weekend. Opening ceremonies happen tonight at Congress Plaza Hotel, which will also be the headquarters for vendor markets (o ering anything from repair kits to flogging toys), demonstrations, dances, parties, and more through Monday evening. After-parties and concurrent exhibitions and events are planned at the Leather Archives and Museum as well as venues like Charlie’s, Fantasy Nightclub, and Jackhammer; many events are 21+ and if you’re thinking about just going to gawk and be rude—make other plans, because this is a celebration of community and you’ll be out of place.
Opening ceremonies happen from 7–8:30 PM tonight; programming from 9:30 AM–11:59 PM daily today through Mon 5/26 (see website for details), many events and vendor market at Congress Plaza Hotel and Convention Center, 520 S. Michigan, event ticket packages $100–$200, 21+ for most events, internationalmrleather.com
Tonight, the mighty Chicago Sky kick off the women’s basketball season in Chicago with a home opener facing the New York Liberty. Standout Sky players Angel Reese and Courtney Vandersloot could bring the team to victory, but the Liberty could be a challenge with players like Breanna Stewart, who put up an average of 20.4 points per game last season. Either way, if you’re looking for a sports event where you’ll see all walks of Chicagoans (along with their kids, grandmas, and sometimes girlfriends), get thee to Wintrust and have a good time. Imagine! A good time at a Chicago sporting event!
7 PM, Wintrust Arena, 200 E. Cermak, $44–$978.15, children under the age of two do not require a ticket if seated on an adult’s lap, sky.wnba.com
Sat 5/24
Another season opener: the people who organize Randolph Street Market bring antique sellers, midcentury modern enthusiasts, vintage designer fashion influencers, and people just looking for a bargain together for several weekend markets per year, but the OG is this weekend’s West Loop extravaganza. There are dozens of vendors scheduled to offer vintage wear, unique decor, and food; plus three separate bar booths will have beer, water, wine, pop, and special cocktails like “the Gardenista” on hand (vodka, tequila, or bourbon with lime and a hint of jalapeño). Pay in advance at Randolph Street Market’s website for the deepest admission discount and extras like swag bags from participating sellers.
Sat 5/24 and Sun 5/25 10 AM–5 PM, W. Randolph between Ada and Ogden (enter near 1341 W. Randolph), $15 at gate, $12 advance (advance tickets cover admission for both
days), discounts for students, military members, first responders, and seniors 65 years and older, children 12 years and younger free, randolphstreetmarket.com
Mon 5/26
Snakes & Lattes is a bar and restaurant focused on both food and board games, with locations in Toronto, Tucson, and Chicago’s Bucktown. The Canadian company fi rst entered the Chicago market when they purchased ownership of Cards Against Humanity’s Chicago Board Game Cafe in 2020, and have been hosting game and gamerrelated events ever since. Tonight, Snakes & Lattes o ers their regular installment of Board Game Designer Night , a bimonthly event that encourages game designers to show up with prototypes and test games out with willing and enthusiastic players, plus network with fellow creators. For people who love games, it’s a great way to meet like-minded players and get feedback on gameplay.
6–10 PM, 1965 N. Milwaukee, free, food and drink available for purchase, snakesandlattes.com
Thu 5/29
Out of the O ce celebrates 23 years of networking with tonight’s edition of the annual LGBTQ+ focused event. Since its beginning, the early evening social has marked the beginning of Chicago’s Pride Month for many LGBTQ+ professionals and their allies. Tickets this year benefit the Legacy Project, a Chicago nonprofit that educates about LGBTQ+ contributions throughout history. The organization initiated and maintains the Legacy Walk installation of pylon memorials along North Halsted between Belmont and Grace that describe historical LGBTQ+ people and their accomplishments. Funds raised from tonight’s event will support the Legacy Project’s #WeWillNotBeErased campaign to counter false narratives about the LGBTQ+ community (and especially trans and nonbinary people) in public discourse and education.
4:30–7 PM, I|O Godfrey rooftop lounge at the Godfrey Hotel, 127 W. Huron, $30 includes one drink ticket and 5:30 PM entry, $50 VIP includes two drink tickets and 4:30 PM entry, 21+, legacyprojectchicago.org v m scollojulin@chicagoreader.com
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Find Shermann “Dilla” Thomas on Instagram or TikTok @ 6figga_dilla.
DILLA’S CHICAGO
Chicagoland has a variety of historical Catholic connections in addition to Leo XIV.
By SHERMANN “DILLA” THOMAS
Dilla’s Chicago is a biweekly window into the hidden histories of Chicago area historical figures, buildings, neighborhoods, and more from Shermann “Dilla” Thomas. Thomas is a Chicago historian, content creator, and founder of Chicago Mahogany, LLC. He serves as the brand ambassador and chief of social media for the DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center.
Unless you have been hiding under a rock, I’m sure you have already heard the news about the newly elected pope of the Catholic Church being from Chicago (technically, the Chicago area). There was a lot of excitement in town and on the Internet when the news broke; I know I enjoyed the hundreds of memes made to celebrate the occasion.
In the response to the news, there appeared to be a sense that this was the first time Chicago had made history related in some way to the Catholic Church. That assumption is false. It’s fair to say that Chicago and Catholicism have been making history together since Chicago became a thing. Since I’m everyone’s favorite Chicago urban historian, I am duty bound to share some of that history with you, the fantastic folks who indulge in the Reader. Did you know that Chicago played a significant role in the life of the first American Catholic saint? Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini (for whom the Chicago Housing Authority’s Cabrini row houses were named) was an Italian-born nun who migrated to the U.S. in the 1880s and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1909. She established 67 institutions (schools, hospitals, and orphanages) throughout her career, and traveled globally for the Church. She founded the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Pope Leo XIII encouraged her to open convents in several U.S. cities, Chicago being one of them. Saint Cabrini died in Chicago’s Columbus Hospital on December 22, 1917, and some of her remains are preserved at the Na-
Le : parishioners in 1942; right: bust in Pioneer Court on Michigan
tional Shrine of Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini, built on the site of the old hospital and reopened to the public in 2012 after a renovation.
Beyond the first U.S.-born pope and the first U.S. saint, Chicago was home to the first recognized Black Catholic priest in the U.S., John Augustus Tolton. It should be noted that James Healy, a Black man born into slavery in Georgia in 1830, was ordained before Father Tolton. However, Healy was ordained while passing as a white man (as he and his siblings’ mixed race origins were not made public until the 1950s).
Tolton was born in Missouri in 1854 and raised in downstate Quincy. He was known for his graceful sermons and his singing voice. After being ordained in 1886, he eventually was assigned to the Archdiocese of Chicago, where he would go on to lead the largest Black American parish in the country at Bronzeville’s Saint Monica Roman Catholic Church. Tolton established Saint Monica’s parish through his will and financial support from Chicago philanthropists. St. Monica is now Our Lady of Africa Parish.
largest Polish church in the country. In 1893, during the tail end of the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago mayor Carter Harrison III was assassinated at his home. The killer, Patrick Eugene Prendergast, had shot him in the chest. Following this event, Zeglen went to work on a bulletproof vest, which he made using silk. His understanding of the resistive properties of silk would go on to save lives, including that of King Alfonso XIII of Spain.
So, the first U.S.-born pope, first U.S. saint, first recognized Black priest . . . all Chicago. Even our city’s name has a connection to the Church. In 1673, a French Jesuit priest by the name of Jacques Marquette and his homie, Canadian explorer and fur trader Louis Jolliet, became the first white men on record to see what would eventually become the “second city.” The story goes that members of the Indigenous Miami tribe assisted the French and Canadian fellas on their journey, showing them through a portage between rivers. Marquette and Jolliet recorded that the Miami called the area Chécagou, which might have been their interpretation of the Miami word “shikaakwa,” a term that refers to the wild leeks and flora that gave the swampland its odor. We’ve been the city of “smelly onions” ever since.
Did you know that a Catholic priest invented the bulletproof vest in our city? Born in Poland, Casimir Zeglen came to the U.S. in 1890. He moved to Chicago, where he served as the pastor of Saint Stanislaus Kostka, then the
There’s also a Catholic connection to the guy we named DuSable Lake Shore Drive after. Chicago’s first non- native permanent settler, Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable, had ties to the Catholic Church. As a darker-complexioned man from Haiti, when he arrived in the French territory of Louisiana in or around 1770, it is said that he was mistakenly seen as an enslaved American. He had to take refuge inside a Jesuit mission. It is also believed that the Church helped him acquire the “freedom papers” needed to travel up the Mississippi River, which he would eventually do and land in Peoria. There, he married a woman of Potawatomi descent, and together they would settle in Chicago, becoming our first permanent settlers.
Chicago has been at the forefront of religious thought in the U.S. since the city’s inception. The Moorish Science Temple of America, the Nation of Islam, and even the Hebrew Israelites all have roots here. Adding to what I always say, “Everything dope about America (including the pope) comes from Chicago—the greatest city on earth.” v
m letters@chicagoreader.com
Dilla’s Chicago is sponsored by Clayco, a fullservice real estate development, master planning, architecture, engineering, and construction firm. Clayco specializes in the “art and science of building,” providing fast track, efficient solutions for industrial, commercial, institutional and residential-related building projects.
FEATURE
Find more one-of-a-kind Chicago food and drink content at chicagoreader.com/food.
Before there were pizza and bagels, Arabs ate manakeesh and ka’ak.
By MIKE SULA
Pizza and bagels have some history together in Chicago.
Think about Piece and its satellite Bro Bagel in Wicker Park. Then there’s Reno in Logan Square, where they’ve been slinging wood-fired pies and Montreal-style bagels since 2012. And demand at the Saturday morning Beachwater Bagels pop-up at Bungalow by Middlebrow rivals that of the extraordinary thin crust reserved for the pizzeria’s Tavern Tuesday.
But you should’ve seen the lines after sundown this past Ramadan at Al Manakeesh. “We were slammed from midnight to around 5 AM,” says Mohammad Atieh. “We were at max capacity. It was a great time.”
Atieh, the general manager at the ninemonth-old Bridgeview restaurant, figures that between February 28 and March 29 during each iftar—the breaking of the daily daylong fast—they sold close to five hundred “Arabic pizzas” and one hundred “bagels.” Double that on the weekends.
Al Manakeesh doesn’t really sell pizza or bagels as most Americans know them; those words are just easy shorthand for the restaurant’s namesake manakeesh, and ka’ak, two Levantine breads whose origins stretch back centuries—and maybe played a hand in the development of what we now know as pizza and bagels, respectively.
Manakeesh (or sometimes al-man’ouché)
is a circular, unyeasted flatbread similar to pita, often eaten for breakfast. But instead of rising like a pillow in the oven, it’s rolled and indented with the fingertips so it stays flat to stabilize toppings. You’ve probably seen stacks of them in Arabic groceries, topped with za’atar or white akkawi cheese or both, often entombed in plastic on the shelves.
The manakeesh’s origins are a bit murky, though something a lot like it was mentioned in an Arabic cookbook as early as the tenth century. But before that, Arabs introduced flatbreads to Italy in the ninth century, leading some to theorize that the word “pizza” derives from the word “pita.” Two years ago, manakeesh was added to UNESCO’s Intangible
Cultural Heritage lists as an emblematic culinary practice.
Evidence that ka’ak was the precursor to the modern bagel is much stronger. According to food writer Reem Kassis, ka’ak Al-Quds (or “ka’ak of Jerusalem”) was first referenced in the oldest known Arabic cookbook, the tenth-century Kitab al Tabikh . It’s a ringshaped, sesame-studded leavened bread that’s just baked, not boiled—though some early recipes call for boiling, which is just one piece of the puzzle connecting it to the modern bagel.
Kassis argues that ka’ak prepared by Arab traders based in southern Italy influenced the development of the Italian tarallo, a boiled ring-shaped bread which made its way to Poland, the eventual birthplace of the modern bagel, via Queen Bona Sforza, a Bari homegirl. Either way, the manakeesh and ka’ak at Al Manakeesh depart from tradition in many ways.
Atieh’s brother-in-law, Alaa “Al” Darhamda, is the chef and creative force behind Al Manakeesh. He grew up outside Ramallah, Palestine, where his family raised and ate all their own food. As he came of age, he learned the art of manakeesh in a Ramallah shop owned by his now brother-in-law Abdullah Darkhalil.
“When Al came to Chicago, one thing he said is that even though we have a really big Muslim Arabic population in this area, the food just didn’t taste like home,” says Atieh. “His whole concept was, ‘I want to feel like I’m back home. I would love to take a bite of something and flash back to memories of Palestine.’”
tomatoes, and/or cheese. Take it with eggs on top, or sliced hot dogs; schmeared with labneh and garnished with turkey or makdous—oilcured baby eggplants stu ed with walnuts and pepper; or with akkawi cheese, tomatoes, and pesto. Or order a sfeha, topped with ground meat and tomato. And yes, there is, in fact,
two layers of dough stu ed with chicken and cheese, covered in another layer of mozzarella, which, after baking, produces cheese pulls of heroic lengths.
“His whole concept was, ‘I want to feel like I’m back home. I would love to take a bite of something and flash back to memories of Palestine.’”
About a year ago, Darhamda enlisted his old boss, Darkhalil, and another former coworker from Ramallah, Yousef Gazi, to help him open Al Manakeesh in Bridgeview.
They installed a custom-built eight-and-ahalf-foot gas-powered dome oven in the dining room. The interior sandstone bricks can reach up to 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit, a temperature absorbed by its shimmering slate-blue mosaic-tiled exterior.
The oven is center stage for a ballet of bread baking on busy weekends when Darhamda flattens doughballs with his fingertips, spins them high in the air, then tosses them across the open kitchen to Gazi, who deftly lands them on a pizza peel and slides them into the oven at an ideal temperature between 750 and 800 Fahrenheit. Depending on the toppings or fillings, they may cook in anywhere from one to two minutes.
Each manakeesh is rolled and flattened to order, and the number of toppings available is dazzling. You can get your manakeesh for a traditional breakfast blanketed with za’atar,
real Arabic pizza: manakeesh with typical pizza toppings like mozzarella, and beef pepperoni or salami.
And sometimes Darhamda goes rogue, with specials like the Mexican Taste: a threecheese-topped manakeesh with jalapeño and the house red chili hot sauce shaata. Sometimes he capitalizes on sweet viral trends like a Dubai chocolate manakeesh, with a gooey chocolate base topped with crunchy shredded knafeh pastry and pistachio drizzle.
Darhamda and his crew go off script with the ka’ak as well. Unlike the typical Jerusalem bagel, there’s no hole in the middle. Seven-inch rounds of warm, soft, slightly sweet bread are glazed with a fruit syrup—maybe grape or pomegranate, Atieh won’t say—and densely stippled with a crunchy armor of toasted sesame seeds.
The ka’ak is delicious on its own, but most guests order them as sandwiches—hence the lack of a hole—sliced through the middle and stacked like muffalettas with their bestselling turkey and cheese combo; labne and za’atar; hog dogs and cheese; or your choice of some three dozen halal toppings.
The open preparation and performative character of this spectacle resembles in some ways the knife-throwing acrobatics at the halal barbecue restaurant Meat Moot just up the street. But Atieh says the optics address a more primal urge in guests.
hand it o to the other chef who’s preparing the manakeesh with the toppings that you ordered. And then you see him handing it o to the chef to put it into the oven. The whole reason we have this presentation is to show you that we are making this fresh for you.” Manakeesh ordered to go are encased in boxes adorned with traditional black and white Palestinian keffiyeh patterns, with different lines representing historical trade routes, or the Palestinian connection to the Mediterranean, or olive trees. “The biggest thing is it represents our solidarity with Palestine.”
They import whatever they can from the West Bank—za’atar, olive oil—though Atieh admits that it can be di cult at times. But it isn’t slowing the group down. They recently opened a second branch in Dublin, Ohio, near Columbus. In the autumn, when the weather cools, they’re breaking ground on a Tampa location, and after that, northern Chicagoland—maybe Skokie.
It’s an expansion driven by cultural preservation.
But the real showstopper is the Doblex, a calzone-like pie formed by crimping together
“We want you to watch your manakeesh made from the very beginning,” he says. “You can see the chef prepare the dough. You can see him toss the dough. You can see him flatten it out with his own hands. You can see him
“We like to tie back everything to our roots,” says Atieh. “Everything that we used to make, everything we used to cook and prepare in Palestine was grown on our own lands. Everyone had the space. Everything was natural. Unfortunately, they’re trying to take it away from us. For us to be able to tie back to that with food—how we remember Palestine, how we want Palestine to ultimately become—is the goal.” v m msula@chicagoreader.com
SURVEILLANCE AESTHETICS
As masked federal agents kidnap community members, a state bill to ensure vulnerable Illinoisans have the right to wear medical face coverings sits in limbo.
By MICCO CAPORALE
In February, state representative Hoan Huynh introduced a bill that would protect the right to wear a medical mask in public. It seems like a slam dunk piece of legislation, so why has it stalled in the Illinois General Assembly?
Last October, Care Not COVID Chicagoland teamed up with other disability rights advocates to draft the proposed House Bill 3853, better known as the Protective Medical Equipment Freedom Act. All it says is that if someone wants to wear a protective medical device on their face—whether a surgical mask or a respirator—that’s fine. What’s not fine is denying anyone opportunities or services for doing so. Under the proposal, wearing a mask remains voluntary, costs taxpayers nothing, and could reduce health-care expenses by making preventative behavior easier—yet the bill has been on hold since being introduced.
Masking reduces the spread of COVID-19— a fact established early in the pandemic by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that’s only been bolstered by subsequent research. Vaccines have slowed COVID’s reach, but certain groups, such as older adults and cancer patients, remain at a very high risk if they become infected. In addition, an estimated 5 to 30 percent of people, regardless of age, health, or severity of infection, will develop long COVID, and every reinfection increases someone’s odds of lasting complications. Further, deaths from the virus are disproportionately more common among people of color, making COVID caution both a disability- and racial-justice issue. Shouldn’t everyone have the right to refuse rawdogging the air?
Imagine it was legal to discriminate against someone for wearing a condom—one of the most low-cost, accessible, and surefire
based not on what has happened but on what could happen. Wouldn’t everyone be safer, surveillance advocates suggest, if businesses help police monitor your every move via your face?
disclose how, Representative Huynh said he’s currently working to amend the bill with hopes it’ll pass by the end of the year.
methods of protection against sexually transmitted infections and pregnancy. Face masks are simply respiratory condoms, yet the bill’s loudest opponents want everyone walking around au naturel. In April, Sebastian Nalls, a policy analyst for disability advocacy group Access Living who helped draft the bill, told the Daily Northwestern that the bill’s language was adapted based on pushback from law enforcement and businesses. It doesn’t protect balaclavas or ski masks, he insists. It would only apply to masks worn for medical purposes, like N95s.
Despite this, the bill faces opposition from groups such as the Illinois Bankers Association, the Illinois Retail Merchants Association, and the Illinois Sheriffs’ Association, according to Huynh.
It’s no coincidence that those same groups are some of the state’s most prolific lobbyists for the use of facial recognition technology, such as Clearview AI and Auror, that use artificial intelligence to aggregate images collected from a vast network of security cameras and social media pages and make them available to private security firms and law enforcement agencies nationwide. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been aggressive in pushing these technologies in the public and private sectors, especially to target and deport immigrants,
Antimasking sentiments are not new; in fact, many existing antimask laws across the country were passed in the mid-20th century to curtail Ku Klux Klan activity. But, since the pandemic, there’s been a right-wing zeal for them, driven primarily by false narratives about a dangerous uptick in retail crime and real desires to suppress pro-Palestine protests. Interestingly, it comes at a time when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents—who work for DHS—across the country are themselves donning ski masks and other face coverings to conceal their identities as they publicly kidnap people to concentration camps. Where are the mask critics now?
“We’re trying to pass something for folks in the disability communities and the aging communities, as well as other communities that are dependent on masks, to help prevent the spread of diseases,” he said in a phone call. “It’s an environmental health issue, too, like with the dust storm we saw a couple days ago. Across the state, we want to make sure folks are able to wear those masks . . . without fear of discrimination or retaliation.”
By protecting people’s right to wear medical face coverings, the proposal would allow vulnerable people to remain visible in daily life. Discrimination and retaliation cause people to hide, as does the mere risk of catching COVID. When people are out of sight, they’re also out of mind, which further justifies a world that doesn’t include them. Forcing people to choose between their health and participation in public life reeks of ableism, ageism, and racism—and it undermines the spirit of individual autonomy. People should have a fundamental right to privacy and freedom of movement, especially when exercising their First Amendment right to dissent. Antimasking laws threaten this. (Huynh, when pressed on whether all people should retain the right to wear a face covering regardless of what kind, declined to comment while affirming his commitment to immigrant communities.)
When North Carolina passed a mask ban last year, Democratic lawmakers successfully fought for a medical exception, introducing a compromise that allowed business owners and law enforcement to request individuals temporarily remove their masks to reveal their identities. Though he did not
The last time Illinois lawmakers tried for a statewide mask ban was in 2017, when a bill targeting protesters proposed making it a misdemeanor to conceal one’s identity from a “peace” o cer. It failed, but there’s currently a citywide ordinance sitting in limbo that seeks to increase penalties for people arrested while wearing a mask. It’s another way to defang protestors. Ultimately, the mask debate—and DHS’s eagerness to push it while protecting its masked agents—is really about policing what safety “should” look like and who is deemed acceptable for participation in public life. v
Surveillance Aesthetics explores how surveillance influences culture.
m mcaporale@chicagoreader.com
Trump and the GOP propose cuts to SNAP to fund tax breaks for the wealthy.
By TANIA WHITFIELD, OTHERWORDS
As a child, I felt so fancy when we used the purple food stamps. Those were the pretty ones.
We were a hardworking and loving family. My parents ensured we weren’t around anyone who tried to make us feel “less than” for needing help to make ends meet.
That’s just reality in the U.S. When the federal minimum wage remains stuck at $7.25 while prices for everything else increase, month after month, year after year . . . yeah, we’re going to need some help feeding our families, a ording health care, and keeping a roof over our heads. Where I live, the hourly cost of childcare alone is more than twice the minimum wage.
So, as an adult, I again rely on food stamps, now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), to feed my family. SNAP helps over 42 million Americans put food on the table.
I’m watching with fear as the Republican majority in Congress and the Trump administration propose slashing food assistance to 40 million people and denying free and reduced school meals to 12 million children. Even Meals on Wheels, already deeply underfunded, has taken a hit recently.
“So, go to a food pantry,” these people say. The reality is that for every one meal that food pantries struggle to supply, SNAP provides nine. And the Trump administration is also cutting funding for food banks.
“Get a job. Budget better,” they say. I have a job, and I know how to budget.
You can’t “budget better” when there isn’t enough in your paycheck to cover even basic human needs. Most people who receive SNAP benefits and are able to work do work. Twothirds are children, seniors, or people with disabilities. We’re all at risk of losing even this modest assistance to feed ourselves and our families.
“We’re just cutting waste, fraud, and abuse in the SNAP program,” they say. But the fraud rate in SNAP is just one percent. So why is food for children, families, people with disabilities,
workers, and seniors on the chopping block?
Let’s get beyond the false rhetoric to the truth: The new administration and its allies in Congress want to fund a massive tax giveaway to the richest Americans and the largest corporations. So they’re taking our taxpayer dollars away from programs that support us and giving them to those who need the least help. They all took an oath to serve us, but instead, they’re betraying us. The rich have so much already, but they always seem to want more.
Well-rounded wellness comes from community
You can’t “budget better” when there isn’t enough in your paycheck to cover even basic human needs.
Even though we didn’t have a lot of money, my father always worked in our community to help others. I do the same to help my neighbors find the resources they need and to hold our elected o cials accountable. My heart is full of love. When I look at my community, I see beauty and greatness alongside the need.
We may be poor due to this country’s wage and income system, which rewards inherited wealth over hard work and disinvests in families and communities. But we know the values of family, community, work, and service. We demand that those elected to serve us do the same. v
Tania Whitfield is a mother in Lexington, Kentucky, and a volunteer with the Kentucky Food Action Network and VOCAL-KY, a People’s Action Institute member organization. See more original op-eds at otherwords.org.
m letters@chicagoreader.com
Situated at 79th and Clyde, Chicago Body Shop neighbors a few tire shops, but its mission is not to tune up your car, but a biological vehicle: your body. For owner Dionis Harvey, “There is no substitute for strength, and no excuse for the lack of it.” Born and raised in Chicago’s Chatham neighborhood, Harvey learned at a young age that in order to nourish and flourish in life, physical, mental, and emotional wellness were essential. With Chicago Body Shop, his mindset and lifestyle are channeled into his commitment to strengthen the community.
In addition to providing private workout sessions and group fitness classes, Chicago Body Shop also houses a full kitchen equipped perfectly for nutritious meal prep. Partnering with nutrition coach Chef Kia J., Chicago Body Shop takes wellness to another level by providing holistic resources to clientele. Each rep continues to deepen Chicago Body Shop’s impact. Their educational approach to wellness plants the seeds that enable guests to sustainably bloom into their goal selves. And while they offer training programs for fitness challenges, like Hyrox and the upcoming Black Out Fit, Chicago Body Shop is a space for every body.
Harvey named the common phrase, “If you want to go far, go together,” when asked what it means to have his business be a part of the Avalon Park community since 2020. As a Southeast Chicago Chamber of Commerce member, Chicago Body Shop understands the reciprocal relationship between providing certain services to the neighborhood and also benefiting from belonging to the ecosystem.
Any journey, especially related to health, requires trust, and Chicago Body Shop seeks to serve as a reliable and personable resource for one’s wellness path. Harvey’s heart for fitness started with his family, and Chicago Body Shop is a place for feeling like family and feeling like your best self. Support yourself and Chicago Body Shop by following them on social media. If you want to take the time to make small changes in your everyday life, sign up for their spring special, where you get free meal prep with select personal training packages.
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Theatre Y gives the experimental playwright’s The End of Reality a powerful production.
By KERRY REID
Richard Maxwell’s career in experimental theater began locally with Cook County Theater Department in the early 90s, where his plays both enthralled and aggravated audiences. As Reader contributor Justin Hayford noted in a 2006 review of a touring production of Maxwell’s Boxing 2000 (created with New York City Players, the company he founded after moving east in 1994), “Maxwell’s plays, full of quotidian tasks and dulled speech, were performed in the deadpan, seemingly amateurish style that made Cook County such a controversial company; I heard many an actor complain that their work was simply empty.”
Now Theatre Y, long one of the more intriguing experimental companies in our current landscape, brings Maxwell’s 2006 play, The End of Reality, to their North Lawndale home. Directed by cofounding artistic director Melissa Lorraine, this story of security guards under attack by nameless aggressors—and equally plagued with their own insecurities and existential doubts— feels right at home in the cavernous space. It’s also especially relevant, given the rising fascism of out-of-control ICE agents and cops. (In that way, it also makes a sensible season companion to Theatre Y’s production of Eugène Ionesco’s absurdist examination of groupthink, Rhinoceros, which they put up around the time of the election last fall.)
and Philip Ridley’s Vincent River , staged in a former macaroni factory in Pilsen, were in part about using the space to shape the work, as is also true with their more recent ambulatory shows. But their older productions also focused more inwardly on themes of isolation and alienation, filtered through opaque lenses of longing, recrimination, and societal su ocation.
All that is present in The End of Reality , in which five security guards in a nameless establishment ping-pong between mundane and even ridiculous ponderings. Theatre Y has reimagined the show by adding an element before the performance begins where audience members fill out questionnaires and are then escorted into a waiting room for the first scene of the play.
The characters in Reality seem unsure what to feel, besides fear and suspicion for the outside world and irritation with each other.
Maxwell gave special permission for Theatre Y to mount this show (which was also staged in translation in 2019 in France), and it marks a return to form in some ways for the company, which has been focused on creating large-scale ambulatory community works in more recent years through shows like The Camino Project, Laughing Song, and The Wiz Walk. Theatre Y’s earlier pieces, like their 2011 repertory productions of James Joyce’s Exiles
Three guards in uniform lean against the wall. The oldest one and apparently the leader, Tom (Matt Fleming), asks younger guard Brian (Willie Round) about getting in on some on-camera film auditions. A third guard, Jake (Shawn Bunch), is depressed about breaking up with his girlfriend. Newbie Shannon (Arlene Arnone) shows up. The boredom and routine are soon broken up when a violent interloper (Marvin Tate) breaks through the door and drags Jake out. We’re hustled out of the waiting room and through a dark passage to the company’s main performing space. (They moved into the former storage facility on West Cermak two years ago.)
Shannon is fired. Tom’s “goddaughter,” as he describes her, Marcia (Kris Tori), takes on the job, and when tensions with Tom grow too great, she moves in with Brian. Tate’s character returns for another assault, but this time he’s taken down and cuffed. But is it even him? Tom says, “This guy’s a fake. He just looks like the guy.” Eventually, Marcia releases the prisoner during a long monologue
RTHE END OF REALITY
Through 6/15: Thu 7 PM, Sat 3 and 7 PM, Sun 3 PM; Theatre Y, 3611 W. Cermak, theatre-y.com, free or pay what you can
where she reminisces about her sister, Maddy, and her mother, and examines the concept of su ering in silence. “We don’t mean those that you think might su er in silence, but it turns out to be a ploy to gain attention or pity. No. We mean the countless lovers, mothers, and others who truly suffer in silence, such that you’ll never know.”
In an interview with Jesse Green of the New York Times during Reality ’s premiere run, Maxwell noted that the play’s focus on the banality of violence grew out of his despair with the 2004 reelection of George W. Bush. But he also wanted to see if he could break away from the pattern of his past work, where (as Hayford noted), actors tended to speak in flat, affectless dialogue. “I never tell people to avoid realism or naturalism or what feels natural,” Maxwell told Green. “It’s just that I’m saying you’re not obliged to pretend that you feel something.”
The characters in Reality seem unsure what to feel, besides fear and suspicion for the outside world and irritation with each other. Early on, Tom tells Shannon, “A lot of people
think because they got a badge like this . . . they can go around like a police o cer arresting people”—a line that hits quite hard with the arrests of migrants and politicians alike with no regard for civil liberties. Fleming’s nostalgic speeches about “the old neighborhood” and what’s happened to the churches and other familiar landmarks also resonate with Theatre Y’s neighborhood, which experienced decades of being underfunded, but has more recently, for good and ill, seen signs of gentrification (hello, Riot Fest!).
By showing security employees as average people doing their jobs without fully understanding the larger moral implications of their work, The End of Reality reminded me at points of Suzan-Lori Parks’s The Book of Grace, recently at Steppenwolf. By bringing the audience into the process (Tori moves down the line during her “su er in silence” monologue, at times making physical connection with people sitting on the side of the playing area), Lorraine’s staging adds a level of both vulnerability and culpability for the actors and the spectators. Tate, the celebrated spoken-word artist and founder of soul group D-Settlement (and a native of North Lawndale), spends most of this show not saying a word, but his facial reactions as he’s seated handcu ed on the floor (and his work in the jaw-dropping fight scenes, choreographed by R.J. Cecott) provide their own raw physical poetry. Kimberly A. Sutton’s jarring sound design makes us feel trapped in the space as walls of noise from just beyond the doors occasionally rush in. By the end of the play, Tom asks (in a tone somewhere between flatness and anguish), “How can I claim to have any control over my life if I haven’t any sense of myself, of my former self, and a new self has not been defined? I’ll move forward in a new fashion.” As he tries to talk himself into believing in the possibilities of newness, I looked around at the rough beast constituting our current social and political conditions. I’m not so sure that the rebirth will come in time. v
m kreid@chicagoreader.com
Honeypot celebrates “Black southern women who love women.”
Based on Northwestern professor E. Patrick Johnson’s book, Fleetwood-Jourdain’s Honeypot: Black Southern Women Who Love Women (copresented by Northwestern University’s Wirtz Center for the Performing Arts, adapted by Northwestern professor emeritus D. Soyini Madison, and directed by Madison and Fleetwood-Jourdain artistic director Tim Rhoze) is a combination of ritual, choreopoem, and storytelling that celebrates Black women’s love for themselves and each other, o en against the oppressive forces of white supremacy, misogyny, and homophobia. The framing device is that EPJ (a stand-in for Johnson, played by Jelani Julyus) has been kidnapped by Miss B (the effervescent Tuesdai B. Perry) and taken to a hive of bees called “Hymen.” The ethnographic work of Johnson (who also wrote Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South—an Oral History) comes to life through a series of vibrant scenes set in various locales, including a blues club, a riverbank, and a garden. The stories these women tell are sometimes ribald, sometimes heartbreaking, but always steeped in a spirit of community and empathy. (Not unlike Shay Youngblood’s Shakin’ the Mess Outta Misery, also reviewed this week.) Early on, it’s clear that they aren’t letting their identities (including their spiritual beliefs) be dictated by anyone else. “I let nothing separate me from the love of God,” one woman declares, and the connection to the spiritual and each other provides the emotional he to this engaging work. In addition to Perry and Julyus, six actors play all the other roles, moving with and between scenes with the aid of Marsae Mitchell’s propulsive choreography. Sometimes the stories begin to feel a bit repetitive, but then we’re reminded that coming out, falling in love, dealing with histories of abuse, and all the other myriad details combine to form the tapestry of love and resilience for these women. That deserves our attention now more than ever. —KERRY REID HONEYPOT: BLACK SOUTHERN WOMEN WHO LOVE WOMEN Through 6/1: Sat 7 PM, Sun 3 PM; Fleetwood-Jourdain Theatre at Noyes Cultural Arts Center, 927 Noyes, Evanston, 847-866-5914, fjtheatre.com, $32 ($10 students)
healer Miss Mary (Sharyon Culberson, who also doubles as lesbian Miss Tom in one lovely scene set at a fishing pond), and Miss LaMama (Africa Pace Brown), whose first brief marriage to an African man convinced her to adopt African dress and speech patterns—all help raise and li Daughter. There is warmth and wit in abundance here, but also pain and sometimes dark (but deserved) karmic payback.
Gotta Be Something Better Than This,” performed here by the trio of Kiang Mirabelli, Kelcy Taylor, and India Huy. And, of course, there’s the dancing. Lauryn Schmelzer’s choreography tips the hat to Fosse’s trademark contortions, and deploys his original choreography (properly credited) for the act one showcase “Rich Man’s Frug.” You can hear every breath of the unmiked ensemble as they dance in the intimate Greenhouse space, sing-
Shawn Wallace’s music direction and the choreography from Tanji Harper enliven and enlarge Youngblood’s world as Daughter learns the truth about her mother and finds a wellspring of determination and love for herself and those around her. As in Fleetwood-Jourdain’s Honeypot (also reviewed this week), stories of Black women who have insisted on the primacy of their lives and their communities feel particularly resonant right now, as there is so very much mess to sort out. —KERRY REID SHAKIN’ THE MESS OUTTA MISERY Through 6/15: Thu–Sat 7 PM, Sun 2:30 PM; Chicago Dramatists, 798 N. Aberdeen, pegasustheatrechicago.org, $35 ($25 seniors, $15 for students 21 and under)
Blank Theatre’s Sweet Charity honors the spirit of Bob Fosse’s original staging.
A young Black girl finds strength in stories from her elders in Shakin’ the Mess Outta Misery
Pegasus Theatre Chicago first presented Shay Youngblood’s 1988 play, Shakin’ the Mess Outta Misery, in 2017, not quite a year into the first Trump administration. Youngblood’s memory play about a young Black woman, Daughter, raised in the south by a community of older women a er her mother le for the north, feels even more vital for our current hellish timeline in this revival, again directed by Pegasus executive and producing artistic director ILesa Duncan.
Youngblood, who died in June 2024 at age 64, drew on her own life experiences in telling Daughter’s story. Felisha McNeal returns from the 2017 production as Big Mama, with Caitlin Dobbins playing Daughter. Big Mama and the other women—including Big Mama’s moonshine-selling sister Aunt Mae (debrah k neal), West Indian
When director/choreographer (and Ravenswood native) Bob Fosse needed a star vehicle for his wife and muse, Gwen Verdon, he decided to adapt Federico Fellini’s 1957 film Nights of Cabiria, a drama following the misadventures of an Italian sex worker. Collaborating with composer Cy Coleman, lyricist Dorothy Fields, and librettist Neil Simon, Fosse’s experiment bore Sweet Charity. Blank Theatre Company’s production, presented at Greenhouse Theater Center, is just like its heroine—goofy and gutsy. Directed by Johanna McKenzie Miller, this Charity nails the spirit of Fosse’s vision through Teah Kiang Mirabelli’s miraculous performance as Charity Hope Valentine, a Times Square dance hall hostess. Kiang Mirabelli’s Charity is a lovesick goofball desperate for companionship who takes her lumps. That’s not to say she’s psychopathically optimistic; when the show slows down, we believe every inch of hurt and hope that Charity sings about.
Fields, working as a woman in a midcentury boys’ club, poured her determination into songs like “There’s
ing beautifully over the five-piece band. This Sweet Charity has its head on its shoulders and a glowing performance at its core. —ROB SILVERMAN ASCHER SWEET CHARITY Through 6/8: Thu–Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM; also Mon 6/2 7:30 PM and Sat 6/7 2 PM; Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln, 773-404-7336, blanktheatrecompany.org, $37 ($22 student/industry) v
There is Poetry to basketball too
Scratch that there is some basketball in poetry too
Both processes in their purest form
Just read tween tween the lines
Behind the back of my backstreet
Before there was paper to pen
There was Nike hyperfuse to concrete
Infuse the sweat
Both shots get shot
It depends on what we let touch the net
Before anybody asked me to feature I was getting picked up
From across the street
Aye Aye you, run wit us
And then summer time it was AAU City said run wit us/
Before I made my way around the city wit a mic
I refused to be caught traveling But was on my pivot/
By The Third
Was doin suicides before me and my editor were going back and forth over lines Made spin moves before I spint a record
Vicky Vicky
Don’t stop dribbling unless you ready to pass Was in triple threat before I became The Third
Couldn’t afford to be missin steps
‘92
Jordan Seemed like Jesus Not to be sacrilegious
But I watched He Got Game And jesus was a Shooter too
Before I got to compare a poem
I flew through air
I narrowed the grounds that Derrick Rose from Don’t Stop Dribbling unless you ready to pass Don’t stop dribbling unless you ready to pass/
Third is a SouthSide born rapper and teacher with a deep affinity for words. As a lyricist and storyteller, Third is always looking to tell the stories of the underrepresented, challenge the norm, and inspire a higher tier or art.
A weekly series curated by the Chicago Reader and sponsored by the Poetry Foundation.
Opening Hours
Wednesday, Friday, Saturday: 11:00 AM–5:00 PM
Thursday: 11:00 AM–6:00 PM
Power Lines 25th Anniversary Celebration
Honoring the 25th anniversary of the iconic anthology Power Lines: A Decade of Poetry from Chicago’s Guild Complex with original contributors and editors. May 22, 2025 at 6:00 PM
Learn more at PoetryFoundation.org
All the world loves a clown. Except, not really—just as much as the clown is a symbol of joy and frivolity, it’s also an emblem of terror, so much so that there’s seemingly infinite media surrounding this specific phobia.
I was thinking about this on Friday when I did a triple feature of sorts: a program of short experimental works about clowns, including a live performance, at Elastic Arts; Andrew DeYoung’s highly anticipated film Friendship (2024) at the Music Box Theatre; and a midnight screening of John Waters’s Desperate Living (1977), also at the Music Box, as part of the ongoing Sapphopalooza series. The first program was Grin and Bear It, presented by Tone Glow and Employees Only, with various films and clown and puppet performances. I was only able to stay for the first block of shorts, which included films by Luther Price and Jack Smith, and the clown performance.
One of the films, Luther Price’s Clown (1990–2002), is profoundly distressing regardless of one’s feelings toward clowns. But that’s the point. The film is Price wearing a disturbing clown mask and engaging in freaky behavior. It’s unapologetically grotesque, not distancing viewers but actively trying to alienate them. (All of this is a testament to Price’s skill and e cacy as an artist, so that’s not a negative critique.)
It segued nicely (weird word to use here) into Justin D’Acci’s live clown performance; he could have been possessed by Price’s spirit. While menacing the audience with his rebarbative behavior, he also filmed us with a camera fitted into a shoe that he carried around on a stick. Which was more distressing: when he descended upon our section, threatening his sad, participatory zeal, or the projection of it on the screen? It’s hard to say, but either way, it was incredible.
Then my husband and I went to Friendship. Tim Robinson’s character, a middle-aged man who does everything awkwardly and eventually repels
the cool neighbor (Paul Rudd) with whom he’s become obsessed, is a proverbial clown— his torment our merriment. It’s unfortunate, then, that in spite of this connection to the night’s theme, Friendship just isn’t that good a movie. It feels more like a reaction to Robinson’s popularity, and Rudd’s character felt straight out of Anchorman (2004). (Perhaps to avoid a more obvious corollary to 2009’s I Love You, Man?) Which is all to say it’s been done before, and better. While there are definitely a few smart laughs, the film felt like a hastily thrown-together product, someone’s bright idea after the success of I Think You Should Leave, rather than anything more significant. This isn’t even a bad thing, but for some reason made me angry, considering this is often what passes for “smarter-than-usual” entertainment.
Waters’s Desperate Living was thus a delightfully rancid palate cleanser, starring many of the Pope of Trash’s Dreamlanders, the cohort of performers who regularly appeared in his films. From Mink Stole’s legendary breakdown at the beginning—“I hate the Supreme Court!” she wails, a proclamation that resounds so many years later—to serving up Edith Massey’s Queen Carlotta as a pig on the spit after she’s been overthrown from the shantytown she rules, it’s not camp but instead pure anarchy. The figures in Waters’s films are clownish, but it’s the characteristics that make them so, which account for the filmmaker’s subversion of a variety of norms (societal, cinematic, and probably others I can’t even think of). You’re laughing with them rather than at them.
My moviegoing is often defined as much by the screenings I can’t make as those that I do. This past week, the Chicago Film Society ended its ten-year run at Northeastern Illinois University with Vincente Minnelli’s The Band Wagon (1953) on 35 millimeter (duh). Thankfully, we’ll all have plenty of opportunities to see more Chicago Film Society at places like the Music Box, among others, but I wish I could have been there.
Until next time, moviegoers. —KAT SACHS v
The Moviegoer is the diary of a local film bu , collecting the best of what Chicago’s independent and underground film scene has to o er.
It was a mistake to make a Final Destination movie into an almost two-hour-long family drama. The series has never followed characters from film to film like the Saw or Scream franchises, so when Final Destination: Bloodlines asks the audience to invest in an extended family, it’s a tough sell.
It doesn’t help that the actors are saddled with trying to imbue real feeling into some of the worst dialogue to ever escape a Hallmark movie. We’re reminded about seven times in as many minutes that Iris (Gabrielle Rose) is the shared grandmother of our group of young leads. Grandma is referred to as “a very disturbed woman”; our protagonist shouts, “I’m not like her!” at her younger brother when accused of being like their mom who le ; and Mom (who, of course, returns) gets hit with a classic, “You could have been there.”
All that cliche is born from one of the franchise’s patented opening set piece visions of mass death: a disaster at a fictional Space Needle stand-in. Iris foresaw this in the 60s and saved hundreds before spending her life paranoid as death made its way through the survivors and their offspring. It’s a solid enough update
on the premise that delivers the gory goods (even if they are rendered digitally), but the focus on a family and their dynamics makes Bloodlines feel like a spec script that was folded into the franchise. (It was not.)
There is one person it’s easy to care about, though:
The late Tony Todd returns for a single scene as William Bludworth, a mortician with similar one-scene exposition drops in three of the five preceding movies. Todd was in the middle of a battle with stomach cancer when he shot his scene and cites this sickness as Bludworth before leaving with a reminder that life is precious and we never know when it will end. It’s a showstopper in the middle of an otherwise middling film, almost making the whole thing worth it. Almost. —KYLE LOGAN R, 110 min.
Wide release in theaters
There is no guidebook to friendship. A coworker, a friend of a friend, a neighbor—forming a genuine emotional connection with someone new only gets harder with time. This is particularly true for adult men, many of whom suffer from seemingly incurable emotional ineptitude, missing the social tools (or vulnerability) needed to form these bonds. It’s almost absurd how closed off—or awkward—they can be. Director Andrew
DeYoung’s debut, Friendship, starring Tim Robinson, takes that absurdity and cranks it to the max.
Robinson is known for a specific caricature of a man. He has honed this hotheaded, socially outrageous character in his cherished sketch show, I Think You Should Leave. For Friendship, he unveils Craig Waterman, an emotionally desperate suburbanite working for a company called Universal Digital Innovation, which creates endless scroll-like products that make people addicted. He has a particular proclivity for ruining every social interaction he is in.
Friendship dominoes a er a package is misdelivered to Craig’s doorstep. It’s addressed to Craig’s new neighbor, Austin Carmichael, who we find out is a mustache-wearing weatherman played with bravado by Paul Rudd. Craig is immediately smitten, as many of us are, especially with Austin’s farewell: “Stay curious, Craig Waterman.”
Austin initiates a friendship, solidified by an adventure exploring the sewers and breaking into the City Hall of “Clovis, USA.” But shortly a er, he breaks off the friendship a er Craig makes a social blunder (of seismic proportions). This gaffe sparks a series of increasingly ludicrous sequences as Craig’s desperation to revive the friendship bedevils his mind. Unlike
some sketches in which Robinson’s cringiness might turn heads away, it’s impossible to take your eyes off the screen.
Friendship does not waste one second of its 100-minute runtime, jumping from bit to bit without losing steam or its narrative focus. Craig’s wife, Tami (Kate Mara), works as a florist and is a cancer survivor who spends an unusual amount of time with her firefighter ex-boyfriend. She also kisses their son (Jack Dylan Grazer) on the mouth very early on. Another one of the most jaw-dropping moments is secured with an a cappella version of Ghost Town DJ’s “My Boo.”
Friendship might be the funniest movie to hit theaters in years, but beneath the laughs, there’s something quietly devastating. It is impossible not to draw comparisons to the 2009 Paul Rudd comedy I Love You, Man, in which Rudd plays a man desperate for companionship. But here, Friendship asserts the question: What if everything was even worse? This tormented quest for friendship is packed with what can only be called shenanigans, but they never distract us from the real-life problem it prods. We’ve all felt the social terror of embarrassment—and even if it’s not as bad as it is for Craig, it sure feels like it sometimes. —MAXWELL RABB R, 100 min. Wide release in theaters v
OVER $348 MILLION IN TOTAL PRIZES
“I just want all the queer Internet artists I meet online to get offline and into real life.”
As told to MICCO CAPORALE
Brendan Carmack is the teddy bear of Chicago’s underground pop scene. The Oak Park native has been making hip-hop as Grizzy Mack since high school. Now 31, he keeps busy with music, and performing is just a small part of that. While earning a psychology degree at Knox College in Galesburg, he helped run the school’s radio station, worked as a sound engineer, and cofounded a collective of local artists and producers called Thirty Radio, with whom he still works today. Since moving to Chicago in 2016, he’s devoted himself to refining his craft while booking DIY shows and running the intermittent Internet radio show Vers.fm. His main priority is uplifting indie talent in pop, hip-hop, and R&B, especially experimental and queer voices.
Many people know Carmack as half of underground queer pop promoters Citypill. In 2019, Carmack met Stevie Logan, and in 2021, the pair organized the first Citypill show. The concept was slow to take off at first, but Carmack became the booker for Happy Gallery in 2023 and began hosting frequent Citypill nights there. In March, Citypill leveled up by bringing in hip-hop renegade BbyMutha for a sold-out show at Sleeping Village—a success that Carmack and Logan are optimistic about repeating at other venues. In the meantime, Carmack hosts karaoke every Tuesday at the Wicker Park location of Emporium Arcade Bar with his Happy Gallery pal Jess Oleson, and he’s preparing to release new Grizzy Mack material that he likens to “very rappy” Toro y Moi.
My last name is Carmack, so that’s where the “Mack” comes from. People used to say I was soft, like a teddy bear. I thought “Teddy Mack,” but that felt too soft. Then I thought “Grizzy”—it’s like a teddy with a little edge, like a soft grizzly. Plus, if you’re on your grind, you’re on your grizzy type. I’m always doing something, so that fits.
I have a sister who’s ten years older. Shout-out to her, because she really showed me cool stu that wasn’t the Christian gospel music that my family had going on. It was the early 2000s, so she showed me, like, the Strokes, a lot of Kanye’s early music, Janet Jackson, stu like that. When I got to middle school, I started listening to, like, Lil Wayne and Eminem. A lot of people my age were listening to bands like Senses Fail and Fall Out Boy—a lot of emo bands—and I started to transition to rap. I’m a big hip-hop head now, but I carry a wide variety of influences.
“It was really nice to have a show for queer people of color making rap or rap-adjacent R&B.”
show I would play songs I liked, along with my songs and friends’ songs. At one point I got a job as a sound engineer at a radio station, and I got to learn how to record myself and use Logic. I did all the music stuff that I could in Galesburg, but it’s small and secluded. After graduation, I wanted to move to the city and do music here. I moved in 2016 and was like, “Let me get a job in some sort of music field.” I was a security guard at House of Blues for . . . four weeks? Ten weeks? I don’t remember, but it was right when the Cubs won the World Series and Trump [was elected] president. I was like, “Oh, this world’s going crazy. I can’t do this.”
I played saxophone for a while—a lot of jazz music and stu . It was second or third grade, and everyone had to pick an instrument. I chose the saxophone because my sister played it. I kept playing through high school, did marching band and stu . It didn’t always coincide with the music I was listening to—like, in marching band, rap wasn’t welcome. We would do really cool covers of, like, Lady Gaga,
but I always wished we’d do a rap song. Today I see marching bands do covers of, like—I saw one do a Tyler, the Creator song. I was like, “Damn, I wish that was the band I was in!” It’s so fun to hear interpolations of songs with a full band, especially with all the brass and woodwinds. I didn’t continue playing sax in college, but I think that experience opened me to all sorts of music. I’m not judgmental like that. I think some folks have their things they lean towards, but I’m down to hear anything.
I didn’t start making original music until my senior year of high school. Then my first year in college, I dropped my first mixtape, and I had a radio show too. My second year, I had this collective of rappers and producers from my hometown called Thirty Radio. On my
In Galesburg, I would just make stuff. I wasn’t thinking about the after part, like getting the songs anywhere. I started taking that more seriously after moving here, because there’s so many people and artists. I wanted to have somebody hear this and get feedback from other artists, but over time, it’s become less about me. I’m like, “Damn, there is some really good stu that’s not heard by too many people. I would love to platform it.”
In 2017, I hosted my first show in Chicago, at Alulu Brewery. It was me and some friends, like Strizz and Puppyslug. I wanted to start booking stuff, but I wasn’t sure how. I just started reaching out to places, and Alulu was down.
I’m a computer artist. I don’t have a band behind me—it’s really just me playing beats and rapping over them. I feel like there isn’t much space for that here, even less around 2017. I’ve heard people say it’s less entertaining to watch, unless [the artist is] dancing and doing a lot. I don’t really care about that. I like
seeing rappers and pop singers just do their thing. I really believe in the stu that I share. I don’t put any artists on that I don’t like, because that would be fake. If I really enjoy them, I want to see them get flowers.
shows and stu , but it’s too tight for that now. It’s perfect for showcasing stu that doesn’t take up a lot of space. My first show was Thirty Radio–focused, and the next one was Citypill. Citypill has continued hosting shows there every other month.
“A DIY band can find a house show anywhere in the city. If I’m a pop artist with my computer and my beats, where can I go?”
In 2019, I met Stevie, and we started Citypill to focus on queer pop and underground pop. “Pop” is a loose term, but we like that kind of stu coming out of the underground. I don’t quite remember how I met Stevie. He has a page called Bops & Flops that reviews queer music, so we connected online. Then we randomly met in person at a Slayyyter concert. I also met two other people that I’ve worked with since at that concert. Big meeting of the gays. I saw Stevie again at a 100 Gecs show, and then I went to an aftershow in a cafe basement in Wicker Park and was like, “Oh, Stevie again!” We both were just very in the scene.
At that time, I was mostly still focused on Thirty Radio, but those friends aren’t queer. Me and Stevie were talking about queer art and queer artists and artists that influence queerness, and we were meeting new artists together. After a while, we were like, “We should do a showcase.” Then COVID hit, so we didn’t do our first Citypill show until late 2021.
It was at Bookclub, when it was still underground. I was the opener for one of their first shows, so I asked them about doing a showcase. It was me, Don Crescendo, and my friend Docx. He’s a producer I’m close with now, but that was my first time meeting. Oh, and Chloe Hotline. That’s my friend from Cincinnati who makes real cool music. These are all people I met online.
Getting to do that show was kind of iconic—like, taking stu from the group chat online into real life. I had done that with Thirty Radio, but it felt different doing all these queer artists. It was really nice to have a show for queer people of color making rap or rapadjacent R&B.
In 2022, we did the second one. Our third one was in 2023 at Happy Gallery. January of that year, Happy Gallery asked me to be their booker. Back in the day, they’d do more punk
Happy Gallery’s been so wonderful, but we’re trying to grow and get into other venues. BbyMutha was posting about wanting to do more shows, and I was a reply guy, like: “I would love to help you host a show in Chicago.” She said, “OK, I’m down.”
That was a big moment: having an artist so big be so down for Citypill. We had to find a venue that would fit her. We reached out to so many places and didn’t get any replies besides Sleeping Village. Afterward we had a pop-up at Happy Gallery, so they could still be involved—like a BbyMutha meet-and-greet. It was nice!
Stevie’s really good at going to events and seeing the big picture, whereas I’m like, if I can’t see a lane, I’m just gonna make it. Sometimes I’m like, “Is it that it doesn’t exist, or is it something that I’m not fully a part of?” I just want all the queer Internet artists I meet online to get o ine and into real life.
A DIY band can find a house show anywhere in the city. If I’m a pop artist with my computer and my beats, where can I go? To get added to band-heavy shows, I feel like you have to get to a certain level for them to be like, “OK, we’ll let this person perform, because they have the numbers or clout or whatever.” I want to see more than one type of music in DIY.
I’ve done a lot of noise or punk shows where I’m the only rapper, and people always comment on it. I did a house show last year and had my iPad, and Jess had an SP-404 [sampler]. A bunch of people commented how it looked better that I had gear. It’s a little silly to me, because the gear wasn’t even how we made the music, just how we played it. But seeing that was enough for people to be more intrigued. It made me want to get rid of it!
It’s a little backwards to me. I’ve been raised on rappers and R&B artists, and it’s just them performing. Maybe for some audiences, that’s less entertaining, but I always wonder why. What’s that energy about? v
m mcaporale@chicagoreader.com
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Cofounder Son Amoz wants his organization to build a spiritually rooted ecosystem for musicians, muralists, and more.
By JOSHUA EFERIGHE
City of Win is a series curated by Isiah “ThoughtPoet” Veney and written by Joshua Eferighe that uses prose and photography to create portraits of Chicago musicians and cultural innovators working to create positive change in their communities.
As major labels and streaming algorithms dominate today’s music landscape, a new wave of artist discovery platforms has emerged as powerful counterweights. These platforms prioritize live performance videos that elevate rising talent beyond the algorithm.
It’s not hard to find examples, some with several million followers, on both sides of the
Atlantic. Berlin-based Colors Studios showcases artists on a minimalist studio stage that focuses all your attention on the performance.
New York channel On the Radar and the neighborhood-rooted performances of From the Block, based in NYC and Atlanta, post videos in their own styles. Chicago has tried it too: Veteran videographer APJ Films launched Purple Box Videos in April 2023 to platform local artists in his signature aesthetic, heavy on inventive editing tricks and video e ects. Around the same time, multimedia company NFO Films began spotlighting Chicago rappers with freestyles and interviews. Earlier this year, Lyrical Lemonade entered the space with its Lunch Break Freestyle. All these local ven-
threads of faith and community.
“One of the core purposes of Golden Street is to remind people of the kingdom of God,” says Amoz. “Once you step on Golden Street, even for a brief moment, we’re going to have some conversations about the kingdom. If you can cultivate and heal the community around you, it leads to a stronger foundation. I believe we come from God—such a fantastic ancestor. That’s our bloodline. And if we come from God, we’re capable of things we haven’t even discovered yet.”
At the top of the Golden Street website, Amoz has posted Matthew 6:33: “But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.” You might hear him recite the Lord’s Prayer before a podcast or artist interview. That faith also su uses the Golden Street Underground Market, the collective’s brick-andmortar space in the Chicago Pedway underneath downtown. A bright yellow wall greets you as soon as you enter the space. It’s adorned with the work of artists who’ve passed through and the signatures of previous guests, giving the room a sacred aura. Since 2019, when Golden Street moved in, Amoz has turned it into a resource hub for local artists, offering workshops and other events, access to information, and opportunities to paint murals.
”I wanted to create a space where artists could have a close-to-home resource in downtown Chicago,” Amoz says. “Because as an artist, you have to know someone, you have to have accomplished or done a certain thing. So it was this idea of being able to provide resources for the creative mind.”
tures center artists’ voices and have emerged within the past couple years.
Son Amoz takes a different approach— though the distinction is less in what he’s doing than in why. Born Amoz Ben Wright in Bronzeville, he cofounded the arts and culture organization Golden Street in 2017. A graphic designer, muralist, portrait artist, and videographer, the 28-year-old doesn’t just use his gifts to showcase emerging talent—he’s building a spiritually rooted creative ecosystem. His video series In the Gallery puts a spotlight on worthy artists, much as Lunch Break Freestyle and the others do—he’s recently featured RayIsRay, Stevie D. Robinson, Mani Jurdan, and Co Playa—but all of his work is connected by
A longtime resident of south suburban Dixmoor, Amoz knows firsthand the hurdles of the creative world. After graduating in 2015 from Thornton Township High School in Harvey (where he now works as an art instructor), he enrolled at DePaul to study screenwriting, then switched to graphic design. But when he expressed an interest in mural painting, he didn’t exactly get the support he’d hoped for.
“I was at DePaul, and a professor told me, ‘Well, you probably won’t achieve that till you’re about 40, to get paid to do [murals],’” Amoz says. But he stuck with his studies, graduating in 2019, and today he has at least ten murals up around the city.
Amoz participated in the creation of Harvey World Wall in the south suburbs (where he organized a group of artists), Chicago Has My Heart in the Loop, and Dust to Dust at northwest-side health-food store the Natural Branches. The Golden Street team—led by
Amoz and his brothers, Ira Moshe and Malachi Israel—painted Bronzeville’s Wall of Therapy. Amoz created the downtown mural Warmth on Wabash, and he worked with his late father, Malik Wright, on Black Is Beautiful, Black Is Forever in Roseland’s Pop! Heights Park, a piece Amoz says earned them $32,000. Amoz has also collaborated with the Chicago Cubs, the White Sox, and the Blackhawks, and his artwork appeared on the first two seasons of Showtime’s The Chi.
“I get a lot of my artistry from my parents,” he says. “My dad was a carpenter. My mom used to draw faces and post them around the house. My brothers too—Malachi drew more than I did. My other brother, Ira Moshe, was always creating: videos, freestyles, dancing, whatever he could.”
Amoz cofounded Golden Street in 2017 with longtime friend Ridgio, a rapper and producer who already had connections at local restaurants and bars. In 2018, for their first major project, they booked two shows with emerging talent, which went so well they added three more. They dubbed the resulting run of gigs the Chicago Mix Tour (it hit several dif-
ferent venues), and it blended music, fashion, and live mural painting.
“After the first two shows, we knew we had something,” Amoz says. “By the last one, we were working with Squeak and Frsh [Waters] from Pivot Gang. Everybody was like, we need another Chicago Mix Tour.”
In 2020, creative di erences led the pair to take separate paths in their work, though they stayed close friends. Amoz remained at the helm of Golden Street, and Ridgio launched the label R.A.W. Entertainment in January 2023.
“For me, Golden Street was more of a path to the Kingdom,” Amoz says. “I didn’t want to let it go.”
Initially hesitant to continue alone, Amoz pushed forward after encouragement from his siblings. Later in 2020, he registered Golden Street as a limited liability corporation (LLC), naming Ira Moshe and Malachi Israel as ocial partners. Both brothers are based in Los Angeles, but the former heads programming in Chicago, while the latter runs a satellite branch in California.
In 2023, the team launched Golden Street Speaks, a podcast exploring faith, art, and com-
munity. That same year, they started Sketch Stage, a monthly open mike where artists can share finished or unfinished work. (Though the latter has been on pause due to lack of funding, Amoz plans to relaunch it this summer.) In late 2024, Golden Street debuted the freestyle and interview series In the Gallery.
Everything Golden Street does has a grassroots aspect, but some of its e orts benefit the community directly with giveaways or other charitable acts. In 2023, the group launched the Day in the Park Fest at Pop! Heights Park, and at last year’s installment, it not only offered live music and art but also distributed 300 backpacks, lunches, hygiene kits, tote bags, gift cards, and even a Nintendo Switch.
“We’d love to tour it eventually,” Amoz says. “That’s part of the 20-year plan.”
Next up: The Cornerstone Project , a documentary the Golden Street crew plans to shoot this summer that will o er a behind-thescenes look at Golden Street’s inner workings. Amoz hopes it will help emerging creatives develop blueprints for their own projects and stay motivated to see them through.
Golden Street is also expanding its footprint.
Amoz says they’ve secured the lease on a much larger retail space across from their current headquarters, where as early as this summer they hope to open a mom-and-pop-style shop selling Golden Street merch and host creative workshops led by industry professionals, including mural artists, audio engineers, producers, and even writers.
“Golden Street should be known globally for our studio production—movies, murals, anything that lets us give people something beautiful. ‘This is what we did for you, artistically.’”
However the brand evolves, Amoz says the mission will remain rooted in scripture.
“I want to keep the Bible as a road map,” he says. “To start with the book and let those stories come to life—merged with contemporary experience.” v
Photos by ThoughtPoet of Unsocial Aesthetics (UAES), a digital creative studio and resource collective designed to elevate communitydriven storytelling and social activism in Chicago and beyond
Justice Hill is cooler than ever on Cooler by the Lake
Recommended and notable shows with critics’ insights for the week of May 22 b
JUSTICE HILL, ICKEN GRIMMS
Wed 5/28, 8 PM, Schubas, 3159 N. Southport, $18, $15 in advance. 18+
JUSTICE HILL KNOWS there are no shortcuts in making music that feels effortless. The Michigan-born Chicago multi-instrumentalist refined his skills through study at Berklee College of Music, untold hours of practice, and frequent gigging. He’s known to play in unorthodox settings (community jam sessions, burlesque performances), and since last year he’s headlined the Green Mill’s famed weekly variety show, the Paper Machete, at least twice. The music on Hill’s 2021 debut full-length, Room With a View, sounds breezy, but it emerged from a labored process; after completing the fi rst version of the album, he scrapped several finished recordings and rewrote half the material from scratch. On his brand-new sophomore album, Cooler by the Lake, he’s more self-assured. As Hill told Schiller Park newspaper People & Places in April, he tried to “set the table a certain way so people can be surprised by the meal.” Lead single “Thank You Hate Me” is a per-
fect slice of midwest soul. Saxophonist Brian Seyler echoes the vocal melody, as though Hill’s lovesick feelings can’t be contained by just one person, and the drum groove uses a snare hit on count four that pops like bubblegum. “Rain” begins as a mournful multitracked choral piece, and then the clouds burst over thunderous tom rolls and a saxophone solo flashes like lightning—imagine Pink Floyd’s “The Great Gig in the Sky” written for a Lake Michigan storm.
Hill also expands his menu to include more diverse fare. The ballad “Outta Sight” feels more Linkin Park than Lincoln Park; it’s powered by Seyler’s sax buzzes and Bill Kidera’s guitar surges as Hill’s sonorous voice echoes in urgent harmonies stacked ten feet tall. “Common Cold” builds to a four-on-the-floor pattern that reflects the sound of classic Chicago house. With the historic news of Chicago-born Cardinal Robert Prevost being elected the first American pope, the eyes of the world have been fixed on the city’s culture. In my opinion, artists such as Hill are more worthy of that spotlight than Malört or dibs. Even if the future Pope Leo XIV has never heard of Schubas, it really is cooler by the lake.
—JACK
RIEDY
Young Widows Kowloon Walled City and Fotocrime open. 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 2100 W. Belmont, $20. 17+
When you’re not in a good place, it can help to listen to music by somebody who sounds like they’re not in a good place. I love lots of those records, and Young Widows have made a few of the best. Guitarist and front man Evan Patterson and bassist Nick Thieneman founded this Louisville trio in 2006, and drummer Jeremy McMonigle has been aboard since 2008. With Settle Down City (2006) and Old Wounds (2008), they developed a dark, fraught, obsessive style of posthardcore that perfectly evokes the experience of trying so hard to hold onto something precious that you break it in your hands. Its stubborn repetitions feel like worrying at a bloody hangnail, and its unpredictable spasms—a jarring eruption of noise, a dropout like the floor falling away—feel like living in a brain that snaps your consciousness around at the end of a whip. Patterson’s voice sounds forlorn and desperate, not angry or unhinged, but he and his bandmates do more than anybody since the Jesus Lizard with the tension between locked-down rhythms and unstable menace.
In March, though, when Young Widows released Power Sucker (Temporary Residence), they hadn’t put out an album of new material in 11 years. A lot can happen in that much time. The band had already evolved on In and Out of Youth and Lightness (2011) and Easy Pain (2014), with longer, more hypnotic songs that feel wrung out and exhausted, like an animal le to struggle in a trap for days. For most of the past ten years, Patterson has been more focused on his solo project, Jaye Jayle (he released After Alter in January), whose approach to noise rock has a drawling, southern Gothic feel—as though a Bad Seeds record appeared to you on a dark backcountry road, through a windshield pelted with rain. So what do Young Widows sound like now?
“Every other Young Widows album was about the vortex and my depressions,” Patterson told PostTrash last month, surprising no one. But in 2021, while going through his second divorce, he started microdosing mushrooms every day—and he kept it up for nine months. “My anxiety pretty much went away,” he said. “I was paying bills on time, calling people, taking care of my responsibilities.” His first child, Leonard Pitch Black Patterson, was born last year. “Prior to having Lenny, I didn’t really care what happened to me that much,” he said. “It opened the door to being a little more selfless, wanting to share and take care of everyone a little bit more.”
Starting a family also helped Patterson chill out about the fact that Thieneman and McMonigle’s child-rearing responsibilities had put a brake on Young Widows, which he admits he’d been a “bitter dickhead” about in the past. They started getting together at Patterson’s house at 10 AM each Friday to work on a new record. To make their limited time count, they wrote faster and consciously tried to avoid getting too finicky. Power Sucker has less of the perversity in detail and structure that makes Old Wounds such an enervating trip, but the sound will instantly scratch the same itch: wiry, gleaming guitar, grotty outboard bass, and bludgeoning drum parts heavy on the toms. You can hear more
Kentucky in Patterson’s voice, and the songs—which are back down to three minutes or so, on average— sometimes even have a touch of bar-band swagger. The production is more “live in a room,” with less of the wild panning, dramatic spatial effects, and minesha reverb from the earlier records. You won’t mistake the reborn Young Widows for a power-pop
band—this is still nasty, bleak, aggressive music—but you might find it easier to believe they’re having fun. The title track seems to be about steering clear of energy vampires: “I am not the kind / To waste my power on your misery,” Patterson sings. And on “Turned Out Alright,” he says something that would probably surprise his old self: “Turned out all right
for a punk-rock kid.”
Young Widows share this Beat Kitchen bill with underappreciated Bay Area noise rockers Kowloon Walled City and Louisville darkwave group Fotocrime, led by former Coliseum front man Ryan Patterson (Evan’s older brother) and also including Thieneman. —PHILIP MONTORO
Music From Mars: A Celebration of Mars Williams’s 70th Birthday See also Sun 5/25. Mars Williams’s composition The Devil’s Whistle will be performed by an ensemble of Ben LaMar Gay, Jeff Albert, Ken Vandermark, Dave Rempis, Dan Oestreicher, Macie Stewart, Steve Marquette, Lia Kohl, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Anton Hatwich, Tim Daisy, and Michael Zerang. 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $31.09, livestream $10.36. 18+
You can write thumbnail descriptions of some very talented artists with just a noun and a couple adjectives, but for the creative endeavors of Mars Williams, you’d need pages and stages. Multiinstrumentalist, composer, improviser, ring leader, scholar—each of those words leads to a book of stories. Williams, who was born in Elmhurst in 1955 and died of cancer in Chicago in 2023, was an anti-
hierarchical artist who brought the same performing intensity and respect for music to an intimate pass-the-hat free-jazz gig as he did to an arena-rock concert with the Psychedelic Furs (with whom he played for decades). He was a consummate master on an armful of saxophones and clarinets, and he o en celebrated music as part of a multisensory extravaganza: The Soul Sonic Sirkus he staged for the Old Town School’s 2011 Chicago Folk & Roots Festival, for instance, featured acrobats and a juggler as well as a big band.
Williams was also an inveterate self-documenter, and a er he died, Experimental Sound Studio (ESS) took on the task of organizing his recordings and making them available to the public. These two days of events celebrate Williams during the month of his 70th birthday by presenting several aspects of his work and raising funds to support the archive.
On Saturday night at Constellation, trombonist Jeff Albert will lead a dozen musicians, all associates of Williams, in a rare performance of Williams’s multimedia piece The Devil’s Whistle Originally performed with several dancers and an even bigger ensemble in the elaborate outdoor sculpture garden of the Music Box Village in New Orleans, it will be paired here with a brief preview of a forthcoming documentary about Williams by filmmaker Kim Alpert, who participated in the premiere. Sunday afternoon at May Chapel in Rosehill Cemetery, experimental cellist and sound artist Lia Kohl will lead a trio through a piece she
continued from p. 19
devised to showcase Williams’s extensive collection of musical toys; afterward ESS will treat us to a sneak peek at the work going into cataloging and digitizing Williams’s musical materials for its archive, allowing us to view photos of his instruments and listen to his recordings.
And on Sunday evening at the Hungry Brain, reeds players Ken Vandermark and Dave Rempis, cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm, drummer Steve Hunt, bassist Kent Kessler, and guitarist-bassist Brian Sandstrom will reunite as the NRG Ensemble, which Williams took over from Hal Russell a er the bandleader’s death in 1992. Though NRG played music by several of its members, for this concert they plan to focus on Williams’s manic, hairpin-turn tunes. —BILL MEYER
Moontype Krill 2 and Fran open. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $20.39. 21+
In 2021, Chicago indie-rock group Moontype made a big impression on the city’s music community with the release of their debut full-length, Bodies of Water. The record fleshed out the sparse songs that bassist and vocalist Margaret McCarthy, using the Moontype name, had begun writing in 2017, while still a student at Oberlin Conservatory. A er graduating in 2018, she relocated to Chicago, where she put together a trio with two fellow Oberlin grads and fine-tuned the material into dreamy alt-pop that draws on skittering rhythms, crunchy riffs, serene folk, and playful indie rock. Moontype’s brand-new second album, I Let the Wind Push Down on Me (Orindal), fulfills the promise of Bodies of Water though its adventurous songs remain anchored in indie rock, they dare you to squeeze them into a box. Though only McCarthy and drummer Emerson Hunton remain from the lineup on Moontype’s debut—Andrew Clinkman and Joe Suihkonen have joined on guitar and vocals—McCarthy’s blunt but delicate singing is still front and center, acting as a
calming anchor and guide throughout the group’s most off-kilter experiments. “Let Me Cry” starts with sweet alt-pop verses, then marries its sugary vocal harmonies to mathy rhythms and a smidge of Thin Lizzy guitar acrobatics. “Long Country” sails on the placid waters of its vocal melody, while the rest of the track flip-flops between psychedelic swirls and chunky grunge riffing. The effervescent “Click Clack,” too brief at just over a minute, feels like floating through space on a rocket pingponging among asteroids. Moontype sound just as good when they’re being straightforward: “Walking in the Woods” is a charming, romantic folk-rock tale as unhurried as an a ernoon stroll with no destination. —JAMIE LUDWIG
Music From Mars: A Celebration of Mars Williams’s 70th Birthday
See Sat 5/24. Lia Kohl performs Mars Williams’ Toy Story, a composition inspired by Williams’s musical toy collection. 2 PM, May Chapel, Rosehill Cemetery, 5800 N. Ravenswood. F b
Music From Mars: A Celebration of Mars Williams’s 70th Birthday See Sat 5/24. NRG Ensemble (Ken Vandermark, Dave Rempis, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Steve Hunt, Kent Kessler, and Brian Sandstrom) perform the music of Mars Williams. 9 PM, Hungry Brain, 2319 W. Belmont, $25.91. 21+
MONDAY26
Science Man Man-eaters and Nightfreak open. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, 21+. F
In 2018, Buffalo punk musician John Toohill was on tour with his band Radiation Risks when he began writing songs in the back of the van without any particular project in mind. Eventually, the material spawned Science Man, a one-man punk outfit pow-
Find
ered by a drum machine and lots of adrenaline— and that’s when things started getting weird. “I’m an all or nothing kind of dude,” Toohill told Ottawa Showbox in 2019. “If I’m gonna do this, I’ve gotta go all cards on the table.” That meant playing riotous fusions of hardcore punk, garage, and noise rock at anything-goes live shows where “anything” has meant rubber safety gloves, gas masks, minor explosions (when approved by the venue), beakers full of mysterious concoctions, and for some reason piñatas. Science Man has become a full band, and it brings the goods so hard that this nonsense doesn’t feel gimmicky—it’s just icing on the cake.
Science Man’s brand-new full-length, Monarch Joy , feels like a bunch of Cold War–era B-movie monsters started a supergroup. Opening track “S.C.I.M.N” lulls you into a false sense of security with halcyon saxophone before forebodingly heavy guitar kicks in from below. From there, the album dives face-first into chaos with the hardcore attack of the irreligious “Control Collar,” the delightfully wacky “Funeral for an Arm,” and the
blistering “Lesser Species,” which could get a circle pit going at Indy 500 speeds. Despite Science Man’s affection for lo-fi aesthetics, this is punk at its most maximal—it’s fun to imagine how far Toohill will push it. He’s teamed up with Lindsay Tripp on a three-part full-album video for Monarch Joy , and part one follows an unnamed protagonist on surreal sci-fi journey through a landscape shaped by wild cut-up collages and stop-motion animation. Who knows where parts two and three will end up! Science Man’s Empty Bottle show also includes sets from local maniacs Man-eaters and Nightfreak, so be prepared to take Tuesday off to recover. —JAMIE LUDWIG
Justice Hall See Pick of the Week on page 18. Icken Grimms opens. 8 PM, Schubas, 3159 N. Southport, $18, $15 in advance. 18+ v
He watches porn when I’m not there, and it makes me upset.
By DAN SAVAGE
Q : I recently came home from a short meeting to find my husband in the bathroom with the door locked to keep the kids out—meaning that he was secretly jerking off to porn while I was away. This has happened a few times before while I was home or out briefly. I’ve tried to explain to him how hurtful it feels to me.
If he’s that interested in sex while I’m away briefly, I would rather he ask me to have sex, include me in watching porn, or even tell me his plan so it doesn’t feel like a secret.
I have nothing against him watching porn and we sometimes do so together. It’s the idea of him doing it at home secretly when I’m out briefly that upsets me. It makes me feel like he is waiting for an opportunity to be alone and jump on it as soon as he can.
I think he prefers this to sex with me. He insists that watching porn doesn’t mean he isn’t also attracted to me, but the secret nature of his actions makes me feel unattractive.
He says that the covertness is not part of the desire for him. Rather, jerking off is more akin to boredom or enjoyment, like deciding to eat a bowl of ice cream. He travels a good bit for work, and I’ve encouraged him to watch porn freely when he’s away. He insists that he’s satisfied with our sex life, including how frequently we have sex.
He says that his interest in porn is just something fun that he, like most men, likes to do, and that it’s an entirely different category than our sex life. But there’s
something about looking at women with perfect (fake?) bodies while I’m out that feeds into my insecurities as a middle-aged woman and makes me extremely angry.
Am I being unfair in asking him to stop jerking off to porn secretly when I could walk in on him easily? What else could we do to solve this problem? —PORN OVER REALITY NEEDLES OFFENDED SPOUSE
a : “Any time porn use is causing problems in a relationship, it is important to assess whether it’s actually the porn use that’s the problem or the masturbation,” said Dr. Eric Sprankle, a professor of clinical psychology at Minnesota State University and the author of DIY: The Wonderfully Weird History and Science of Masturbation
“How would PORNOS feel if her husband wasn’t watching porn and was just masturbating to a fantasy while in the bathroom? Would there still be concerns that he’s dissatisfied in the relationship? Would there still be feelings of insecurity and anger over the thought of him fantasizing about other women?”
Dr. Sprankle noticed that you used the words secret or secretly several times in your question.
“A secret would be you suspecting him masturbating in the locked bathroom, but when confronted, he lies and just says he has IBS,” said Dr. Sprankle. “But PORNOS is aware that her husband masturbates, and he’s admitting to it, so the issue isn’t secrecy. Often for couples, the
is unnecessary and unwise. Doing so creates conflict.
After answering your question, PORNOS, Dr. Sprankle wanted to put one to you.
true objection is not to porn in and of itself, but the fact a partner has a solo sex life, and it doesn’t make a difference what they’re using to reach orgasm alone, whether we’re talking about porn, their own fantasies, or Chris Isaak music videos.”
Focusing on the real issue—which, again, isn’t porn but your husband having orgasms on his own once in a while—could help you work through this conflict.
“PORNOS and her husband need to figure out what role masturbation has—and should have—in their marriage and ensure they’re on the same page about it,” said Dr. Sprankle. “Our solo sexuality exists whether or not we are in a relationship, and masturbation does not have to compete with partnered sex. Even though an orgasm is an orgasm, there are different motivations for masturbation compared to partnered sex, and each one can meet unique needs the other isn’t equipped to meet.”
While your husband needs to be considerate of your feelings, PORNOS, you need to accept that your husband has a solo sexuality and is entitled—as we all are—to a zone of erotic autonomy. Meaning, he’s allowed to have fantasies that don’t revolve around you, just as you’re allowed to have fantasies that don’t revolve around him. So long as his fantasies don’t consume all of his erotic energy (e.g., so long as he’s not neglecting your needs, and so long as he can indulge his fantasies without neglecting or endangering your kids), attempting to police your husband’s solo sexuality
“PORNOS said that he her husband—is satisfied with their sex life,” said Dr. Sprankle, “but is she satisfied? Is he meeting her sexual needs? Is she able to masturbate as often as she would like? Is she having sex as often as she would like? Have there been instances in which you tried to initiate sex, but he turned you down because he masturbated earlier that day? That would suggest his masturbation frequency is interfering with PORNOS’s sexual satisfaction, and that would definitely be a problem. If she communicated this to him, along with her feelings of insecurity and anger, and he continued to lock himself in the bathroom, essentially dismissing her needs and feelings, that would be an even bigger problem.”
But if you’re generally satisfied—if you’re satisfied enough (really, the best any of us can hope for!)—and your husband isn’t neglecting you or the kids and he’s making a good faith effort to masturbate when you’re less likely to “catch” him (not to keep secrets, but to be considerate)—you’re going to need to shrug it off when you realize the bathroom door is locked for that reason.
“They’re both still individuals in this partnership,” said Dr. Sprankle, “and individual needs require a certain amount of space and alone time. And that alone time may include occasionally locking yourself in the bathroom, and it shouldn’t matter whether the person in there is masturbating to porn videos on their phone or taking a dump.”
Follow Dr. Eric Sprankle on Bluesky, Threads, and Instagram @drsprankle. For more about his work, visit his website at drsprankle.com.
Q : I’m a cis female in my late 30s and my partner is a cis male in his 40s. We have been married for ten years, together for 15, and have school-age children.
I actually met my husband when I started dating his then-wife. This situation was not a trio, but I was around him a lot, so we became friends, and eventually the three of us talked about all moving in together. Ultimately, I got scared and ended the relationship with his wife. It was a confusing time in my life, and I made the decision that I did not want to be with a woman long-term. Things happened, he and his wife split, and he and I fell madly in love. In the beginning of our relationship, we had a LOT of conversations about commitment, about my sexuality and about my past (I had significantly more experience), and I explained to him that I could not be happy “going without” being with a woman ever again. He knew I was bisexual and that I needed openness.
For many years we were open in this way—mostly threesomes or foursomes together, but there were a couple times where I had sex with another woman without him. He also had sex with other women without me. Over time, I began wanting to explore sex with other men, but this has been a hard “no” on his end. He says that’s not what he agreed to, which is true.
We have had many discussions about this over the last five years, but I eventually gave up. It’s definitely caused some resentment on my end, and because of what I perceive to be an unfair dynamic, I closed our relationship completely a few years ago. It wasn’t out of spite. I just no longer felt good seeing him enjoy a freedom born out of MY sexuality and MY needs in the beginning. Our sex life has
gone downhill since. I don’t know how to move past this resentment. I feel misunderstood and I feel locked in a cage over this issue. I think we are at an impasse, and I don’t know how to get back to a happy, healthy place together. How do we fix this?
—BI LADY AND ANNOYINGLY HET SPOUSE
a : You have two shit options here, BLAAHS: you can live with a deeply frustrating status quo (no fucking other people and no desire to fuck each other) or you can issue an explosive ultimatum. And while it’s tempting to say, “What do you have to lose?” (since your sex life is a wreck and resentment is a cancer), it’s not just your marriage that’s at stake. You have kids If your kids are still young and/or you can’t afford to divorce, it may be in their best interest for mom and dad to suck up a few sexless (or nearly sexless) years before mom attempts to impose terms. (You did sign up to be parents, BLAAHS, and parenting sometimes means doing what’s best for the little shits.)
You hammered out an asymmetrical agreement at the start of your marriage: to accommodate your bisexuality. You were allowed to sleep with other women—and so was your husband. Your husband had the freedom to pursue anyone he might be interested in while you could only pursue half the people you might be interested in. Now, I think you deserve a lot of credit. I’ve gotten countless letters from married bi women over the years who felt entitled to a “get out of monogamy free” card that allowed them fuck other people . . . but who didn’t think their husbands should be allowed to fuck other people. v
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AbInitio Developer (Schaumburg, IL): Contribute to the company’s Ab Initio software processing platform. WFH hybrid; 3 days in-office, 2 days WFH. $127K-$137K/yr. Reqs. incl. BS & 3 yrs. exp. Mail resume w/ cover letter to: Central Garden & Pet, 1340 Treat Blvd, Ste 600, Walnut Creek CA 94597, Attn: HR.
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Construction Supervisor: Supervise, coord activities of constr workers. Inspect work progress, eqpt, constr sites to verify that specs are met. Read specs: blueprints, determine constr requirements, plan procedures. Assign work. Conceptual dvlpt of constr project, oversee org, sched, budgeting, impl. 1 yr exp in managerial position related to any construction trade. Bachelor’s in Civil Engineering. MK Construction & Builders, Inc, 2000 N Milwaukee Ave, Chicago IL 60647
Director, Innovation, AbbVie Inc, North Chicago, Illinois. Lead high profile initiatives in the hematologic oncology space that support the company’s strategic agenda and make a real difference for the patients, partnering with the AbbVie executive team. Develop and deliver executive updates for business reviews and new findings. Utilize deep science and clinical training to perform data-driven problem solving spanning the drug development lifecycle for hematologic oncology enterprise critical
assets, such as product development, trial design, clinical acceleration, and commercial presentation. Develop cross-functional understanding of highest-priority commercial questions, identify the most critical issues, collaborate cross-functionally with commercial teams and other functions to develop solutions, and provide strategic direction to ensure optimal outcomes. Translate strategic vision into tactical action, identify the highest impact ideas and plans, and focus efforts to work well across commercial priorities. Bring rigorous conceptual thinking to answer key commercial questions for AbbVie, leveraging internal and external intelligence and resources as required. Monitor, understand, and prioritize market trends of relevance across TAs, and help determine how AbbVie should prepare and respond. Drive executive-level discussions to influence complex business decisions and effectively collaborate crossfunctionally to deliver business results. Partner with VP and executive level stakeholders, acting as a thought-partner on key business decisions that impact the current and future state of AbbVie. Must possess a Master’s degree in Business Administration, Public Health, or a closely related field, & 3 years of experience in the job offered or in a consulting-related role in the pharmaceutical or healthcare industries. Of the work experience gained, position requires three years of experience in the following: (i) Strategic development in the healthcare or pharmaceutical industries; (ii) Clinical trial design and clinical data interpretation; (iii) R&D process in the healthcare or pharmaceutical industries; (iv) Leveraging statistical or data analysis to develop and create business insights; (v) Financial modeling and analysis; (vi) Go to market and commercialization; (vii) Translating strategic frameworks into actionable plans; (viii) Project management; and (ix) Driving executive-level discussions. Up to 25 % domestic travel required. Experience may be gained concurrently. Apply online at https:// careers.abbvie.com/en & reference REF39455B. Salary Range: $229,999 - $296,500 per year.
Global Veeva Vault PromoMats Technology Architect, AbbVie Inc., North Chicago, IL. Utilizing Veeva Vault PromoMats conceive, design, engineer,
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IT Technical Specialist (Marketing Data), AbbVie Inc., Mettawa, IL. Serve
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Medline Industries, LP in Northfield, IL is seek’g multiple openings for:
A.) End-User Computing Administrator/ Deployments to be responsible for endpoint Device Mgmt, SCCM sw packaging, & deployments. Salary: $85,363 / yr. Apply at: https:// tinyurl.com/3cuh9hap B.) Sr. Solutions Architect(s) to collaborate on enterprise platforms, application modernization, sys’s integration & Citizen IT enablement support’g the Sales & Marketing bus portfolio. Salary: $126,755/ yr. Apply At: https:// tinyurl.com/56x3vbav
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discipline or foreign equiv & 3 yrs of relevant exp in soft engg or finance role req’d. Alternatively, MS in Finance, Comp Sci, or other relevant quant or financial discipline or foreign equiv & 1 yr of relevant exp in software engg or finance role req’d. Add’l specific skills req’d. Base salary: $83,283-$110,000/year. For position details & to apply, visit: https://www. morningstar.com/careers; ref. job ID REQ-050006. Oceans Logistics Coordinator: Coord, monitor supply chain ops for food & beverages. Ensure premises, assets & comm ways are used effectively. Utilize logistics IT to optimize procedures. Recruit & coord logistics staff (truck drivers) acc to availabilities & requirements. Sup orders & arrange stocking of raw materials, eqpt. Comm w/suppliers, retailers, customers. Plan & track shipment of final products. Keep logs & records of warehouse stock, executed orders. Prep reports for upper mgnt. Work acc to law, regs & ISO. HS or foreign eqvlt. 2 yrs exp as logistic coord. $59,488 per yr. Color Brands LLC; 168 N Clinton Ave, Suite 200, Chicago IL 60661.
Senior Law Clerk, Chicago. Assist attys in ERISA claims practice. Maintain files; draft legal docs; research & analysis; correspond w/ clients. JD or LLM & coursework in law clinic req’d. Start at $71,323 w/ health/ dental/vision/life, 403(b), tuition remission, PTO benefits. Send resume, cover letter to Tracy Kish, Administrator, IIT, C-K Law Group, 565 W. Adams, Ste. 600, Chicago, IL 60661.
Senior Manager, Epidemiology Data Analytics, AbbVie Inc., North Chicago, IL: Develop data analysis plan & analyze real-world databases to prepare relevant tables & figures. Communicate results & findings to epidemiologists in Oncology. Contribute to design of observational studies including registries, provide critical review of observational study protocols, & participate in internal discussions. Evaluate new data sources & participate in studies for innovative use of real-world data. Review literature for analytic methodology & coding algorithms related to realworld data. Must have a PhD in Epidemiology, Pharmacy, Pharmacy Administration, Healthcare Services, Biostatistics or related field & at least 2 years of experience as a Data Analyst, or related role, in oncology: (i) Using SAS, SQL, R, or related statistical software or other data analysis tools for data analysis, modeling, &
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Staging & Cleaning Professional: Staging real estate properties to max house appeal for quick sale by cleaning after constr using vacuum cleaners, supplies, eqpt; laying out furniture, decorations to improve appearance. Cleaning duties, staging after constr in prep of sale of properties. Heavy cleaning. 2 yrs of staging or cleaning exp. MK Construction & Builders, Inc; 2000 N Milwaukee Ave, Chicago IL 60647
Cisco Systems, Inc. is accepting resumes for multiple positions in Chicago, IL: Customer Success Manager (Ref#: CHI169B): Build, implement and analyze technical test plans to obtain data to validate critical networks. Telecommuting permitted. Salary
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TheMathCompany, IncChicago, IL - Engagement Manager - Customer Success - Dsgn strat & roadmap for bldg analytics capabilities for clients. 20% trvl req. Benefits: Mdl, Dental, & Vision Insurance; Commuter Benefits; Paid Paternity & Maternity Leave; 401(k). Salary: $196,123/Year. Telecomm permitted. To apply: Send resumes
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TheMathCompany, Inc.Chicago, IL - Engagement Manager - Customer Success - Help clients solve cmplx challenges & enable their sustained analytics transformation. 10% domestic trvl req. Telecomm permitted. Benefits: Mdl, Dental, & Vision Insurance, Commuter Benefits, Paid Paternity & Maternity Leave, 401(k). $170,000 / yr. To apply: yuvaraj.r@mathco. com . Req# 7760012
VDC Director (Master’s w/ 6 yrs exp or Bach w/ 8 yrs exp; Major: Civil Engg or equiv) - Chicago, IL. Job entails working w/ & reqs exp incl: Revit, Revizto, Bluebeam, Navisworks, AutoCAD, & Autodesk Construction Cloud; Building architectural, structural, mechanical, electrical, plumbing, & fire protection systems; commercial, residential, hospitality, & healthcare construction sectors; Project accounting & forecasting. Various worksites: relocation or occasional travel to project-based unanticipated worksites within the USA possible. $125,000/year. Benefits: www.viatechnik.com/ who-we-are/careers - Send resumes to VIATechnik LLC, Attn: HR, 200 E Randolph, Ste 5400, Chicago, IL 60601
Manager, Statistical Programming (Oncology), AbbVie US LLC, North Chicago, IL. Guiding a team of statistical programmers, research & develop new pharma products. Leads programming for a compound/indication or therapeutic area in early and/or late stage development, interface with Statistics, Data Sciences, Medical Writing, Regulatory Publishing & Clinical Operations. Develop & oversee development of Statistical Analysis System (SAS) programs for creation of Analysis Data Model (ADaM) data sets following Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium (CDISC) standards. Must have a BS in Statistics, Computer Science or a related field, & 5 years of statistical programming experience. Of the experience required, must have: (i) 5 years utilizing SAS programming concepts & techniques related to drug development & regulatory filings; (ii) 5 years applying CDISC standards, including ADaM & Study Data Tabulation Model (SDTM); (iii) 5 years developing SAS programs for the creation of ADaM data sets following CDISC standards, & for the creation of Tables, Listing, & Figures; (iv) 3 years working in a matrixed organization
working across business stakeholders & line functions to gather, analyze synthesize requirements & translate; (v) 2 years developing standard SAS macros; & (vi) 1 year providing oversight & mentoring of assigned Statistical Programmers & Statistical Analysts. Alternatively, will accept a Master’s degree in Statistics, Computer Science or a related field, & 2 years of statistical programming experience. Of experience required, must have: 2 years of experience with (i) through (iii); 1 year of experience with (iv) & (v); & 6 months of experience with (vi). Experience may be gained concurrently. Any suitable combination of education & work experience will be acceptable. 100% telecommuting allowed. Apply online at https:// careers.abbvie.com/en & reference REF39459F. Salary Range: $160,000 - $197,000 per year.
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