Chicago Reader print issue of May 29, 2025 (Vol. 54, No. 34)

“Opposing a genocide, I didn’t question that.”

SAIC banned lecturer Kelly Xi from campus. Was it because of her political activity?

By Kerry Cardoza, p.

8

THIS WEEK

CITY LIFE

04 Feature Trump’s attacks on DEI could threaten Chicago Women in Trades.

06 Street View Artists on a coffee run serve bold looks.

FOOD & DRINK

07 Reader Bites | Cardoza Bombón at Cadinho Bakery & Cafe

ARTS & CULTURE

08 Cover Story | Cardoza SAIC joins a wave of colleges sanctioning students and faculty for their speech.

NEWS & POLITICS

13 Make It Make Sense | Mulcahy, McFadden DOJ probes City Hall, free public showers, and a discussion on copaganda

THEATER

14 Feature The Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival’s Puppet Lab offers diversity in style and stories.

FILM

16 Feature Chicago indie-rock band the Trenchies combine music, comedy, and puppetry in their ongoing webseries.

17 Moviegoer Arts and cra s

17 Movies of Note Mountainhead has nothing cutting-edge to say about billionaires, and Tornado is littered with tangents and loose ends.

MUSIC

18 Secret History of Chicago Music The Radiants helped drive the shi from doo-wop to soul.

20 Shows of Note Previews of concerts including Khanate, Neu Blume, Preoccupations, and Your Old Droog

BACK

22 Savage Love You didn’t disturb your partner’s biome when you started doing anal.

CLASSIFIEDS

PUBLISHER AMBER NETTLES

CHIEF OF STAFF ELLEN KAULIG

EDITOR IN CHIEF SALEM COLLO-JULIN

ASSISTANT MANAGING EDITOR

SAVANNAH RAY HUGUELEY

PRODUCTION MANAGER AND STAFF

PHOTOGRAPHER KIRK WILLIAMSON

SENIOR GRAPHIC DESIGNER AMBER HUFF

GRAPHIC DESIGNER AND PHOTO RESEARCHER SHIRA

FRIEDMAN-PARKS

THEATER AND DANCE EDITOR KERRY REID

MUSIC EDITOR PHILIP MONTORO

CULTURE EDITOR: FILM, MEDIA, FOOD AND DRINK TARYN MCFADDEN

CULTURE EDITOR: ART, ARCHITECTURE, BOOKS KERRY CARDOZA

NEWS EDITOR SHAWN MULCAHY

PROJECTS EDITOR JAMIE LUDWIG

DIGITAL EDITOR TYRA NICOLE TRICHE

SENIOR WRITERS LEOR GALIL, DEANNA ISAACS, BEN JORAVSKY, MIKE SULA

FEATURES WRITER KATIE PROUT

SOCIAL JUSTICE REPORTER DEVYN-MARSHALL BROWN (DMB)

STAFF WRITER MICCO CAPORALE

MULTIMEDIA CONTENT PRODUCER SHAWNEE DAY

SOCIAL MEDIA ENGAGEMENT

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VICE PRESIDENT OF PEOPLE AND CULTURE ALIA GRAHAM

DEVELOPMENT MANAGER JOEY MANDEVILLE

DATA ASSOCIATE TATIANA PEREZ

MARKETING ASSOCIATE MAJA STACHNIK

MARKETING ASSOCIATE MICHAEL THOMPSON

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Illustration and design by Amber Huff Le : the Trenchies ANDREW PRIDMORE Right: Sam Lewis, Black Episcopalian

EDITOR’S NOTE

One of the selling points of Chicago, in my opinion, is the variety of higher education institutions that are headquartered here. Many of them offer doctoral degrees (University of Illinois Chicago, Loyola, Chicago State, Illinois Institute of Technology, University of Chicago, just to name a few). This, of course, doesn’t guarantee that our general populace is any smarter or more cultured than average, but it’s safe to say that one has a better chance of running into a PhD here than in other parts of the country. And there are benefits to having colleges around, even if you’re not an enrolled student, staffer, or faculty member. You can attend free public programs, like lecture series and talks, and have access to scholars. Many of these institutions contribute to our city’s cultural offerings by holding art exhibitions or music recitals. Colleges are the place where people learn about the big ideas and come up with ideas for changing the world. . . . And the freedom to deliver these big thoughts and new bits

Reader Letters m

Re: “Bridgeview’s Al Manakeesh bakes Arabic flatbread and ‘bagels’ 1,001 ways,” written by Mike Sula and published in our May 22 issue (volume 54, number 33)

Al Manakeesh is one of my favorite places in “Little Palestine” (Bridgeview). Such a unique idea and I’m glad they rolled the dice and went along with it. —Anas Masoud, via Instagram

Re: “Illinois police, retailers don’t want you to mask up,” written by Micco Caporale for the Surveillance Aesthetics column and published in our May 22 issue

Call your alderpeople and push back, y’all. Leave a public comment when possible. I’m not gonna get sick because a retailer is worried about stealing. —Whitney Wasson, via Instagram

of information is what our world needs. Right?

Not everyone agrees with this theory, as we’re seeing especially starkly at places of higher learning throughout the country. Colleges and universities are places where people can (and should) learn about our fundamental right to assemble and express our views through protest. But many schools are being desecrated by federal funding cuts and political interference. Even Harvard hasn’t escaped the madness.

Universities are prime sites of dissent, critique, and critical thinking, and the power of the people having original thought flies in the face of fascism. Succumbing to the Trump administration’s strategy of cutting out collective understanding of the world would be tantamount to setting our universities on fire and walking away. We must protect free speech and expression, whether on campus or off.  v

—Salem

Collo-Julin, editor in chief m scollojulin@chicagoreader.com

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The Chicago Reader accepts comments and letters to the editor of less than 400 words for publication consideration.

m letters@chicagoreader.com

By C.J. Funches

I come against the notion of being shallow. Being so thin and so scurried that I fall deeper into the Earth whenever big footsteps enter into my garden.

I am the garden and I am big footsteps.

I am not shaken by the unknown instead, I count it all joy.

I am, in fact, good soil. Laid on a firm foundation. Hearing, seeing, and understanding. With every seed sown into me I produce crops yielding a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown.

I am the same as a tree that has been planted by streams of water.

I yield my fruit in the appropriate season with leaves that do not wither I am prospering in whatever I do.

Here’s my daily prayer:

Lord, whatever fear, whatever uncertainty, whatever evil loose me from it’s fetters.

Lord, whatever lack, replace with abundance.

Lord, whatever hurt, replace with healing.

I want the most of what You are.

I want the most of what You have for me.

I want to be as devoted to you & your will as Jesus was to simply complete it, for no other reason aside from it being Your will.

Even when struggles meet me on my journey, in You, may I defy all the odds.

May I be as open to surrendering to You as I am receiving from You.

May I set myself aside more than I set You aside.

May I set You aside no longer. You are my portion.

May I be a reflection of Your glory.

Christian JaLon is a South side Chicago Native. She is a singer/songwriter, poet, and published author (“Amen” by C.J. Funches). JaLon began posting covers on YouTube at the age of 13, and currently has several singles, EPs, and albums under her belt.

Poem curated by The Third. 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

Opening Hours

Wednesday - Saturday: 11 AM - 5 PM

Power Through: A Poetry Reading

Featuring Midwest-based authors Oliver Baez Bendorf, Imani Elizabeth Jackson, Nathanael Jones, Vi Khi Nao, and Ruben Quesada.

June 5, 2025 at 6:00 PM

Learn more at PoetryFoundation.org

weekly series curated by the Chicago Reader and sponsored by the Poetry Foundation.

A Psalm and a Matthew

More women are landing jobs in the trades but Trump’s war on DEI could change that

Local advocates say that efforts designed to improve access and diversity in labor are under threat.

By ARIEL GILREATH, THE HECHINGER REPORT

This story was produced by the Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news outlet focused on education.

Two years into Stephanie Stachura’s apprenticeship as an electrician in Chicago, she saw something she had never seen before: another woman working on the jobsite.

“I had a fangirl moment because I was just in awe of her,” Stachura said. “She was older and had been in it since she was younger.”

Stachura’s surprise stemmed from the fact that women make up a tiny proportion of workers in skilled construction trades in the United States. Just 2.7 percent of electricians in the country are women.

Five years later, she’s still friends with the journeywoman she saw that day. Meeting her helped Stachura overcome the nervousness she felt as a newbie and a woman in a nearly all-male profession. They still talk with each other about their experiences on jobsites, she said.

“A tradeswoman who has done her time?” Stachura said. “That is a badass . . . and I just want to be around her.”

Despite making up 47 percent of the U.S. workforce, women constitute less than 5 percent of workers in skilled construction trades—a cluster of careers that typically o er high pay without requiring a college degree. The few women who land apprenticeships in a skilled trade often face bullying, harassment, and low-level work opportunities. In recent years, nonprofit groups o ering “preapprenticeships” and other programs designed to improve the representation of women in the trades have made some progress in changing the culture of construction worksites and improving access for women, nearly doubling the share of women in skilled trades from less than 3 percent to about 5 percent in the past decade. Now, advocates say those e orts are under threat from the Trump administration’s attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion.

A day after his inauguration in January,

President Donald Trump revoked several decades-old executive orders designed to diversify the workforce, in an attempt to root out what he called “immoral race- and sexbased preferences under the guise of so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Among them was Executive Order 11246. Issued in 1965 by President Lyndon B. Johnson, the order required federal contractors to provide equal employment opportunity without discriminating by race.

In 1978, the O ce of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) issued a goal that took the order a step further: Contractors had to make a good faith e ort to hire women to fill at least 6.9 percent of their positions in construction. That figure, which hasn’t been updated in 45 years, was based on the share of women in the workforce in the 1970s.

While that goal has never been met industrywide, the executive order paved the way for the creation of preapprenticeship programs— short-term training that introduces women to careers in the trades. With that order revoked, construction employers who receive federal dollars are now freed from having to show they’re making an e ort to hire women or underrepresented groups.

Along with arguing that equity initiatives are illegal, Trump also signed two anti-DEI executive orders directing federal agencies to cancel funding for any programs that include diversity, equity, or inclusion in their operations. In May, the Trump administration canceled a major grant for groups helping women get jobs in trades, along with several other grants that supported programs seeking to prevent sexual harassment.

And the two agencies that historically investigated harassment or discrimination claims on jobsites—the OFCCP and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)—have published statements about their new focus on investigating “DEI practices.” The EEOC declined a request to comment, and the OFCCP did not respond.

Confusion about what exactly the Trump administration means by the phrase “illegal DEI” in those orders has left nonprofit leaders puzzled.

“It is really ill-defined in these executive orders what exactly ‘illegal DEI’ is, and so it leaves everyone in limbo a little bit about what they can and can’t do,” said Jayne Vellinga, executive director of nonprofit Chicago Women in Trades. If a program “is designed around achieving equity for a group of people, does that mean that it’s across-the-board illegal?” she asked.

In February, Chicago Women in Trades sued, saying the administration’s actions threaten the nonprofit’s existence and its right to free speech. Federal money makes up about 40 percent of the group’s budget; losing it would drastically reduce its operations.

Most of the federal funding going to groups like Chicago Women in Trades comes from the Apprenticeship Building America grant program, which was created by the Biden administration and included $50 million in grants to “support equity partnerships and pre-apprenticeship activities” to boost enrollment of underrepresented groups in registered apprenticeships. Another federal funding source is the WANTO (Women in Apprenticeship and Nontraditional Occupations) program, which has been around since 1992 and last year gave out $6 million to nine groups that work to increase opportunities for women.

Trump cut WANTO, and about two dozen other grants that boosted women’s representation in careers and addressed sexual harassment at worksites, from his 2026 budget released in May, Mother Jones first reported.

Chicago Women in Trades was excluded from the cuts because of the group’s lawsuit.

In April, a federal judge ordered a preliminary injunction preventing the Trump administration from pausing funding for the organization based on the anti-DEI executive orders while the group’s lawsuit moves through the courts. Other grantees decried the cuts. Maisie

Howard, director of development and communications at Vermont Works for Women, said her group was notified in a May 6 letter of the immediate cancellation of a two-year, $400,000 WANTO grant it received last year. The letter said the grant does not align with the Department of Labor’s priorities “with regard to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility.”

Vermont Works for Women was planning to use a portion of the federal funds to start a new program training women for advanced manufacturing fields, such as working in semiconductor plants.

“It was a big deal for Vermont to be able to get this funding in the first place,” Howard said. “It was a big blow.”

Nonprofits are worried that the hostility at the federal level toward gender- and racebased programs will put local money at risk as well. Since the administration is threatening to cancel funding for groups that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion, local and state entities that rely on federal dollars could be tempted to pull back donations to preapprenticeship groups to protect themselves, trade groups say.

Fear of retribution has led some nonprofits to change the language on their websites and in their materials to remove words the administration might target, according to a review of nonprofit organization websites. Before the injunction, some groups had been threatening to cancel their contracts with Chicago Women in Trades, adding to the organization’s “pressure to self-censor its speech,” the court order said.

The Painters District Council No. 30, a labor organization representing painters, finishers, and glaziers in north and central Illinois, as well as southern Wisconsin, is about 5 percent female, said Marisa Richards, the council’s director of outreach and engagement. The group is trying to change that by focusing on making jobsites safer for women through harassment training. That work isn’t changing, but they’re reconsidering using the words “diversity, equity, and inclusion” when they talk about their e orts.

“We’re trying to make sure that we avoid those phrases because they can be triggering or isolating, and then it just changes the conversation,” Richards said. “We’re still highlighting the diversity, without specifically calling it diversity.”

The mission statement of Utah Women in Trades—to increase the “number of women pursuing and succeeding in non-traditional building and construction trades”—has not changed, but welding instructor and board vice president Nicci Navarro said she feels more cautious about how she presents her classes with sexual harassment and discrimination training. The Civil Rights Act is still law—it is illegal for employers to discriminate based on race or sex, even if the executive order enforcing it in the construction industry is gone. She’s careful to cite that law when she presents the HR training.

“I make sure to explain that to my students,” Navarro said. “We have to talk about diversity, we have to talk about sexual harassment.”

Despite having “women” in its name, Utah Women in Trades has had recent graduating classes that are about one-quarter men, Navarro said. Still, the group is concerned that having “women” in its title could mean it runs afoul of the Trump administration’s anti-DEI crusade.

There’s another long-term worry: The culture these groups have worked so hard to change might shift. When women graduate from the preapprenticeship programs and enter the workforce, will their jobsites be safe places to work?

Even as more women enter construction jobs, bullying, sexual harassment, and discrimination remain rampant in the industry. In 2021, more than one in four women in these trades reported “always” or “frequently” being harassed on the job, according to a survey of more than 2,600 people by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR). A 2023 report by the EEOC said some of the “most egregious instances of harassment and discrimination” the agency has ever investigated were in the construction industry. Three days into Trump’s second term, that report was removed from the EEOC website.

Women also report fewer opportunities to learn high-quality skills during their apprenticeships. They may be assigned to count screws or complete tasks that are simple and repetitive compared to duties given to their male counterparts, said IWPR senior research fellow Ariane Hegewisch. This is something that could hinder their future job prospects.

The preapprenticeship programs don’t guarantee a job, but they help women learn what’s necessary to apply for an apprenticeship. Sometimes, the programs help cover initial expenses for tool kits or childcare. In the end, it’s up to each student to carve a path into the trades.

“It has not been my experience, in the many years that I have worked here, that unqualified women have gotten jobs over qualified men,” Vellinga said. “Most tradeswomen would tell you that they have to be more, not less, qualified than men to work even half as much.”

In December, the Illinois chapter of the AFLCIO passed a resolution to increase the ratio of women in construction trades from about 5 percent to 20 percent by 2029. Part of that goal includes an annual meeting to assess best practices and whether member unions are making progress. Trump’s executive orders haven’t changed that goal, chapter president Tim Drea said.

“We’ll roll with the punches coming out of Washington. We’re just going to keep moving forward,” Drea said.

Because women typically have less exposure to shop classes and fewer opportunities to learn how to use tools at a young age compared to men, women who go through the program often do so later in life as a career change.

Some women, like Stachura, said they simply hadn’t known it was an option for them.

“Nobody in my family was ever like, ‘Oh, you should go into a trade.’ That was never a conversation that happened,” Stachura said.

Stachura, an electrician in the Chicago area for seven years, learned about Chicago Women in Trades when she was 33 and a single mom to three children. She was in the process of going back to college for nursing when she saw a social media post from a friend describing how she was making decent money after finishing the preapprenticeship program.

Being able to earn enough money to support her children without taking on student loan debt appealed to Stachura, as did the idea of working with her hands. She dropped out of nursing school and enrolled in Chicago Women in Trades. Along with studying for an apprenticeship test, she started going to the gym to make sure she could lift heavy objects. At the end of the program, Stachura said, she scored in the top 5 percent of applicants seeking an electrical apprenticeship in the Chicago area that cycle.

By the time she completed her apprenticeship in 2023 and became a journeywoman electrician, Stachura was making a six-figure salary—at least three times more than she had ever earned before.

“I went from struggling to pay bills and worrying about where I was going to get the money from for groceries to being able to volunteer on the weekend because I have the capacity to do for others,” Stachura said.

The preapprenticeship program opened the door to that opportunity, she said. The classes she attended not only taught her how to use di erent tools and prepare for the apprenticeship test, they also gave her a chance to hear from women who had years of experience working in various trades. It’s what helped her realize she wanted to be an electrician.

“It literally changed the trajectory of my life and it changed the trajectory of my children’s lives,” she said.

Now, Stachura is a superintendent at the construction company where she works, as well as vice president of her local’s chapter of the Sisters of International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. When she comes across other women on the jobsite, she wants them to feel inspired like she once was. v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

CITY LIFE

STREET VIEW

Style to go

On a casual coffee run, two artists serve bold yet smooth looks.

By ISA GIALLORENZO

Great style is often about finding balance in contradiction. People can play with extremes such as formal and casual, quiet and loud, feminine and masculine, or demure and daring, and a cohesive look emerges from the mix. On the way to a co ee shop early in the morning, Tromblau, 27, and Frances, 32, embodied that kind of e ortless tension—the sort where every clash somehow clicks.

“I love how bold Frances is, how they’re able to traverse extremities and use their body as part of the fashion. Frances is a very talented makeup artist so they’re able to metamorph,” said Tromblau, a trombonist, composer, DJ, and educator.

“Tromblau inspires me to be loud and take risks. I’m inspired by their massive collection of clothes and how they remix the context of timeless pieces. I love seeing how people respond to Tromblau’s style; it’s a pillar of their identity,” said Frances, who’s also a performing artist, musician, and dancer.

Influenced by their parents, Jewish culture, and “having fun,” Tromblau wore a beige

Chanel scarf on their head, paired with yellow trouser shorts, a T-shirt, and an olive duster coat with rounded shoulders. “When I cover my hair, I’m playing on a type of modesty,” they said, describing their style as “preppy with a twist.”

A self-proclaimed “shape-shifter,” Frances was sporting Dickies utility pants they bought at Santee Alley in LA—one of their favorite

places to shop. “I always reimagine myself when I travel, so I love buying clothes away from home,” they said.

Up top, a green cuto shirt added a slightly polished yet distressed vibe. “This shirt makes me want to go outside and play.” Frances draws inspiration from “pop stars, drag queens, and T-boys,” who, like them, bend form and embrace transformation.

Together, Tromblau and Frances treat getting dressed like a living art practice—deeply personal and rooted in joy. “Express yourself, feel free, have a good time,” said Tromblau, summing up their philosophy with characteristic ease. Frances agreed, adding, “Spend time in places where people are dressed eccentrically—and [emulate] that, regardless of the context.” For both of them, style is about showing up fully and perhaps inspiring others to do the same. v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

Tromblau (le ) and Frances think style should be deeply personal and rooted in joy.

ISA GIALLORENZO

FOOD & DRINK

McKinley Park’s Cadinho Bakery & Cafe is inspired by the culinary delights of Portugal. But the idea for its mouthwatering bombón espresso drink— technically of Spanish origin—actually came from a visit that proprietor Alejandra Rivera made to her hometown of Tegucigalpa, Honduras. The shotsize beverage is made by carefully layering milk foam, espresso, and condensed milk. (Nondairy milk options are available.)

From where I hail in Massachusetts, Portuguese bakeries are commonplace; in Chicago, the food of my hometown can be nearly impossible to find. Stumbling upon Cadinho, which opened its brick-andmortar in 2024, was a godsend. I’ll find any excuse I can to journey south and pick up one of Rivera’s flawless pastéis de nata—and now I’m dreaming about her bombóns too. —KERRY CARDOZA CADINHO BAKERY & CAFE 3483 S. Archer, $5, 773-801-0508, cadinhobakery.com v

Reader Bites celebrates dishes, drinks, and atmospheres from the Chicagoland food scene. Have you had a recent food or drink experience that you can’t stop thinking about? Share it with us at fooddrink@ chicagoreader.com.

Cadinho’s bombón is the perfect corrective to the achingly sweet, supersize drinks that have become ubiquitous at certain coffee chains that shall remain nameless. The drink’s layers are presented in such a way that each flavor hits your palate one at a time. It starts with warm milk, followed by a strong, slightly sweet blend of Latin American espresso by Metric called En Masse. There’s just a dollop of condensed milk at the end, which adds the ideal minor note of sweetness.

Bombón at Cadinho Bakery & Cafe

ARTS & CULTURE

HIGHER ED

Is SAIC trying to stifle free speech?

The school seems to be cracking down on political activity, including banning SAIC lecturer and union organizer Kelly Xi from campus.

By KERRY CARDOZA

Kelly Xi became an artist by chance. As an undergraduate, her focus was initially on molecular biology. But a scheduling conflict landed her in a Photoshop class instead of the molecular genetics class she’d intended to take, and her life course was forever changed. “From that first interface I was like, ‘Oh I could do this,’” Xi said. “I was so opened up to the possibilities of being expressive and

bold and taking creative risks but also, like, finding your voice.”

Through that class she met an alum of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where Xi later attended grad school, earning a degree in art and technology studies in 2023. She then got hired as a nontenure-track (NTT) faculty member at the school, teaching a range of courses in the art and technology and contemporary practices departments, as well as in the school’s low-residency MFA program. Xi was the sort of engaged faculty member you always hope to have as a teacher—one who works with student groups, attends oncampus events, and does studio visits.

But Xi’s work came to an abrupt halt in December when SAIC provost Martin Berger sent her an email notifying her that the institution was putting her on paid administrative leave

and temporarily banning her from campus for “misuse of SAIC resources,” according to emails that Xi shared with the Reader. Yet the reasons alleged seem to fall short of the sort of egregious acts that such severe sanctions would warrant, according to the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), which sets the standards for academic freedom and due process. The administration has accused her of sharing student email addresses with other students, printing for personal use, attempting to disrupt a career fair, and distributing external materials without authorization—ostensibly related to Xi’s work as a member of Art Institute of Chicago Workers United (AICWU), the union that represents the school’s faculty.

(In a statement, an SAIC spokesperson said it is their practice not to comment on person-

nel matters.)

Instead, the timeline of the school’s surveillance of and investigation into Xi’s activities, which date back to the student-led proPalestinian encampment staged at the Art Institute of Chicago last May, suggest the professor may have been targeted for political reasons. Across the country, waves of students and faculty at higher ed institutions are being disciplined for their speech—either at the hands of the nativist Trump administration or directly from their school leadership, seemingly emboldened by the rightward political tide or trying to get ahead of censure by the federal government. At SAIC, Xi’s dismissal seems to be part of an institutional move toward controlling communications and quelling political activity, moves that have included investigating students and limiting their abili-

SAIC joins a wave of colleges that seem to be disciplining students and faculty for their speech. SHIRA FRIEDMAN-PARKS

ty to protest or share resources.

“Clearly these tactics are being used to intimidate really engaged people in our school,” one tenured professor, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation, told the Reader. “I feel like they’re intentionally targeting specific students and specific faculty, maybe the most vulnerable ones, as examples.”

On May 4, 2024, a group of a few dozen students and organizers took over the manicured North Garden at the Art Institute of Chicago to resist the school’s complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. (At the time, Israel had killed over 36,000 Palestinians following the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack; the death toll has since risen to more than 53,000 Palestinians.) Protesters set up tents and a sign reading “Hind’s Garden,” in honor of six-year-old Palestinian girl Hind Rajab who was killed by Israeli armed forces in early 2024. According to the People’s Art Institute and Students for the Liberation of Palestine— the coalitions behind the encampment— organizers were calling on the school and the museum to disclose all funding and investments; provide amnesty for pro-Palestinian faculty, students, and sta ; and divest from any entities supporting Palestinian occupation, including cutting ties with the Crown family. Ranked by Forbes as the 30th richest family in the U.S., the Crowns are partial owners of the weapons contractor General Dynamics and are deeply embedded in the Art Institute. They’re significant donors—including funding a $2 million endowed professorship in the school’s painting and drawing department. Local artist Paula Crown received her MFA from SAIC in 2012; A. Steven Crown sits on the boards of both SAIC and the Art Institute. The encampment did not last long. The museum alerted the Chicago Police Department to the protest—which grew to encompass a few hundred people over the course of the day—within its first hour. According to the People’s Art Institute Instagram, while organizers were involved in a discussion with Berger over potentially moving the location of the encampment, the institution abruptly changed course and the museum asked CPD “to remove those illegally occupying the property.” A previous statement from the museum to the Reader states, in part: “After approximately five hours, an agreement could not be reached. The museum requested that the Chicago Police Department end the protest in the safest way possible, and arrests

were made after protesters were given many opportunities to leave.” Demonstrators had occupied the garden and surrounding areas for just a handful of hours before police began forcefully clearing it, arresting nearly 70 people, most of them students. Similar encampments at other schools in the Chicago area had more longevity: One at Northwestern lasted five days, University of Chicago’s lasted eight,

country, which adopt them of their own volition. While the AAUP has no power to sanction schools who fail to follow these policies, the organization can launch investigations and can place o ending institutions on its o cial censure list.

The AAUP academic freedom and tenure committee wrote that, in the fall of 2024, Xi was teaching a course that incorporated “po-

“It appears as if SAIC is punishing Kelly Xi for her extramural speech and action. . . . Based on our current understanding of what has transpired, SAIC looks to be in violation of both AAUP Recommended Institutional Regulations concerning academic freedom and due process and provisions of its own handbook.”

and another at DePaul stood for 17 days.

Xi was part of a group of faculty supporting the student protesters in the lead-up to the demonstration and during the negotiations with the school during the encampment, so her political activities were visible to SAIC’s administration by at least the start of May. What Xi didn’t know was that, even before the encampment, the school had already begun surveilling what she was printing on campus.

Throughout the spring, summer, and fall, Xi continued to publicly speak out and organize with AICWU’s contract committee—legally protected union activities. She also continued working with student groups—both SAIC-sanctioned and unofficial ones—which aligned with both her art practice and her courses. In February 2025, the Illinois conference of the AAUP, a branch of the national organization, filed a letter urging SAIC president Jiseon Lee Isbara and the rest of the leadership to reinstate Xi. The AAUP’s guidelines on academic freedom and due process are enshrined in most reputable school policies across the

ARTS & CULTURE

It would be irresponsible for an artist scholar specializing in social justice and activism not to support students raising concerns about the situation in Gaza, about a faculty contract, and other matters of the day.” Xi’s printed materials for class were often political in nature; she also concedes that she sometimes printed items at the request of student groups, a practice that other faculty members the Reader spoke with described as routine.

Xi stopped printing completely in late October, after being told by a colleague that the administration was tracking large print jobs.

In the summer and fall, Xi was involved in Curators Under Censorship, the collective who organized an exhibition at the school’s student-run SITE gallery called “School as a Function of Empire.” The group began working on the show over the summer of 2024. Many of the organizers had been arrested during the May encampment and the show was in part a response to the police violence they experienced. One artist included the pants they had been wearing that day when they were dragged across the grass by police. Other works focused on the genocide in Gaza or the school’s ties to Israel, particularly its relationship to the Crown family. From the start, organizers told me, the exhibition proposal received an inordinate amount of scrutiny from the school. “The students overlooking the curatorial SITE team were very receptive and were very supportive of us immediately,” Joey Maben, one of the show’s undergraduate organizers, told me. “But then the Art School Considerations [ASC] board, which is made up of administration, had a lot of questions for us, if I can put it that way.”

litical activism as an element of the anti-racist curriculum she was hired to teach.” Thus, they continue, “It is hardly surprising that a faculty member whose work focuses on social justice and activism would engage regularly with student groups that focus on these very issues.

Another exhibition organizer, grad student Mira SimontonChao, said typically only the SITE team reviews proposals, whereas here every detail had to be submitted and approved by ASC. “With us, they were like, ‘You need to submit every single bit of information that you want to have present in the room, including any written material, for approval before we allow you to even go forward with planning.’ . . . We had a reading nook as well. They made us sub-

Lecturer Kelly Xi was surveilled by SAIC for months. AMBER HUFF

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continued from p. 9

mit every single title that we wanted to have.”

The most pushback from ASC was in relation to the works submitted and who could involve themselves in the show, details that attorney Rima Kapitan, who worked with the curatorial team, confirmed to Sixty Inches From Center. Curators Under Censorship is an anonymous collective—save for a few representatives who met with ASC—that includes students, faculty, and alumni. According to organizers, ASC initially tried to say that the involvement of those who weren’t current students wasn’t allowed, although this stipulation hadn’t applied to previous SITE shows. ASC also had issues with the collective operating anonymously; they insisted on reviewing the names of every artist and curatorial member. So, although Xi’s pieces weren’t labeled as such in the show, ASC, and by extension school administration, were aware of her involvement.

Xi said this resistance from the administration made her suspect that she might be falling under the school’s scrutiny. Her desire to be a part of the show anonymously was the first time she’d felt the need to self-censor. “I had a suspicion that they weren’t going to be OK with me, a faculty member and employee, being involved in the show and showing artwork in the show . . . because it was directly about General Dynamics and the Crowns and problematizing our educational model at SAIC where we’re just not allowed to talk about these things,” she said. “I had a suspicion that was going to be an issue, especially because the dean of faculty is on the Art School Considerations board and John Pack [the head of campus security],” she said.

So began a monthslong back-and-forth between the collective and ASC, with the collective eventually enlisting Kapitan to assist them in navigating what they saw as undue censorship. According to SAIC’s Student Handbook, ASC “is designed to help students realize projects that may present health, safety, legal, or other challenges to the artist and/or members of the SAIC community.” Students and alumni I spoke with described ASC as usually getting involved in exhibitions or projects that pose a potential health or safety threat: working with weapons, an open flame, or biomatter. The handbook outlines these in a checklist, as well as the more ambiguous “potentially-sensitive content,” defined as “work which may reasonably be foreseen to result in a strong level of emotional distress or perception of threat in the viewing audience generally or in individual member(s) of an

audience.”

Eventually, the ASC board rejected the curators’ proposal to have a community wall where the public could leave thoughts—a common strategy for engaging an exhibition’s visitors.

“We didn’t want it to be like a traditional gallery where it’s like you’re separated from art and the artist as a viewer. We wanted to emphasize the community aspect, just given the subject matter,” Maben said. The collective put together community guidelines to make sure nothing hateful was written. “But even then the Art School Considerations board was adamant that that not be included.”

“They were saying the legal risk of it creating a hostile campus environment were too high,” Simonton-Chao said. “They just keep being like, ‘We just are worried about you guys getting sued, like, we’re not worried about us getting sued.’ . . . It was very framed

“Never in the history of the school has a person who’s been teaching been banned from campus. I mean, it’s just insane.”

the end, the collective compromised by having preapproved printed materials that visitors could wheatpaste onto the wall.

The board also stipulated that the gallery’s external-facing windows had to be covered so no one could see in and that security had to be present at the opening. The bureaucratic hurdles resulted in delayed installation and an inability for the organizers to promote the show as much as they would have liked.

Nevertheless, the show drew a large crowd. An article from SAIC’s student-run F Newsmagazine shows a line of visitors outside the gallery waiting to get in on opening night. “The show came out very beautifully,” Maben said, noting that there were no issues and no reports of anyone taking o ense to its content.

The extra attention to the “School as a Function of Empire” exhibition is of a piece with other changes at the school that seem

business days before the planned event. “SAIC reserves the right to determine the time, place, and manner of demonstrations, events, and other displays of free expression,” the policy states. It goes on to detail vague consequences of violations of the policy, noting that “each case is context specific.”

When SAIC’s student government account shared the new policy on its Instagram, student responses were overwhelmingly incredulous. “Thank you for throwing us this bone and allowing us a space to protest your contribution to genocide on your terms !!! because every revolution begins on the terms of the oppressor!!” read one response. “This is actually crazy coming from a school who actively teach [sic] us to use our voice & speak out and act on important issues. The fuck kind of artists are we for staying silent????” read another.

in this way of trying to scare undergrads into self-censorship.” Simonton-Chao and Maben both lamented the opacity of ASC. Its members are not listed online and much of its purview seems subjective. “You can’t contest Art School Considerations because they give us no transparency of protocol or policy. They’re very authoritarian,” Simonton-Chao said. In

intended to control speech and organizing generally. Last fall, a new demonstration policy for students was announced, designating just one area on campus open to protests: the “280 pit,” an outdoor space—which is not fully wheelchair accessible—in front of SAIC’s 280 S. Columbus building. The policy requires students request the use of the area at least three

The school also has a strict policy on pamphleteering, forbidding “solicitation and distribution of non-AIC sanctioned materials on or at its premises by any student, employee, or non-employee. . . . Students may not solicit or distribute materials for any purpose at any time on AIC/SAIC property.” In an email replying to our request for comment, an SAIC spokesperson said that the school’s “solicitation policy has been in place for many years.”

“It’s an art school. It doesn’t make any sense,” Xi said of the policy. “Things like zines and posters are included among the solicitation policy now.” It doesn’t seem to take into consideration the fact that zines, Xerox art, and other printed matter are often part of courses as well as faculty and students’ art practices. Indeed, the school’s library has a zine collection and a zine group.

A new, reduced print budget for faculty—which was implemented at the start of this year, after Xi’s dismissal—also poses challenges in the way professors plan their classes. Two professors said their printing allotment used to be unlimited; now it’s capped at $25. If they want to print more, they need to ask their department heads for advance approval. “It’s quite annoying because

. . . there’s like five pages of mandatory things that we have to put in [printed syllabi],” said lecturer Sarah Bastress. “I maxed out my printing on the first day without printing a syllabus for every student. . . . It is a really blatant, silly thing for them to do, just to save face for punishing Kelly.”

The new policy has forced her to change her teaching practice. “I used to print a schedule for every class for students and I used to print poems,” she said. “It’s very frustrating.”

“Print costs have gone up so much, and our budgets have stayed the same,” the tenured professor told me. “So it gets spent really quickly.”

The solicitation policy and the print policy appear to be directly related to Xi’s dismissal. One of the charges that Berger levied against her was “unauthorized distribution of external materials,” which seems to refer to protected union activities. Xi, along with other AICWU members, would regularly pass out union stickers, buttons, and fliers, and would meet with colleagues on campus to have them sign union or strike pledge cards or talk about union business. Labor law protects employees engaged in union activity, from circulating petitions and talking with coworkers about working conditions to protesting and distributing union literature and insignia.

In fact, Xi was particularly active in oncampus union organizing in the days leading up to her removal. She first realized something was o on November 19, 2024, when she noticed her faculty profile and two promotional articles about her work as a grad student had been removed from SAIC’s website. That same day, her faculty ID card was blocked from printing anything. She reached out to her department chair, who told her that Berger had reached out to him directly to say that Xi was under investigation. Later that day, Xi was asked to meet with Berger. Berger relayed over the phone to AICWU’s AFSCME union negotiator, Kathy Steichen, that the meeting would not be disciplinary and thus Xi would not be allowed to have a union steward present. (AICWU is affiliated with AFSCME Council 31.) The Supreme Court case NLRB v. J. Weingarten, Inc. stipulates that employees have the right to union representation during investigatory interviews.

“But it became disciplinary,” Xi said. “It became immediately clear. You know, if my contract was on hold, that is by definition disciplinary.” At the November meeting, Berger told Xi she was under investigation by executive director of campus security John

Pack, who was looking into her allegedly nonacademic printing and alleged involvement in a student’s attempt to disrupt an on-campus career fair. (A student tried to make an announcement over the microphone and asked Xi to film them. But they were unable to access the sound system, and ultimately, no disruption occurred.) Berger informed Xi her spring classes were on hold until the conclusion of the investigation.

The next day, Xi met with Pack, associate director of security Dennis Leaks, and Steichen, the AFSCME negotiator. There, Pack presented Xi with a list of everything she had printed from May 3 to October 28 as well as surveillance footage of her printing. As the AAUP support letter states: “Among the items in the folder that Mr. Pack claimed to be illegitimate/ non-educational include: zines on gentrification in the arts, history of organizing at SAIC (produced from an archive of activist faculty copy-printing), student org Teach-in flyers, and a student-made collage on student activism.” Xi told both Pack and her department head that she was willing to pay for the nonsanctioned printing and also asked to review the print jobs they had flagged but to no avail.

gaining was going. On December 3, after the Thanksgiving break, Xi spent much of the day meeting with other colleagues about the union and tabling with an AICWU colleague about the strike pledge and about a student petition that had just dropped in support of nontenure track faculty.

The petition, called Student Solidarity with SAIC NTT Faculty, was published online

ARTS & CULTURE

entire student body, and shared it with students for non-work reasons. If true, this would be an egregious violation.”

He went on to revoke her SAIC privileges, freezing her staff ID, banning her from both SAIC and the Art Institute premises, and putting her on paid administrative leave through the end of the fall semester.

“NTT faculty are overworked, underpaid, and undervalued despite being the driving force behind all our cherished parts of SAIC. NTT faculty have supported us unconditionally, and SAIC exploits this devotion.”

All the faculty members I spoke to for this article said that having administration track a colleague’s printing was unprecedented. “Hearing that John Pack was tracking Kelly’s copies for months is unbelievable,” the tenured professor wrote me over email. “We’re all guilty of making personal copies here and there.”

“One of the perks [of teaching at SAIC] is that you get to use the school resources,” said Mary Patten, an SAIC professor emeritus who has been at the school since 1993. “All faculty have access to resources at the school. Tech resources. You can use an editing room. You can check out a camera. You can use the photocopier and make Xerox art. . . . I’ve never even heard of a faculty getting disciplined for making copies of their own resume or something. Never. I mean, photocopying, that’s not one of the big budget items anyway in the school.”

In the days leading up to her dismissal, Xi continued with her regular teaching and union activities. On November 25 and 26, she and another AICWU member visited colleagues in their classes to talk to them about how bar-

on December 2 and also went out as a mass email to the student body. NTT faculty at that point had been negotiating their first contract with the university since June 2023 and were gearing up for a potential strike. “Your professors’ working conditions are your learning conditions,” the letter stated. “NTT faculty are overworked, underpaid, and undervalued despite being the driving force behind all our cherished parts of SAIC. NTT faculty have supported us unconditionally, and SAIC exploits this devotion. We must reciprocate the care that our faculty show us and echo their demands by supporting their strike preparations.” To date the petition has over 800 signatories online. (In the fall semester, the school had a total student body of 3,395.)

While it may seem innocuous for students to send out a mass email to their fellow classmates, the administration considered it “confidential student information.” The school quickly determined that Xi had a hand in providing students with a portion of that email list, and at 4:55 PM the following day, December 3, Xi received an email from Berger with the subject line “**URGENT**.”

“I’ve received a report that you appear to have ignored both our policies and my specific stated expectation that you be mindful not to use SAIC resources for anything other than work duties,” Berger wrote. “Specifically, it appears that you may have taken information you may have access to based on your employment, namely the contact information for the

Xi didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to her students. She was removed from her yearlong class with just two weeks left in the semester. On December 23, Pack forwarded Xi a letter from Berger explaining the result of the investigations. It found that she violated school rules, namely unauthorized distribution of materials, personal printing, and “inappropriate access to and circulation of confidential student information.” Berger relayed that her complete ban for SAIC and AIC properties would remain in place, as would her access to any SAIC resources, including her email.

“I can’t go to Gene Siskel. I can’t do studio visits with grad students who have asked me. I can’t attend any exhibition or event or talk,” Xi said. “It really prevents me from my ability to engage as an artist.” Xi, who often makes involved installations featuring neon, has used SAIC’s fabrication facilities since she was a grad student there. “My practice is kind of at this pivot point, hopefully not dead end.”

Xi eventually got in touch with the Illinois AAUP who sent their support letter to SAIC’s president on February 3, 2025. It drew from conversations with Xi and some of her colleagues as well as a grievance Xi attempted to file with SAIC. Xi spent two months compiling documentation for the grievance, soliciting support letters from a number of colleagues and gathering evidence.

But she didn’t hear back—because the school had blocked not only her SAIC email address but also her personal Gmail account from being able to communicate with anyone at SAIC. She didn’t realize that until she got an out-of-o ce email from Pack, in response to an email she had tried to send to a colleague. She submitted her materials again using a different email and was initially told by the new grievance committee chair, professor Lou Mallozzi, that there may be some part of her grievance that they could address. But a week

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continued from p. 11

later, after reviewing her complaint, Mallozzi wrote that the committee could not in fact take up her grievance. “According to the faculty handbook, the grievance committee’s purview regarding lecturers is very, very limited. In fact, the o cial policy is that the grievance procedure is open specifically to tenure track and adjunct faculty, with no provision for lecturers,” he wrote in an email.

Like many other schools, SAIC increasingly relies on lecturers and part-time faculty. As of last year, they made up more than 80 percent of the school’s faculty, 632 out of 783. Mallozzi’s email implies that the vast majority of SAIC’s teaching staff have no right to due process, though the faculty handbook, which he references, states no such thing. The handbook’s grievance section begins: “A faculty member, whether full- or part-time, may bring a grievance against the School for the reasons set forth in Section 7.1. A” which includes allegations of a policy violation that results in suspension.

The handbook does, however, include the AAUP’s guidelines on both academic freedom and due process. Those guidelines stipulate that a faculty member may be suspended “only if immediate harm to the faculty member or others is threatened by continuance.” “Based on the information we have available to us, Kelly Xi’s continued presence on the SAIC campus appears to pose no threat of ‘immediate harm’ to anyone,” wrote the AAUP committee in their support letter. They continued, “It appears as if SAIC is punishing Kelly Xi for her extramural speech and action. . . . Based on our current understanding of what has transpired, SAIC looks to be in violation of both AAUP Recommended Institutional Regulations concerning academic freedom and due process and provisions of its own handbook.” SAIC’s faculty handbook does mention that a grievance may be brought if a school entity contravenes the provisions of the handbook.

The school declined to respond substantively to AAUP’s letter because Xi was pursuing a grievance through the school and was working with a lawyer, and because personnel matters are confidential, according to Steve Macek, who chairs the Illinois AAUP committee. “I don’t think—especially administrations who behaved the way they have—usually want to be forthcoming with information,” Macek said. If they had, they could have easily sought Xi’s permission to discuss the case.

Macek said that AAUP has received a large influx in complaints in the past several months

and, with limited resources, it cannot intervene in every situation. “What happened with Kelly seemed particularly egregious. That’s why we took the step we did of writing a letter,” he said, adding that the organization is seriously considering launching a full investigation of SAIC, which could result in an official censure.

AAUP regulations state that removing someone from the classroom is the most severe sort of penalty, and should be used only if there is an immediate threat. “That clearly was not . . . true in this case,” Macek told me. “Whatever problems they had with her providing printing privileges to the students or whatever the problems they had with her, it didn’t rise to the level that justified what they did. And it’s just outrageous to yank somebody out. It’s a disservice to their students—and it’s also a clear violation of the academic freedom of the professor.”

Patten told me, “Never in the history of the school has a person who’s been teaching been banned from campus. I mean, it’s just insane.”

“I think it’s really clear that the SAIC administration did this to silence Kelly and her outspoken activism in support of a free Palestine, her vocal support of the union, her involvement in getting other faculty to be excited about the union and to get involved,” NTT lecturer Anneli Goeller said. “She is not the only faculty member who has been a proud and supportive union member, or who is in support of a free Palestine, and who has been active in antigenocide campaigns. And so I came to that conclusion myself as well, that she is being targeted in part because she is a woman of color, involved in activism and vocal about it and unapologetic about it as she should be. I have been involved in similar campaigns throughout this whole time, and I have not had any discipline.”

Students and faculty I spoke to for this article described a subdued atmosphere on campus this semester. They attributed it to the federal government’s witch hunt of academics and students who have spoken out in support of Palestine and to the school’s dismissal of Xi and its investigations into student activists.

“This increased climate of fear is something which is very, very real, and it’s very felt,” NTT lecturer Garrett Johnson said.

As for Xi, she filed an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board, though the prospects for that are uncertain, given cuts made by the Trump administration. The AAUP is still looking into her case. Xi is hopeful that one day the faculty handbook will be rewritten to more explicitly protect her former colleagues—something AICWU is actively seeking to get into their contract. Otherwise her future is uncertain.

“It’s been really difficult. It’s been kind of like a four-months grieving process,” she told me. “I put ten years, the last ten years of my life, towards . . . I feel real naive about the purpose of art. And I mean, it’s important that we don’t silence repression, but I also feel really exposed right now.” For now she’s taken a temporary job delivering compost. She doesn’t know if she’ll find another job in the education sector. “I know that sounds really grim, but that’s kind of what I’m seeing in our present reality, people being targeted for their political and intellectual beliefs.” Her removal from the classroom is not only

“This increased climate of fear is something which is very, very real, and it’s very felt.”

a loss for Xi, but also for the school and, more importantly, her students. “They are totally shooting themselves in the foot because they’re depriving students of this amazing faculty person who’s one of those exceptional faculty who just is so generous and so resourceful for students,” Patten said.

Bastress agreed. “Kelly did a wonderful job making some really talented students and idealistic students feel seen and like they had the ability to make a di erence,” she said. “I don’t have a harder-working person in my mind than Kelly.”

That spark that Xi felt when she first started making art is still accessible, but maybe a little less so. You can hear it when she talks about teaching. “It’s what I try to make infectious for all my students,” Xi told me. “It’s incredible. You know, for me, empowering them, seeing the world through their eyes anew, every single semester.” She never imagined that supporting her students, helping them become politically engaged citizens and artists, would cause her to lose her job. “Opposing a genocide, I didn’t question that.” v

m kcardoza@chicagoreader.com

SAIC students and faculty describe a subdued atmosphere on campus this semester. AMBER HUFF

NEWS & POLITICS

DOJ probes City Hall

The Department of Justice (DOJ) is investigating Mayor Brandon Johnson’s administration for allegedly making hiring decisions “solely on the basis of race.” The federal civil rights probe, launched by Attorney General Pam Bondi, came after Johnson highlighted key Black o cials in his cabinet at a May 18 event.

“The deputy mayor is a Black woman. The [head of the] Department of Planning and Development is a Black woman. [The] infrastructure deputy mayor is a Black woman. [The city’s] chief operations o cer is a Black man. [The] budget director is a Black woman. [My] senior advisor is a Black man,” Johnson said at a May 18 event. “And I’m laying that out because when you ask, ‘How do we ensure that our people get a chance to grow their business?’ [By] having people in my administration that will look out for the interest of everyone— and everyone means you have to look out for the interest of Black folks, because that hasn’t happened.”

In a May 23 interview, DOJ assistant attorney general for civil rights Harmeet Dhillon—de-

scribed as “one of America’s best-known conservative legal activists”—told right-wing cable channel Newsmax that it’s an “open-andshut investigation.”

“Chicago actually has a long and lurid history of rent-seeking and favoritism and nepotism and all other kinds of discrimination, and especially racial discrimination,” she said.

—SHAWN MULCAHY

New public shower program

The Chicago Department of Family and Support Services (DFSS) announced a new weekly service in partnership with ShowerUp, a nonprofit that o ers showers and hygiene resources to people experiencing homelessness or hardship. The faith-based organization provides free access to mobile, private showers, as well as free personal care items like toiletries, socks, and underwear.

ShowerUp has had a Chicago branch since 2021—it’s the largest city of the seven that the nonprofit currently serves—and has provided more than 6,000 showers and hosted hundreds of events locally. But this partnership with DFSS offers a new location and weekly

cadence: The shower suites and hygiene resources are available every Wednesday from 11 AM to 1 PM, weather permitting, at 10 S. Kedzie on the Madison side of the Garfield Community Service Center in East Garfield Park. Other regular locations include the Chicago Cultural Center, the Forest Park Blue Line station, and a range of local churches. Visit showerup.org/chicago to view the full calendar of pop-ups. —TARYN MCFADDEN

On copaganda

Alec Karakatsanis wants you to stop reading the daily news. That’s what he told a packed house on May 21 at Pilsen Community Books during a talk to promote his latest work, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

So much of the media we consume is tainted by pro-cop propaganda, argues Karakatsanis. In many cases, this is deliberate—reporters accept cops’ narratives without question, police departments shape how and what makes the news, and academics argue the benefits of living under a heavily surveilled police state. But even the most well-intentioned daily reporting

often falls short, according to Karakatsanis, because it lacks context about how and why we got here in the first place.

Traditional media exists to preserve the status quo. It defines the scope of conversations about crime and safety, including which systemic changes are possible, which are palatable, and which are simply “too radical.”

Karakatsanis argues the need for counterpropaganda—the kind that relies on more than just research and evidence alone. He points to long-form and investigative journalism (music to my ears!) as a way to blend compelling narratives with data. Charts and figures are useful, he says, but they need to be in service of a broader ideological project. Right-wing, law-and-order messaging is e ective not because it is well-reasoned but because it is sensational.

Copaganda is all around us. Karakatsanis’s book offers an essential look at ways to push back.

—SHAWN MULCAHY v

Make It Make Sense is a weekly column about what’s happening and why it matters. m smulcahy@chicagoreader.com

From le : Mayor Brandon Johnson; Garfi eld Community Service Center; cover of Alec Karakatsanis’s Copaganda COURTESY CITY OF CHICAGO, THE NEW PRESS

THEATER

TInside the Puppet Lab

By KIMZYN CAMPBELL

CHICAGO PUPPET LAB SHOWCASE

5/29- 6/ 1: Thu–Fri 7 PM, Sat–Sun 3 and 7 PM; Segundo Ruiz Belvis Cultural Center, 4048 W. Armitage, chicagopuppetfest.org/chicago-puppet-lab, $20 ($15 seniors/ students). See website for complete schedule. to tell forgotten histories, perform surgery, and project interior worlds, often with surprising elements, like ice and experimental sounds.

The Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival’s residency program offers diversity in styles and stories.

One of the artists this year is Madigan Burke, an ex–mechanical engineer turned multidisciplinary artist. Burke frequently explores their queerness through puppetry with pieces illustrating relationships with the body. Their piece, Operating Theater, will entail surgery and livefeed video puppetry. They say the Puppet Lab is good for all audiences. “It does a few things that are hard to find anywhere else. For people that don’t know much about puppetry, [it helps] to know that puppetry includes everything from shadow puppets to foam puppets, to light puppets and marionettes. It can be so many di erent things.”

he annual Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival in January is a highlight of the Chicago theater season, but the festival works year-round to help develop new work and artists.

Opening this weekend for its fourth year, the festival’s Puppet Lab Showcase, presented at Segundo Ruiz Belvis Cultural Center in Hermosa, and led by codirectors Tom Lee and Grace Needlman, highlights the work of eight artists who have been in residence at the lab for the past eight months. The lab has a threepronged mission to diversify the local puppet arts scene by reaching new populations of artists, increasing puppet works from other disciplines, and growing appreciation for puppetry in general. Needlman identifies an additional perk of the program: “I think a lot of people who come into the program already have a sense of community leadership, but it’s been so cool to see Puppet Lab alums go on to use the practices that we develop in Puppet Lab and build the community.”

Lee got the idea for Puppet Lab from his experience in a similar, now defunct, program at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn. “When I first made work in New York City, I didn’t even know how to make a puppet show. For me as a young artist it was totally ground-shifting. It

really taught me how one makes a puppet show, how you experiment, and how to figure out your own process. It gives the artist a goal to work towards.”

Puppet Lab fulfills an important part of the broader mission of the Puppet Theater Festival, Lee notes, by “presenting complete, finished, packaged shows from all over the place. Puppet Lab is building the local community of artists. It really feels like this is having an impact on what Chicago puppet theater looks like.”

“Puppet Lab is building the local community of artists. It really feels this is having an impact on what Chicago puppet theater looks like.”

All around Chicago, there are “puppet slams” hosted by multiple solo artists and fledgling companies and collectives. These events are exciting ways to showcase new, short (five- to ten-minute) acts, but Puppet Lab o ers something a bit more structured to help puppeteers move their work toward a full show.

Needlman explains other ways the lab is different from puppet slams. “The big thing that it’s important for audiences to know coming to Puppet Lab is that artists are taking on

very large or very new and challenging projects that they’ve wanted to do for a decade or more. It’s like, ‘This is a thing that I’ve been trying to get out into the world,’ or ‘This is a new way of working,’ or ‘This is a new problem.’”

The Puppet Lab provides support for the selected residents in developing individual pieces from concept to performance. They meet weekly during that time to offer each other support and feedback while the work evolves into a 15- to 20-minute piece of puppetry. This current iteration, presented in two programs of four pieces each, will include full costumes, DIY sets, sophisticated projections, and live music—all provided by multidisciplinary puppeteers, some with backgrounds in acting, music, or fine art. Among other themes, this year’s pieces will explore cultural myths, family heritage, and musical realms.

One of the biggest advantages to working with puppets is the range of freedom it gives the creator in storytelling. On the Segundo Ruiz stage, puppets will travel through time

For the people who are puppet fans already, Burke says, “It’s a great thing to see the showcase and then consider applying yourself. Any sort of performance can sometimes seem intimidating as an audience member. But with this cohort, it’s been really neat to see people that are coming in from effectively not-quite-puppetry backgrounds.” They say it’s been gratifying to see those works develop into puppet performance. Burke describes the Chicago puppet ecosystem in a biological way. “In Chicago, there’s such a thriving DIY community of puppetry. Once you meet a couple puppet people and start chatting and showing up to events, it just mushrooms, like a mycelium network. That is really puppetry in Chicago. The roots are everywhere. Everybody’s connected. Everybody knows somebody that can help you. It’s really awesome.”

Another artist who is part of the thriving Chicago puppet culture is Sam Lewis. With a background as a poet, vocalist, and actor (Lewis is also a cofounder of Elastic Arts Foundation), he says being part of Puppet Lab has helped him step up his game with puppetry to develop a longer piece. “Puppet Lab became really an essential element in this three-pronged strategy I had.” Being accepted into the program gave him the impetus to seek out two other resources that allowed his work to come together. Lewis found a space large enough to build his puppets as part of South

Madigan Burke COURTESY CHICAGO

THEATER

Side Artists in Sacred Spaces because making his art on the south side was important to him.

Lewis also worked with Voice of the City, an organization that connects artists with neighborhood residents, receiving a Neighborhood Access Program (NAP) grant from the city for work based on family histories and genealogy. This enabled him to further develop his piece Black Episcopalian, which tells his family history using shadow puppetry and multiplane projection. Lewis says it’s especially important to be stewarding and documenting this very personal family history at a time when histories are being erased. “I take that seriously and try to work in the ways that I feel are important for us to preserve histories. You get to a point where you’re the adult in the room and if you don’t do it, it’s just not gonna get done. There’s always someone else who will handle it, someone else has it. But we’re at the steering wheel now.”

Lee and Needlman say that seeing the shows of both programs in the showcase is important for understanding the scope of the work being presented via Puppet Lab. In addition to Burke and Lewis, the other artists and pieces in this year’s Puppet Lab are Irene Wa.’s she is drying , a large-scale marionette piece that explores “the restriction of movement and the tension of dependency”; Charlie Malavé’s A Suite of Dreams , which incorporates shadow puppetry, projection, and miniatures to explore a dream world; Ruby Que’s Touch, which uses ice puppetry and a puppet microphone to play with “constructed invisibility”; Anthony-Michael Stokes’s An Anansi Experience , which draws on West African folklore; Robbie Lynn Hunsinger’s Shehnai Mist/ Suona Flames , which incorporates shadow puppets, animations, and wearable musical

instruments in an exploration of “the moods and music of the Indian Shehnai and Chinese Suona”; and Michele Stine’s AudioFile, which uses crankies, object puppetry, and figurative puppetry to embody “the physical remnants of a life left behind, and the playground for someone to rediscover the joy of sound.”

Needlman says, “This group of people has

been working together for eight months and everyone’s working on their own show, but there’s a real dialogue, a real sort of interwovenness between the shows that is not generally something that you see in a slam when people are just coming together for a oneo show.”

Lee adds, “There’s a whole lot of momentum behind Puppet Lab. We just hope it continues to get stronger and has more artists come through it. If you love puppets, you’ve got to come and check it out. If you hate puppets—I don’t know how that’s possible, but this will change your mind. If you don’t know about puppets, you’re just going to discover what is truly possible.”

m letters@chicagoreader.com

Sam Lewis TOM LEE

FILM

WEBSERIES

Sesame Street meets Seinfeld on Trenchies TV

Chicago indie-rock band the Trenchies combine music, comedy, and puppetry in their ongoing webseries.

By AMBER STOUTENBOROUGH

Episode one of Trenchies TV opens with Logan Ludwig, lead singer of Chicago indie-rock five-piece the Trenchies, playing a letter game with puppet Tuggy the Tiger. The background music is playful, reminiscent of a children’s show. The letter game involves picking up paper letters and singing words that start with each letter, causing those objects to magically appear.

Ludwig encourages Tuggy to play, demonstrating with his own examples.

“I don’t think very good under pressure,” Tuggy says nervously, but Ludwig ignores this and launches into “The Letter Song.”

“‘L’ is for love, the greatest word there is. ‘B’ is for birds in the sky.” A garland of hearts floats onto the screen as Ludwig cheerfully runs his fingers through it, smiling up at fake birds dangling from fishing lines.

“Tuggy, come on, it’s your turn!” The pressure mounts in this seemingly innocent game. Ludwig’s cheerful demeanor turns annoyed and forceful while Tuggy struggles to find a word starting with “G.”

“Tuggy, it’s not that hard!”

“OK, ‘G,’ uh—grenade!” Ludwig turns toward the camera and freezes in shock as the whole room explodes.

The scene transforms dramatically, though the playful tune continues in the background. The room erupts in flames. Tuggy, trapped beneath a table, screams in panic. Ludwig appears to be dead from the grenade blast. In what resembles a dramatized TV crime scene, Tuggy swears and frantically searches through the letters. “I knew I shouldn’t have played this game! . . . ‘A’ is for an ambulance that comes really fast!” The sequence ends with Tuggy’s desperate cries for help. Hard cut to band member Andrew Pridmore in the shower; he dons a robe and holds a pipe and a glass of whiskey: “It’s Trenchies TV, baby!”

In Chicago’s vibrant music scene, the Trenchies stand out with their unique approach: They’re a band that includes puppets as members. The group—which consists of Ludwig, Pridmore, Hayden Marth, Sydney Cramer, Robby Kuntz, and a couple of pup-

pets—has a genre-defying sound, which they describe as “Muppet core,” with “some jangle, some knee-slapping.” In 2023, Reader writer Leor Galil wrote that “their brain-sticky tunes . . . balance sincerity and whimsy,” and “make you feel like your day is filled with unforeseen possibilities.” The addition of puppetry creates an unexpected yet engaging musical experience, especially in their new webseries.

“When the band first started three years ago, we wanted to initially never show humans onstage, like Gorillaz, but for puppets,” Ludwig says. “Then we just started to do gigs on our own, and what we learned was that our chemistry onstage was not worth hiding, so we kind of brought the puppets out with us.”

The band’s journey with puppets began about two years ago with Fletcher Pierson, a professional puppeteer who moved to Chicago in 2016. Puppetry combines his love for physical theater and sculpture.

“Chicago, puppets, and music very much go hand in hand,” Pierson says. “Live music does so much for puppetry. Even just having live music during a more traditional puppet show really makes it come alive. . . . I don’t think anyone else is doing the same kind of storytelling that we’re doing, and I always want to push the story a little bit more.” Pierson has contributed to the creation of the Trenchies puppets and helps operate them onstage during live performances.

“The puppet scene in Chicago is really alive and well; people are doing really exciting stu all over the city,” Pierson adds.

“We play with puppets. It’s like a bonus. It sets us apart,” Cramer says. “If someone doesn’t rock with that, that’s fine, but I think it’s also been cool to see other artists come to our shows, because I think it’s an attraction that resonates for other creative people.”

“I feel like it’s OK to laugh at us onstage, because we’re being silly—we’re in on our own joke,” Ludwig says.

As the band’s audience grew and they performed at venues across Chicago—including a residency at Burlington Bar in Logan Square— Ludwig sought to expand the Trenchies’ creative horizons by venturing into acting.

“I was just getting bored of the album cycle, show, repeat,” Ludwig says. “We’re gonna make music videos anyway, so we might as well create a little narrative—even though it’s all very random, but in a good way—to test our chops in that department. I want to see what happens if we do something bigger, and I know [the webseries] is a good opportunity to figure it out.”

The first episode of Trenchies TV , titled “Pie Lit,” premiered on YouTube on August 31, 2024, and it now has more than ten thousand views. The show combines music, comedy, and puppetry in a format similar to a mash-up of Sesame Street and Seinfeld

“I definitely feel like the [show] is for adults, but for adults that still want to seek out nostalgia and to tap into their inner child,” Marth says. “We want everyone to be silly with us. Just because we’re grown-ups doesn’t mean we have to be serious all the time.”

Evan Hansen, a previous collaborator on the Trenchies’ music videos, joined the production team to handle filming and editing the show. Pierson also expanded his role from the live shows to assist with the TV series. Each skit is written by Ludwig, with ideas developed with the band. Using green screens, toy figurines, and of course puppets, the scenes take place in Ludwig’s apartment living room and on the streets of Andersonville.

“[Trenchies TV] is all fun and games, and the music is kind of the same, but our approach is not silly,” Kuntz says. “Behind the scenes, we take this stu seriously. We want to be a good band that sounds good.”

With a small-scale production, the Trenchies have had to work hard to create a show with minimal help and experience. Between lighting, filming, and writing, each band member contributes to the creative process.

On their first day of shooting the webseries, what was meant to be just a couple of hours of work before band practice turned into a full day of filming on one of Chicago’s hottest days of the year.

“It was just a miserably hot day, and we all started with high spirits. By the end of the day, we were sweeping fake blood and cleaning concrete,” Cramer says. “Almost everyone was covered in fake blood, and Andrew was

dry heaving—probably having a heat stroke. It was awesome. I look back on that day fondly. We put literal blood, sweat, and tears into that day.”

Though the show rarely has any overarching plotlines (besides a lawyer meeting with Tuggy the Tiger after the grenade mishap), each scene features comedic twists on everyday experiences—and some not-so-everyday experiences, like being beamed up by aliens for a casual hangout.

Though not every day has been as bloody and grueling since then, the Trenchies have released three episodes of Trenchies TV and are now hard at work putting the final touches on their second album, planned for release this summer. Three songs from the webseries—“Tacoma,” “Dust,” and “Picking Up the Pieces”—will be featured on the 12track album. v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

The Trenchies perform at Rattleback Records. AMBER STOUTENBOROUGH

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

What do Akira Kurosawa’s Ran (1985) and Christopher McQuarrie’s Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025) have in common? Not much, except that they’re almost the same length—the former is two hours and 47 minutes, the latter is two hours and 50 minutes—and I saw both on Saturday.

But the moviegoing experiences themselves did share certain similarities: Though released 40 years apart, both were shown to packed theaters, with viewers as enthusiastic for one as the other. Both are also cinematically epic as well as epically cinematic undertakings, grand in scale and story. Ran, set in the 16th century amid a fallow volcanic plain, is a loose derivation of Shakespeare’s King Lear. It’s about an elderly warlord and his three sons, and his bequeathment of the kingdom to the eldest son, much to the chagrin of the other two, one of whom is banished for daring to speak out against his father’s decision. Compelling the greed and betrayal that undergird the story is Lady Kaede (played sublimely by Mieko Harada), who convinces one and then another brother to fully usurp their father and assume dominance at all costs.

To give a sense of its epicness, costume designer Emi Wada spent three years creating 1,400 costumes, following Kurosawa’s mandate that authentic weaving and dyeing techniques be used. The castle devoured by flames as the warlord makes a narrow escape was specially constructed on the slopes of Mount Fuji and then burned down for real. Somehow it still feels subtle, the artistry never outweighing the art. The same can’t be said of Final Reckoning, as much as it pains me to say. I unabashedly love the Mission: Impossible movies and am sad they’re o cially over (or so Tom Cruise says), but this one, while fun to watch—especially in 4DX—wasn’t more than the sum of its parts, of which there are several exceptional set pieces bumpered by seven movies’ worth of exposi-

NOW PLAYING

Mountainhead

A still from Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025)

tion. I’d still recommend seeing it, though, not least because Cruise, actor-cum-auteur (it’s billed as a Tom Cruise production, after all), is a dedicated advocate of the moviegoing experience, to say nothing of his less endearing devotions. The stunts, which Cruise famously performs himself, are impressive; he’s the contemporary, higher-octane corollary of someone like Buster Keaton, for whom defying death is a necessary part of affirming life, often for us as much as them.

Speaking of meticulous crafting, on Friday, I went to the Chicago Film Society o ces to see Skin, Inscribed, a touring program of contemporary hand-processed films from Brazil curated by filmmaker Tetsuya Maruyama (who was in person at the screening), featuring only work produced at artist-run film labs. Maruyama’s 2024 film, untitled(three moons), involving dual 16-millimeter projection, was the same film— contrasting circles in the center of the image— being projected at the same time. Per Maruyama in the program notes, “No projector runs at the same exact speed as another, even with the standard frame rate of 24 per second. There is a (d)e ect that could not be counted in number and this ‘imperfection’ is apparent to our retinal perception throughout a long transformation, as if it were a lunar orbit.”

Another of the films, João Reynaldo’s Typefilm an Armory Show (2022), also dual projection, was made sans camera, with words typed directly on the film. If you’re reading this in print, it’s not that di erent from this, words printed on a page. Just imagine it being projected.

My next column will be a report of the Nitrate Picture Show in Rochester, New York, which I’m going to for the third time. So 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.

Tech bros rule the world. That much became damningly clear at Donald Trump’s inauguration, when a photo captured four of the world’s most powerful men—Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, and Elon Musk— standing nearly side by side (along with Bezos’s partner, Lauren Sánchez), all glued to their phones. Tech bows to money and power. And here they are, our spineless nerds, seemingly concerned only with the advancement of technology, not the consequences it brings.

Writer and director Jesse Armstrong poses a question: What happens when four fictional megabillionaires (not unlike our own) vacation for the weekend as the world falls apart? In Mountainhead, we find that for them, business is business—and the world is just a distant, observable game.

Mountainhead is the name Hugo Van Yalk (Jason Schwartzman) gave to his sprawling Utah mansion. For the weekend, he’s invited three of the richest men in the world to hang out, play poker, and indulge in their private boys’ club. They call themselves the Brewsters. First to arrive is Randall (Steve Carell), an aging billionaire with cancer and a small god complex. Next comes Jeff (Ramy Youssef), a brash tech mogul who prides himself on his moral superiority. Finally, Venis touches down (Cory Michael Smith), a clean-cut, emotionally guarded figure whose vulnerability is suffocated by a hardened exterior. The Brewsters’ motto and rulebook—repeated like a mantra—is, “No deals, no meals, no high heels.”

Some of the film’s best moments play as we watch these four talented actors settle into their wealthy archetypes. Venis is unable to talk about his divorce. Randall boils an egg without water. And Hugo—whom the Brewsters call “Souper,” as in, soup kitchen, because he is the poorest—pines a er their attention.

This weekend is meant to give these “men at work” a reprieve from their stressful lives. However, the quartet can’t spend a second away from their phones. This is thanks to an update released by Venis’s social media company, Traam, which distributed generative AI so advanced that the masses are using it to overload the Internet with false information—so much disinformation that governments and economies are toppling worldwide. Jeff holds the keys to another AI tool that can decipher reality from generated content, and a simple deal could stop violence worldwide. But, remember, no deals!

A lot of Mountainhead is anchored to regurgitative worries about AI and tech. Most of the jabs at the billionaires are nothing new and nothing too cutting. Perhaps this is what is most unfortunate about the film. Mountainhead isn’t jarring enough to undermine how we’ve already accepted that our lives are in the hands of these tech leaders. Yet, it is undeniably haunting when Venis asks, “Do you believe in other people?”

—MAXWELL RABB TV-MA, 108 min. Max

Tornado

The British Isles are an unusual setting for a samuraiinclined western, yet that’s precisely where Scottish director John Maclean chose to stage his sophomore feature, Tornado, a decade a er his idiosyncratic debut, Slow West. The misty weather rolling over the hills feels fittingly atmospheric, but the execution is messy, fabricating a world littered with tangential characters and motivations, none of which appears to matter much.

Tornado throws us into the middle of a chase scene with the titular character. Tornado, played by Kōki, is sprinting across a grassy field toward a treeline. Close behind her is a young boy (Nathan Malone). All in all, it’s enough to hook you. And if that shot doesn’t pull the audience in, the next one will—the film cuts to their pursuers, led by a ruthless, gray-bearded Tim Roth as the gang leader Sugarman.

This chase sequence is, by all means, drawn out. The first 20 minutes of the film follow Tornado evading Sugarman and his funnily named gang, which includes his son, Little Sugar (Jack Lowden), and his deputy, Kitten (Rory McCann). By the time Tornado finds refuge in the strong man’s quarters of a traveling circus, we are le with a bounty of questions.

Tornado jumps into a flashback at this point. Tornado and her father, played by Takehiro Hira, travel the countryside performing samurai-inspired puppet shows. At one show, the two performers cross paths with Sugarman’s gang. This is the impetus of the chase, and, spoilers aside, we end up where we started a tad faster than one might expect. Ultimately, the flashback leaves us wanting and wondering more than before.

For a 90-minute chase film, the loose ends needed trimming. Why Sugarman’s ties to the circus ringleaders matter, or the depth of Tornado and her father’s relationship, should be clear and tightly drawn. As Tornado sprints across the countryside, the world feels smaller rather than fleshed out; characters she encounters seem meant to connect, but the film never pulls the thread taut. Visually, Tornado grips hard, and its climactic confrontations deliver adrenaline in spades, a clear homage to Akira Kurosawa’s signature blood geysers again and again. Still, in no way does this climax feel earned. —MAXWELL RABB R, 91 min. Limited release in theaters v

THE SECRET HISTORY OF CHICAGO MUSIC

The Radiants helped drive the shift from doo-wop to soul

Despite some minor hits in the 1960s, this Chicago vocal group couldn’t ride the wave they’d helped create.

By STEVE KRAKOW

Since 2005 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place.

Chicago’s famed soul-music scene produced beloved groups (the Impressions, the Chi-Lites) and legendary labels (Chess, Vee-Jay), and that’s reason enough to remember soul’s roots in doo-wop. Doo-wop hasn’t aged as well as soul—it hasn’t produced an answer to neosoul, for instance—but it was one of the genres that fed into rock ’n’ roll. In the 50s and early 60s, it was extremely popular, and groups of young singers (who usually got started in church) developed their doowop chops harmonizing on street corners, in parks, or anywhere they could. The Radiants belong to this history, and their development also parallels the early-60s shift from gospel and doo-wop to soul and R&B.

The Radiants formed around lead singer and tenor Maurice McAlister, who was born on April 23, 1934, and raised in Chicago. In 1960, while a congregant at the Greater Harvest Missionary Baptist Church (established in 1912 and still open at 5141 S. State), McAlister put together a vocal group by cherry-picking the best belters from the church’s youth choir— baritone Wallace Sampson, bass Elzie Butler, and tenors Jerome Brooks and Charles Washington. Within a few months, Washington was replaced by McLauren Green (sometimes given as Green McLauren or Green McLaurin). At first they sang mostly gospel, but the young group was also developing secular material, written by McAlister. Within a year the Radiants had a demo recording and began seeking a label. “We had been trying, walking

up and down Michigan Avenue, which was Record Row then,” McAlister told Robert Pruter for his book Chicago Soul. “We went to Chess four or five times, but they never did have the time for us.”

Luckily, the Radiants’ manager, Lee Jackson, knew label boss Leonard Chess. Jackson had a day job as a supervisor for a meatpacking company, and in true Chicago fashion, he ingratiated himself using gifts of encased meats. “He used to go to Chess Records and talk to Leonard,” said Brooks. “A lot of time he’d bring him a thing of bologna or salami, so they got pretty tight.” Jackson also gave Chess the Radiants demo, and by May 1962 they were recording for the label.

the army late that year), and “Shy Guy” and “Please” both have a rollicking rock ’n’ roll drive and arrangements heavy on reverbed guitar. The other two tracks stick to the tempos and vocal blends of 50s doo-wop groups such as the Flamingos.

Their first session culminated in the August release of their debut single, “Father Knows Best” b/w “One Day I’ll Show You (I Really Love You),” which became a minor local hit. The single balances perfectly on the cusp between doowop and soul: The A-side combines a Motownstyle backbeat with the innocent-sounding harmonies of the 50s, while the B-side rests on the deep bass vocal of doo-wop but adds a passionate Sam Cooke–style lead from McAlister and strings reminiscent of Johnny Pate’s orchestrations for the Impressions.

In 1963, the Radiants released two more fab singles, “Heartbreak Society” b/w “Please Don’t Leave Me” in February and “I’m In Love” b/w “Shy Guy” in October. The latter featured new member Frank McCollum (Green left for

The Radiants all but broke up in 1964, with only McAlister and Sampson remaining. They continued as a trio by recruiting another member of the Greater Harvest choir, organistvocalist Leonard Caston Jr., who’d just left the army. The new lineup’s first release, “Voice Your Choice” b/w “If I Only Had You,” came out in late 1964 and proved to be the Radiants’ biggest hit, reaching number 51 on the Billboard pop chart and number 16 on the R&B chart.

From their first days with Chess, the Radiants had been working with A&R man, producer, and songwriter Roquel “Billy” Davis, who’d joined the label in 1961 and helped position it to ride the growing wave of soul. Pruter described the records he produced as “fully orchestrated and arranged, often horn driven and deeply touched with gospel and blues fervor.” McAlister and Caston eventually joined Davis’s sta of

songwriters and producers, and by 1964 McAlister had contributed tunes to Chess artists such as Bo Diddley and Sugar Pie DeSanto. McAlister wrote “Voice Your Choice” with Gerald Sims (who’d later play guitar on R&B classics “Rescue Me” and “Higher and Higher”), and its intricate three-part harmonies echoed the Impressions. Later in 1964, the Radiants released “I Gotta Dance to Keep My Baby” b/w “Noble the Bargain Man,” with an A-side cowritten by David Clowney (aka Dave “Baby” Cortez of “The Happy Organ” fame).

In 1965, the slow-grooving A-side of “It Ain’t No Big Thing” b/w “I Got a Girl” reached number 14 on the R&B chart, with McAlister and Caston trading o pleading shouts. “The marvelous vocal interplay of the song worked like a constant flux of voices slipping in and out of the musical mix,” Pruter noted, “a technique later copied by the progressive r&b groups of the 70s, Sly and the Family Stone, and Earth, Wind and Fire.” Pruter also comments that future Earth, Wind & Fire mastermind Maurice White drummed on all the Radiants’ sessions. Later in 1965, Caston left to focus on writ-

ing and producing for Chess. He also played piano on sessions alongside saxophonist Gene Barge. James Jameson replaced Caston for the underrated 1966 platter “Baby You’ve Got It” b/w “I Want to Thank You, Baby.” The chugging Motown-style groove on “Baby You’ve Got It” was a departure for the Radiants, and though it wasn’t a big hit in the States, it did better overseas—UK mod-soul unit the Action covered it that same year.

After that single, McAlister too stepped away from the Radiants to get more involved in production and songwriting. The Radiants didn’t disappear, though, because Davis brought in a new lead singer from another group: Mitchell Bullock had lent his powerful gospel pipes to the Confessions, who’d recorded the lush, soulful single “(Don’t It Make You) Feel Kinda Bad” for Chess in 1965 but broke up before it could be released. In a classic case of record-label high jinks, Davis had Chess put it out under the Radiants name in 1967, and it sold well locally.

The Radiants were now Bullock, Sampson, Jameson, and Caston’s younger brother Victor. Caston cowrote both songs on the group’s first 45 in this incarnation, “Don’t Take Your Love” b/w “The Clown Is Clever,” which adorned their polished, gritty R&B with brilliant Charles Stepney arrangements. In 1968, the Radiants had their last chart hit, also cowritten by Caston and graced with the golden Stepney touch. “Hold On” b/w “I’m Glad I’m the Loser,” with its late-60s fuzz guitar and unstoppable backbeat, stayed on the R&B charts for seven weeks.

MUSIC

soul man Syl Johnson as producer. “My Sunshine Girl” b/w “Don’t Wanna Face the Truth” had the trademark Radiants harmonies in full glorious e ect, and the B-side had the kind of up-tempo groove that UK fans on the Northern Soul scene love. It did no business, though, and the Radiants called it a day in 1972.

During the Radiants’ last few years, former members McAlister and Green had operated as the duo Maurice & Mac. They tended toward a rawer soul sound, and the singles they released between 1967 and 1972 included the poppin’ “So Much Love” and the simmering “You Left the Water Running.”

The Radiants’ manager, Lee Jackson, knew label boss Leonard Chess. Jackson had a day job as a supervisor for a meatpacking company, and in true Chicago fashion, he ingratiated himself using gifts of encased meats.

I can’t find any evidence that McAlister stayed active in the music biz after 1972, and he died from cancer on November 11, 2017. The Radiants’ music has been reissued, but the only two compilations I know about probably aren’t too findable these days. Discogs thinks the 1995 Titanic Records release The Radiants: The Ultimate Collection might be a bootleg, and the 1999 comp The Radiants With Maurice & Mac: The Singles Collection 1962-1970 is apparently the only thing Rack O Ribs Records ever put out. It does include a rare McAlister solo single, though, the catchy “Baby Hang On” b/w “I’d Rather Do It

Myself” from 1967.

I’d love it if such seminal music would stay in print, and I’d snap up a new double-LP collection if I could be sure it was legitimate. In the meantime, keep an eye out for original copies of the Radiants’ singles—they’re still out there, and they might even stay a ordable if the record-collecting public doesn’t figure out how great they are! v

That year the Radiants would drop another single written and produced by the same team, “I’m Just a Man” b/w “Tears of a Clown” (not that one). It tanked, sadly, and so did the group’s two 1969 records: “Book of Love” b/w “Another Mule Is Kicking in Your Stall” (with a funky A-side and a Temptations-meets-Sly B-side) and “Choo Choo” b/w “Ida Mae Foster.”

The Chess brothers sold the label in 1969, and Leonard Chess died in October of that year, so it’s probably irrelevant whether the Radiants left or were dropped. The group cut their final tracks in 1971 for Twinight Records, with

The radio version of the Secret History of Chicago Music airs on Outside the Loop on WGN Radio 720 AM, Saturdays at 5 AM with host Mike Stephen. Past shows are archived at outsidetheloopradio.com/tag/secrethistory-of-chicago-music.

MUSIC

PICK OF THE WEEK

Pitch-dark drone-doom supergroup Khanate make a rare Chicago appearance

Recommended and notable shows with critics’ insights for the week of May 29

b ALL AGES F

KHANATE, JON MUELLER Fri 5/30, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport, $39.34, $52.21 balcony, $328.17 six-seat opera box. 17+

THERE’S DOOM, there’s drone, there’s sludge—and then there’s Khanate. Formed in 2000, the inimitable supergroup—guitarist Steven O’Malley (Sunn O))), Burning Witch), drummer Tim Wyskida (Blind Idiot God, Insect Ark), bassist James Plotkin (OLD), and vocalist Alan Dubin (OLD, Gnaw)—slithered with the dreadful weight of a massive diseased torso, building a pitch-dark sound from distortion, feedback, and mind-numbingly slow tempos. The four albums they released in the following decade are all atavistic slabs of self-loathing, self-flagellating abjection.

Khanate have always felt like a band crawling through an abyss out of time, so while it was a surprise when they dropped an unannounced fifth album 14 years after 2009’s Clean Hands Go Foul, it made sense that they’d picked up in the exact wasteland where they left off. On 2023’s To Be Cruel (Sacred Bones), O’Malley tortures his guitar more

than he plays it; Wyskida hits his drums with enormous blows so widely spaced that he might be in sync with the slowly shifting tectonic plates below; and Plotkin holds on for dear life as his bass threatens to swallow the record whole. All the while, Dubin shrieks koans of surreal despair. “Let’s die!” he urges on “Like a Poisoned Dog.” “Let’s all . . . the horror of a smile.”

Each of the record’s three tracks hovers around the 20-minute mark, dragging on till every bit of flesh has been scraped from O’Malley’s fingertips and your scalded eardrums. This is music to endure, not to enjoy—or rather, the enjoyment is in the endurance. Khanate have defined—and perhaps discovered—one of the purest and most defiled poles at the extreme end of the world of modern music. Don’t miss this rare opportunity to have them shatter your puerile essence in person.

—NOAH BERLATSKY

THURSDAY29

Neu Blume Sleeper’s Bell and the Conor Lynch Band open. 8:30 PM, the Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, $15, $12 in advance. 21+

Neu Blume make music that celebrates the joy and contentment in the everyday. The Detroit-based band is led by the duo of vocalist Mo Neuharth and vocalist-guitarist Colson Miller, who moved to the city from Arizona, where they’d cofounded Phoenix indie-rock group Nanami Ozone. In Neu Blume, they create spacious, sunlit alt-folk that feels light not because it ignores life’s ups and downs but because it transcends them. The title track of their debut full-length, April’s Let It Win (Music Sounds), is so similar melodically to the Beatles’ “Don’t Let Me Down” that you could hear it as a response— but where John Lennon pours his anxieties about the staying power of his budding romance with Yoko Ono into an anguished plea, Neuharth calmly assures her partner that she’s in his corner, even when the chips are down. That sort of idyllic domesticity also suffuses “Chene Trombly,” where Neuharth and Miller entwine their voices and wax poetic about driving suburban streets lit by the floodlights of a neighborhood park and soundtracked by chirping cicadas. Even when the going gets a little rough, as it does on the twangy “Don’t Know How to Change” (about keeping on doing the same thing and expecting different results), the girl-group–style “doot-doo” vocals and overall easygoing vibe make it clear that everything’s going to work out fine.

—JAMIE LUDWIG

FRIDAY30

Khanate See Pick of the Week at le . Jon Mueller opens. 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport, $39.34, $52.21 balcony, $328.17 six-seat opera box. 17+

Problems Lovely Little Girls headline; Problems and Shri open. 10 PM, Cole’s, 2338 N. Milwaukee, $14.45. 21+

Darren Keen has been making freak music from the heartland for longer than there’s been a TSA. Born in Lincoln, Nebraska, and based in Chicago, he’s been weaving through midwestern music scenes since the late 90s, talking shit on Conor Oberst and writing material for freewheeling bands and solo projects that tells ridiculous tales of middleAmerican boredom and depravity. In a 2007 interview with independent music blog Lazy-i, he described his outsider trajectory: “A lot of bands start off cool and keep getting cool, but I started off so lame and went from there.”

Keen’s solo project Problems, launched in 2020, combines sophisticated electronic production with lyrics so blisteringly sincere it sometimes hurts to listen to them. For instance, the 2021 EP Dog Is Love starts with “Love of a Dog,” a matter-of-fact song extolling the virtues of being the object of canine affection. (“There is nothing more important in life / Than the love of a dog.”) The three instrumental tracks that make up the rest of the EP all have

EBRU YILDIZ

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titles that open them up to interpretation about being, observing, or interacting with dogs. Problems’ extensive catalog includes a variety of similarly complex production styles, punctuated with extremely flat, straightforward vocals—except for This Is Working Out (Orange Milk), which is entirely instrumental. Its songs’ ridiculous fitness-themed titles (“LSD Protein Shake,” “Down to Beef Up”) disguise smartly eclectic instrumental tracks that mine some of dance music’s most ephemeral genres. Keen runs Personal Space Booking, a small management company representing regional talents, including Heet Deth and Plack Blague, and last year he became talent buyer for the Burlington Bar. This show at Cole’s won’t be your last chance to catch Problems live, but it’s good to embrace the chaos whenever you can. Keen’s a goofy guy who simply loves the game; no one makes it this long in DIY without some infectious earnestness.

—MICCO CAPORALE

SATURDAY31

Preoccupations Still Depths open. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $33.17. 21+

Calgary postpunk four-piece Preoccupations formed in 2012 from the ashes of noisy art-punk outfit Women. As Viet Cong, they dropped a strong debut album in 2015, then changed their regrettable name the following year in response to accusations of racial insensitivity and cultural appropriation. As Preoccupations, they’ve released three more solid albums of tantalizingly complex postpunk, infused with electronic flourishes and textured with elements of psychedelic, shoegaze, and ambient music.

MUSIC

Their brand-new fifth record, Ill at Ease , zeroes in on the tension between growing increasingly wary of the outside world and developing greater self-awareness and self-acceptance—undoubtedly relatable to a lot of fans over 30 grappling with

the absurd realities of 2025. Preoccupations employ forward-thinking sonic experiments while wearing their love of synth pop from the 80s and 90s on their collective sleeve. “Focus” kicks things off with urgent knocking, then opens the door to serene guitars over a driving beat. The bright mood is offset by the cryptic, ominous lyrics of vocalist and bassist Matt Flegel, which describe a struggle against the collapse of shared values. “The diagnosis is: I’m doing my best to forget everything that I know,” he sings. “But I can’t shake the shame of mistakes that I made / It must have happened here a thousand years ago.” Much of the record depends on hooks, but Preoccupations sometimes get more atmospheric and dreamy—a rapid synth pulse like the rhythmic chop of helicopter blades lurks beneath the relaxed swing of “Retrograde.” Despite its title, Ill at Ease feels most grounded when dread and positivity coexist. The chorus of the tense, seesawing “Andromeda” prays for a collision between the band’s spaceship and Andromeda. (For those keeping score at home, the Milky Way is in fact expected to collide with the Andromeda galaxy in about 4.5 billion years.) Sometimes your best hope is also your demise. —JAMIE LUDWIG

Your Old Droog Meyhem Lauren, Kipp Stone, and Recoechi open; DJ RTC spins. 8 PM, Metro, 3730 N. Clark, $35, $30 in advance, $60 preshow. 18+

Your Old Droog is always working, sharpening his tools as he grows his celebrated catalog. Born Dmitry Kutsenko in Ukraine and raised in Brooklyn, the prolifi c MC is known for his sardonic lyricism, and he’s clocked more than a decade in the trenches of independent hip-hop, collaborating with some of the genre’s best, including Mach-Hommy, Roc Marciano, and the late, great MF Doom. Droog’s latest album, last year’s Movie , feels grander than much of his output to date, partly due to the beats provided by a heavy slate of producers, including Just Blaze and Harry Fraud. Among the standouts are the Madlib-produced banger “Care Plan,” which features a rare guest verse from hip-hop legend Yasiin Bey, and “Yodi Dodi,” where Droog raps about his homebody tendencies over a sweet loop of sliding bass and delicate flute.

Most recently, Droog dropped the second release in his bare-bones “Witch in the Kitchen” series, for which he spits lines in an actual kitchen while his frequent collaborator, turntable legend Edan, handles the decks. For Chicago fans, it’s enough to whet the appetite for Droog’s upcoming concert at Metro. The stacked bill, assembled by local record label Closed Sessions, features beloved locals DJ RTC and Recoechi, Ohio rapper- producer Kipp Stone, and Queens hiphop stalwart Meyhem Lauren. Some might recognize Lauren mainly from his work on Action Bronson’s globe-trotting, cuisine-gobbling Viceland show Fuck, That’s Delicious, but hip-hop fans know him first and foremost as an endearing MC with a respectable discography. (He’s got a joint album with DJ Muggs and Madlib, for crying out loud!) This show promises a night of ultra-impressive, modern boom-bap—grab your tickets while they last.

—CRISTALLE BOWEN

v

Preoccupations YOONHA PARK, MARLAENA MOORE, JON SHERMAN

Mo Neuharth and Colson Miller of Neu Blume COURTESY THE ARTIST

Darren Keen of Problems COURTESY THE ARTIST

Your Old Droog COURTESY THE ARTIST

The

SAVAGE LOVE

SEX AND RELATIONSHIPS

Slut biome

By DAN SAVAGE

Q : My girlfriend and I started to do butt play (her butt) about two months ago. It was a once-per-week thing, first with butt plugs and then, a er two weeks, anal. Two weeks ago, shortly a er anal sex, she caught a really bad flu (confirmed by a medical test) that lasted a week, with a stubborn fever and fatigue. She is not the type to usually get knocked out by an illness; she’s healthy, active, eats well, etc. A er her symptoms finally passed, we waited about a week, and then we were back to business, though this time with just the butt plug. A day later, her fever and fatigue were back, and again they hit her harder than she’s used to and lasted a few days.

So, here’s the thing: Everyone’s talking these days about the importance of the body’s natural biome and healthy bacteria. I know that gut bacteria are obviously deeper in the intestine, but I’d imagine there’s got to be some “good bugs” in the ass, too, right? Basically, I’m wondering if she’s just been having a spate of bad luck with some coincidental timing, or if shoving stuff up your butt can actually weaken or damage your biome and kill your healthy bacteria.

Some other details: She doesn’t use any chemical anal douches or anything (just shower water, thoroughly applied

by hand), the butt plug is silicone (washed with soap and water), we use Sliquid Sassy (a waterbased lube), we never go A-to-V, and there’s no evidence we’re doing things too rough (e.g., some moderate soreness the day after but no blood). Neither of us wants to give up our new hobby, but we also don’t want to risk damaging her immunity. Is there any evidence, medically or anecdotally, that this is a real issue? —BIOLOGY UPENDS NAUGHTY SHENANIGANS

a : Your girlfriend’s gastrointestinal tract is 30 feet long—so, unless you’re hung like three consecutive horses (and/ or you’re shopping for butt plugs in the “you’ve got to be kidding me” aisle of the sex shop), BUNS, you’re only playing with the last six to ten inches. And the bacteria in your girlfriend’s rectum (good witch bacteria, bad witch bacteria) are on their way out, BUNS, not up. Douching and anal play can only hasten their departure. So, I would chalk your girlfriend’s recent postanal-play illnesses up to coincidence. And if what she experienced was a thing—or if it was still a common thing (“flu-like symptoms” are an early sign of HIV infection)— rabid antigay bigots would not shut up about it (they love talking about butt stuff ), and actual gay men would schedule

anal on the Fridays of three-day weekends. Just the fact that sexually active gay men into anal (#NotAllGayMen) don’t set aside three days to recover a er anal sex is solid anecdotal evidence that this was a coincidence, BUNS, not a thing.

Q : Trans woman from Denmark here. I’ve matched with a cuck on Feeld who’s looking for people who want to have sex with his fiancee. He was clear this is not a simple “hotwifing” scene, as he enjoys the humiliation aspect of it. So, if this thing happens (we are still negotiating), what word would I use to describe myself? What would my position be called? I heard on the podcast that the person who fucks the wife of a cuckold is sometimes called a “bull.” This strikes me as a very malecoded term. What if the third party is a woman? Does this touch upon some kind of gender bias in the cuck culture? Is it more typical to want a man to fuck your partner? —NERVOUS ABOUT TERMINOLOGY

a : You don’t fuck another man’s fiancee— or another man’s wife or girlfriend or boyfriend or husband—with a term, NAT. You fuck another man’s fiancee with whatever it is you enjoy fucking people with, e.g. your fingers, your tongue, your toys, your

strap-on, etc. Also, you will not have to present a business card with “bull” engraved on it when you arrive, NAT, and you will not be announced by a herald when you enter the bedroom. Cuckold scenes are about power, not nicknames, and you can enjoy the power play—you can enjoy having sex with this man’s fiancee—without having to embrace and/or tacitly endorse terms other people use to describe themselves when they fuck other people’s partners.

That said, “bull” is the most common term for the third in a cuckold scene, and a bull is typically understood to be a dominant, well-endowed man who is sexually superior to the cuck. Some people feel the term is hypermasculine (in a bad way), dehumanizing (in a bad way), and racially loaded (in a very bad way). The stereotype of the Black bull—brought in to ravish a white wife while the white husband watches—is a common trope in cuck porn and

play, and some find it deeply problematic. But something can be problematic and still be a turnon. There are Black men out there who identify as bulls and enjoy playing that role for couples who respect them as people. But the term is optional. If you’re into the dynamic and the chemistry with this couple is right, and you’re certain his fiancee has enthusiastically consented to “cheating” with you, you can and should go for it—as yourself. But if you like the term, NAT, you aren’t disqualified from using it just because you’re a woman. While the term is male-coded, it’s also insertive-partner-coded (bulls do the fucking), but gay cucks refer to the men who sleep with their top husbands as bottom bulls. If gay bottoms can use the term “bull,” NAT, why can’t a woman? v

Read the rest of this column, listen to Savage Lovecast , see full archives, and more at the URL savage.love. m mailbox@savage.love

JOBS

Assistant Professor Loyola University Chicago is seeking an Assistant Professor in Chicago, IL to teach classes on a variety of criminal justice & criminology topics at the undergraduate &/ or graduate levels. Up to 50% remote work allowed. Full time. $50,000 - $85,000/ yr. Competitive compensation (please see https:// www.luc.edu/hr/ benefits/). Please send resume to cdonner@luc.edu & ref job #082589.

Beyond Finance (Chicago, IL) seeks experienced professionals to fill the following openings: Data Scientist ($94,000$114,000), Salesforce Development Manager ($156,000-$234,000), Sr. Marketing and Analytics Associate ($94,000-$114,000), SDET Manager ($128,000$192,000), Senior Salesforce Developer ($112,000-$168,000), Senior Director, Strategy & Operations ($164,000$246,000), & Salesforce Developer ($92,000$138,000). See details at beyondfinance.com/ careers. Work is performed in co’s office in Chicago w/some remote work permitted per co policy. Benefits inc. co contribs for H/D/V, generous PTO, holidays, parental leave, 401(k) match, merit adv. opps, career dev. & training. Apply: Send resume to bllcrecruiting@ beyondfinance.com with the job title in subject line. bllcrecruiting@ beyondfinance.com

Construction Supervisor: Franklin Park IL. Directly sup & coord activities of constr workers. Inspect work progress, eqpt, constr sites to verify safety, ensure specs are met. Read specs: blueprints, to determine constr requirements, plan proc, assign & coord work. Plan, direct, coord, through subordinate personnel, constr activities. Participate in development

of constr project, oversee org, sched, budgeting, impl. 2 yrs exp. Green Construction and Development, Inc. greenconstructiond@ gmail.com

Consultant, Construction Mgmt - (Chicago, IL), WSP USA Solutions: Cndct field invstigtn with architects and sr engrs to assess bldng systems including paved parking lots. Salary $91,000/yr. Stnd corp benfts. Reqs: Bach’s (or frgn equiv) in Architecture, Engg Technlgy or a rltd fld; 2 yrs’ of exp as Princple/Sr Architect or rltd. Email resume to jobs@wsp.com, Ref: 4802.

Cvl Engr - (Chicago, IL), WSP USA Inc.: Prfrm advncd dsgn tsks & drwngs usng comp-aided dsgn (CADD) rltd to the dvlpmnt of trnsprtatn prjcts in Microstation & OpenRoads. Stnd corp benfts. Salary $118,581.00. EOE. Reqs: Mas’s in Cvl Engnrng, Trnsprtatn Engnrng, or rltd fld, & 3 yrs of exp as a Trnsprtatn Engnr, Strctral Engnr, Cvl Engnr, or rltd rol. Rsrch exp is accptble. Emplyr will accpt a Bach & 5 yrs of exp in lieu of a Mas’s & 3 years of experience. Apply to: jobs@wsp.com, Ref: 9907.

Esperanza Health Centers seeks Vice President, Information Technology in Chicago, IL: Maximize business intelligence systems throughout org. Assess company data & system needs & implement appropriate strategies. Telecommuting permitted from Chicago area 1-day a week. Degree & commensurate exp. req’d. For pay scale, benefits & to apply online visit www. esperanzachicago.org/ page/career-opportunities.

Software Technical Manager, Chicago. Administer software apps, execute mods; develop analytical tools, reports; create, execute test cases. Master’s in IT/ related. Start at $89,336 w/ health/dental/vision/life, 403(b), tuition remission, PTO benefits. Send resume, cover letter to Melissa Munoz-Rush, Manager, HR, Illinois Institute of Technology, 10 W 35th St., Ste. 1300, Chicago, IL 60616.

The Jems of Insurance Group Inc. seeks a Business Intelligence Analyst. Mail resume to 7222 W. Cermak Rd, Suite 713, North Riverside, IL 60546

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