Chicago Reader print issue of October 16, 2025 (Vol. 55, No. 3)

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THIS WEEK

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IN THIS ISSUE

NIGHT ISSUE

04 Staff Note | Caporale Even in darkness, life finds a way.

08 Photo Essay Working the night shift 10 Night | Prout An exploration of the city’s dusk-tilldawn wildlife and the humans who study it 12 News Let out of jail late at night 16 Preview | Cardoza Jupiter Magazine takes on filmmaking.

18 Theater | Reid Late-night live performances face new challenges since COVID. 20 Film | Friedman-Parks & McFadden Chicagoans share their movie picks at Terror Vision Records and Video.

INTERIM PUBLISHER ROB CROCKER DIRECTOR OF ADVERTISING AND REVENUE PRODUCTS AMBER NETTLES CHIEF OF STAFF ELLEN KAULIG ---------------------------------------------------------------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, MIKE SULA FEATURES WRITER KATIE PROUT SOCIAL JUSTICE REPORTER DEVYN-MARSHALL BROWN (DMB) STAFF WRITER MICCO CAPORALE SOCIAL MEDIA ENGAGEMENT ASSOCIATE CHARLI RENKEN

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CITY LIFE

06 Environment Activists help protect residents from potential Damen Silos demolition pollution (Borderless Magazine).

ARTS & CULTURE

15 Profile | Cardoza The experimental short films of Paige Taul

THEATER

17 Plays of Note Trap Door’s Dutchman and Raven’s Oak both explore Black people caught in surreal and scary environments.

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

FILM

DEVELOPMENT MANAGER JOEY MANDEVILLE DATA ASSOCIATE TATIANA PEREZ

22 Moviegoer It’s a hapax legomenon.

22 Movies of Note Ken Camp’s 1984 trance-slasher film Highway Hypnosis and Jane Schoenbrun’s 2018 experimental documentary A Self-Induced Hallucination both ask prescient questions.

---------------------------------------------------------------MARKETING MANAGER MAJA STACHNIK MARKETING ASSOCIATE MICHAEL THOMPSON ----------------------------------------------------------------

MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE

SALES REPRESENTATIVE WILL ROGERS SALES REPRESENTATIVE KELLY BRAUN SALES REPRESENTATIVE VANESSA FLEMING

24 City of Win Thirteendegrees° leads the underground rap renaissance of #NewChicago.

26 Secret History Panicsville proves how vast “sound art” can be.

28 Soundboard Previews of concerts including MachHommy, Home Is Where, Frog, and Amy Rigby 30 Gossip Wolf Hannah Frances returns to celebrate a new album with a Chicago band, Adamn Killa turns his TikTok comedy on Trump’s occupying troops, and more.

CLASSIFIEDS 31 Jobs 31 Marketplace 31 Services 31 Matches

(Clockwise from top) The Infinite Wrench ANNA GELMAN A group of Chicagoans celebrates as they recieve a loved one from the jail around 9:15 PM on Aug. 20. DAVE BYRNES Saddam Khan, a clerk at a Lakeview 7-Eleven near the Southport corridor DELANEY EUBANKS Moth sheet at night in LaBagh Woods ROBERT LOERZEL Terror Vision goers discuss Empire Records (1995) SHIRA FRIEDMAN-PARKS

2 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 16, 2025

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ON THE COVER Shadow puppetry by Drew Dir (left) for Chicago Reader.

Dir is a director and puppet designer at Manual Cinema.

Creative direction by Shira Friedman-Parks; photos by Kirk Williamson. For more of Dir’s work, visit manualcinema. com or @manual_cinema on Instagram.

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STAFF NOTE M oments of profound darkness are often called night. That’s part of why Elie Wiesel took it for the name of his 1956 Holocaust memoir. Night is a potent metaphor, not only for the way it shrouds in black horrors too unbearable to witness, but also because it creates a temporality that offers hope: If we wait long enough, light will come.

Darkness always leads to dawn.

But night—figuratively and literally—has its own rhythms and always has. Though it exists in contrast to the day, night provides conditions that sustain its own people, animals, businesses, and experiences. The tensions between night and day are something of what is captured by Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (1985), when a nine-to-fiver encounters a woman at a diner only to end up navigating the bowels of New York City’s underground, and Susan Seidelman’s Desperately Seeking Susan (1985), when a bored housewife goes to great lengths to trade lives with a nightlife fixture she knows only through personal ads. For all its agonies and ecstasies, “nightlife” is still “life.” It’s

neither better nor worse than day life; it simply is.

In this issue, we wanted to emphasize what happens at night—the things people living according to daylight forget about or miss, as much as what makes life at night challenging or unique. In a photo essay, contributor Delaney Eubanks recognizes the workers who clock in after most others have gone to

bed. Features writer Katie Prout introduces us to the local wildlife that thrives in darkness, while contributor Dave Byrnes shines a spotlight on Cook County jail’s growing penchant for releasing people after 11 PM, when it’s much harder to get home. Editor Kerry Reid explores why late-night performance spaces have struggled to sustain themselves since the arrival of COVID-19, and

editor Taryn McFadden and designer Shira Friedman-Parks talk to people who buy movies from a late-night video pop-up.

At this juncture in Chicago’s history, we know all our readers are waiting for some kind of dawn. We hope this reminds you that even in darkness, life fi nds a way. v —Micco Caporale, staff writer m mcaporale@chicagoreader.com

NIGHT WALKS June 8, 2021, at 11:41 PM: Castaways Bar & Grill at North Avenue Beach, before its recent renovation and name change PHILIP MONTORO

A NEW GAME IS

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Get lost in the beauty of the night.

Our annual celebration of outstanding Chicagoans

COMING NOVEMBER 20

Find us at this year’s Chicago Women’s Expo in Rosemont on October 25th & 26th!

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CITY LIFE ENVIRONMENT

Environmental advocates keep eyes on Damen Silos as demolition resumes For months, activists have been surveilling the Damen Silos demolition to ensure that environmental protection measures are in place and enforced.

By AYDALI CAMPA This story was originally published by Borderless Magazine. Visit their website and sign up for their newsletter at borderlessmag. org

O

n a Friday afternoon in September, Kate Eakin and a volunteer drone photographer surveilled the Damen Silos demolition site. They captured photos and videos of what appeared to be dust hovering over the concrete towers being torn down, and sent some of them to Alder Julia Ramirez (12th).

It’s the kind of message Ramirez had been getting from southwest-side residents monitoring the demolition of the historic silos—a site that’s been a familiar marker of home all her life.

“Some people may feel like it’s callout culture,” Ramirez said. “I think it’s just these checks and balances.”

Eakin, executive director of the McKinley Park Development Council (MPDC), recruited volunteers to document the demolition process since it began in July. They’ve been pointing phones and drones at the century-old towers, creating an informal surveillance network of residents monitoring for water and air pollution.

They say they are stepping in to fill gaps in oversight of the complex demolition in a community already burdened by industrial hazards.

Eakin said concerns and skepticism over demolition oversight stem from the city’s history of handling complex demolitions.

The Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH) issued a temporary stop-work order last week to investigate dust noticed by city inspectors at the site to evaluate whether current dust mitigation plans are sufficient as the demolition focuses on the largest tower remaining. However, the work resumed on Wednesday, according to city officials.

Eakin said she was pleased to hear the

6 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 16, 2025

demolition had paused after noticing issues.

“We hope that changes in the demolition plan will make real improvements to protect neighbors and natural resources,” she said.

Last year, debris from the Bally’s Chicago casino demolition spilled into the North Branch of the Chicago River. In 2020, a smokestack implosion in Little Village sent a dust plume over the neighborhood that residents blamed for health issues.

Three years ago, Michael Tadin—owner of an asphalt plant that has generated hundreds of complaints since 2018—bought the 23-acre Damen Silos site from the state for $6.5 million.

The purchase left southwest-side residents

bracing for another polluting industry. The neighborhood is already home to a controversial metal scrap shredder, manufacturing plants, and high diesel truck traffic.

Leading up to the sale, advocates pushed for the site’s redevelopment into festival grounds, according to reporting from Block Club Chicago.

Tadin told Borderless Magazine that there are no plans for the future use of the site after the demolition is completed. He also contended that city inspectors have been on-site throughout the entire demolition process and that there have been no environmental violations since the demolition began.

Historical significance and ongoing demolition Built in 1906, the historic Damen Silos became Chicago’s first skyscraper, transforming the city into a regional hub for agricultural exchange. For 70 years, grain flowed through the structures that served as grain elevators.

Even after closing in 1977, the towers remained iconic. They have been a familiar sight to commuters on the Stevenson Expressway and the Orange Line, a backdrop to countless landscape photos of the Chicago skyline, and featured in Michael Bay’s 2014 film Transformers: Age of Extinction.

Now, after nearly half a century of standing abandoned by the Chicago River, they’re almost gone.

Since the demolition began three months ago, Heneghan Wrecking Company has taken down the buildings surrounding the silos and large parts of the silos, sparking concerns from those surveilling the operation about whether the demolition is happening too quickly to ensure environmental regulation compliance.

The city’s Department of Buildings (DOB) and the CDPH are overseeing the demolition,

Ajay Chatha (R) joins fellow organizers with the Pilsen Environmental Rights and Reform Organization (PERRO) as they observe the demolition of the Damen Silos on Wednesday, September 24, 2025. MAX HERMAN/BORDERLESS MAGAZINE

CITY LIFE and inspectors from both agencies are expected to be on site for the entire process.

According to CDPH, they may also issue tickets for air pollution–related issues and material mismanagement. The contractor is required to recycle or reuse at least half of the demolition remnants. The agency can also stop the demolition if inspectors detect dust leaving the site and if air monitoring shows that PM10—fine and coarse particulate matter levels that can trigger respiratory problems—exceed the set limit for two consecutive days.

Alfredo Romo, executive director of Neighbors for Environmental Justice (N4EJ) based in McKinley Park, is concerned about dust from the demolition of the old concrete structures, especially on windy and poor air quality days.

He said CPDH should also monitor the air for fine particulate matter, PM2.5, and wants the air monitoring data to be made available to the public.

Air monitors only detected elevated PM10 levels on multiple days during the Canadian wildfires, CDPH said. Still, the agency said it has not observed any violations since the demolition began despite the temporary pause.

“PM10 is monitored because it is the best measure to determine if dust is leaving the site,” CDPH said.

But Pilsen Environmental Rights and Reform Organization (PERRO) members say they have noticed dust plumes coming from the demolition operations even though it was being hosed down.

Ajay Chatha, a PERRO organizer who has been monitoring the demolition progress three times per week, said the temporary pause allowed residents to breathe but was unsure how an updated plan would better protect the community when work resumes.

When asked about community concerns, DOB commissioner Marlene Hopkins said the agency spent months coordinating with CDPH before issuing demolition permits in July, developing what it called a comprehensive framework based on lessons from past demolitions. The agency said multiple community meetings allowed residents to raise concerns about dust control and other environmental protections, which, she said, led to a stronger demolition plan.

“We cannot and will not repeat the mistakes of the past, which is why complex demolitions require stringent review and public engagement,” Hopkins said. “This isn’t just about issuing permits in accordance with code—it’s

about accountability and going beyond minimum requirements when community safety demands it.”

Some locals have also expressed concern that the demolition is happening too quickly, potentially skipping crucial measures to control dust.

The DOB said that the timeline communicated to the public “has always been dependent on the weather, and as recent weather conditions have been satisfactory, there have been fewer delays in work.”

The agency also said that a series of steps follow the demolition of the building, including clearing the debris, sorting and separating materials, backfilling open foundations, and leveling the site.

River concerns

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) has primary jurisdiction over the river, where barges have been positioned to catch falling debris.

The USACE’s role is to halt or modify work if necessary and ensure permit compliance. It does not regulate general pollutants or chemical contamination, which falls under the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and state authority, according to Teralyn Pompeii, regulatory branch chief for the USACE’s Chicago District.

The agency periodically conducts inspections and plans to coordinate with the EPA, state, and Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago if contamination occurs during demolition, Pompeii said.

“To date, the District has not identified any illicit discharge of demolition debris or other fill material at the Damen Silos site,” she said.

But residents aren’t trusting official oversight alone.

“We have been more concerned with making sure nothing goes in the river,” said Eakin of MPDC. “We’ve got eyes on what’s going on in the river, and we have been communicating with the Army Corps of Engineers about concerns from various parties.”

Eakin argues that while permits were required for the demolition, there is a lack of enforcement to ensure debris doesn’t fall into the water as the demolition is carried out. She said the responsibility falls on people like her and other community activists.

“Basically, there’s not a lot of enforcement tools,” said Eakin. “There’s responsibility if something does go in the water, but there’s not a lot of proactive enforcement.”

A barge was placed on the river up against

the edge of the site where the silos sit, but Eakin thinks debris can easily fall into the cracks between the barge and the site, and that the barge isn’t big enough to capture all the debris that could fall.

She called on Urban Rivers to oversee water pollution in the river from the demolition debris. Members of the organization collected samples of the river near the demolition before and during the demolition and are sending them to researchers at Northwestern University. Phil Nicodemus, research director at Urban Rivers, said they do not have the results back yet.

“We don’t want there to be some major problem with water quality that just goes unnoticed because nobody’s bothering to look for it,” Nicodemus said.

Looking ahead

As surveillance continues, so does the uncertainty over the site’s future use.

Romo of N4EJ said they are preparing to push back against a redevelopment that could bring in more pollution to McKinley Park.

“If [Tadin] has an intention to bring another

source of air pollution, we’re going to challenge that,” Romo said.

At the same time, residents on the southwest side are also bracing for the demolition of the Fisk Generating Station in Pilsen, an abandoned coal power plant about two miles away. Citing similar concerns of environmentally hazardous dust polluting the air and waterways in the process, local advocates like Chatha from PERRO are urging the city to deny demolition permits for the retired plant.

Demolition oversight and future redevelopment of these two sites in an already environmentally overburdened area could determine how much added pollution these neighborhoods receive.

Chatha said that whatever replaces these towers will shape their neighborhood for decades to come. v

m Aydali Campa is a Report for America

corps member and covers environmental justice and immigrant communities for Borderless Magazine. Send her an email at aydali@borderlessmag.org.

“THIS IS A VERY PERSONAL FAMILY TALE, NOT UNLIKE THOSE PLAYING OUT MORE AND MORE, EVERY DAY IN CHICAGO AND AROUND THE U.S.” – Playwright Sandra Delgado

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OCTOBER 16, 2025 - CHICAGO READER 7

PHOTO ESSAY

Night shift The people who keep Chicago going from dusk till dawn.

By DELANEY EUBANKS

Saddam Khan 7-Eleven, 10 PM to 7 AM Saddam Khan, a clerk at a Lakeview 7-Eleven near the Southport corridor, has worked the night shift since he graduated with his bachelor’s degree in 2016. “The job market is really tough in India, so I only got the opportunity to work the night shift .” He moved to the U.S. in 2023 and started working at one of his cousin’s 7-Eleven franchises. With few willing to work the all-night shift , Khan thought it would be the right thing to do. “You know, work hard and save money when you’re young.”

Seven days a week, he cleans, stocks shelves, and works the register.

He says he’d work the day shift if he could, but the night shift has its advantages. Very few people come in during the early morning hours, which he appreciates as an introvert. During these slow shift s, he can listen to music or talk to his family back in India, where it’s daytime. “I can be in my zone, just being myself.”

When I ask him what he thinks of the old adage, “Nothing good happens after midnight,” he replies, “Any hour is a good hour.” DELANEY EUBANKS

Nick Beinbrech Golden Apple Grille & Breakfast House, 10 PM to 6 AM “I feel like I could only do the night shift ,” says Nick Beinbrech, a server at Lakeview’s iconic 24-hour Golden Apple diner. It’s more relaxed, he says. People are done for the day and aren’t in such a rush. It makes for a calmer crowd of customers. He typically wakes up around 9 PM, then works from 10 PM to 6 AM. “I don’t think people understand that. When people walk into the restaurant at 10, 11 PM, they think that you’re on the same schedule as they are,” he says. People don’t have to think about how the city isn’t built for people who work nights. For instance, some errands can only happen during the day: doctor’s appointments, laundry. There are days Beinbrech only gets three hours of sleep before clocking in.

Still, the night shift works for him. A self-described night owl, Beinbrech tells me that before he began working overnight, he’d wake up with anxiety in the mornings, and now he doesn’t. “When I work a night shift , I don’t get morning anxiety,” he says. “I don’t even get anxiety when I go to work at 10, 11 PM. It’s just something that I wake up [with] in the morning. It’s hard for me to function properly that way. I think waking up late just works better for me.”

DELANEY EUBANKS

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Elise Grant MedVet, 7:30 PM to 8 AM Seven years ago, veterinary tech Elise Grant was asked to help cover the night shift at MedVet Chicago. It was “one of the best things that could have ever happened,” she says. To this day, she works 12-hour shift s, three nights on, then four days off.

The Avondale veterinary hospital is open 24/7, 365 days a year, and like human hospitals, patients can arrive at any time with emergencies. Grant says that one of the biggest challenges is helping pet owners manage their emotions. “You’re dealing with an owner who’s tired, scared,” she says. “The compassion we have to have for that person— because they’re dealing with so many more things, because it’s the middle of the night—is, I think, higher.”

The MedVet night team is smaller than the daytime crew, which can add to the intensity of their workload. “It’s not as easy as a lot of

Ian Rodriguez Chicago Fire Department Engine 83, 6 AM to 6 AM Ian Rodriguez has worked as a firefighter and EMT for four years.

“I was looking for more purpose, adventure, but also knowledge of just how life operates.”

At the Uptown firehouse, he leans back in an office chair, surrounded by other firefighters talking casually among themselves. At any moment, a call can come in for an emergency nearby. The team averages over 20 calls per 24-hour shift . Some of those calls could involve fighting fires, getting people off the train tracks, administering CPR, executing water rescues, climbing roofs, or performing vehicle extrications, all on only a few hours of sleep. “We don’t know the house [or situation] that we’re getting called to, but we go in no matter what,” Rodriguez says.

It’s challenging work, and he likens it to being a professional athlete with its intense physical and mental strain. “It’s very demanding.” So, he stresses the importance of taking care of himself in the 48 hours between his shift s to avoid burnout; hobbies and therapy help him bounce back from traumatic calls.

Regardless of the strain, he prefers working nights. “There’s a mystique about night,” he says. And it’s ultimately the people, his colleagues and those they serve, who keep him going. “We directly protect the people of . . . Uptown, so we have a lot of pride in that. It’s a very diverse neighborhood, whether race, wealth, or age. We greet people with the utmost respect every time.” DELANEY EUBANKS

Haley Hatton Night Ministry, 8 PM to midnight “Harm reduction at its core is meeting people where they’re at without judgment,” says Haley Hatton, a harm reduction specialist for the Night Ministry, a local nonprofit that provides human connection, health care, and housing support to Chicagoans experiencing poverty or housing crises. Every Thursday from 8 PM to midnight, her team joins a group of volunteers at the Forest Park Blue Line stop. Together, they provide meals, harm reduction supplies, and clean toothbrushes for unhoused Chicagoans, many of whom seek shelter on the city’s 24-hour train lines, while a makeshift clinic provides medical care.

people like to say it is,” Grant says.

But it has also led to an irreplaceable closeness she loves. “I see [my coworkers] probably more than I see my husband sometimes,” she jokes. But in earnest, “I’m grateful to have those people to depend on and rely on as well.

It’s kind of a surefire, secret community of people who know what it’s like.”

Hatton greets each client with genuine kindness. As she directs them to grab food, water, and medical supplies, she pauses to look them in the eye and says how good it is to see them. “It’s what I love to do,” she says. “It’s really just human-to-human work, and it just feels really good. There’s mutual love and respect with the people I get to work with. And I am so, so grateful for this constant opportunity to get to know my neighbors.”

Hatton relishes being able to provide comfort and support to her clients. “It’s the same level of care and love that I think it’s important to receive all around the clock,” she says. For those who may see the night as uninviting or dangerous, she challenges them to spend a night shift with the Night Ministry. “There is some good and pure love and community that really happens, even after most of the city has gone to sleep.” DELANEY EUBANKS

DELANEY EUBANKS

T

he city doesn’t go to sleep just because most of us do. Some people work nights, keeping the city going. Haley Hatton, a harm reduction specialist for the Night Ministry, put it plainly: “[This work] doesn’t just happen by magic.”

So, for a month, I stayed up late and met night workers across the city and across industries. In addition to Hatton, a corner store

clerk, a diner server, a firefighter, and a vet tech all shared their stories with me. Most of them feel working nights offers a cheat code to the city’s chief annoyances, like traffic and crowds. There’s also a magic to Chicago nights to which they have special access: the golden

hue that radiates from streetlights, the skyline shining off the lake, quiet solitude difficult to find in the city, and a kinship with their fellow night workers.

Working nights also presents its unique challenges—exhaustion, rowdy and drunk people,

rude customers, long hours (and, of course, strange photographers)—yet they all have done it for years. And some wouldn’t have it any other way. v

m letters@chicagoreader.com OCTOBER 16, 2025 - CHICAGO READER 9

FEATURE

Chicago’s creatures of the night An exploration of the city’s dusktill-dawn wildlife and the humans who study it

By KATIE PROUT

A

few winters ago, I was running on the lakefront after sundown when I noticed another runner loping my way. This one was on all fours, silvery in the winter moonlight. Warily, we circled each other, then kept going in our respective directions.

It was my first Chicago coyote sighting, but not my last. Like many other Chicagoans, I’ve spotted a few coyotes out in the daylight at Graceland Cemetery. I was surprised to see creatures I assumed were nocturnal, but Mason Fidino, quantitative ecologist at the Urban Wildlife Institute at the Lincoln Park Zoo, said that’s not entirely accurate.

Fidino studies how animals change their behavior according to their environment, especially when their environment contains humans. In Chicago, he and his colleagues at the zoo monitor one hundred or so motion-triggered trail cameras, or camera traps, that they’ve scattered in a 25-mile radius from the city’s center: in city parks, outside forest preserves, on golf courses, along the 606 trail, and in cemeteries. “We’ve got cameras next to the Bean!” he told me. Four times a year, for the last 15 years, those cameras are turned on for a month. Photos are uploaded to Chicago Wildlife Watch, where the public can help identify animals caught on camera and chat with scientists (like Fidino) as they do so. “The diversity of species that we pick up is just super impressive,” Fidino said. “We documented our first river otter this year, which was absolutely astounding. We’ve still never seen a bobcat, but maybe someday. And we’re just waiting to pick up armadillos in Chicago.”

River otters and armadillos are diurnal, or most active during the day. Bobcats are mostly nocturnal but can also be crepuscular—most active at dawn and dusk—and they make

10 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 16, 2025

an appearance during the day as suits their needs, which are increasingly impacted by humans. Take the coyote I saw: In environments with fewer humans, coyotes are most active at dawn and dusk, although they can be active during the day, too. But in cities, to avoid humans while still taking advantage of the abundant resources urban areas provide, coyotes, raccoons, and other normally crepuscular mammals turn nocturnal.

“If you asked a coyote, ‘Hey, do you want to be active at night here?’ The coyote would probably go, ‘Honestly, no. I’m a species that’s much more crepuscular,’” Fidino said. He called them “misanthropic synanthropes”: misanthropes hate people, and synanthropes are wild animals that live alongside humans for the benefits we bring, among them more food and water, and fewer predators.

Other local night creatures include woodchucks and two species of weasel—the longtailed and the rudely named “least.” They’re occasionally spotted in Chicago but are more prevalent in the city’s outskirts, as are beavers.

Striped skunks scuttle both in and out of the city. Chicago’s eight species of bats are nocturnal, as are southern flying squirrels, though I saw one flitting through trees above me the morning I called Fidino. The white-tailed deer of Chicagoland roam nightly, though they’d be more crepuscular in human-free woods. Cottontail rabbits are more active at night. When temperatures start to drop, possums become more active during the day for warmth. “It’s because they have those bare little hands and tails,” Fidino explains.

It’s clear that the sleeping habits of many species are more malleable than we might popularly understand.

After analyzing observations of 445 mammalian species from camera trap data gathered throughout the world (including Chicago), Fidino, along with other scientists around the globe, found that less than half the species’ current classification of nocturnal, diurnal, or crepuscular was accurate. Not only that, but many species fit more than one classification.

As one might expect, there are many factors that play into an animal’s wake time and activity—the presence of humans and our lights and changing environmental temperatures among them. Their paper was published in Science Advances this year.

Among their findings was the understanding that animals adapt their wake and sleep behaviors according to human activity, and that animals—like humans—try to live where they have the most resources. Personally, Fid-

ino has observed that the east side of the 606 trail has more fox squirrels and the west side has more gray squirrels. Like flying squirrels, gray squirrels are also generally more present on the north side of the city, where there are more resources than on the south side, thanks to historical disinvestment and redlining.

(According to Project Squirrel, founded by University of Illinois Chicago professor Joel Brown and biologist Wendy Jackson, “Gray squirrels [are also] associated with densely populated areas, parks and campuses, fox squirrels with suburban areas.”) Coyotes “also

and city parks, they “try to be respectful of [people’s] use of the space.” Machine learning blurs the faces of any humans caught on the camera traps. Though we’re mainly diurnal, some of us—third-shifters, bartenders, insomniacs, newborns—get most active when the sun goes down.

For decades, Chicagoland’s woods and forest preserves have been rife with rumors reflecting our popular panics and cultural obsessions. There was the Satanic panic of the 1980s. (“We are convinced, but cannot prove, that babies and others have been used,”

An Isabella tiger moth ROBERT LOERZEL

correlate positively with higher income,” Fidino explained, and are more present on the north side, though they have been spotted throughout the city. The income itself, of course, doesn’t draw them in, but perhaps the larger amount of green space that accompanies higher investment does.

But nocturnal wildlife can be found in every Chicago neighborhood. For example, Chicago is home to eight different types of owl, according to the Chicago Park District, and they make their homes throughout the city. Even industrial areas can be habitats for coyotes, explained Fidino, as they are devoid of humans at night.

Humans are animals too. “I’ve seen just about everything you can see on a camera,” Fidino allowed when I asked him about human nocturnal behaviors. When researchers place the cameras in public spaces like the 606

said a police officer, the sole source of a 1989 story on teenage devil worship and human sacrifice in the Chicago Tribune.) Then there were the Mothman sightings of the 2010s and 2020s. (“Isn’t it kind of fun for there to be a bit of magic around, to let there be a little bit of mystery in the world?” Fidino said in a 2024 Tribune story gently debunking these supernatural reports.)

In 1989, the cop quoted in the aforementioned Tribune story described going into the woods to look for animal corpses whose bodies bore evidence—or so he believed—of ritual sacrifice. The Tribune advised readers to “stay out of deep woods near cemeteries late at night when fires are flickering, especially when the moon is full.” But in August 2025, seven people met after sunset near a picnic shelter in LaBagh Woods. They brought with them a diesel generator, a large frame made

out of PVC pipes, and a white bedsheet they stretched across the frame and staked into the ground like a camping tent. They all volunteer as ecological stewards of LaBagh Woods and gathered that night to monitor moths, real ones with names more poetic than the legendary cryptid’s: wavy-lined emeralds, pale beauties, tufted apple buds, and lucernes.

Lights dangled off the sides of the frame. A larger light, set on a tripod and aimed toward the sheet, beamed into the night like the bat signal. (Despite what the signal implies in Batman stories, bats—if they live away from human civilization—actively avoid light. Although nocturnal, they’re most active shortly

without him.

The volunteers waited and watched in the dark. Over three hours, the seven recorded 426 observations of 105 insect species via pictures they uploaded online; later, a total of 41 people would log on and confirm the identities of what they saw. In addition to moths, the monitors observed other insects, like the yellow net-spinning caddisfly and the golden sweeper.

“That was a pretty standard night,” said volunteer Joel McFarland. “But we have noticed that we get the highest number of insects and species when it’s hotter, more humid weather.” As the weather has become more unpredictable because of climate change, so have the group’s observations. The monitors usually try to set up next to the same slough, or wetland, in LaBagh Woods, but for two

“He got some really good pictures of it and talked about it to anybody who would listen.”

The day after our interview, McFarland followed up over email. “I’m not sure how well I conveyed this,” he wrote, “but one of the things that made Dennis really special is that he was dedicated to the hard work of environmental restoration—organizing workdays, clearing invasives, maintaining equipment—but also took the time to marvel at the beauty and diversity of the smallest creatures at LaBagh.”

As the moth monitors show, you don’t have to be a scientist to be a steward. You just have to notice the world around you. Curiosity about what we see encourages us to care.

Once, driving over the Chicago River in Pilsen after midnight, Reader culture editor Kerry Cardoza saw a giant animal running up

A coyote and deer are caught on camera traps; volunteer monitors in LaBagh Woods observe insects at night. LINCOLN PARK ZOO URBAN WILDLIFE INSTITUTE; ROBERT LOERZEL

after the sun sets. However, since artificial light attracts many insects that bats eat, urban bats have adapted to feast all night.) This pipe-and-sheet contraption was built by Dennis Marton, a gruff and grandfatherly retired United Airlines employee who grew up near LaBagh Woods. “This was my playground,” he told WTTW for a 2020 story on the volunteers. Marton dedicated decades of his life to the care of LaBagh Woods. Different light frequencies attract different insects, and Marton spent years adjusting the lights on the PVC frame to ensure their brightness would attract a variety, rather than hurt or repel them. Marton died in July at age 79; that August night was the first time the moth monitors met

months this summer, they noticed the slough was completely dry.

From spring to fall, the group meets monthly to mothwatch, though they also track other insects. In total, the group has observed 341 insect species since they started. McFarland is partial to treehoppers. “They’re super, super tiny and have this interesting body shape: a kind of hump on the back that’s projected out above [them],” he said. As for Marton, McFarland said, he favored the polyphemus moth, a gorgeous, tawny moth with a six-inch wingspan and two deep purple spots on its hindwings that make the creature appear to be observing you, too. “I remember how excited he was, just to catch it,” McFarland recalled.

between the cars behind her. “I’ve seen a lot of coyotes in the city, and I’ve never seen a coyote anywhere near that big,” she told me. Cardoza noted the animal’s fur, which was strikingly gray. It took off toward the river, where she lost sight of it in the dark. Later, Cardoza looked up gray wolves, which were plentiful in Illinois until white settlers deliberately killed them all before 1860.

“I’ve told this story a lot, but no one believes me,” she said. Her friend, who was driving, didn’t see the creature; Cardoza was its only witness. “It was moving too wild to be a dog,” she recalled. “It was crazy. It was beautiful.”

“I’m sorry,” said Fidino over the phone, sounding truly regretful. “There’s just no

wolves here.” What Cardoza may have seen, he suggested, was a very big coyote, especially if it was wintertime—they grow out large winter coats. Or perhaps it was a really large dog. “But one thing it would not be is a wolf,” he said. “If you wanted to see a wolf, I would encourage you to go down to the Lincoln Park Zoo and enjoy the red wolf exhibit. It’s not quite the same as a gray wolf, but those are about the only ones you could see here in the city of Chicago.”

We want to believe. Like coyotes, wolves are generally crepuscular. In recent years, according to the Illinois Department of Natural Resources (IDNR), gray wolves have been spotted in Illinois. While the IDNR isn’t aware of any “self-sustaining populations or packs currently residing in Illinois,” 11 gray wolves have been documented in Illinois since 2002, three of them closer to Chicago than I would’ve thought. In 2005, a male wolf was hit by a vehicle and died just north of Chain O’ Lakes State Park in northern Lake County. In 2009, a male wolf was killed in western Kane County by a coyote hunter, and a female wolf died after being hit by a vehicle in southwestern La Salle County in 2013.

“I feel like it’s not impossible,” said Cardoza, that what she saw was a gray wolf. Highly unlikely? Yes. But I agree—not impossible.

My own nocturnal creature kept me largely indoors after sundown this summer. Every night, as our lantern-eyed black cat prowled, my spouse and I rocked and fed our newborn next to a sound machine that doubles as a night-light—red, the color of the womb. I missed out on fireflies, yet another creature that is not strictly nocturnal—some species are active during the day. They’re one of my favorite parts of summer, but pulled into the glow of my phone while fighting to stay awake and care for my baby, I read that their population may be on the decline. Human light pollution, as well as construction, use of pesticides, and aggressive lawn maintenance, may be negatively impacting their numbers. I asked McFarland about this.

“It’s funny,” he said, sounding excited, “this is the type of thing LaBagh volunteers talk about at length when we get together.” This summer, McFarland said, they noticed even more fireflies than usual, at least in LaBagh.

It’s a hopeful impression they all share, if unquantifiable, since fireflies aren’t attracted to the artificial light the moth monitors shine.

Out there in the dark, they make their own. v

m kprout@chicagoreader.com OCTOBER 16, 2025 - CHICAGO READER 11

INVESTIGATION

Leaving Hotel California Night time is prime time for releases at the Cook County jail.

By DAVE BYRNES

I

t was half past midnight and eight women had just been released from the Cook County jail. They hadn’t eaten in hours. They didn’t have their phones, keys, or anything else they had on them when they were arrested; a few didn’t even have sure ways to get home. One, a recent transplant to the city with no close contacts, broke down in tears at the prospect of a night on the streets.

That was a Thursday in May, and those women were only a few of the people released from the jail long after the sun went down that night. Their situation is far from rare. According to discharge data from the Cook County Sheriff’s Office, late-night jail releases have only become more common over the last five years.

Data obtained through the Freedom of Information Act shows that, between May 29, 2020, and July 30, 2025, more than 133,000 people were released from the jail onto the intersection of 27th Street and California Avenue on Chicago’s south side. Of those, more than twice as many people were released between 8 PM and 5 AM as between 5 AM and 8 PM—about 94,000 releases at night compared to slightly more than 39,000 releases during the day.

The percentage of people released between 11 PM and 3 AM—when there are virtually no California buses north or south—likewise jumped significantly over the same five-year stretch. These wee-hour discharges accounted for just 14 percent of everyone released to the street in 2021 and 40 percent of people discharged in 2024.

Volunteers with Chicago Community Jail Support, a group that offers aid and resources to people being released from the county jail, back up the hard data with their own experiences. In multiple interviews this summer, CCJS volunteers reported a trend of people getting out later at night.

“In the last six to eight months, maybe a year, basically no one comes out before 9 o’clock,” said Seth P., a longtime jail support volunteer using a pseudonym to avoid police scrutiny. Another volunteer named Lawrence, who likewise asked that the Reader only use

12 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 16, 2025

to 27th and California can include those who live outside Chicago, have nowhere to spend the night, need medical attention, or need to recover property held by police in a different part of the city.

Jail support volunteers say they’ve resorted to all kinds of ad hoc solutions for addressing these needs: booking hotel rooms for people with nowhere to spend the night, stocking Narcan, helping people who were recently released find addresses of relatives they barely remember but whose homes may be their only hope for shelter. “Last Saturday I gave a ride to someone all the way out to Midlothian,” a jail support volunteer going by Lauren said on

their first name, gave a similar account in August. “It usually comes in waves. It often feels like, when we’re packing up for the night, there will be a wave of like 12 people,” they said.

The increasing trend of late-night releases correlates with CCJS’s own history. The loose, volunteer-run organization initially came together in 2020 to provide moral and material support to people arrested during protests against police violence but has persisted long after the protests dissipated.

Over time, the group’s mission changed from supporting protesters to helping everyone released from the so-called Hotel California. They now run their small aid station—marked by a deep-purple tent—almost every night outside the jail’s exit on 27th and California and provide people released with whatever resources they have available: food, water, first aid, bus passes, phone calls to loved ones, warm clothes, even rides home when the need arises.

The group typically operates two shifts, from 6:30 to 9 PM Chicago Community Jail Support and 9 to 11:30 PM, though it’s volunteers DAVE BYRNES common for volunteers to stay out even longer. Core organizers with the group said that beAugust 15, referring to the cause of the increasing number village some 25 miles west of late-night releases, they’re of the jail. also considering adding a third Dozens of people may shift to cover the small mornbe released on any given ing hours. “I feel like we’re not night. Despite doing everydoing the task we set out for thing they can, organizers ourselves if we don’t stay until concede they don’t have at least 12:30,” Seth P. said. the capacity to consistentTransit, shelter, and rely handle so many needs sources are all less accessible so late at night. Shifts are late at night. The health risks often staffed by only two of cold and inclement weather or three people, and the are magnified. People released group’s volunteer nature

“There’s this persistence of desire for support and community around something that is so intensely dehumanizing.”

means staffing availability can shift daily. “A lot of the needs persist,” Lawrence said. “People being released late, in all kinds of weather, with nothing and nowhere to go.”

Letting people out late at night can also endanger other parts of their lives—like their jobs, families, and social responsibilities, said Sharlyn Grace, senior policy adviser at the Law Office of the Cook County Public Defender. “It’s a serious problem and something that harms a lot of people,” Grace said. “I don’t know why this has gotten so much worse.” She emphasized that people released the same day or only a few days after their arrest were particularly vulnerable. “Instead of being released

two or three hours later, they’re missing work because they’re not getting out until 12 or 13 hours later,” Grace said.

Roughly half the 133,000 people released to 27th and California between May 29, 2020, and July 31, 2025, spent less than a day in jail, sheriff’s office data shows. The median time spent behind bars was about 14 hours.

Late-night releases can also inconvenience families and loved ones. It’s common to see people waiting, sometimes for hours, outside the jail exit. Some wait in their cars, others outside the jail reception area on 27th and California, some even spend the time with jail

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Correctional officers leave the Cook County jail during a shift change on August 15, 2025. DAVE BYRNES

support volunteers. “OK, now it’s 8 PM, still no sign of them. Now it’s 10 PM, still no sign of them,” Grace said.

People released from the jail themselves report being frustrated with how long it takes to be processed out and then let go. Multiple people who spoke with the Reader in August reported waiting hours—sometimes as few

as two but sometimes as many as 12—to be released. “The only reason [jail staff ] gave us for the wait is that it’s shift change,” a woman who asked only to be called Emily said on August 20, after being freed shortly before 11 PM. “Besides that, they just said it happens when it happens.”

The sheriff ’s office, in a written statement,

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continued from p. 13

denied any connection between jail staff shift changes and release times, or that staff deliberately wait until shift changes to release people.

The cascading issues resulting from latenight releases—and how the increase of latenight releases correlates with CCJS’s own operational history—has led some volunteers to suspect the jail is releasing people at increasingly late times specifically to disrupt their aid efforts. The Cook County Sheriff’s Office denied this, but the sentiment remains among some volunteers. “I can’t say for sure, but it definitely feels targeted,” Seth P. said.

If it’s not targeted at jail support volunteers, what’s causing this climbing trend of latenight releases? The sheriff’s office pointed much of the blame away from itself, citing a number of alleged delays in release processing it said were out of its control. “One of the largest, and most long-standing, contributors to longer release times is the continued use of a paper system to transmit court orders to the jail. The Sheriff has for years advocated for a modern, electronic system to replace the archaic and inefficient paper system,” said Matthew Walberg, a spokesperson for the sheriff ’s office, in a prepared statement.

Walberg further explained that, when court operations began bouncing back from the pandemic in 2021, the number of jail discharges began to increase. So too, he said, did the “time-to-discharge.” Combined with this allegedly inefficient paper system, the sheriff ’s office claimed that release documents sent from the court clerk’s office could take hours to reach the jail’s records department. “This meant that if, for example, a court ordered an individual released during a 2:30 PM hearing, the jail would not learn of the order and begin processing it until 5:30 or 6:30 PM,” Walberg said.

SHIRA FRIEDMAN-PARKS

iff ’s Office has full access to the Circuit Court’s case management system, which provides immediate electronic access to release orders.”

Walberg also pointed to alleged judicial delays caused by the Pretrial Fairness Act, which eliminated money bond in Illinois. “In September 2023, the Pre-Trial Fairness Act took effect, which dramatically expanded the amount of time judges spend on each case during initial appearance hearings and instituted new procedures that caused additional increases in the time it takes for a court order for release to reach [the jail records department],” Walberg said. “Today, it is common to see delays of up to six hours between the time a court orders an individual’s release and the time the paper copy of that order is received by Records.”

However, the sheriff’s office provided no hard data establishing a causal link between

11 PM and 3 AM occurred between 2021 and 2022. The number and share of daytime and early evening releases also fell from 2021 to 2022.

Other causes the sheriff’s office cited for late-night release times include the time needed to fit monitoring devices on people ordered to electronic monitoring and fingerprinting procedures with the Illinois State Police (ISP).

Walberg’s statement implied some recent change in those fingerprinting procedures— that the jail used to only supply ISP with one print but now provides ten—without giving a definitive time frame. “Where it used to take approximately one hour for ISP to analyze a single print, it can now take up to three hours to get ten prints back,” Walberg said.

ISP public information officer Melaney Arnold refuted the claim in an email statement. “The Cook County Sheriff ’s Office may have recently changed its procedures, but the Illinois State Police has always required a ten-print submission for custodial status or identifications purposes.

ISP’s response time has not increased, and in most cases, occurs in less than an hour,” Arnold wrote.

Diamond, who asked to use a pseudonym for fear of police retribution, was released just before 1 AM on August 21. She claimed jail staff refused to release people until they behaved in a way in which the staff approved. “If you

“It’s a serious problem and something that harms a lot of people.”

However, the Cook County Circuit Court Clerk’s Office refuted some of the sheriff’s office’s claims. “The Clerk’s Office does not rely on a paper-only system to transmit court orders. After a judge signs the order, they are transmitted through secure electronic and physical processes, ensuring timely and accurate delivery,” said Rowida Zatar, executive clerk of external affairs for the circuit court, in a prepared statement. “The Cook County Sher-

14 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 16, 2025

the law and the increasing trends of late releases. The office did provide two graphs claiming to “illustrate the increase in time that is largely attributable to [Pretrial Fairness Act]–related delays,” but those graphs only demonstrated the increasing trend of latenight releases itself, not how the law caused them. Additionally, as Walberg noted, the Pretrial Fairness Act took effect in September 2023. The largest jump in releases between

loud, that piss the officers off. They keep you in there even though your paperwork is done,” she said. Several men released earlier the same night reported a similar experience.

The sheriff ’s office asked for the names of individuals who had complained about treatment by jail staff, with Walberg arguing, “It is impossible to address these specific allegations when the identity of the individual is unknown.

“We would argue that it is unfair to publish these allegations without giving the Jail the ability to speak directly to the specific incidents, if any,” Walberg continued, though he did provide a link to the sheriff ’s Office of Professional Review complaint form for any individuals who believed they had faced abuse by a sheriff ’s office employee.

Due to the fear of retaliation expressed by Diamond and others, the Reader did not disclose their identities to the sheriff ’s office.

Jessica Wang, a legal fellow at the MacArthur Justice Center, said the sheriff ’s office’s explanations for release delays struck her as deflection. She also said that regardless of the specific factor or factors causing late-night releases, the sheriff ’s office is responsible for protecting the constitutional rights of everyone in its custody. Late-night releases, she said, raise questions about violations of people’s Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable seizures, including unreasonably prolonged detention. “I think the fact it’s taking so long to release these people . . . and they’re being released in the middle of the night, does raise some Constitutional questions around, you know, is this in step with the Fourth Amendment?” Wang asked.

When asked what it would do to reverse the late-night release trend and ensure more people are let out during daylight or business hours, the sheriff ’s office responded: “We continue to work with other criminal justice system stakeholders to address long-standing sources of delay, such as the lack of an electronic mittimus system, and to streamline forms and processes to ensure that the correct individuals are being released in an efficient and timely manner,” Walberg said.

For now, jail support volunteers say they will continue to be outside the jail as often as they can, providing whatever aid they can—even as the nights get longer. “There’s this persistence of desire for support and community around something that is so intensely dehumanizing,” Lawrence said. v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

TAUL R PAIGE paigetaul.com

PROFILE

Out of bounds Paige Taul’s precise short films take a diffuse approach to exploring Black cultural identity.

By KERRY CARDOZA

ARTS & CULTURE in the same cookie-cutter style development.

The film serves as a response of sorts to—and sometimes quotes directly from—documentary filmmaker William Greaves’s influential Still a Brother: Inside the Negro Middle Class (1968). Shot digitally and in black and white, 71 runs parallel to but in contrast with Greaves’s work. Both began with the same striking admission, from an unidentified Black man: “I

T

he first thing we see is that he’s wearing a spotless pair of white Air Force 1s. Then the rest of his frame comes into view: pristine joggers, tank, baseball cap—all bright white. He sports tiny gold hoops and a gold nose ring. Standing outside before a red brick wall, we slowly realize he’s posing for the camera. He faces this way, then that. He turns his hat forward, backward, at a slant. He squats; he crosses his arms, showing off his biceps. But he’s not doing this for our benefit. It’s for his girl.

Paige Taul’s short film 7-7-94 For my babe (2018) is a tiny revelation. A Polaroid that the artist’s father sent to her mother before being sent to prison was a jumping-off point, with a model—a stand-in for Taul’s father—considering From left : Stills from Paige Taul’s On Sunday and Full what pose to take. How did her father Contact COURTESY THE ARTIST want to be remembered? Then a young man—what did he think was cool?

I first encountered Taul’s film in a small, really cool,” Taul says. She eventually moved rogue screening room built for Chicago Artists into that department, concentrating on cineCoalition at 2022’s EXPO Chicago. It hasn’t left matography. “I did not go into school thinking me since. Taul’s work can do that to you; it is about art whatsoever,” Taul says. “But obviously came out thinking only about it.” sharp, calculated, just so.

Her experience at UVA—in a small program The filmmaker sees all her work as connected. All explore Black cultural identity, albeit primarily taught by one professor—was front through different expressions: from style to of mind recently as she worked on tenure refamily, from music to sports, from class mobil- view documents for the School of the Art Institute (SAIC), where she has taught since 2023. ity to personal mythmaking.

“I work serially with the intent that they She enjoys the flexibility of teaching at the can be played in this mixed match,” Taul says. school, where she can create courses around “They’re all sort of concerned with having topics she’s interested in while also taking on more foundational classes. But she doesn’t reached me at some point.”

The artist’s foray into filmmaking hap- feel that teaching informs her filmmaking.

The artist mostly takes inspiration from her pened serendipitously. She entered college at the University of Virginia planning to be a family and from other films. “I see something research biologist. A casual reference to en- that looks interesting, and I hold on to it,” she joying movies led another student to recom- says.

Her film 71, from 2022, stars the artist’s mend Taul check out professor Kevin Jerome Everson, a prolific filmmaker who taught in mother, Jessica Taul, and her aunt, Pamela Patterson, as they reflect on the Black middle the studio art department.

“I sat in on a few classes and thought he was class and their differing perspectives living

have to think within the structure of the society which I live, which is a white society. Their values are imposed on me, and I think this kind of way. I don’t think of myself as being a Negro.” At 19 minutes, it’s Taul’s longest piece so far; watching it, it’s easy to wish it were longer, so fascinating is it to listen to people uninhibitedly talking about class.

Taul says her family loves being included in her work—“They get mad when they’re not featured,” she tells me, laughing—and takes offense at people who look at that condescendingly. “I think there’s a taboo, especially in the arts, of saying parents are involved in some way,” she says, “as if parents can’t understand,

as if they’re not part of the audience you’re making the work for.”

Making sure her family can connect with the work is important. “If I’m making work about Black community, Black identity, then the people closest to me who identify as Black, if they can’t watch this and see something in it, then I’m doing something wrong,” she says.

The way Taul thinks about her work has evolved over time. “When I started making work, I was saying, ‘Oh, I’m thinking about alternative Blackness.’” But eventually that didn’t feel right; it was as if she were excluding her work from being a part of Black culture. “I hope I’ve gotten better at thinking about language that says, if something doesn’t follow the mainstream representation—not mainstream in media, but mainstream in cultural practice—to not say that it isn’t part of it.”

She doesn’t feel that describing her work as being interested in Black cultural identity is exactly right—she’s exploring something more nuanced. “I’m always looking for a specificity, a better way to visualize this experience, this feeling, this whatever, because it’s never going to be like a bull’s-eye, which is part of the fun,” she says. “The point is not to make the bull’s-eye. I think if anyone makes the work and says, ‘This is exactly the thing that I imagine,’ I, like, don’t believe it . . . because then that, to me, feels like a claim to ultimate truth, which I also don’t think is really true or real in certain things.”

For now, Taul is eager to keep exploring these interests, to keep working toward a greater understanding of cultural expression. (She’ll get the chance to do this more in-depth during an upcoming residency at the Mothership in Tangier, Morocco.) And she’ll be watching other films—perhaps the thing that excites her the most. Taul lights up when talking about her 2021 short film Goat, about a girl and her Jordans, and its subtle calling back to Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It (1986).

“I do love film so much,” Taul says. Taking a moment to ponder what other art inspires her, she laughs, “Other films almost exclusively.” v

m kcardoza@chicagoreader.com OCTOBER 16, 2025 - CHICAGO READER 15

IT’S JUST A FUCKING OPENING R 18 min. Screening as part of the Chicago International Film Festival’s Shorts 4: City & State, Thu 10/16 5:30 PM, AMC Newcity 14, 1500 N. Clybourn, Sun 10/19 12:30 PM, Chicago History Museum,

McCormick Theater, 1601 N. Clark, $17, chicagofilmfestival.com/film/shorts04-citystate

FILM

Everyone’s a critic With It’s Just a Fucking Opening, Jupiter Magazine pushes against the strictures of criticism.

By KERRY CARDOZA

I

f you’ve ever seen an art performance IRL (or gone to an art opening for that matter), the opening scene of It’s Just a Fucking Opening is likely to be chillingly familiar. Even more so if you’ve been the one performing.

While an unseen artist does their thing in the center of the gallery, the viewer embodies the artist themself—eyes scanning the half-engaged audience standing around awkwardly, some nodding, some looking perplexed. We hear the artist breathing heavi-

ly—maybe from the performance, maybe from spiral. It’s important to note that the art in anxiety. The camera jerks around; the image is question—whether it was good or bad, deep or grainy and interrupted by splashes of red and silly, effective or not—is never actually seen. yellow.

What we as viewers are shown instead is the What follows sets the tone of the entire social critique that surrounds the work, and short film: a group of friends, or frenemies, s p e a k i n g b l u n t l y, a n d maybe a little performatively, about what they all just witnessed. One says it lacked gravitas. Another bemoans the now ubiquitous use of burning herbs. Someone laments the art world’s appetite for Black trauma.

The rest of the film trails Anisa (Ireon Roach), the performance artist, around the afterparty. She’s paraded to an important gallerist by her best friend, realizes her partner missed the It’s Just a Fucking Opening COURTESY JUPITER MAGAZINE opening, and then overhears the ad-hoc critics from the film’s start, how the artist grapples with those reactions, which sends her further into a downward with the art-world apparatus, and with her

NIGHT WALKS crafted hair

local art

authentic vibe

February 6, 2024, at 9:55 PM: Columbia Beach near Pratt Boulevard PHILIP MONTORO

own ego and decision to make art in the first place.

The film, by Josh Brainin, Camille Bacon, and Youssef Boucetta, was produced by Jupiter Magazine—which makes total sense if you’re familiar with the publication. Launched in 2024 by young art world luminaries Daria Simone Harper and Bacon (a Chicagoan), the magazine has aimed to radically experiment with the forms that criticism can take from the start. Their inaugural issue featured an extended prose poem; issue three took the form of satellite public programming, wherein attendees experienced different cultural events together— including watching films, taking a tour of print media, doing yoga, and responding to writing prompts.

So on the heels of their second year, Jupiter expands once more, with a beautifully shot film that again takes aim at the prescribed limits of criticism—asking who does it and how and where. It’s a bold statement for a publication to make, one that is sure to spawn opinions among those in the art world that it’s desperate to shake up.

It’s also a love letter of sorts to Chicago’s art world in particular, filmed as it was in West Town’s Tala gallery and featuring an abundance of local, nonactor faces: Tala owner Francine Almeda, DJ Blesstonio (Antonio Robles), Document gallery partner Sibylle Friche, artists Jada-Amina Harvey and Stella Rae Binion, plus Bacon herself playing a small role.

Phones are also ever-present, which feels true to life but is also perhaps a nod to where so much criticism takes place these days. Sure, social media is home to people sharing their thoughts about the latest movie they watched or book they just read, but it’s often also where people are reading more traditional published reviews (like the one you’re reading now). Are the filmmakers hinting that it may pay to slow down, to cool the hot takes (both making and consuming them), to unplug and perhaps first take the time to consider what you actually think about a work of art before engaging with the maelstrom? If we’re to take Jupiter at their word—that it’s important to prioritize a slow writing and editing tempo—then I think they are. v

m kcardoza@chicagoreader.com 16 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 16, 2025

THEATER OPENING

R Crazy train

Trap Door’s Dutchman is arresting and disturbing.

Written when Amiri Baraka was still going by LeRoi Jones, 1964’s Dutchman is a deliberately discomfiting blend of absurdism and political allegory. Set on a subway train in New York and unfolding in real time, the story involves a young Black man named Clay (representative of his seemingly malleable nature and identity) and a white temptress named Lula, who makes her entrance munching on an apple like Eve. She teases and seduces while tormenting and insulting (a suitable embodiment of how the American dream has long been dangled just out of reach for non-white people). Clay largely avoids rising to the bait—until she mocks him as “Uncle Thomas Woolly-Head.”

Keith Surney’s spare but sharp staging for Trap Door, in which he plays Clay, divides Lula’s role between three actors—Carolyn Benjamin, Genevieve Corkery, and Ali Foley, with Benjamin doing most of the initial heavy lifting at making us believe Clay would stay engaged in conversation with this oddly repellent but confident woman. (There’s a 1966 film version available

Production Sponsor Whirled Peas Foundation

In Partnership with Curt's Cafe

Donald Trump, it’s not unfair, either. And it’s important to remember that Baraka’s play was written less than a decade after Carolyn Bryant’s claims that Emmett Till whistled at her led to the boy’s brutal murder. Dutchman (the play’s title evokes both the Dutch slave ships of the Middle Passage and the recursive and inescapable fate of the legendary Flying Dutchman ghost ship) is raw, confrontational, poetic, and sometimes maddening, but its pull for audiences and other playwrights (Chicago writer Tina Fakhrid-Deen gave it her own contemporary spin in 2022’s Pulled Punches) remains palpable, as Surney’s staging demonstrates. —KERRY REID DUTCHMAN

Through 10/25: Thu–Sat 8 PM; Trap Door Theatre, 1655 W. Cortland, 773-384-0494, trapdoortheatre. com, $22

R Swamp thing

Terry Guest’s Oak is a sure-handed blend of southern horror and social commentary.

Terry Guest’s aching, funny, and sometimes quite scary Oak, now in a local premiere at Raven Theatre under the direction of Mikael Burke, might hit a little too close to home with ICE out on our streets kidnapping adults and children. But that’s probably all the more reason to make time for it, especially if you’re looking for something for the scary season with a little social commentary meat on its bones.

Set in a small rural town in Georgia, where “snatching season” means that a certain number of kids disappear every year (with the white ones getting most of the media attention, of course), Guest’s play boldly plants its flag between the surreal and the all-too-real. The prologue, delivered by teenager Pickle (Jazzy Rush), tells the story of an enslaved woman, Odella, who disappeared in a creek while running away (which meant having to leave her infant daughter behind). Does her ghost claim the town’s children, or is something human to blame?

For Pickle, her little brother, Big Man (Donovan Session), and their exhausted single mom, Peaches (a blistering Brianna Buckley), getting through every day is hard enough even without thinking about whatever it is that lurks in the woods. But when the children’s cousin, Suga (Stephanie Mattos), disappears, they go on a quest that unpeels more layers of their family history and of Black southern history. (I never heard about the Atlanta Ripper, a serial killer who preyed on Black women in 1911 and 1912, until this show.)

It’s tempting, of course, to put Guest’s play in the Jordan Peele bucket of Black-centered Oak MICHAEL BROSILOW horror tales woven through with disquisitions on white supremacy. But Guest, who grew up in Georgia, obviously has great affection for southonline starring Shirley Knight and Al Freeman Jr.) As ern gothic tropes, whether leaning into their clammy Clay, Surney skillfully alternates between sunny bemusehorror or sending them up (a scene with Buckley as First ment and growing unease. And the casting conceit for Lady Temple, a hermit-like old woman who allegedly the women gives us a chance to see that while the white survived an encounter with Odella, is equal parts people around someone like Clay may change, their creepy and hilarious). Stellar design elements (including motivations, underlying bigotry, and taste for destroying Ethan Korvne’s original sound and music, Korvne and Black lives sadly stay the same.

Burke’s media design, Eric Watkins’s suitably crepuscular In some ways, the play still feels of its time, written lighting, and Sydney Lynne’s deceptively simple set, when Baraka was changing not only his name, but also featuring a wooden walkway over the “creek” with commoving out of his marriage to his Jewish first wife, Hettie mon household objects appearing as necessary) add to Jones, and more openly embracing Black nationalism. the tension between the real and supernatural in this There’s certainly a case to be made that embodying the sure-handed spooky show. —KERRY REID OAK Through 11/9: Thu–Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM; Raven Theatre, deadly effects of white supremacy in a white woman 6157 N. Clark, 773-338-2177, raventheatre.com, $45 dances with misogyny, but given that a majority of (student, military, and industry $20) v white women in this country voted three times for

OCTOBER 23 - NOVEMBER 16

MUSICTHEATERWORKS.com 9501 Skokie Blvd, Skokie Box Office: 847.673.6300

5 OCTOBER 16, 2025 - CHICAGO READER 17

AFTER HOURS

The late shows Audiences have shifted since COVID, but theater producers aren’t giving up on the night owls.

a lot of late-night stuff happening there just because it’s when people are getting off work or when we can get the space. There is that deliberate ‘transgression in the dark of night’ element that is on purpose for those kinds of things. I think there’s other art happening in Chicago that is late on purpose, that is not

like, if people work till five and they wanna get home from work, eat dinner, and then come back out, that can be quite a quick turnaround.

And with having burlesque shows, we need to have time to flip the room and clean up whatever weird mess someone leaves. In the burlesque world, it seems like post-COVID,

necessarily just comedy. But it is intending to be transgressive, and that’s the time to put it.”

Burlesque, drag, and variety shows often fall into the category of transgressive performance. But Newport Theater founder Eva la Feva notes that there have been shifts in late-night programming in that world as well. “I’ve been in the theater/burlesque world for a long time. And I remember when Uptown Underground was a thing, I think they had an 11 PM start time. [The burlesque venue on North Broadway closed in 2018.] To me, that seems so late. I’m always like, ‘Oh my gosh, I don’t wanna be out past 1 AM.’” La Feva also notes that the 9:30 PM slots at the Newport tend to be pretty popular for performers and audiences. “At our theater, we really struggled because I want to have two spots on Fridays and Saturdays, neither of which seem too early or too late. Friday at seven can sometimes be tricky because it’s

there definitely has been a bit of a departure from the super late-show start times.”

The Annoyance Theatre might have been the first in town to really push the idea of doing several different shows across different nights and time slots. But they, too, have scaled down late-night programming since 2020, though it definitely still exists. On Fridays at 11:59 PM, you can see Holy Fuck Comedy Hour, featuring material written in one week by the ensemble. On Saturdays at 11:59 PM, We Took Edibles an Hour Ago (which, as the name implies, features improvisers under the influence of cannabis) takes the stage.

Annoyance executive producer Jennifer Estlin tells me via email, “Late-night audiences have changed fairly drastically for us. It used to be that the 10 PM or 10:30 weekend show was the one that everyone wanted. Now, we’ve moved our second show slot earlier to 9 or 9:30, and we have shows starting as early as

By KERRY REID

L

ate-night theater in Chicago existed before the Neo-Futurists launched Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind in 1988. Second City, for example, has long had the tradition of late-night improv sets (known as Third Act) following their regular shows.

(Their current offerings on the mainstage and at Second City e.t.c., This Too Shall Slap and Chaos Theory of Everything, have 10 PM performances on Fridays and Saturdays.) Other improv and sketch theater venues, including the Annoyance Theatre and iO, also have regularly scheduled shows for the night-owl shift.

But as the longest-running late-night show in Chicago history, the Neo-Futurists (who changed the name of Too Much Light . . . to The Infinite Wrench after a very public 2016 dispute with founder Greg Allen) have seen generations of audience members experience the joy of discovering this fringe institution.

(If it’s been a minute since you’ve attended, it’s pretty much the same as it was in the early days. Audiences “order” short plays at random by yelling out one of the 30 titles on a menu; the clock counts down 60 minutes; and if the company sells out, they send out for pizza for the crowd.)

Yet the impact of the 2020 COVID-19 shutdown has made late-night producing more of a gamble than it used to be, according to several producers and performers I spoke with recently.

That includes the Neos. According to artistic director Connor Shioshita Pickett, who has been with the ensemble since 2017, the company had anticipated a drop-off in attendance for their signature show after the shutdown. “We moved the show from our traditional 11:30 PM start time to 10:30. And I think that was really useful in addressing the late-night lull.

We also have been lucky in Andersonville that we got a Taco Bell not long ago. No joke—the neighborhood is up later than it was before the Taco Bell opened,” says Pickett.

They note that their audiences tend to consist of “People who are just older than col-

18 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 16, 2025

The Infinite Wrench CONNOR SHIOSHITA PICKETT

lege age, like early to mid-20s. There are also pretty strong contingents of elder millennials and Gen Xers who remember the show from an earlier era, who might have kids now, and who are starting to bring their kids.”

Late-night programming isn’t just a marketing tool for the Neos, according to Pickett. “I think the Neos who came before me, who had a longer tenure before the pandemic began, were really intentional and serious that this is a late-night show that should remain a latenight show. In the ambiance of darkness, other possibilities emerge. Other transgressions and other ways of being and thinking, other points of view become possible that become less available as you go earlier into the evening.”

Pickett also notes, “I think we are a little bit less confrontational or intentionally transgressive in some ways because of the way that our scheduling has changed and the way the neighborhood has changed.”

Fletcher Pierson, general manager for the Neo-Futurists, says, “I come from a DIY theater and punk puppetry background, so there’s

“I think night is the time of dreaming.”

6:30 PM, and people come to them! Our midnight shows still get an audience, but it’s definitely much more sporadic than it used to be.”

Steven Plock, general manager at iO, also notes that they’ve scaled back late-night programming since 2020. (The theater actually closed down in summer 2020 under former owner Charna Halpern but returned under new ownership two years later.)

“For the first eight or nine years that I worked there, everything was eight o’clock and 10:30 showtimes, and then midnight showtimes on the weekends. We were pretty consistently open,” says Plock. “Saturday nights, we’d have people in the bar doing latenight improv jams until 3 AM. You’d be kicking people off the stage and closing out their tabs. And we haven’t really seen that post-COVID, for sure.”

Plock identifies several factors for the contraction in late-night audiences.

“Maybe it’s COVID, maybe it’s just generational differences. People certainly don’t drink as much alcohol, and social habits seem to be very different.

And then of course there’s an overabundance of entertainment that you can find from the comfort of your own home.”

The iO space features a full bar and restaurant, which Plock notes stays open until 11 PM every night. “If people are out late or if business is up on a Friday or Saturday, we’ll stay open as long as people are eating and drinking.”

Annoyance also has a full bar with a license that allows them to serve till 2 AM on weeknights and 3 AM on Saturdays. But that’s not enough to guarantee a late-night crowd, according to Estlin. “Often (especially on weeknights) our bar doesn’t stay open until our license hours . . . because it’s emptied out by midnight. We’re finding that in order to get late-night audiences, we need to program events rather than just rely on people coming to hang out. We’ve been doing parties once a month called Lipstick Lounge; they start at 9:30 and go until we close, and have been very well attended. So our programming strategy has had to be adjusted and definitely requires more one-night or short-run events.”

Keenan Camp has been producing RIFF: Chicago’s Music Improv Party across various venues for a decade. (It started out as VAMP: A Music Comedy Drinking Show.) The

show began in the Saturday 10 PM slot at the now-defunct MCL Chicago space in Lakeview, which was dedicated to musical comedy. “It was a BYOB theater, which was very helpful, and we were kind of a drinking show,” says Camp. After MCL Chicago closed, Camp moved his show to iO and tried to keep it going virtually during the pandemic. The company also did a brief stint in one of the smaller venues at the Second City complex and then returned to iO. Now they’re at the Newport. But it’s not a late-night show anymore. Instead, the show runs one Wednesday per month at 8 PM. The reasons for the shift, according to Camp, aren’t just about the changes in audience preferences. Camp took time off to go to grad school, and he discovered that “I can’t do a weekly show, and coordinate this show, and produce this show every week.” But he suspects the audiences the show draws also are looking for earlier options. “I think late night also equals kind of a more expensive night. You might go out beforehand, have a few drinks, have dinner, then you got a late-night show, and then maybe you’re out a little longer. Maybe you get home and then you’re pooped.”

One theme that emerged from the producers and performers I spoke with is that latenight audiences are, as Estlin notes, looking for something that feels like a special event,

“People certainly don’t drink as much alcohol, and social habits seem to be very different.”

RIFF: Chicago’s Music Improv Party KYLE MOORHOUSE

The Infinite Wrench ANNA GELMAN

which means thinking more creatively about booking acts. For example, Camp incorporates a live band or other musical act for each performance of RIFF, which he says brings in a different kind of audience than the usual improv or sketch fan.

Plock says, “We’ve experimented a lot with different types of programming that is more events structured, more exclusive, whether that’s music festivals, or after-parties, or just things like iO Fest.” The latter runs annually in the summer. “Those shows are packed until two in the morning,” says Plock.

As a producer, la Feva notes that one thing

that’s difficult across the board is that younger audiences in particular tend to make plans last-minute, which makes it hard to know if a show will actually have a decent house; she urges people to order tickets in advance as much as possible in order to support the work.

She also says that scheduling at the Newport requires taking into account different kinds of content. “If there’s a show that’s like a little more sex-forward or something, I do try to schedule those in the 9:30 PM slots. I’ve had people propose certain shows that I feel would be strange to have in a matinee slot, like dark, sexy, gothic vampires at 3 PM on a Sunday.”

Aside from wrestling with the business logistics of doing late-night, though, all the people I talked to spoke positively of the experience of creating live performances for the nocturnal animals among audiences.

For Pierson, it’s almost a mystical adventure. “I think night is the time of dreaming, and either you’re dreaming while you’re asleep or you’re dreaming because you’re out with your friends and the world feels different.

I was a fan of the Neos before I worked here, and every time I saw Infinite Wrench late at night, I would feel set, right? I would feel like so many things were possible in my own life and in society. You are in this space that is activated when everybody else is asleep, and then you step out onto the streets, and there’s still some cars, but really it’s just you spilling out of this other world. Everything feels much more possible.” v

m kreid@chicagoreader.com OCTOBER 16, 2025 - CHICAGO READER 19

VISION RECORDS AND VIDEO R TERROR Through Fri 10/31, 3729 N. Southport, 2–10 PM daily, terror-vision.com

FEATURE

Terror Vision at twilight Chicagoans share their movie picks at the late-night pop-up video store.

Photos BY SHIRA FRIEDMAN-PARKS, WORDS BY TARYN MCFADDEN

W

hen the sun sets on North Southport between Grace and Waveland, the glimmering marquee of the Music Box Theatre is the star of the block. But just south of the bustling cinema is a small storefront that also attracts moviegoers. Terror Vision Records and Video welcomes patrons with 70s decor, old-school media relics, eclectic oddities and collectibles, and a vast collection of Blu-rays, DVDs, and VHS tapes available to rent or buy.

The late-night pop-up shop opened on April 11 (the same day as the start of the Music Box’s David Lynch: Moving Through Time series, which naturally attracted fitting clientele) and will close on October 31. Ryan Graveface and Joe Swanberg always intended their establishment to be fleeting, but never fear: Graveface’s collection of movies will find a new home at the Graveface Museum Chicago in Wicker Park. The library of around 20,000 titles—previously the Odd Obsession collection— includes a range of genres but favors horror, oddball, cult, foreign, indie, and arthouse films.

Despite the beloved local big screen next door and the nearlimitless content available to stream from anywhere, Terror Vision sees pretty consistent business. Will Morris, who welcomed me from behind the counter, said that he almost always sees a rush before and after neighboring showtimes.

Whether visitors are just killing time or shopping with intention, it’s a refreshingly tactile experience to browse films the analog way. Terror Vision even advertises a collection of physical media exclusives—that is, titles completely unavailable to stream digitally.

According to Morris, the rental market is especially booming.

“Rentals have been insane,” Morris said.

20 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 16, 2025

“Everything keeps changing on streaming—things are available, then they’re not available, or they’re censored.

And it’s fun to just fill up your bookshelves.” —Laura

A selection of the most-rented films at Terror Vision CARNE (1991) CHRISTIANE F. (1981) LADY TERMINATOR (1989) ALUCARDA (1977) SALÒ, OR THE 120 DAYS OF SODOM (1975) RUBBER’S LOVER (1996) SEDUCTION: THE CRUEL WOMAN (1985) TRASH (1970) TETSUO: THE IRON MAN (1989) SWEET SWEETBACK’S BAADASSSSS SONG (1971) SUICIDE CLUB (SUICIDE CIRCLE) (2001) THE DEVILS (1971) APOCALYPSE NOW (1979) WORKPRINT TRIBULATION 99: ALIEN ANOMALIES UNDER AMERICA (1992) REFLECTIONS OF EVIL (2002) MYSTICS IN BALI (1981) GUINEA PIG 2: FLOWER OF FLESH AND BLOOD (1985) ZOMBIE (1979) MEET THE FEEBLES (1989) GUMMO (1997) BLIND WOMAN’S CURSE (1970)

Will Morris (top left) and the shelves of Terror Vision SHIRA FRIEDMAN-PARKS

“We really thought it’d be 20 to 30 people.”

Instead, the shop’s small corner shelf intended for active rentals has expanded to nearly floorto-ceiling stacks behind Morris, with dozens even piled neatly on the steps of a ladder

leaning against the wall. Terror Vision’s rental membership program—$15 monthly for up to three films at a time, in any format—is thriving; Morris said he still signs up four to five people per day, even as the pop-up nears its

closing date. (Memberships will transfer to the Graveface Museum location.)

“Turns out,” Morris added happily, “people want to rent movies.”

My colleague, Shira Friedman-Parks, joined me in visiting Terror Vision on a busy Friday night after dark. Together, we asked visitors what films they were eyeing or going home with. v

m sfriedman-parks@chicagoreader.com m tmcfadden@chicagoreader.com

Gibson and Kay’s pick Eephus (2024) “I’m a filmmaker, so I’m kind of privy to [physical media], and I work in a physical media store as well. I like having physical tokens and things to go back on and watch.” —Gibson

John’s pick Movies by Andy Warhol - Cira [sic] 1965: “My Hustler” / “Life of Juanita Castro”

Laura’s pick Linnea Quigley’s Horror Workout (1990)

Emnet’s pick Shoot the Piano Player (1960) “I like very dreamlike storytelling, and I was captivated by this ventriloquist-looking piano player [on the cover]. And also— Truffaut. Can’t go wrong.”

Jake’s picks Michael Jordan: Air Time (1993) and D2: The Mighty Ducks (1994)

Sabrina, Ryan, and Bella’s pick

Danny and Miguel’s picks

Empire Records (1995)

The Club (2015) and Meru (2015) “I’ve seen both before. They’re really hard to find otherwise, and I like to own my stuff.” —Miguel

David’s pick The Host (2006)

OCTOBER 16, 2025 - CHICAGO READER 21

FILM A still from Female Trouble (1974) COURTESY DOC FILMS

D

oc Films at the University of Chicago was largely the subject of my column last week, and it will be this week, but for different reasons. One of which is that I started volunteering there. Whenever there’s a 9:30 PM (or 10 PM) screening on a Saturday night, there I’ll be as a fireguard. Anyone who’s been to Doc even a few times is probably familiar with the position; the show captain, who introduces the screening and goes over the house rules, references the fireguard in these prologues. They sit in the back by the door and are the point of contact if there’s a problem during the show. (The name is a little misleading, having nothing to do with guarding from fires or any other such cataclysms; fireguards are mostly just needed if the film goes out of focus or something like that.)

For my very first shift, the film screening was John Waters’s Female Trouble (1974) on 35 millimeter. Waters might be the Pope of Trash, but he’s also an avuncular figure, memes of whom advise us that sometimes stupid and cute are enough, and that if they don’t read, don’t fuck ’em. As a result, it can be easy to forget, between viewings of his films—especially his 70s films— that they are genuinely shocking. Like, visible skid marks on underwear during sex and killing your own child shocking. And this one was a blast. The audience was small, considering it was prime time on Saturday night, but everyone was having fun. By the second half, the audience couldn’t contain their reactions. The undergrad with whom I was volunteering had planned to leave a little bit of the way in to attend a party, but he ended up staying, enraptured with Waters’s batshit insanity.

One might say Waters is a singular figure.

Something of a hapax legomenon, if you will:

22 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 16, 2025

“A word or form occurring only once in a document or corpus.” Hapax Legomena is the name of a seven-film cycle by experimental filmmaker Hollis Frampton, spanning three hours, that screened Sunday night at Doc. He described it as “a single work composed of detachable parts, each of which may be seen separately for its own qualities.” And thanks to Olivia Hunter Willke, who programmed the Sunday night Frampton series (and is also my good friend), we were able to see it in its entirety. It was mesmerizing.

My favorites were the first and last films in the series: Nostalgia (1971) involves a series of photographs as they’re slowly burned atop a hot plate, over which another experimental master, Michael Snow, reads stories that Frampton had composed from his memories. The photograph shown aligns with the story read over the previous photo, creating a dissonance that both echoes the general instability of memories and illuminates their temporality, making them at once volatile and precious.

Special Effects (1972) involves a rectangle composed of white dashes that throbs against a stark black background with synth music blaring. I didn’t realize that it was a static image being photographed with a handheld telephoto lens, which accounts for the rectangle’s apparent movement. It’s an effect that’s special, but because it’s a static image that only appears to be moving because of the handheld camera, is it technically a special effect as understood in common film parlance? The rectangle also mimics the film frame, of course, but it’s the perceived movement of the rectangle that fascinated me. I also appreciated the soundtrack, which, as I said that night, made it feel like a game of Pong was yelling at me.

Other screenings of the week included Jean Rollin’s Fascination (1979) at the Alamo Drafthouse (Rollin is the subject of this month’s Terror Tuesday theme, so there will be more on him in future columns); Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf (1968) at the Music Box Theatre as part of their monthlong Music Box of Horrors series; and, finally, multiple showings as part of Celluloid Now. The projection setups of the latter were impressive; they suggest the illusion of cinema—that so much is going on behind the scenes to make it look seamless on the screen.

Until next time, moviegoers. —KAT SACHS v

The Moviegoer is the diary of a local film buff, collecting the best of what Chicago’s independent and underground film scene has to offer.

NOW PLAYING

R Highway Hypnosis

Amid the still-evolving terror of the early HIV/ AIDS crisis, Ken Camp’s 1984 trance-slasher film Highway Hypnosis asks something prescient: Could the impression of death be scarier than the real thing?

Following a serial killer driving the monotonous desert stretch between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, Camp uses the highway and its car-wheel soundtrack as a chloroform rag. The exhaustive present—necessary alertness in a world of cold war conservatism and mass governmental neglect—becomes a cudgel for peak horror as the viewer drifts into submission. The murders blend together with the scenery, a slow collage of oversaturation and vacancy.

Like the film Cruising—released three years earlier to massive community protests around homophobic representation—Highway Hypnosis took inspiration from the spate of gay serial killers that tore through California in the 70s and 80s. Camp, however, refuses the salaciousness of a Hollywood slasher, offering up something much more terrifying. Slot machines, aircrafts, and cinema’s all-time most perverse use of “Baker Street” by Gerry Rafferty puncture the film’s white noise; scenes often show everything but murder, everything tinged with looming dread.

Camp is part of a lesser-known cluster of gay videomakers who worked with EZTV, a DIY production house that started in early 80s LA. EZTV’s films have recently reentered the screening circuit through the preservation and curatorial work of filmmaker and historian Elizabeth Purchell. Working with Camp and his archives, Purchell has restored Highway Hypnosis and begun the process of finishing Shock Video, a never-completed late-70s short of Camp’s. Like Highway Hypnosis, Shock Video is very much a product of its time. Instead of an impressionistic collage, however, it raises a knife with the ubiquitous violence of the time: police brutality, Jonestown, Vietnam. In their DIY resourcefulness and ability to capture the unease of their moment, these films belong to a gay horror tradition all their own.

—CASSANDRA GILLIG 63 min. Screening Tue 10/21

9:30 PM at the Music Box Theatre, preceded by an introduction by Elizabeth Purchell and a screening of Shock Video

R A Self-Induced Hallucination

Last year, Jane Schoenbrun’s junior feature, I Saw the TV Glow (2024), cemented them as a profound and distinct voice in filmmaking, but their found-footage debut, A Self-Induced Hallucination (2018), already had all the trappings of a groundbreaking filmmaker. The experimental documentary, originally uploaded to YouTube and always screened for free, appropriates video clips culled from the Internet to explore subjectivity, truth, and children’s autonomy through the Slender Man phenomenon.

In 2009, there was a contest on the website Some-

thing Awful that invited users to share their best images altered to look like paranormal phenomena. A user submitted a black-and-white photo of children scattering while a tall, thin figure loomed in the background. He supplemented it with creepy quotes from “witnesses,” which inspired others to expand on the lore with their own text and images. Over the next few years, a whole Internet subculture emerged around what became the Slender Man myth that included fan fiction, cosplay, movies, video games, and more.

Then, in 2014, two 12-year-old girls murdered a friend, explaining to authorities they did it to become proxies for the Slender Man. Not only did the event trigger a moral panic with all the flavor of the Satanic panic of the 1980s, but it also led to a Lifetime movie starring tween girls who vividly described the process of playing murderers as part of its publicity campaign.

On one hand, so-called authorities were arguing children needed to be protected from the Slender Man myth—that the problem was exposure to the myth, not something like undiagnosed schizophrenia. On the other, actual kids were being paid to fake a killing for an audience—and then talk about it on daytime television.

A Self-Induced Hallucination JANE SCHOENBRUN A Self-Induced Hallucination closes with a YouTube video of a trans teen describing being subjected to what amounts to conversion therapy for living online as the opposite gender instead of choosing suicide. While it’s never expressly stated, their parents believe they’ve fallen victim to “the dangerous gender ideology” pervasive online, but that’s actually what’s keeping them alive.

Schoenbrun strategically chooses clips that revel in everything hilarious, unnerving, and profound about Slender Man to reveal something deeper about cultural fears and children’s needs. At just 68 minutes, A Self-Induced Hallucination packs a swift, raw punch.

This screening is hosted by experimental microcinema Tesseract Cinema to raise money for the Transformative Justice Law Project. It’ll be preceded by two found-footage shorts. —MICCO CAPORALE 67 min.

Screening Wed 10/22 7 PM at Elastic Arts v

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UPCOMING SHOWS OCT 18

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VIOLENT FEMMES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .THE SHED PARCELS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . FAIRGROUNDS WITH

OCT 21

LOS FABULOSOS CADILLACS . . . . . . . . .THE SHED WITH

OCT 23

THE LEMON TWIGS

SANTIAGO MOTORIZADO

LORNA SHORE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .THE SHED

THE BLACK DAHLIA MURDER, SHADOW OF INTENT AND PEELINGFLESH

WITH

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MUSIC CITY OF WIN

Thirteendegrees° leads the rap renaissance of #NewChicago He’s a key member of an underground movement that decenters drill in favor of what he calls “weird shit.”

Summer Smash in June, and appeared in “best new artists”–style roundups by the Fader and Pigeons & Planes. This caught the eye of Fake Shore Drive founder Andrew Barber, who became Thirteen’s manager this past March.

“I heard his name, like, late 2024,” Barber recalls. “I went to his Instagram page, looked at it for about one minute, and I was like, ‘Oh, this kid’s got it.’”

By JOSHUA EFERIGHE City of Win is a series curated by Isiah “ThoughtPoet” Veney and written by Alejandro Hernandez that uses prose and photography to create portraits of Chicago musicians and cultural innovators working to create positive change in their communities.

O

n Saturday, September 6, around 7 PM, if you’d happened to be walking down the alley behind the Half Evil clothing shop in Wicker Park, you would’ve been in for a surprise.

Between the dumpsters behind the streetwear store and the garages of the homes across the alley, underneath the Blue Line, you would have found 30 or 40 people, mostly in their teens and twenties, partying at a pop-up concert with Chicago underground rappers Thirteendegrees°, Zootzie, and BurloDaVirgo.

The twist? All three of them performed out of the back of a U-Haul truck.

The show had been announced just hours before. How did anyone find out? “All the Twitter promo pages and on Instagram!” yelled 16-year-old Michael Cie amid the chaos.

“That’s why I fuck with Thirteen.”

Cie and his friends got a glimpse into the next wave of Chicago’s underground—a group of alternative creatives who call themselves #NewChicago. “#NewChicago is a movement,” says Thirteendegrees°, born Jalen Hughes on the south side. “Chicago always been centralized around drill. Me and my guys have been trying to be pioneers of showing that we’re different.

We’re not straight into drill—we’re into quoteunquote weird shit, you know, hipster shit.”

What began early last year as an idea hatched by three friends—Thirteendegrees°, Donovan Fairchild, and Exavier Rodriguez— has evolved into a flourishing Chicago scene with dozens of participants. Fairchild, founder of streetwear brand Lost and Found Chicago, and Rodriguez, founder of clothing line

24 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 16, 2025

Cult, serve as Thirteen’s creative directors and fellow architects of #NewChicago.

The group launched an Instagram page in November 2024, joining other new underground hip-hop sites in Chicago and elsewhere, including FTY Chicago, Sound Scrape, Don’t Be Late, Overlooked, and Underground Sound. “ # N ew C h i ca go h e l p e d t h e movement and themselves,” Rodriguez says. When asked about the movement’s forerunners, he names Chicago newcomers Kels!, Lil2Posh, and Kio Racks—led by, of course, Thirteendegrees°.

“I’m from Hammond, Indiana, and I claim #NewChicago,” says JahPool, who manages Zootzie and Da Villain, among other #NewChicago artists. “It’s not a collective, it’s just a movement for real.

Everybody fucks with each other.”

JahPool threw some of Thirteen’s first shows and organizes his U-Haul pop-ups.

“I’m just poppin’ a little bit, just being the face of it,” Thirteen- Jalen Hughes, better known as Thirteendegrees° degrees° told Vancouver-based THOUGHTPOET FOR CHICAGO READER platform Kids Take Over in August.

“You don’t need to talk about guns, killin’ Barber, who used to manage Lucki and still people, like, fuckin’ hoes and shit. You can be manages Detroit’s Bruiser Wolf, says Thirteenweird.” This underlines his insistence that degrees° sparked a bidding war. “Almost Chicago rap is more than drill. “We got differ- every artist out of Chicago has been drill or ent artists, like me, like Lil2Posh, like Kels!,” drill adjacent. There were a lot of labels on the he says, “really bringing a different type of ground trying to get him,” Barber says. Evenenergy, a different type of culture.” tually Island Records closed the deal.

The numbers back up Thirteen’s claim to lead #NewChicago. “Da Problem Solva,” usic wasn’t the first plan for Thirteenfrom January’s Clique City Vol. 2, went viral degrees°. A standout on the Hillcrest on TikTok and has surpassed 3.7 million High School basketball team, he played Spotify plays. He sold out a headlining show at Moraine Valley Community College in Palos at Reggies Rock Club in April, performed at Hills before walking away in 2020. “I’d been

M

facing trials and tribulations all my life cause I’m not the tallest,” he explained in a 2023 interview with Vision Vocal. “I’m thinking, is this really for me?”

Back in Chicago and out of college, he leaned into his other loves: fashion and music. But it wasn’t until an eye-opening conversation with a woman from Atlanta that he took the idea of making his own music seriously. As he described in an interview this March, the two of them dissected Chicago’s underground and realized that, while Lucki and Juice WRLD had made their marks, nobody else outside the street-rap lane seemed to be coming up behind them.

Thirteen’s stage name includes his longtime jersey number. “When I started making music, I just wanted to keep the 13 alive,” he told Vision Vocal. “I added ‘degrees’ because we’re in Chicago. It’s always cold, and, on no cocky shit, I feel like I’m cold at everything I do.”

Thirteen started out in 2022 by recording songs in his car on BandLab using an iPhone 4. On his early tracks, such as “Bluechipz” and “Lost and Found,” he trafficked in a sound inspired by Atlanta label Opium—Destroy Lonely beats and Ken Carson loops. Since then, he’s developed a style that blends influences from The-Dream, T-Pain, Trippie Redd, and Pi’erre Bourne. “Very grungy, but melodic and emotional,” he says.

“I got sounds where I can mosh pit, sounds you can play in the club, sounds you can play at a party. I feel like everybody can enjoy—anybody in any demographic.”

What makes Thirteendegrees° stand out in Chicago isn’t just his sound—it’s also the world he’s built around it. His branding revives the Tumblr aesthetic of the 2010s: deep-fried photo filters, cheetah print, snapbacks, Jeremy Scott shoes, Obey, Pink Dolphin, Boy London. He does the same thing with the artwork for his releases.

His 2023 project Urban Junkie appeared on Soundcloud with a release date of 2013. Metropolitan, which came out the same year, uses artwork that looks like a CD in a jewel box, and Thirteen appears wrapped in a Chicago flag in a nod to A$AP Rocky’s Long.Live.A$AP. The cover of last year’s Uptown Dropout echoes the art from the 2012 GOOD Music compilation

NIGHT WALKS

MUSIC Cruel Summer. Then came Clique City Vol. 1 (2024) and Clique City Vol. 2 (2025), whose artwork refers to the Weeknd’s House of Balloons and Santigold’s albums.

“It’s really what I grew up in—the trap era, the Tumblr era, early Instagram,” Thirteendegrees° told Vision Vocal. “When I was a kid, I wanted to do what the adults were doing, but I couldn’t because I was young. So what I’m doing now is what my younger self wanted to do.”

Thirteen insists he’s not just re-creating the past—he’s bridging eras. “The foundation and the overview of my aesthetic is iPhone 4, iPhone 5, but people don’t really take the time to differentiate the different worlds,” Thirteendegrees° says. “Like, I did three different niche aesthetics.”

The newest Thirteen album, Black Fridayz, came out October 3—the pop-up behind Half Evil was part of the promo campaign. “Since I blew up, life’s been chaotic, traveling across the world, performing and shit,” Thirteen says. “The chaoticness and learning how to balance it—that’s the biggest thing, and that’s

what I try to show within the music.” He also wants people to respect him as an artist rather than just talk about his image.

“Shut the fuck up about the nostalgia shit,” Thirteen says. “Every artist has had influences.

I also want them to hear my bars. People just hear a good beat and me singing, but I’m actually talking about different topics in my life.”

Thirteendegrees° has ambitions beyond music. He works on clothing designs in his free time, including cutting pieces himself. He also sees a future in gaming. “After this album, I just want to try something new,” he says. “I’m always trying to better myself as an artist.”

Until then, keep your ear to the streets—or the alleys. You might just catch the next Thirteendegrees° show pulling up in a U-Haul. v

August 17, 2022, at 10:52 PM: Edgewater’s coolest 1963 Buick LeSabre, parked on a residential street just west of Broadway between Thorndale and Granville PHILIP MONTORO

m letters@chicagoreader.com Photos by ThoughtPoet of Unsocial Aesthetics (UAES), a digital creative studio and resource collective designed to elevate communitydriven storytelling and social activism in Chicago and beyond

OCTOBER 16, 2025 - CHICAGO READER 25

MUSIC THE SECRET HISTORY OF CHICAGO MUSIC

Panicsville proves how vast ‘sound art’ can be Andrew Ortmann’s long-running collaborative project has traversed countless confounding musical paths across more than 30 years.

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.

A

t its most basic, music is simply organized sound: birdsong to attract a mate, ritual drumming to induce a trance state, ambience to thaw out a cocktail party, programmed beats to get people moving together.

Music can also have artistic intent that goes beyond what you can hear. Even without words, it can attempt harsh social criticism or playful subversion. “Musique concrète” comments on the nature of music by using found sounds, making it impossible to notate. Far beyond the territory of the catchy tune, “sound art” encompasses practically everything that doesn’t fit into a more definable category.

Few acts use as much of this limitless space as Panicsville, an ongoing collaborative project founded in 1992 by composer and electronic musician Andrew Ortmann.

Ortmann was born in Saint Louis, Missouri, in 1972, and raised in nearby Saint Charles. He says his earliest influences included the original Doctor Who theme, created in 1963 by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. “Extreme nature and all variety of machinery and mechanisms would certainly fascinate my impressionable little mind,” Ortmann says. The soundtracks and sound effects in horror and sci-fi movies seeped into his brain too.

As a preteen, Ortmann got into metal—the more extreme the better. But he lost patience with the tedious guitar solos and moved toward punk and hardcore. He would read reviews in Maximumrocknroll and order anything the writers hated, which led him in weird, noisy directions. Eventually he found unhinged anti-rock such as the Butthole Surfers and Throbbing Gristle.

26 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 16, 2025

In those pre-Internet days, musicians into fringe culture often had to guess how the sounds they loved had been created. “Learning about gear back then proved exceptionally difficult,” Ortmann says. “I started using tape decks and would hunt for whatever electronics, effects pedals, or synthesizers could be scavenged from pawn shops or secondhand music shops.”

In 1990, Ortmann started art school at Webster University in Saint Louis. For a class project, he had to contact an artist he admired.

He ended up corresponding for two years with Jim Shaw, who’d made the cover for the 1989 Bongwater album Too Much Sleep. “Don’t ever follow trends. In the art world or otherwise,” Shaw told him. “Always follow your intuition and your own artistic path.” Shaw also mentioned pressing vinyl for his band, and only years later would Ortmann realize that Shaw was referring to legendary Detroit collective Destroy All Monsters.

Ortmann learned about the Dada and futurist art movements and discovered Japanese noise provocateurs such as the ear-piercing Merzbow and the apocalyptically violent Hanatarash. He also remembers seeing the Plasmatics’ 1981 TV spot on Solid Gold, where Wendy O. Williams chainsawed a plugged-in electric guitar in half. “That had to have been an inspiration,” he says.

Panicsville took shape in ’92, during Ortmann’s sophomore year. He took the name from a 1964 pulp paperback, Patty Goes to Washington, featuring characters from The Patty Duke Show. “It’s Panicsville on the Potomac,” reads the front cover. Ortmann thought the name would capture the right chaotic, outlandish vibe and telegraph that the project wasn’t snooty high art.

Panicsville began playing what Ortmann calls “challenging and culturally inaccessible shows,” beginning in 1993 with a Halloween house party in Edwardsville, Illinois. (Some-

STEVE KRAKOW FOR CHICAGO READER

one’s parents were out of town.) Ortmann teamed up with Dave Forquer and Ryan Kohler—the first of his many, many collaborators under the Panicsville name—for a messy low-budget spectacle.

“We prepared many computer keyboards filled with blood packs,” Ortmann says. “I had secured industrial-strength floodlights as well, which blasted the audience, accompanied by our sonic squall wall, as we happily exploded our props.” Panicsville soon graduated to Saint Louis venues that would host underground, experimental gigs, including the Way Out Club and Cicero’s.

Ortmann had launched his own Nihilist label in ’92 by releasing handmade Panicsville cassettes. In 1995 he upped his game, releasing the first piece of Nihilist vinyl: Pound of Flesh, a clear seven-inch in a plexiglass sleeve. It featured Ortmann, fellow future Chicagoan Ben Vida (later of Town & Country and Dreamweapon), Dave Stone, and Jeremy Brantlinger in a free-jazzy noise group also called Pound of Flesh. Later that year, Nihilist released the first Panicsville “album,” Four Notes in Search of a Tune.

In 1996, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch published a review. “The sleeve itself was a gorgeous handmade piece of A-R-T,” it noted. “So I remove the plastic and slowly pull out the record, and it was BROKEN INTO SIX PIECES. And it was no accident, because they hotglued the record back together.”

Ortmann says that Four Notes “defined our

conceptual path.” Panicsville made it “from hundreds of different records we collected, then collectively smashed to pieces, then lovingly pieced back together.” Some would only play for ten seconds, but they’d all play.

“Most of the early releases were very ‘processoriented,’ but the end product was worth the pain,” Ortmann says. Ironically, he didn’t yet know about Christian Marclay, who in the 1980s had made similar “collage” LPs. Later in the 90s, Ortmann released three mind-bending Panicsville CDs through Nihilist, all of them in one piece: Floccinaucinihilipilification (1996), The Last Compulsory Exercise (1997), and Evil? (1998, packaged between two clipped-together pieces of wood).

Ortmann moved to Chicago on August 1, 1999, sharing the Skin Graft loft in Ukrainian Village. He recalls that on his second night in the city, he saw Japanese fuzz rockers High Rise play on a rooftop at 23rd and Michigan (a show I’d booked). Ortmann eventually moved into a loft in that building, which he shared with MV Carbon of no-wavers Metalux and other musicians.

I remember a Panicsville show from the early 2000s where Ortmann wore a black pleather octopus suit he’d made, whose many arms had contact mikes sewn into their ends.

Some tentacles dragged on the ground as he moved, and that input added to the unearthly cacophony. “Costumed shows were always a blast,” Ortmann says. “They were not ideal to see out of, and some of your dexterity was

MUSIC compromised, but they looked pretty good.”

At one notorious 2004 gig, Panicsville miked shark meat sizzling on an onstage hot plate. “I was told we earned best-smelling show that year at the Empty Bottle,” Ortmann says. At a series of concerts in the early 2000s, the group parodied laptop musicians.

“I took these ancient word processors that were like two inches deep, gutted them, and

Fe-Mail and Whitehouse), No Trend in London in 2006 (with Ramleh and Consumer Electronics), and Sonic Protest in Paris in 2006 (with Prurient and Hair Police). In 2010, Ortmann used a city arts grant to fund a notorious gallery performance for four synthesizers and four running motorcycles. And in 2016, Panicsville performed at the Trip Metal Fest, presented by Wolf Eyes in Detroit—the astonishing bill also included Sun Ra Arkestra bandleader Marshall Allen, computer music pioneer Morton Subotnick, and hard-partying rocker Andrew WK. Panicsville did magic tricks during their set.

Panicsville performances are rare these days, but Ortmann played the Empty Bottle’s Night of Modular Synthesis XI earlier this month. He continues to record, solo and in collaborations (including Cables with synth artist Joseph Raglani). Since 2005, he’s DJed a radio show called The Eternal Now on beloved New Jersey indie station WFMU. Nihilist also has plenty of releases in the works, most notably a reissue by UK ritual dark-folk collective Metgumbnerbone.

Ortmann’s latest release of his own music is the 2023 triple LP Psychoacoustic Electronics, issued by Nihilist under his given name.

The product of four years’ work, it features appearances from frequent collaborator and paranormal investigator Michael Esposito, poet and endurance artist Bryan Lewis Saunders, and vocalist Louise Bock (aka Taralie Peterson of Spires).

The categories on this mammoth work’s Discogs page give you some idea of its sprawling strangeness (and some idea how little Ortmann and his fans respect categories).

Its genres are listed as “Electronic, Rock, Non-Music, Classical, Folk, World, Country,” and its styles are “Field Recording, Electroacoustic, Ambient, Drone, Experimental, Musique Concrète, Sound Collage, Therapy, Education.”

In other words: Panicsville. v

Ortmann wore a black pleather octopus suit he’d made, whose many arms had contact mikes sewn into their ends. Some tentacles dragged on the ground as he moved, and that input added to the unearthly cacophony. inside me and Jeremiah [Fisher] each had two MiniDisc players,” Ortmann recalls. “Each one was maxed out at 256 samples, all of them on shuffle! We each had a little tea candle inside, so it would emulate what might be happening on a computer screen. The end of set would be slyly blowing out the candle and closing the processor lid as a single action. Some people would come up and ask what programs we were using.”

I asked Ortmann to play electronics in my psych-punk band Plastic Crimewave Sound for a 2001 Beat Kitchen show with Spectrum, a group featuring former Spacemen 3 members Peter “Sonic Boom” Kember and Will Carruthers. (Ortmann and Kember hit it off, geeking out about synthesizers.) Ortmann would become a temporary auxiliary member of PCWS, playing local shows and appearing on our first singles and 2003 debut LP, Flashing Open.

Throughout the aughts, Ortmann stayed fiendishly busy. He collaborated with local musicians as diverse as Weasel Walter of the Flying Luttenbachers (in “supergroup” the Chicago Sound and on the 2004 duo album Contradiction), oddball sludge collective Behold! the Living Corpse, abject art-rockers Lovely Little Girls, and idiosyncratic folk acts Spires That in the Sunset Rise and Josephine Foster. Panicsville released splits with the likes of Bay Area Caroliner spin-off Rubber O Cement, local noise artist Vertonen, and Michigan electro-scuzz masters Wolf Eyes.

As Panicsville built a reputation, Ortmann began playing festivals with international lineups: No Fun in New York in 2005 (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.

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OCTOBER 16, 2025 - CHICAGO READER 27

Recommended and notable shows with critics’ insights for the week of October 16

MUSIC

b ALL AGES F

PICK OF THE WEEK

Rapper Mach-Hommy takes charge of his own destiny

Sat 10/18, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport, $187, $222 seated balcony, opera boxes sold out. 17+

LONG BEFORE ORVILLE PECK AND KONTRAVOID donned their masks, there was Mach-Hommy. Since 2011, the rapper has been able to keep his identity a secret, in no small part with the bandanna he wears around his face (sometimes he adds a hat or sunglasses). It’s afforded him a degree of privacy that eludes most artists at his level (he’s been covered by the likes of GQ and Rolling Stone and exalted by stars as big as Jay-Z and Black Thought), and this has allowed him to take risks in what he says and how.

Mach-Hommy imbues his impressive body of work—two dozen studio albums on top of an exhausting amount of EPs and singles—with pointed lyrics about the social and political effects of empire.

On many of his recordings, he draws from his Haitian American upbringing to center the realities of Haiti, whose history of internal conflicts and violent subjugation and exploitation by colonizers has made it one of the most politically unstable and underdeveloped countries in the modern world.

Most of Mach-Hommy’s lyrics are in English, peppered with Haitian Creole, and he works to prevent them from being republished on lyric sites—which, as he explained to Rolling Stone in 2022, is just one more way others try to monetize his work. “I’m a literary artist and I’m a writer, number one,” he said. “Before it ever becomes a sound, number one.

And so that in and of itself is a work of art, and that’s published writing.

Those words, they’re mine.”

Last year, Canadian noise-pop singer Cindy Lee made headlines for refusing to put their 2024 album, Diamond Jubilee, on services such as Spotify and Tidal, uploading it only to YouTube and then redirecting users to purchase the record through their website. Mach-Hommy has been taking a similar approach for the duration of his career, restricting which of his albums are available on streaming platforms (most aren’t) and sometimes selling them directly to fans via social media before they’re available anywhere else. For example, in 2016, he released his

28 CHICAGO READER - OCTOBER 16, 2025

FRIDAY17

MACH-HOMMY

Home Is Where Forests and Rugh open. 8 PM, Subterranean, 2011 W. North, $30.05. 17+ The energy that propelled fifth-wave emo from in-scene meme to crossover indie-rock phenomenon in 2020 evaporated over the past couple years, but scene leaders Home Is Where have forged ahead with nary a hiccup. The members of this Florida folk-punk band manage a difficult balance, drawing creative fire from the decline of empire while enduring the psychic damage of actually paying attention to the government’s speedrun into fascism. It’s amazing that Home Is Where can still channel the fury of the moment into smoldering songs without giving in to exhaustion. Their latest fulllength, May’s Hunting Season (Wax Bodega), tones down the caterwauling noise of the band’s first two albums in favor of a quiet, sustained rage, leaning into the “folk” part of folk punk—the gentle, ambling “Everyone Won the Lotto,” for instance, makes liberal use of slide guitar. Bea MacDonald’s lyrics can read like postmodern interpretations of Greil Marcus’s Americana obsessions in Mystery Train. “Artificial Grass” is about an Elvis impersonator dying in a car crash—and doesn’t a tacky fake king, freighted

COURTESY THE ARTIST

record HBO (Haitian Body Odor) via an Instagram announcement, offering a limited run of 187 CDs for $300 apiece. A year later, he put the album on SoundCloud so anyone could listen. Some see this as Mach-Hommy commanding his worth; others might decide he’s exploiting fans who have extra money or turning the tables on commodity fetishists who’ve long profited from their collections while cutting out artists. In the end, he got his bag, and everyone got access to the music.

In a cultural moment that places a premium on privacy and bodily autonomy, while musicians are struggling to sustain their craft, this rare local Mach-Hommy performance should remind fans he’s always been ahead of the curve. —MICCO CAPORALE

Pachyman (top), Mndsgn ALEX BULLI , SHANE SHAKANOI

MUSIC with unwarranted cultural significance and killed in a mundane, stupid, and preventable way, make an on-the-nose metaphor for our collapsing country? I still worry that Home Is Where will burn out, but on Hunting Season they sound prepared to survive an inhospitable music industry and an intolerant society that’s specifically and viciously hostile to trans people. —LEOR GALIL

Pachyman, Mndsgn Michi opens.

10 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $33.17. 21+.

Pachy Garcia puts a lot of work into the music he makes as Pachyman, but it feels as effortless as relaxing on the beach. Inspired by Jamaican dub masters such as King Tubby and Scientist, the Los Angeles–based Puerto Rican multiinstrumentalist plays everything on his albums (including drums, bass, synths, and hand percussion), recording and mixing with analog equipment and oldHome Is Where TEXAS SMITH school techniques in homage to the classic Channel One Studios sound of the and electronic music as Mndsgn (pronounced “mind 1970s. On his latest full-length, May’s Another Place design”). Like his tourmate, Ancheta is an expert (ATO), Garcia brings elements of indie rock, disco, at building a variety of heady moods. In June, he and postpunk into his immersive, eclectic soundreleased “Sixundrground,” an airy cover of Sneaker scapes. If you feel like you’ve been whisked away Pimps’ 1996 trip-hop classic “6 Underground,” and by its spacious, enveloping atmospheres, that’s his latest album, August’s Geddup!!!!, incorporates by design; the album’s placeless spirit and perpetdeep flavors of Detroit ghettotech and heavy funk. ual motion are informed by the time he’s spent on —JAMIE LUDWIG the road in recent years. “Another Place could be a safe space,” Garcia told Juno Daily upon the album’s release. “It can be a place to be emotionally vulnerable as well.” For this Empty Bottle show, GarAmy Rigby 8 PM, Friendly Coffee Lounge, 6731 cia is joined by a live band featuring guitarist JaviRoosevelt, Berwyn, $25.63. b er Pérez, keyboardist Diego Gaeta, and bassist Jordan Brooks. He’s also touring as coheadliners with Amy Rigby’s latest album, last year’s Hang In a fellow Angeleno, Ringgo Ancheta, who makes There With Me (Tapete), includes “Too Old to Be experimental fusions of jazz, alternative hip-hop, So Crazy,” a song about gearing up for another go-round where she recounts the reasons a musician in her mid-60s shouldn’t tour again. She sings from plenty of experience: Rigby has been in bands since the 1970s, when she played country music in New York City punk clubs with the Last Roundup.

Since then, she’s been a member of girl group the Shams, a celebrated solo performer, and a close collaborator with fellow singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Wreckless Eric (who’s also her spouse). She knows the travails of subsistence- level music-making firsthand.

But as Rigby reveals over and over again in her two memoirs, Girl to City and Girl to Country (published in 2019 and 2025, respectively), she’s never let caution get in the way of doing what she loves.

That love manifests in multiAmy Rigby BOB KRASNER

Frog JAROD A. WALKER ple ways on Hang In There With Me. On “O Anjali,” a catch-up call with a friend turns into a moment of shared heaviness; “Bangs” shares the joy of the discovery that a new hairdo can still change your life; and on “Dylan in Dubuque,” a nerdy nugget of trivia about one of Bob Dylan’s weirder concerts becomes Rigby’s lodestar for staying serene no matter what life throws at her. On record, Wreckless Eric’s history-steeped production can hook you as securely as Rigby’s lyrics. But when she plays solo, as she will at this show, she proves that all you need are sturdy songs and a true voice. Since the release of her first book, Rigby’s performances have been split between music and brief readings that are long on context and poignancy. —BILL MEYER

SATURDAY18 Frog See also Sun 10/19. Godstar Megamax open. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, advance tickets sold out. 21+ The cover of the 2025 Frog album 1,000 Variations on the Same Song is a photo of front man Danny Bateman and drummer Steve Bateman (Danny’s brother) standing in front of a Long Island City business called Stillwell Supply that used to rent out construction equipment. The album opens with “Stillwell Theme,” whose jaunty piano (which recalls the title sequence of Cheers) runs counter to Danny’s bleak lyrics about an alcoholic builder newly unemployed at age 30. He sings the address to Stillwell (“Forty-four sixty-eight / Vernon Boulevard”) as though this is an ordinary jingle and not an homage to a fallen pillar of a local industry in decline. Stillwell closed in early 2021, but Frog still mourn it.

They often root their stylistically flamboyant indierock songs in their backyard—on 2023’s terrific Grog, the banjo-led “New Ro” is a tribute to their hometown of New Rochelle—and that’s part of what makes them feel special.

In song, the Bateman brothers are earnest townies, proud to draw upon their tangled histories, even the teenage embarrassments that other indie rockers might’ve fled by moving to Brooklyn in their 20s. Danny delivers his disarming lyrics in the strained falsetto of a karaoke singer who doesn’t care about hitting the perfect note but wants to nail the right feeling. Frog’s musical approach is silly, slightly folky, and as mercurial at the musicians’ moods—Grog takes detours into disco (“Black on Black on Black”), 1950s balladeering (“Maybelline”), and fingerstyle folk (“420!!”). Frog have shifted to a more tossed-off approach for the two albums they released this year: February’s 1,000 Variations and September’s The Count. It’s part of their strategy to keep songwriting fun for them.

“You need to find new ways across the Seine every night walking home, and then the city will always feel new again,” Danny wrote in a Reddit AMA just after 1,000 Variations came out. “On this record, and all the recordings since that are still to come out, Stevie and I have been trying to dissolve any distance between the initial improvisation and the final recording. Sometimes we succeed, sometimes we have to run it again a bunch of times, but there are no rules you can’t break as long as you meant to break them.” As long as Frog keep making songs as fine as “Doomscrolling Var. II”—a wrenching view of late-night Web surfing in search of a lost love—they can take whatever path they like to get there. —LEOR GALIL

Mach-Hommy See Pick of the Week on page 28. 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport, $187, $222 seated balcony, opera boxes sold out. 17+

SUNDAY19 Frog See Sat 10/18. Jason Shapiro opens. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $26.78. 21+ v

OCTOBER 16, 2025 - CHICAGO READER 29

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SINGER, GUITARIST, AND COMPOSER land, who also played percussion, bass, pedal Hannah Frances recorded her breakout 2024 steel, and piano—not an approach that could album, Keeper of the Shepherd, in Vermont, translate to the stage. In 2023, using some and now lives there full-time. But she still has introductions from Diamond, she put togethone foot planted here. “I come to Chicago a er an ensemble of Chicago musicians, which starts at 3 PM with local guitar wizard Emily lot, just because I have a good amount of col- she’s maintained ever since by bringing play- Jane Powers. Ratboys front woman Julia laborators here,” she says. “My whole band is ers in and out. When Frances recorded an Steiner headlines with a solo set at 6:15 PM, here.” Frances will return to Chicago to cele- Audiotree session in October 2024, for exam- followed by a dance party with CHIRP DJs till brate the release of her lush new album, Nest- ple, Lily Finnegan sat in on drums. Nested in 10 PM. Tickets cost $35.35 for a single day or ed in Tangles, whose expansive arrangements Tangles includes contributions from Grizzly $63.65 for the whole weekend.

ADAMN KILLA HAS BEEN ONE of Gospair her taut, delicate guitar playing with Bear’s Daniel Rossen and several Chicagowoodwinds and strings. On Friday, October 17, ans, including Lucky Cloud bandleader Chet sip Wolf’s favorite underground Chicago rapshe’ll headline Constellation backed by an Zenor and saxophonist Sarah Clausen (who pers for nearly a decade. Improbably, he’s eight-piece ensemble. recently released the terrific solo album With now become a sensation as an influencer—and Frances is in her late 20s, and she got a rig- Many Hands through Chicago label Empty he’s popular enough that when global YouTube sensation IShowSpeed visited Chicago orous arts education. “My mom is a musician,” Stage). she says. “She’s a wickedly talented pianist Clausen is the musical director of Frances’s in September, he made sure to hang out with and educator. So growing up, I was heavily band, where she plays alto sax and bass clar- Adamn. All summer long, this wolf has lapped involved in all areas of performing arts. I was inet. Also backing Frances at Friday’s release up Adamn’s comedic TikTok clips (which he reposts on Instagram), many a very competitive dancof which show him dancer. I was a singer, played ing to his single “Fall On,” piano, played trumpet. I from his recent overlooked did musicals constantly. I full-length, Generational was in choirs, I was in jazz Run. He often dedicates a band, and I was in School video to a specific group of of Rock.” After her dad people, and somebody from died when she was 18, Franthat group is usually in the ces focused her approach shot; for example, while on to music. tour with Chance the Rap“I shifted my relationper in Toronto, Adamn made ship with performing,” she a pit stop at York Universisays, “because I started ty to meet hundreds of stuwriting original music for dents who also appeared in the first time and started a video he made for women deeply connecting with in STEM. He ends each dedthe guitar.” Frances selfication with the words “This released a handful of EPs is for you.” and full-lengths, and she Adamn has a lot of favorwas teaching at School of ite bits, and he likes to mess Rock in Chicago at the time with police officers, security of her fifth release, 2021’s guards, and other flavors of Bedrock. After it came out, cop by bending over in front though, she hit a creative Hannah Frances returns to celebrate a new LP with a Chicago eight-piece. GRANT HINDSLEY of them, facing away with his block.

“I was afraid to really step into myself, and show will be Diamond (on tenor sax, flute, and hands behind his back as though he’s being that fear was making me feel very depressed,” clarinet), percussionist Jonah Lazarus, violin- cuffed, and shouting, “Arrest me, daddy!”

Frances says. “I was like, ‘I don’t know what to ists Caroline Jesalva and Scott Daniel, trom- (Then he usually breaks into dance.) So after do with myself as a musician, because I feel bonist Emma Blau, electric guitarist Kyle Paul, National Guard troops arrived in Chicago last afraid to perform my music.’” She forced her- and cellist and bassist Meredith Nesbitt. Tick- week as part of Trump’s assault on Chicago, self through that wall by going on DIY tours ets are $31.09 ($10.36 for the livestream), and Adamn posted a series of clips of him pulling the “Arrest me, daddy!” bit on members of the for most of spring and summer 2022, which the performance starts at 8:30 PM. she says “led me to have the confidence to TWO LONGTIME SUPPORTERS of Chi- National Guard from the tour’s stop in D.C. fully lock in and write and record Keeper of cago’s indie scene, Leigh Kelsey and Emily (His right-hand man, Forever Band, also shot the Shepherd.”

Hilleren, have organized a two-day musical videos dancing in front of the guard.) ChicaOne of the musicians joining Frances on celebration called the Windy Pop Weekend- go multimedia outlet Real Ones thinks Adamn that album was Chicago woodwind player er. Cole’s Bar hosts the debut festival, which and Forever Band might be the National Hunter Diamond, whom she’d met in 2022. features a dozen acts playing dream pop, Guard’s kryptonite, and this wolf is grateful “He sat in on some of my solo sets, and then power pop, indie rock, shoegaze, and twee they’re using their wit and their platform to we started playing as a duo more often,” Fran- pop. Saturday’s music begins at 6 PM with embarrass the fascists terrorizing communices says. “That transpired into him doing all Chicago lo-fi fanatics Monogamy and closes ties around the country. —LEOR GALIL the woodwind arrangements on Keeper of five hours later with flowery Michigan trio Idle the Shepherd.” When Frances recorded Keep- Ray (led by indie lifer Fred Thomas). Sunday Got a tip? Email your Chicago music news to er, she worked with engineer Kevin Cope- begins with a craft fair at noon, and the show gossipwolf@chicagoreader.com.

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