Chicago Reader print issue of September 4, 2025 (Vol. 54, No. 48) by Chicago Reader

Mike Reed talks about building a new festival to light up a whole neighborhood with adventurous music.

By Jamie Ludwig, p. 16

THIS WEEK

CITY LIFE

04 Editor’s Note For now 05 Street View An advocate for local makers hosts a fashion and home design event.

FOOD & DRINK

06 Feature You’re in Emidio Oceguera’s house at Cerdito Muerto.

NEWS & POLITICS

08 Make It Make Sense | Mulcahy Thousands rally in Chicago for Labor Day, the Illinois Secretary of State’s Oﬃce ﬁnds a surveillance technology company violated state law, and a new report details the shortcomings of Cook County’s eviction court.

ARTS & CULTURE

09 Art of Note Recommended group shows at LVL3 and the Design Museum, and a chickenhuman collaboration at Old Friends

THEATER

10 Rhinestone Digest | Renken Your show needs a tip kitten.

11 Plays of Note The F*ck House at Strawdog traces teenage angst in the 80s; Refracted Light at Eclectic Full Contact shows a teen and her family struggling with the eﬀects of bipolar disorder.

FILM

12 Feature Noir City: Chicago is back at the Music Box Theatre, celebrating determined and duplicitous dames on the big screen.

13 Movies of Note Caught Stealing is Darren Aronofsky’s best work yet; Suspended Time is a thoughtful French comedy; Vice Is Broke is hollow in the end.

14 The Moviegoer A bigger boat

MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE

16 Cover Story | Ludwig Sound & Gravity maestro Mike Reed talks about building a new neighborhood festival.

20 The Secret History of Chicago Music Henry Threadgill turns jazz into a kaleidoscope of worlds and times.

22 Shows of Note Previews of concerts including Beach Bunny’s Pool Party, Clipse, and Castle Rat

26 Gossip Wolf | Galil Mykele Deville celebrates his ﬁrst album as a dad, the weekend’s slate of music festivals wrings the last drop out of summer, and more.

24 Savage Love Should I give up my kink for this relationship?

(Clockwise from top)

Thousands of Chicagoans march during Labor Day’s Workers Over Billionaires rally on September 1, 2025 PAUL GOYETTE/FLICKR VIA CC BY 4.0

Cerdito Muerto in Pilsen KONRAD WAZNY

Mykele Deville at a Garﬁ eld Park Conservatory show last month COURTESY THE ARTIST Phantom Lady (1944)

ON THE COVER

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Photograph of Mike Reed by Francesca Patella. Cover design by Kirk Williamson. Learn more about Reed in the story starting on p. 16.

EDITOR’S NOTE

Here’s what Chicago needs: Safe, consistent, high-speed public transportation that darts around the city like a ﬂock of spirited birds. Truly cross-neighborhood travel, where you don’t have to go downtown to transfer for every route, and buses and trains run 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Here’s what else Chicago needs: free, anonymous (if you need it to be), unbiased, and trauma-informed mental health care available on demand to community members. Every empty building can serve as a health clinic, free store, temporary housing, social work o ce, food pantry, art space, music venue, and information hub.

Here’s another thing: Chicago needs continued investment from the global business community, but not at the expense of our southeast side’s environmental and community health footprint. Keep an eye on those data centers.

And another: Let’s get a reprieve on that whole parking meter thing. I know a private corp owns the meters until 2083, but is there anything preventing the city or the county from forcing a new land rental agreement for each machine? We have a lot of other stu we need to pay for.

And of course: We need more Chicago media outlets, newspapers, podcasts, broadcast and cable TV news programs, terrestrial and streaming radio shows, zines, journals, blogs, independent newsrooms, and all the information. All the information! We do not need to distill our journalists into one or two spaces. Access to information means more power for the people.

Here’s what Chicago doesn’t need: gun violence, federal troops invading our streets, blowhards masking as concerned citizens, racist, homophobic, biphobic, transphobic, sexist jago s, and ICE.

These are just some of the Chicago things I think about on a regular basis. For the last six and a half years (two and a half in this chair, as editor in chief), I’ve had the privilege of being able to think my Chicago thoughts and share my Chicago worries on the Reader website and in our print pages. And for now, this is my last issue as a sta member.

It wasn’t an easy decision, but I took a buyout along with several other staff members, including senior writers Deanna Isaacs and Ben Joravsky, and multimedia content producer Shawnee Day. I started negotiating this over the summer, when the Reader’s fate was still uncertain. And now with Noisy Creek in place,

I’m happy to report that the Reader feels like it’s headed toward stability again.

For the rest of the year, I’ll be working on family projects (still gotta sell my dad’s store, in case you read my note about taxes a while back), and finishing up a book that I started working on an embarrassing amount of time ago. And then, we’ll see! I’m hopeful you’ll read me here at the Reader now and again, when our excellent section editors allow. The new management has already started a search for the new EIC, and I’ve been promised that they’ll pick someone with deep Chicago ties.

I wrote this to our staff last week, but because people who are constantly working don’t get enough accolades: “Thank you to Reader sta ers, past and present. Thank you all for your humor, intelligence, grace, kindness, energy, and commitment.

“It’s a rare thing to work somewhere where everyone cares so deeply about the health of the organization. It’s even more rare to walk away and like everybody. Someday, I might be back in a di erent role, or work on a project with y’all. But my sta time here was a very special thing, and I’ll cherish what I’ve learned from all of you.”

Thanks, readers, for making this work both worthwhile and possible. It’s been a slice putting this thing together. And please continue to tell our writers, editors, and other sta your own Chicago worries and thoughts. There is no Chicago Reader without Chicago. v

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

FOODBALL MONDAY NIGHT

The Reader’s weekly chef pop-up series, now at Frank and Mary’s Tavern, 2905 N. Elston, Avondale

Follow the chefs, @ chicago_ reader, and @mikesula on Instagram for weekly menu drops, ordering info, updates, and the stories behind Chicago’s most exciting foodlums.

Sep. 8 Pakistani–BBQ fusion on fire with Eyekhanic Eats @eyekhanic.eats

Sep. 15 Title belt dogs

Patrick Bertoletti and John Carruthers @deepdisheats @nachosandlager

Sep. 22 The revenge of Focaccia Mama @thefocacciamama

Sep. 29 Taquiza time with Mother Prepper @mother_prepper

Oct. 6 Pork chop meets bun with Butcher Shop @_butchershop

Oct. 13 The return of homecoming king Umamicue @umamicue

Oct. 20 The neverending story of Haru Haru @haruharu.chicago

Oct. 27 Third annual luna negra with Piñatta (feat. Mary Eder-McClure) @pinattachicago @notasweetsperson

Nov. 3 Creole soul with Saint Della @saintdellachi

Nov. 10 Modern Mexican with Enmolada @enmoladachicago

Nov. 17 Brunch for dinner with Brunchlox @brunchlox

Nov. 24 A zapiekanka Thanksgiving with I Love Grill and Lemonade @i_love_grill_and_lemonade

Dec. 1 Happy moments with Cash’s Kitchen @cashs_kitchen

Dec. 8 Return to the Silk Road with Umami from Scratch @umamifromscratch

Dec. 15 Breakfast for dinner with Chrissy Richards @theechicagochef

Dec. 22 Saturnalia with Twilight Kitchen @twilightkitchenrp

Dec. 29 Veganuary pregame with Herbivore @herbivore_chicago

Jan. 5 Three-peat from Morgan Street Snacks @morganstreetsnacks

LETTY SPARROW: THE CHICAGO DESIGNER MARKETPLACE instagram.com/lettysparrow lettysparrow.com

SHOP LOCAL

CLOSET MEETS COUCH: CURATE YOUR LOOK AND LIVING SPACE

Wed 9/ 10 6 –9 PM, City Haus Chicago, 25 E. Huron, $ 40, $25 FGI members and $20 students (with required discount code available at website), fgi.org/event/closet-meets-couch-curate-your-look-living-space

fashion events, where she regularly sports pieces by regionally based brands.

A fashionista puts the spotlight on local designers

DeAnna Spoerl uses her website Letty Sparrow and other platforms to promote Chicago fashion and lifestyle brands.

By ISA GIALLORENZO

For the talented designers in Chicago’s fashion scene, an issue persists: How does an independent and/or emerging maker compete with global corporations spewing out fast fashion, established luxury brands, and the consumers distracted by both of them?

Entrepreneur DeAnna Spoerl, 36, is making space in the Chicago market for independent designers who prioritize quality and authenticity.

In her o hours from Bear Icebox—the public relations and brand strategy company she runs with her husband, Bob Spoerl—the mother of two carves out time to explore local commerce and pursue her long-held dream of working in fashion.

She created the online platform and “designer marketplace” Letty Sparrow to spotlight her favorite local designers and services. It’s an evolving directory and journal of the city’s fashion scene, divided by neighborhood, brand, and product type.

“To me, clothing is storytelling. We often say our outfits tell a story, but it goes deeper than styling. The most important part of that story is where the threads come from,” Spoerl says.

Spoerl ﬁrst tried her hand at fashion design and modeling during her days at Loyola University Chicago, where she majored in communications and held minors in creative writing and anthropology. She has fond memories of her undergrad time. “I was part of the Black

Cultural Center, and I always participated in [the organization’s] annual fashion show. One year I even presented a garment—I made a cocktail dress out of industrial co ee ﬁlters to go with their sustainable theme,” she said. Drawing on her multidisciplinary background, Spoerl has a deep appreciation for every detail that goes into creating a garment—and she puts her money where her mouth is. She’s a familiar face at Chicago’s

On the day I photographed Spoerl, she featured items with Chicago ties for both her outﬁt and her accessories. Spoerl wore a dress by Swaby and boots by Il Fratellino, a brand cofounded by Chicago native Brian Atwood. She accessorized with a bag by Borris Powell and a necklace by Nyet Jewelry.

When asked to share her local favorites, Spoerl lights up and speaks in great detail about her shopping experiences—so much so that narrowing down her list proves di cult.

“I’ve been a fan of [Chicago designer] Shernett Swaby for many years. When I first met her and tried on her designs, I was amazed at how everything fit and draped my body. I told her I didn’t think her vest dress would look right on me, and she just said, ‘Come over here and try it on.’ She slipped the dress right over what I was wearing and zipped me up—my jaw dropped,” Spoerl remembered. “From then on, I was loyal! What Shernett is able to do—create designs that any woman can wear and feel amazing in—is a gift. I’ve seen and personally experienced that aha moment.

CITY LIFE

Strangers ask me, ‘Where did you get those leggings?’ Her little details make a big impact. She can take something ordinary and make it fantastical. And believe it or not, I’m a simple woman—but the most random, unconventional detail will win me over.

“I feel like I’ve collected the most precious

“Next I’d say [designer] Jamie Hayes is someone I’d trust to always keep it real with me. She’s taught me so much about the fashion industry, from patternmaking through the production process, and it’s helped me better understand the industry as a whole. I also love that Jamie’s space showcases so many other independent brands alongside her own. Anyone looking for unique, special pieces that easily fit into your daily wardrobe will ﬁnd something at [Hayes’s shop] Production Mode.

“I also have to mention Christina Karin. I met Christina more recently, but I’d been following her brand for a while. I love the powerful, feminine, strong-yet-soft elegance of her designs. I own a pair of black slacks that fall so e ortlessly down the leg—I feel unstoppable in them. Christina does a great job creating pieces that are both bold and approachable for the everyday woman.

“And to round out this list, Tania Mackey of Niczka design house has become a fast staple in my wardrobe. She has this ability to make clothes that stop people in their tracks.

pieces of Chicago fashion and still have so much to discover! I also want to mention so many others: Vanessa Arroyo of Seres Footwear, Jacob Victorine of All We Remember, Stephane St. Jaymes, Gente Fina, Maancy jewelry, Nyet Jewelry, and Koush—I could go on, because I’d hate to leave anyone out!”

After years of taking part in Chicago’s fashion events, Spoerl is organizing one of her own. On Wednesday, September 10, she will host Closet Meets Couch, a styling experience and creative showcase at River North decor shop City Haus Chicago. Spoerl created the event in partnership with Fashion Group International (FGI) Chicago—a nearly century-old nonproﬁt that supports the city’s fashion industry through education and resources. Spoerl currently serves on FGI Chicago’s board of directors.

Closet Meets Couch will bring together fashion and interiors through four distinct vignettes, each styled di erently and featuring the work of local designers. “My hope is for good conversation about style and to get people shopping,” said Spoerl, staying focused on helping local designers connect with the buyers they need. v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

DeAnna Spoerl of Letty Sparrow ISA GIALLORENZO

A leather tote from Chicago designer Borris Powell ISA GIALLORENZO

FOOD & DRINK

RESTAURANT FEATURE

You’re in Emidio Oceguera’s house at Cerdito Muerto

Find more one-of-a-kind Chicago food and drink content at chicagoreader.com/food.

A longtime family-owned spot in Pilsen reopened this summer as a restaurant and cocktail bar with plenty of personal touches.

By MILES MACCLURE

Cerdito Muerto is on a discrete block of Halsted, on the eastern edge of Pilsen, just north of 18th Street. There’s no big sign, just two green lights with a large black door that leads patrons down a dark hallway to the restaurant—but don’t call it a speakeasy. “ It just gets thrown around so much nowadays,” owner Emidio Oceguera says of the ubiquitous word.

The building has been in his family for decades. In the 1980s, his father ran a pool hall in the space now occupied by the restaurant, and his mother ran a small taqueria in the back. Cerdito Muerto is still a family a air; Oceguera’s wife, Sarah Dickerson, leads marketing and branding e orts.

Oceguera says the wheels for Cerdito Muerto started turning before the pandemic, but he’s dreamed of opening up his own restaurant in the space since he was 12. This summer, those dreams ﬁnally came to fruition when Cerdito Muerto opened on June 26. Oceguera takes pride in his Mexican heritage and wanted to bring dishes and drinks from his childhood into an elevated setting. “ I’ve always been a very proud Pilsen resident, a very proud ﬁrst-generation Mexican American kid,” says Oceguera.

“The space was designed in its inception to be a ‘if you know, you know’ kind of spot. So all I did was lean into that,” Oceguera says. Oceguera’s mother, Consuelo, greets restaurantgoers alongside the hostess. “ That’s the whole vibe—you’re in my house,” Oceguera says.

Oceguera pays close mind to the classics of Mexican cuisine, particularly in their original form; he disregards the cheese that’s become popular on birria tacos of late. He says some menu items at Mexican restaurants in the

United States have become trite—there are no chips and guac on Cerdito Muerto’s menu, for instance—but if you ask nicely, he might make you a margarita. “ I don’t have a margarita on the menu,” Oceguera says. “[But] if you go

there, I’m gonna make probably the best margarita that you’ve ever had. I don’t need to advertise certain things about my culture.”

The al pastor tacos are a point of pride. Oceguera says that pork is often viewed as a cheaper, low-cost meat, but he invests in high-quality pork and meticulous preparation. The resulting product is an al pastor taco that’s soft, the meat melting like slow-cooked brisket. The spices are delicate and don’t overpower the meat itself. “My mother trained my chef on how to perfectly cut up the pork so that it doesn’t turn mushy,” he says. “The right thickness, the right length—that’s the key to our al pastor. And it’s been the way that my mother, at 71 now, has been doing it since I could remember.”

The food menu was crafted in collaboration with Chef Becky Carson, who helped open Ramova Grill and Taproom, a Bridgeport joint south of Cerdito Muerto on Halsted. Alongside al pastor tacos, Carson introduced her take on branzino —a Mediterranean fish dish that Cerdito Muerto serves with chimichurri—to the menu. Oceguera says it has quickly become a fan favorite. The cocktails at Cerdito Muerto took more than a year and a half to develop, Oceguera says. With beverage director Rachele Byrd-Townsell, he crafted a menu with cocktail staples like the Saturn, a gin drink with passionfruit and orgeat, and the Espresso Martinez—their take on an espresso martini. Their paloma is made with a house-

Cerdito Muerto operates out of a pre–Chicago Fire building in Pilsen that’s been Mexican-owned for generations. KONRAD WAZNY

FOOD & DRINK

made grapefruit soda, a ri on Squirt. Gusto Vino—a cocktail composed of red wine, Coca-Cola, and lime—holds personal signiﬁcance for Oceguera. He and his wife ﬁrst had the drink on a trip to Florence, Italy, where they sipped it alongside a pie from Gusto Pizza. “ That drink is just a little hidden gem there for me to always remind me of my wife, our relationship, and everything we’ve gone through to get to this amazing point in our lives,” Oceguera says.

The red wine and cola combination is also popular in Spain, where locals call it “calimocho” or “kalimotxo”; Argentinians refer to the mixture as “Jesus juice.”

Wines by the glass and bottle at Cerdito Muerto are exclusively from Mexico. Some wines hail from northern Baja California, where microclimates are similar to those of the wine-growing regions in California. Other wines come from the mountain state of Querétaro, a lesser-known wine-producing region north of Mexico City.

Oceguera is a career restaurant man in Chicago. His ﬁrst job, after graduating from Iowa State University with a degree in hospitality, was at Jason’s Deli. From there, he worked at several local spots, including a tequila bar called Ay Chiwowa and Chicago Cut Steakhouse, where he was the general manager before he left to start Cerdito Muerto.

Oceguera says the restaurant industry is a

natural ﬁt for him. “ I love people, I love taking care of people, and I like to throw a party, I don’t like to be the party,” he says. He’s certainly succeeded at that. On weekend nights, patrons squeeze into every seat in the house, the bar is loud and vibrant, and the smell of Consuelo’s al pastor ﬁlls the air. v m letters@chicagoreader.com

The bar at Cerdito Muerto serves a housemade version of Squirt soda on dra . KONRAD WAZNY

Cerdito Muerto’s Piña Colada Güera KONRAD WAZNY

NEWS & POLITICS

Chicago is a union town

Thousands of workers gathered in the West Loop on Monday to rally for labor rights at Chicago’s annual Labor Day demonstration

Speakers at this year’s event—one of hundreds of protests held in cities across the U.S. on Monday under the Workers Over Billionaires banner—denounced President Donald Trump’s months of attacks on workers and poor people and held ﬁrm against his threats to deploy federal troops to Chicago. Since the start of his second term, the president has laid o federal workers en masse and attempted to strip union representation from tens of thousands more. And his administration in recent weeks has blown smoke about a potential federal invasion of Chicago, following the deployment of National Guard troops in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.

“Are you prepared to defend this land?” Mayor Brandon Johnson asked the crowd. “No federal troops in the city of Chicago! No militarized force in the city of Chicago! We’re going to defend our democracy in the city of Chicago!”

Veronica Castro , deputy director of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights , told demonstrators, “The movement for worker rights, racial justice, and immigrants rights has to keep moving forward in the face of Trump’s overreach.”

A day earlier, U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) secretary Kristi Noem confirmed plans to flood the city with federal agents as early as this week. “We’ve already had ongoing operations with ICE [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement ] in Chicago and throughout Illinois and other states,” Noem told CBS News, “but we do intend to add more resources to those operations.”

The feds will reportedly operate out of Naval Station Great Lakes, a U.S. Navy base in North Chicago, according to the Chicago Sun-Times Trump immigration adviser Tom Homan suggested to reporters on August 28 that Chicago would see a “large contingent” of agents carrying out the administration’s deportation blitz.

What the Flock?

Safety illegally shared data from license plate readers in Illinois with U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), according to Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias

State law prohibits local law enforcement agencies from cooperating with federal immigration e orts. But an audit of a dozen police departments across Illinois conducted by Giannoulias’s o ce revealed Flock allowed CBP access to license plate readers in the state, according to an August 25 video statement.

Giannoulias announced the audit earlier this summer following multiple reports that Flock allowed immigration authorities to illegally access data. In another instance reported by 404 Media, a Texas cop used cameras in Illinois to search for a woman who self-administered an abortion, also in violation of Illinois law.

Flock, which boasts the nation’s largest network of license plate readers, is used by many suburban police departments as well as the Illinois State Police. A since-turned-o national search function allowed law enforcement agencies to share their data with other agencies across the country.

According to a video statement, Giannoulias ordered Flock to shut o all access to CBP. That step, while necessary, will likely mean little in practice. Federal agencies like DHS, CBP, ICE, the Federal Bureau of Investigation , and others already have vast access to our personal data through data-sharing agreements and joint operations centers.

Instead, some local officials are moving to cut ties with the technology altogether. The City of Evanston shut off its cameras and moved to terminate its contract with Flock on August 26, citing the ﬁndings in the secretary of state’s audit. Evanston joined the Village of Oak Park, which voted to cancel its contract with Flock earlier in August following sustained opposition from residents.

Evicted, alone

Cook County’s eviction proceedings are overly complex, inaccessible to tenants, and disproportionately target Black people, according to a new report by the Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts.

“Evicted in the Dark,” published in late August, details ﬁndings from a team of court watchers who monitored the county’s eviction court between November 2024 and April 2025.

Observers found that most tenants lack legal representation—a fact that is especially dire given that proceedings often rely heavily on legal jargon and an assumed familiarity with obscure court procedures. Researchers also found that courts routinely failed to provide interpreters to non-English speakers, further limiting access during hearings.

More than half of tenants in eviction court were Black, according to the report. In Chicago, the disparity is even more stark, with Black renters accounting for 71 percent of the people observed in court despite comprising only 17 percent of the city’s population.

Among the report’s recommendations: Expand the county’s right-to-counsel pilot program to ensure every tenant has access to a lawyer in eviction court, add additional courtrooms or extend the case management period to allow proceedings to move more slowly, hire additional interpreters, and—most importantly—create more a ordable housing so fewer people face eviction in the ﬁrst place.

—SHAWN MULCAHY v

Make It Make Sense is a weekly column about what’s happening and why it matters.

m smulcahy@chicagoreader.com

From L: A Flock Safety license plate reader; thousands of Chicagoans march during Labor Day’s Workers Over Billionaires rally on September 1, 2025

COURTESY FLOCK SAFETY, PAUL GOYETTE/FLICKR VIA CC BY 4.0

ARTS & CULTURE

EXHIBITIONS

Your network is your net worth “Chicken Stingel: The Sequel” fails to take ﬂight.

There is a meme format where one of capitalism’s cinematic avatars lists three or so items—some ridiculous—as it begs its readers to consider with whom they spend time, for it is this company that determines their ﬁnancial future. The meme is goofy, but it’s one that Old Friends seems to have taken seriously by giving NFT provocateur Kenny Schachter free range to enlist chickens Jiji and Henrietta in the creation of the miniature canvases and casts that hang on the gallery’s walls for his unfortunate “Chicken Stingel: The Sequel.” Yet,

oil painting of a chicken holding a paint palette and giving a thumbs up with a humanoid hand. That thumb might as well have been a middle ﬁnger for me, you, Jiji, Henrietta, and everyone taken in by Schachter’s schtick.

—ANNETTE LEPIQUE “Chicken Stingel: The Sequel” Through 9/21: Thu–Sat noon–6 PM, Old Friends, 3405 N. Paulina, oldfriendsgallery.com/exhibitions/ chickenstingel

RLeaning into liminality

A group show at LVL3 wedges viewers into the unresolved middle ground between human and constructed world.

just like heroes who live long enough to become villains, enfants terribles always grow old, and friendships built on capital never last. A er viewing the exhibition, I can safely say Old Friends needs some new friends.

Maybe there’s something here to be said about the U.S.’s crisis of male loneliness, for Schachter, also known for his art world gossip, was once the subject of a highly publicized bro breakup with gri er Inigo Philbrick. Both men were admirers of Rudolf Stingel’s work, and it’s ostensibly Stingel’s notion of audience collaboration that inhabits the structures Schachter supplies for Jiji and Henrietta (i.e., their gallery coop, their miniature canvases covered in edible adhesive, and feed from which they can create). I say “ostensibly,” as Jiji and Henrietta feel not only like proxies for this missing male art world camaraderie, but also like standins for an audience that the artist appears to disdain. In Stingel’s original series from the early aughts, audience members were invited to mark large-scale insulation panels installed within galleries and museums. This absent invitation is where the asymmetry, the contempt, lies. For what are the chickens supposed to do, not eat? Lay down and die as we watch and clap?

When I visited the show’s opening, I crouched down near the coop to look Jiji and Henrietta in their eyes. I couldn’t hold their gaze for long as it was, frankly, sad. My eyes instead dri ed toward a small, untitled

Day-to-day, we have little opportunity to inspect the veil of the built environment surrounding us. We subconsciously accept the surface of the world as fact— the shared, objective grounding we all stand upon and deﬁne our relations by, without awareness of this assimilation. But “The Haunting of a Place That Longs for Your Arrival” at LVL3 disrupts the continuity of townscape. Its three artists have honed in on the liminality that lies just beyond the curtain of urbanity, wedging viewers into the unresolved middle ground between human and constructed world.

The exhibition is disarmingly sparse. Scattered small sculptures read like the refuse le by an eclectic squatter in an abandoned apartment: unappealing le overs, cryptic machines, frantic mind maps. Sinister cereal bowls by Laveen Gammie are emblematic of this. Peppered across the gallery ﬂoor, the low-lying dishes are exceedingly ominous. Their viscous, deep red ﬁlling, billed as red wine, appears more like blood.

Red wine is particularly useful in attracting and killing fruit flies, hence Gammie’s listing of “eternal fly traps” for the sculptures’ medium. Drawn in by the promise of drunken sweetness and trapped by Saran Wrap coverings, flies succumb to a fate both gruesome and poetic. Beyond their assumed function, the varying levels of liquid and messy plastic coverings of the bowls index a presence in space and time. They interrupt the expectation of a seamless urban fabric with a disturbingly human solution to a mundane pest problem.

I love you forever, I love you for always (As long as I’m living, you’ll be), another stunning piece by Gammie, rests lightly on the floor. Composed of a pink paper gi bag with a transparent trapezoidal cutout, the work has an entirely visible interior where two dead flies find their final resting place. A limp red ribbon ties the two handles of the bag together, drawing them down and forming a hardly protective roof for the pair. On this structure, the red ribbon resembles that of mistletoe, urging the dead to kiss. The work exposes the layers of transition that compose our environment: a moment of rest for a tired hand becomes a forgotten bag, which in turn becomes a romantic tomb for insects caught between the constructions of human activity.

Echoing the signs of life indicated by Gammie, a precariously placed cup of iced lemon water sits on the metallic edge of Bradley Marshall’s Waistline and Timeframe. Condensation gathers on the plastic as if

its drinker stepped away only a minute earlier. The main body of the contraption could be a crossbow, utility pole, or gym equipment. Bent steel rods form repeated ribs in an angular system whose function lies just beyond understanding. Rigging wire suspended by the rods is capped by hardware that screw into a strangely generic high school class ring. Lacking a school name, the ring is a stand-in for a monumentalized portion of the American experience. Altogether, the cup, class ring, and industrial materiality gesture toward the shared patterns, systems, and habits that shape our lives as we move unconsciously through them.

Marshall’s sculptures excel at prying into the psychic dimensions of constructed spaces. Two wall-based fiberglass works, 10.5 Years and 7.3 Years, contain collections of images within semitranslucent blocks of glass fibers and resin. Drawn from architectural textbooks, home goods catalogs, and other archival materials, the images reflect the enduring fascination of humans in designing and defining spaces. Their arrangement, with the pictures getting smaller as they move toward an imagined horizon in the internal space of the fiberglass, also demonstrates a strong understanding of linear perspective—yet another attempt by humans to navigate the tension of orienting space to its experiential quality.

Plain architectural observations of Riley Duncan further underscore questions about the positioning of people between the built environment and the encounter it provides. The works riﬀ oﬀ of analog, sometimes obsolete, infrastructure. Chute, a small wall-based sculpture, references the form of pneumatic tubes that were commonly

a Place That Longs for Your Arrival” Through 9/28: Sun 1–4 PM or by appointment, team@lvl3official. com, LVL3, 1542 N. Milwaukee, third floor, lvl3official.com/the-haunting-of-a-place-that-longs-foryour-arrival

RArts of Life’s first-ever retrospective

At the Design Museum of Chicago show, charming bursts of imagination are around every corner.

While browsing Arts of Life’s “Community on the Make” exhibition at the Design Museum of Chicago, I had the pleasure of meeting Marcus Imani Kennedy, one of the artists featured in this 25th anniversary retrospective. As he prepared for a TV interview with NBC Chicago marking the exhibition’s opening week, Kennedy warmly greeted visitors and eagerly discussed his passion for music, one of his main inspirations as a painter. Kennedy is one of over 80 artists currently practicing at Arts of Life, a nonprofit that provides studio space, professional opportunities, and a supportive community for visual artists with a range of physical and intellectual disabilities. “Community on the Make,” the organization’s first-ever museum retrospective, celebrates a quarter-century of creativity by displaying recent pieces by Arts of Life members, volunteers, and staff alongside earlier works by founding member

utilized in the 20th century to convey items from one point to another. Sliced open vertically, chute provides a section view of one of these tubes, inviting viewers to peer into or shove an arm down the sculpture’s open sha .

Another wall-based work, prompt, presents three symmetrical buttons in muted earth tones set into a brick-like structure. The ﬂat circular buttons mirror another analog feature of infrastructure: elevator buttons. And, like chute, prompt urges engagement from the viewer, encouraging the selection and pressing of a button. The MDF and unblemished paint coats of these sculptures render them with a hypersmooth, near-digital quality. This blurring approach to form, combined with reference and invitation, places viewers into a distorted scene lost in space and time, equally familiar and distant.

The precise attention of Gammie, Bradley, and Duncan manages to split open what is so o en taken for granted. Instead of resolving the unease found in transitory states, the artists lean into liminality, inviting viewers to linger in the many thresholds between the man-made environment and the sensorial experience of living within it. —NATALIE JENKINS “The Haunting of

Veronica “Ronnie” Cuculich.

Charming bursts of imagination are around every corner, from the whimsical animals of Alex Scott (A Hippo Eating a Watermelon; Untitled: Six-Legged Dog Critter) to Christina Zion’s Lewis Carroll-inspired A Place in Wonderland and the sci-ﬁ overtones of David Krueger’s The Aliens Are Coming! It’s Time to Blow Up the Planet. Ariée’s penchant for fashion design comes through in two untitled pieces that depict stylishly dressed women, with glitter and rhinestones adding ﬂair to a striking pink-and-black color scheme. A landscape by Isamu Guy Conners (Mountains) and several abstract acrylics by Ted Gram-Boarini evoke the vibrant colors and visible brush strokes of Impressionism. The sheer range of styles and subjects represented here makes for a compelling introduction to Arts of Life and its core values: inspiring artistic expression, building community, promoting self-respect, and developing independence. —EMILY MCCLANATHAN “Community on the Make” Through 9/30: 10 AM–5 PM daily, Design Museum of Chicago, 72 E. Randolph, designchicago.org/ arts-of-life-25th-anniversary, free v

Kenny Schachter, Untitled (Chicken Stingel: Painting), 2025

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND OLD FRIENDS

Installation view, “Community on the Make” COURTESY ARTS OF LIFE

COLUMN

Your show needs a tip kitten

They work hard for (other people’s) money.

By CHARLI RENKEN

Tip kitten. Bucket boy. Puppy. The job of collecting tips and clothing items between numbers at a drag or burlesque show goes by many names. Some shows won’t have them; others hire people or rely on volunteers or friends in the audience to get the job done. Regardless of who does it, I truly believe it’s one of the hardest jobs in the scene.

In my opinion, every show needs a collection person. Without one, performers miss out on tips or don’t get all their clothing and props back after their numbers. The last thing you want to do when you’re breathless after a performance is to crawl around on the floor picking things up.

“Once a performer goes on and takes off their clothes, you don’t want them to go back out there and pick up their clothes themselves. It ruins the fantasy of it all,” says burlesque performer, producer, and tip kitten Vixen Violencia. “That’s not cute! We want to keep it cute. We want to keep it cunty.”

Depending on the show’s tip policy, tip kittens are also often responsible for counting out dollars, exchanging them for bigger bills, and making sure everyone gets the money they earned. Sometimes, kittens also do stagehand work, like moving props on- and o stage, holding spotlights to add extra illumination to a show, or cleaning up messes. I once mopped up a bunch of water spilled on the stage during a metal rendition of Cardi B’s “WAP” performed by Sir Vix Banger at Metal Monday Monsters. And that wasn’t close to as messy as some of the acts I’ve seen tip kittens help clean. (Thank the cabaret gods for tarps and push brooms.)

also have to be “on” as a performer, adding character to the show without being too distracting. It might look like a menial task, but it’s much more than that.

kittening can also make the show that much more engaging. “There are no small parts in burlesque,” he says.

As important as the job is, it’s not always treated as such. It’s sometimes viewed as a job you do if you can’t manage to get booked to perform, which just isn’t true. Plenty of successful performers also tip kitten.

The pay for tip kittens also ranges wildly: from an unpaid volunteer position to receiving $75 plus a split of the night’s tips. That pay range depends on a lot of things: the show’s budget, the venue, the expected duties of the kitten, and how much a producer values having one. Some shows treat tip kittening like it’s a perk—an optional, unessential thing to add to your show. Not everyone agrees with that, though.

“The first time I was ever in a drag show at an open stage in Connecticut, I was performing, grabbing money, throwing it around, having a good time, and when my time was up, I did what I thought was really obvious, and I started picking up my tips. A drag queen comes up and puts their hand on my shoulder and says, ‘No, you never pick up your own money,’” says drag king, costume designer, and tip kitten Collin Advance, adding that he was surprised when he moved here a year ago to find shows that didn’t have tip kittens.

Shows of note

See venue website for complete information , including age restrictions.

COCOON BY WILLY LAQUEUE Thu 9/4 8 PM, Newport Theater, $28 52

FRESHMAN 15: MASTERCLASS Fridays at 9 PM starting 9/5, Hydrate, $ 5

WAY OUT WEDNESDAY every third Wednesday, 8 :30 PM, Way Out, free

A FAMILY AFFAIR Tue 9/9 8 PM, California Clipper, $10

BEING INTENTIONAL: ADDRESSING ISSUES AFFECTING BLACK BURLESQUE PERFORMERS AND PRODUCERS Wed 9/ 10 7:30 PM, virtual presentation by Cocoa Pearlesque, free

PROBLEMATIQUE: A VARIETY CABARET YOU’LL NEVER FORGET Thu 9/ 11 7 PM, Newport Theater, $7 18 -$ 39 19

Y’ALL’S BRUNCH second Sunday of every month, noon, Carol’s Pub, $ 6 93 –$12 08

QUEERIOD PRESENTS: DRAG UNIVERSITY second Sunday of every month, 5 PM, Charlie’s, free

HOKUS POKUS LIVE! STARRING GINGER MINJ, JUJUBEE, AND SAPPHIRA CRISTÁL, FEATURING LANDON CIDER Fri 9/ 19 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, from $ 67

MISS CHICAGO COMEDY QUEEN PAGEANT Mon 9/22 6 PM, LIPS, $23 18

performer and tip kitten Goodie Sesso. “I don’t see it as a volunteer position. I would only do that as a volunteer if it was a fundraising show, which I have done, but if everyone else is getting paid except for [the tip kitten], that just feels so Cinderelly.”

While tip kittens are doing all of this, they

“They’re still very much part of the production. They’re part of the creative vision of the show, and in that sense, what they’re doing is an art as well as a necessary task in the moment,” burlesque performer, tip kitten, and historian Standing Room Luke says, adding that he often uses kittening as a way to practice character work. Taking on a persona while

At the end of the day, tip kittening is labor and a lot of labor at that. While some are willing to do it for free, in an ideal world, it really needs to be compensated.

“I’m very much about labor rights, and I hate when labor is disregarded. I very much feel that tip kittens should get the same cut as a performer who does one act,” says burlesque

For shows with little to no budget, some of the kittens I spoke to suggested ﬁnding other ways of compensation. Maybe you can’t pay your kitten, but you make sure they’re fed, or you give them the opportunity to perform a short number, sometimes known as a “tip act,” to earn some tips. Maybe you pay them a smaller amount, but at least it’s something. Whatever it is, just make sure they feel appreciated for the work they’re doing. It’s no less of a job than performing. v

m crenken@chicagoreader.com

Vixen Violencia at Way Out

Wednesday THE BUNNY ROYALE

OPENING

RTeenage trauma, 80s style

The F*ck House gets an astounding world premiere at Strawdog.

You’re 13 years old in Chicago. It’s the 80s. You’re about to start junior high. Your best friend really wants to check out the cute goth boys at Medusa’s. She knows neither of you will ever really fit in at school, but being from a first-generation Korean family, fitting in is your biggest goal for the year. You are both very different people, but nothing can tear you apart. You’re sisters in solidarity. Except it’s about to get bumpy. Hormones, societal expectations, casual racism, internalized sexism, disparate interests, and most of all, boys—or worse yet, men. The F*ck House serves up multiple echelons of teenage trauma and drama in this astounding world premiere, written by Susan H. Pak, directed by Christina Casano, and presented by Strawdog Theatre as part of their BIPOC Playwright Residency.

The company’s ﬁrst show of the season really rocks, beginning with the soundtrack—a cadre of deep cuts from the 80s alternative scene. Mo (Emily Zhang) brings the hopeful naivete, crushing on boys and dreaming of being a popular cheerleader. By contrast, Steﬀ (Olivia Lindsay) has a tougher side, having experienced the vagaries of a broken family. Clever scenic design and props (both by Nina Castillo D’Angier) capture the look of an 80s teen

bedroom, where Zhang and Lindsay strip down to their skivvies for their frequent costume changes (designed by Aly Greaves Amidei), zipping from one perilous social encounter to another. Music (sound design by Heath Hays) is highlighted in the transitions but also features heavily in Steﬀ’s journey as a punk rock violinist.

Just underneath the surface of their youth and vigor, each girl struggles with their own family situation. Mo’s desperate attempts to assimilate and slough off racist microaggressions from classmates are heartbreaking. Whip-smart Steff channels her talents into less worthy activities than math club, knowing that, due to her socioeconomic status, she will never belong. Steff drives the action, while a more cautious Mo tries to slow the roll, maybe to avoid the regular beatings her father doles out for her infractions.

In spite of tough circumstances, neither girl seems fully aware of the trauma they are living with daily. They chose laughter and the requisite adventures of most wayward teens: shopli ing, drinking, and messing around with the opposite gender. But there is something disquieting about watching their youthful energy and excitement slowly turn to cynicism and guardedness— even with each other, as their loyalty is repeatedly tested. It’s a riveting and unﬂinching look back at the painful and exhilarating business of growing up with a powerful friendship to bolster you through it.

—KIMZYN CAMPBELL THE F*CK HOUSE Through 10/12: Thu–Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 2 PM; Theater Wit, 1229 W. Belmont, 773975-8150, strawdog.org or theaterwit.org, $10-$80

Refracted Light brings adolescent mental health out of the shadows

Eclectic Full Contact’s world premiere is an earnest and sometimes funny look at one family’s conﬂicts.

Sending your kid off to college can be emotionally draining under the best of circumstances. But when your child has a diagnosed mental health condition, the anxiety can be off the charts. That’s the situation faced by Lucy and Ted Harris, the parents at the center of Dana Hall’s new drama, Refracted Light , now in a world premiere (directed by Natividad Salgado) with Eclectic Full Contact Theatre. Daughter Penny (Jamie Lee) is 18 and about to head off to a prestigious undergraduate creative writing program. But she struggles with the belief that her meds for her bipolar disorder are limiting her creativity, as well as with her desire to break away from the overprotective instincts exhibited by Lucy (Jessica Lauren Fisher) in particular. Ted (Zach Kunde) tries to mediate, and Penny’s therapist, Dr. David Daker (Charles Schoenherr) offers encouragement. But it’s the arrival of Lucy’s younger sister, Becky (Kim Wilson Buck), that really sets off the fireworks.

Becky—played beautifully by Wilson Buck, a former Reader theater critic—is also an artist (she has worked for years as an actor with a traveling company) and is also bipolar. Her talks with Penny (particularly a lovely encounter at the top of the town water tower, where Penny has run off after another argument with her mom) reveals that she understands what it feels like when some of the colors in your world are muted by the medicine that lets you function in that world. (A line about how bipolar disorder can make you feel “like a passenger in your own body” is particularly cogent.)

Hall’s play is earnest and often funny, but it does tend to overstate its points a few times, which flattens out the dramatic insights. In particular, until near the end, Fisher’s Lucy is stuck with being in the repetitive and reactive mode of overanxious caregiver, which while undoubtedly true to the situation, doesn’t give the character as much room for nuance as she deserves. (Particularly since Kunde’s Ted gets the sympathetic comic-relief guy bits.) But Refracted Light deserves praise for tackling the issue of raising kids with mental health issues. And it made me quite glad that Illinois is the first state in the nation to require universal mental health screenings for public school students. Parents like Lucy and Ted shouldn’t have to go it alone. —KERRY REID REFRACTED LIGHT Through 9/27: Thu–Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM; Edge Theater, 5451 N. Broadway, eclectic-theatre.com, $30-$35 v

NOIR CITY: CHICAGO 2025 Fri 9/5 –Thu 9/ 11, Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport; series passes $125 general admission, $100 Music Box members; single tickets $12 50 general admission, $11 50 seniors, $10 Music Box members; musicboxtheatre.com/series-and-festivals/noir-city-chicago-2025

‘ Where winsom e w o m e n turn wicked!’

Noir City: Chicago is back at the Music Box Theatre, celebrating determined and duplicitous dames on the big screen.

By YOLANDA PERDOMO

“If you haven’t got enough brains to agree with me, then keep your mouth shut.

From here on in, I’m answering the questions, got it?” —Claire Quimby, Tension (1949)

They say a woman’s work is never done, and that maxim is on display in 18 film noir o erings at Noir City: Chicago, playing from September 5–11 at the Music Box Theatre. This year’s fest—with the subtitle “Where winsome women turn wicked!”—focuses on the ladies who made these movies so memorable more than 80 years after they were ﬁrst seen on the silver screen.

It’s not just the singular femme fatale, although there are killers in the mix. Included in this year’s festival are two neo-noirs (1990’s The Grifters and The Hot Spot ) and several working women—a sharpshooter (1950’s Gun Crazy), a successful industrialist (1946’s The Strange Love of Martha Ivers), and an amateur

detective (1944’s Phantom Lady ). All are involved in various misdeeds. There are women living their conjugal lives with nice guys (1949’s Tension) and criminally possessive bad ones (1947’s Out of the Past). All of the dames have secrets.

“These movies show these women as trying to do the best they can in what was and probably still is a male-dominated world,” says author and film scholar Alan K. Rode, who will introduce the ﬁlms from Monday through Thursday. “They’re doing their best to survive and, in some cases, prosper. And that puts them on an equal plane with some of their male protagonists.”

Eddie Muller, host of Noir Alley on the Turner Classic Movies network, says great scripts, compelling actors, and directors with a vision also make these movies captivating.

“They do cast a spell. There’s a particular vibe about them I think people really relate to. Audiences today relate because it’s very

A still from Detour (1945)

acy is thoroughly cemented thanks to the 1945 classic Detour . She plays Vera, a miserable hitchhiker picked up by Al (Tom Neal) for a ride they’ll both regret. “Savage” is the perfect word to describe Vera. The screen name Ann Savage was actually given to the actress Berniece Maxine Lyon by a theatrical producer, hoping it would make her more noticeable to casting directors. Nevertheless, even with glamorous cheesecake pics, the name change didn’t help Savage’s career.

“She really showed what she could do as an actress in that ﬁlm,” Rode says. “She was a private pilot and used to ﬂy planes out of Santa Monica Airport. She was a woman who had a very full life.”

Savage’s Detour , which will screen on Saturday, September 6, gave the actress one last hurrah toward the end of her life. In the 1980s, director Edgar G. Ulmer’s wife hosted a screening at UCLA and was asked about the actress. “No one knows whatever became of Ann Savage,” said Shirley Ulmer. At that moment, Savage shouted from the rear of the theater, “I’m here!” The audience cheered, excited to see and meet the actress who had disappeared decades earlier. Muller also got to know the actress, adding that she knew what she wanted out of life.

stylish; it’s very sexy. There’s a sinister aspect to the whole thing,” says Muller, who will open the festival on Friday night and introduce the weekend ﬁlms. “They’re not corny in the way that younger people sometimes ﬁnd old movies to be corny.”

“Shut up. You’re making noises like a husband.” Vera, Detour (1945)

The women are not one-dimensional or relegated to the role of arm candy. Their complexity may have been inspired by their lives offscreen. These women typically weren’t Hollywood household names, like their counterparts Rita Hayworth and Lana Turner. But the works of Evelyn Keyes, Ann Savage, Audrey Totter, and Marie Windsor are just as important and as fascinating.

Take Savage: She made several B movies, and except for the occasional cameo, her career ended in the 1950s. Rode says her leg-

“She was very volatile. She chafed at authority. That’s just who she was. And she would never play the game the way it was expected,” says Muller, who interviewed Savage and other actresses for his book, Dark City Dames: The Women Who Defined Film Noir (Running Press, 2025). It covers their professional biographies, coupled with gorgeous Hollywood glossies, and there’s a section illustrating their lives after Hollywood, with never-before-seen family snapshots.

Along with Savage, the book also has stories featuring Jane Greer (Out of the Past), Totter ( Tension , 1949’s Alias Nick Beal ), Windsor (1956’s The Killing), Keyes (1951’s The Prowler ), and Coleen Gray ( The Killing ). They’re set alongside minibiographies of ten other actresses, including Ella Raines ( Phantom Lady) and Joan Bennett (1945’s Scarlet Street), whose lives and careers were forever changed because of ﬁlm noir, and whose movies will be screened at Noir City: Chicago.

“I didn’t want everybody to think these Hollywood stories are like Norma Desmond [the aging and delusional star of 1950’s

Sunset Boulevard], that they’ve all gone crazy because they lost their fame,” says Muller. “When I got to know them as people, I got women who made the same kind of movies, played the same kind of parts, competed for the same kind of roles, but they were all completely different people. It gives a depiction of women in Hollywood at that time that I don’t think you get to see often. These were working actresses who were right at that midlevel, where stardom seemed like it was right there, but they could just as easily be sliding back into playing character roles.”

“I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know anything except how much I hated him.”

—Kathie Mo at, Out of the Past (1947)

Muller’s Film Noir Foundation (FNF) works not only to bring these dark gems to the public but also to ﬁnd and preserve them for future generations. To date, the nonproﬁt has rescued, restored, and remade prints of more than 30 movies, including Cry Danger (1951), Alias Nick Beal, and The Prowler, all playing at this year’s fest.

“We forged really good relationships with a lot of these [studio] people, but everything takes time. And film preservation is not a process that lends itself to brevity,” says Rode, a longtime FNF board member. “There are only so many entities that can do the physical work. It’s a gradual process of ﬁnding materials, clearing rights, getting all this stu .”

Rode says that whether you’ve seen these noirs countless times or are going in for the ﬁrst time, diving into the deep end can be exciting.

“You’re going to get a course in film noir directors, ﬁlm noir actors, and certainly ﬁlm noir actresses. And you’re going to also get a sense of the times that these movies are made. I think the lineup is a total immersion in the 1940s with a little seasoning over the weekend from a couple of great neo-noirs.”

Muller says the Noir City events are also great for longtime fans who work as movie missionaries.

“They want to come back and show it to their friends, which is how everybody should experience Double Indemnity [1944] or Sunset Boulevard: ‘Oh, they’re showing it at the Music Box? Let me get a group of people together who haven’t seen it.’ And you get to be the ringleader who introduces it to them on a big screen. That’s like a little wonderful conspiracy I have with my audience.” v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

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

NOW PLAYING

R Caught Stealing

Hank Thompson (Austin Butler) is running away from everyone and everything. All of Darren Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing unfolds as Hank scrambles to evade two ruthless Russian heavies, a Puerto Rican gangster played with devilish relish by Bad Bunny, a pair of cold-blooded Hasidic mobsters, a detective played by Regina King—and, perhaps most dangerously, himself.

Once a talented high school baseball player in California, Hank works late nights at a bar in New York’s Lower East Side. It’s the 1990s, and gentrification is just beginning to take hold in the grungy downtown neighborhood, as evidenced by the bar owner (Griffin Dunne) and his favorite regular, Amtrak (Action Bronson). Hank loves three things: booze, the San Francisco Giants, and his mother, whom he calls every day. And he’s starting to love a fourth: Zoë Kravitz’s Yvonne. This is made clear in a steamy exchange set to loud rock ’n’ roll, which feels straight out of a 90s music video. Their spark, lit in the film’s first quarter, continues to burn, even as Hank is drawn into his neighbor’s seedy life.

Hank’s neighbor is Russ, an archetype of a British punk, played by Matt Smith with such conviction that you’ll forget he was ever Doctor Who. Russ leaves town to see his father, who’s had a stroke, and asks Hank to watch his cat. Soon a er, two Russian henchmen come knocking on Russ’s door, and when Hank tries to intervene on Russ’s behalf, they turn their sights onto him and beat him to a pulp. It’s all downhill from there.

One burst kidney later, Hank wakes up at the center of a web of New York’s criminal underbelly. At first, the film’s relentless tempo feels disorienting, but soon it reveals itself as its defining strength. Characters slip in and out of Hank’s path in a blur, while Aronofsky keeps the camera tethered to his psyche—a discipline the Black Swan (2010) director knows well. The effect is intensified through Matthew Libatique’s taut, dynamic camerawork. As Hank is batted back and forth across the city and between dueling criminal factions, he grapples with the haunting memory of drunkenly crashing his car at the end of high school, ending his baseball career and the life of his friend. This is the part of himself from which he runs.

Caught Stealing is successful for two reasons. First: Each supporting actor delivers a memorable (and somewhat playful) performance as they fall in and out of scope, particularly Liev Schreiber and Vincent D'Onofrio as Hasidic gangsters Lipa and Shmully. And second: Butler commits fully to the intensity of the character, giving Aronofsky’s ardent style the urgency it demands. It’s Aronofsky near his best. —MAXWELL RABB R, 107 min. Wide release in theaters

of my 20s. Once I got home from a birthday weekend of food, drink, and conversations about the finer things— writers, filmmakers, music, and theater—I was too tired to put anything on. Unintentionally but appropriately, the last film then of my 20s was Olivier Assayas’s latest, Suspended Time, a breezy French comedy full of food, drink, and conversations about the finer things.

Suspended Time—which explicitly and implicitly pulls from Assayas’s real life—takes place at the onset of the 2020 pandemic. Unlike this summer’s other COVID-19 comedy, Eddington, Assayas's ﬁlm is more interested in how the pandemic illuminates people as they stubbornly are, instead of using the event as a catalyst for a character’s transition into a shell of what they once were.

Brothers Paul (Vincent Macaigne) and Etienne (Micha Lescot) isolate together in their provincial childhood home with their respective girlfriends, Morgane (Nine d’Urso) and Carole (Nora Hamzawi). The ﬁlm was shot at Assayas’s actual residence, where art and objects collected by his family over generations make up the lived-in, indoor environment. Assayas splices narration about his memories growing up in between scenes of the brothers reconciling their relationship to the past and their ability to envision a future.

The movie has the requisite (though chuckleworthy) neurotic pandemic jokes in addition to comedy mined from the siblings’ “odd couple” dynamic. Though the setting is late spring, the underlying chill is appropriate for an end-of-summer watch. Suspended Time isn’t particularly novel, and it’s a touch too thin to successfully stretch into 105 minutes, but you could do for a worse late August hang than these couples. What Suspended Time understands best is the discomfort felt as an ending shi s to a beginning. Whether it’s the passing of seasons, exiting your 20s, or understanding what comes a er lockdown, change seldom happens in us but around us, simply oﬀering new light in which to see ourselves. —DANIELLA MAZZIO 105 min. Limited release in theaters

Vice Is Broke

Suspended Time

As my 30th birthday approached, I considered too late which movie I’d want to make the ceremonial ﬁnal watch

for longer than anyone might expect, tapping into a millennial-centric need for the disruption of the status quo. What started as a small Montréal-based alternative outlet was marketed into a $5.7 billion empire. But like any Icarian fable, it really, really didn’t work out, and, in June 2023, it imploded into unsavable bankruptcy. A lot of people got burned, including Huang.

Carrying a lingering nostalgia, Huang set out to trace how this pioneering company—once the hallmark of a generation—lost its way. Vice Is Broke balances two opposing sentiments. First is Huang’s frustration with a company that withheld money from him. The second is a lasting void Huang feels now that the Vice he loved disappeared. This makes for a super compelling vantage point from which to tell the story; however, Huang can’t quite parse out his feelings in time to tap into the bulk of the problems that remembering Vice stirs up, whether that’s within the company’s business indiscretions or its impact on journalism.

Vice Is Broke opens with Huang positioning himself as a down-to-earth guy. He makes sure to underline that he’s not a journalist, comparing himself to his hero, Anthony Bourdain, whose show No Reservations inspired Huang to prioritize people-ﬁrst storytelling. It’s a bit vainglorious, and Vice Is Broke struggles to shake the feeling that its documentary approach perhaps carries too much of the same brazenness and surface-level feeling as Vice’s work.

Eddie Huang witnessed the rise and fall of Vice up close. The chef and author, best known for hosting the Viceland series Huang’s World, emerged as part of a new breed of journalists who embodied Vice’s swaggering approach, where the wall between subject and storyteller collapsed to lay the red carpet for a new era of the gonzo journalism syle that developed in the 70s. This media experiment worked really, really well

Huang examines Vice to varying degrees of success. It’s best when he is the most unforgiving, particularly in condemning how the brand sensationalized foreign countries—the opposite approach to that of his hero, Bourdain. What might be the best parts of the ﬁlm are a confrontational interview with Vice cofounder (and Proud Boys founder) Gavin McInnes, and an exchange with cofounder Shane Smith, but the takeaways feel relatively one-dimensional. What passes for inquiry here is closer to rough research. Vice Is Broke is momentarily compelling but hollow in the end, much like Vice when the hype inevitably died down. —MAXWELL RABB R, 102 min. Mubi v

Caught Stealing NIKO TAVERNISE/COURTESY SONY PICTURES

FILM

Iwas fortunate enough to grow up near several drive-ins and went almost every weekend in the summer as a kid. We’d sit on lawn chairs in the gravel, enjoying foil-wrapped burgers, corn dogs, and piping hot french fries next to iron poles, where the sound of the film blared through those hefty, grated speakers. The movie wouldn’t start until it was dark; it was always a double feature, sometimes even a triple. As a small child, I’d fall asleep in the back seat if my parents stayed for the second movie. But as I got older, I’d stay up for the full lineup with my family, with friends, on dates. It was a core part of my formative experiences as a cinephile, but since moving to Chicago almost 15 years ago, I haven’t been doing it nearly as often.

For my 30th birthday, I ventured back to the drive-in at the Cascade in West Chicago, but that has since closed. During the pandemic, I started going to the McHenry Outdoor Theater in McHenry, Illinois, and I went again this past weekend to see Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) in celebration of its 50th anniversary. My best friend and I share a love of the original summer blockbuster, so naturally we had to spend part of our long Labor Day weekend seeing it. I recommend both the drive-in and a jaunt to Woodstock (where my friend recently bought a house) for a nice cinephile-adjacent day trip: Orson Welles lived there for four years as a teenager, performing in and directing plays at the town’s opera house, also famous for its inclusion in Harold Ramis’s Groundhog Day (1993). The town now has murals and statues honoring both Welles and the classic comedy.

Maybe it’s because I’ve seen Jaws so many times, or perhaps it was the particulars of the

viewing experience, but it resonated with me a bit differently this time. Because while I love the drive-in, I won’t pretend it’s without fault, as both image and sound are compromised—this in turn creates a distancing effect that sometimes makes the actual ﬁlmmaking all the more obvious. It struck me more clearly this time that Jaws is, in fact, the second studio film of a twentysomething, not the work of an already seasoned master. It’s still a work of genius, at once so simple, so complex (lest we forget it required the building of not one but three 25foot mechanical sharks), so entertaining and thought-provoking, but it was fascinating to see it in a new light, driven in part by Spielberg’s ﬁlmed introduction.

It’s like the opposite of saying the same word over and over until it loses meaning. Semantic satiation, that’s called. But cinephilic satiation is different, in that after seeing a movie many times, it can begin to take on expanded meaning, o ering small revelations each time.

I did see other movies this week: Zach Cregger’s Weapons (2025) at the Regal City North (which was packed for discount Tuesday) and a secret Hong Kong action ﬁlm at the Davis Theater as part of the ongoing Trust Fall series. The end of summer tends to be slow for moviegoing, but it’s about to speed up fast with Noir City beginning this week at the Music Box Theatre (see p. 12).

So on that note. . . . Until next time, moviegoers. —KAT SACHS v

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

A still from Jaws (1975) COURTESY UNIVERSAL PICTURES

MUSIC

ISOUND & GRAVITY

Wed 9/10 through Sun 9/14, 6:30 PM (Wed–Sat) or 7 PM (Sun), multiple venues, more info at soundandgravity.org, festival pass $252.84, day passes $50.78 (Wed), $102.59 (Thu–Sat), $30.05 (Sun), 21+

n November 2024, when Condé Nast announced the end of Chicago’s Pitchfork Music Festival, the discourse focused on the changing economic and social climate for large-scale music events and the tension between art and finance in the festival business. The Pitchfork fest had started in 2006 when the online music magazine collaborated with local promoter and jazz drummer Mike Reed, who’d just launched his production company, At Pluto. It swiftly became a destination event, eventually attracting more than 60,000 visitors per year with its eclectic, expertly curated bill and relaxed atmosphere. The festival celebrated underground music culture o stage as well, with creatively chosen vendors that included a showcase of poster artists by Flatstock and a record fair hosted by CHIRP Radio.

Condé Nast acquired Pitchfork in 2015, and two years later it split the festival from the publication. The new owners introduced VIP ticketing in 2017, to signiﬁcant

Mike Reed talks about building a new festival to light up a whole neighborhood with adventurous music.

By JAMIE LUDWIG

backlash, and pushed for a more revenue-driven approach. The festival remained a hub for indie music fans looking for something less corporatized than, say, Lollapalooza, and its lineups didn’t change dramatically—though Reed says Condé Nast tried to pressure him into booking mainstream pop stars such as Justin Bieber and Demi Lovato. In early 2024, Condé Nast ﬁred most of Pitchfork’s editorial sta and merged the publication with GQ. By the end of the year the Chicago fest was dead.

Reed isn’t letting his expertise sit idle, though: He’s still presenting a Chicago festival. The inaugural Sound & Gravity runs from Wednesday, September 10, till Sunday, September 14. Its diverse lineup departs from Pitchfork’s o erings by pushing further into the avant-garde—it tracks more closely with the bookings at Constellation and the Hungry Brain, venues that Reed owns. He says he’s also inspired by music-focused, neighborhood-rooted festivals such as the Hyde Park Jazz Festival and Lincoln Square’s Square Roots. Pitchfork and other large outdoor festivals in public

parks usually have to build their own infrastructure, and Sound & Gravity avoids the escalating cost of that approach by using relatively small preexisting venues. At press time, the fest was scheduled to present 52 artists (more than a typical Pitchfork lineup) at seven spots clustered around the intersection of Belmont and Western. Their combined capacity is a small fraction of Pitchfork’s, and they include Constellation and the Hungry Brain, of course, as well as Beat Kitchen, Judson & Moore, and the Rockwell on the River event space.

The stacked bill for Sound & Gravity includes rock, jazz, pop, ambient, contemporary classical, folk, beat-driven electronic music, and plenty of things that don’t ﬁt into any one category. It’s di cult to convey the range of the bookings, but on the jazz front alone, highlights include New York trio Tarbaby, Norwegian group the Andreas Røysum Ensemble (joined by Chicago performance poet Marvin Tate), free-jazz collective Irreversible Entanglements, and the Sun Ensemble led by Tennessee-born saxophonist Zoh Amba.

You can also see—among many others—adventurous Chicago classical institution Third Coast Percussion, Nigerien guitar phenom Mdou Moctar, Geologist from Animal Collective, experimental Latine groove purveyor Helado Negro, Bill Callahan of Smog, Egyptian pop producer Nadah El Shazly, psychedelic electronic artist Eucademix (aka Yuka Honda of Cibo Matto), and New York–based singer Ganavya (who grew up in Tamil Nadu immersed in the Hindu musical storytelling tradition of harikatha). Electrical Audio has programmed a handful of surprise sets on Friday and Saturday at Guild Row (3130 N. Rockwell), but Reed won’t o er any hints beyond saying that they’ll feature known artists rather than new projects.

Many sets overlap, so no matter how quickly you get from venue to venue, you can’t see everything. Sound & Gravity o ers passes for the whole festival as well as passes for each day, but you’ll have to make some tough calls either way. Admission to individual shows is subject to capacity, but if your ﬁrst choice ﬁlls up before you arrive, you can probably catch your second choice just a couple blocks away. Reed hopes that picking a path through the festival on the fly—and talking to other fans in transit—will be part of the fun.

All proceeds from Sound & Gravity will benefit Constellation Performing Arts, a nonprofit that Reed founded in 2013 as an extension of the venue. Its mission is to support diverse music and arts programming and foster community. Reed says the nonprofit also plans to fill the space vacated in the Constellation building by the June closure of movement-arts institution Links Hall, and he’s using the working name Comrade for that project.

Reed wants future editions of Sound & Gravity to incorporate dance, and he hopes the festival will call attention to the “creative corridor” that’s developing in the neighborhood—the same way the West Loop has become famous as a sort of restaurant row.

Mike Reed, founder of Sound & Gravity

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Jamie Ludwig: By the time the end of the Pitchfork Music Festival was announced, did you have a vision for Sound & Gravity?

Mike Reed: The idea was something I had a few years ago. I just never really had the capacity to take it on. Obviously with more time on my hands, I could actually take a look at it. I wanted it to be more of a neighborhood sort of event, like Around the Coyote, which was an arts fest in Wicker Park, or the Hyde Park Jazz Fest, which has a similar sort of multivenue [approach] that incorporates di erent parts of that area of Hyde Park.

Maybe the music event becomes a catalyst for anybody in the neighborhood to do things: “Hey, that’s a good weekend to have a yard sale,” or whatever they want to do to ignite an area of town. And the music events become a thing that that energy could draft o of.

Park chamber of commerce or Roscoe Village chamber of commerce. These events were essentially vehicles to make money for those organizations and build reserves for their ongoing operations. Instead of doing something that a lot of organizations do—you might have a gala or have some fundraising drives—I said, “Why don’t we just make a product that we know how to make?”

We put on shows. We’ve done them on a large scale, and we do them weekly on a regular scale. If we could make a product and sort of price into it a little bit more, that could be a vehicle for our own fundraiser but have the extra benefits of being a potentially larger community event that other people could benefit from too: other creative businesses, venues, and establishments, and regular people in the neighborhood. If they deem that’s the weekend that they want to have a barbecue and invite all their friends from di erent neighborhoods and do a sort of concert pub crawl, great. If not, then they can have a back-

If we really go back to the essence of it, the whole thing was wrapped up in what the website did. In the beginning years, it was indie music and other types of adventurous listening. Things are now a lot less speciﬁc. If you read Pitchfork or any type of [music] website,

more of a feeling that, from Summer Smash to Riot Fest to Wicker Park Fest to Out of Space to, I don’t know, the Evanston Folk Festival—now you’ve got Salt Shed—it’s all the same shit, you know? It should be somehow special.

The stacked bill for Sound & Gravity includes rock, jazz, pop, ambient, contemporary classical, folk, beat-driven electronic music, and plenty of things that don’t fit into any one category.

the popular leanings have taken the forefront. Whereas 15 years ago, the main headlines might’ve been about the Silver Jews, now it’s, like, Olivia Rodrigo.

There’s a special quality that happens when you’re part of a subculture—I suppose at that time period, the indie world was still small enough that it was its own sort of subculture.

If you also then extrapolate that into a larger thing about the concert industry, this is my perspective: The concert industry is not that old. Elvis came around, and then the Beatles come around and play Shea Stadium. They’re literally playing through the baseball announcer’s PA—they don’t have all this stu . It’s amps and then the baseball announcer’s PAs.

Then the idea got more refined in terms of thinking about Constellation and the Hungry Brain, which is another one of my venues around the corner. I was really thinking about the longer-term vitality of that organization as a not-for-profit and seeing what was going on with di erent not-for-profits. Links Hall (which was a very long-running space partner in the Constellation building), by the fall, they were in quite a bad place financially, and their future was in question. Seeing what was going on there, seeing what was happening with Chicago Dancemakers Forum and them kind of shrinking, seeing High Concept Labs, who just more recently moved out of their space at Mana Contemporary, seeing other contractions with other arts organizations that present performance stu , I wanted to ensure, as one business was obviously sunsetting—meaning the Pitchfork event and that production company—that maybe I could do things to be proactive about Constellation.

So the purpose became, “What if we could use this vehicle as essentially a fundraiser?”

In the history of, let’s say, the traditional street festival, most are organized underneath some type of charitable situation, like Wicker

yard sort of thing and the whole area can have this sort of vibrancy for a few days.

It was also key that it be centralized. It’s really compact, obviously. It’s very walkable, and it essentially acts like a pub crawl. That really jibed with a lot of events that I think right now are interesting. I can say that there’s inspiration from events like Big Ears in Knoxville, Le Guess Who? in Utrecht in the Netherlands, the Winter Jazzfest in New York, the old CMJ, and I suppose even the very ﬁrst days of South by Southwest.

Turning around from something I used to do with 20,000 people in the park, I can do much more interesting and musical presentations. I could have a string quartet or an acoustic duo without being worried about them being drowned out by some DJ on the third stage.

You did an interview with the Sun-Times years ago where you described Pitchfork as a festival for people who are “really into music,” versus “lifestyle events” like Lollapalooza. How do you see Sound & Gravity speaking to that sort of binary?

Back in the day, Pitchfork deﬁnitely was that.

Things get real speciﬁc about taste and communities. Not just the music part, but the adjacent parts of the community, from people who work in design or people who work in arts of some sort to the places that you hang out and the bartenders who are there. Everything about it becomes its own sort of world. It might be a small one, but it’s a lot more powerful than this juiced one where who knows why anybody’s there.

Popular culture in itself doesn’t necessarily fall into a very speciﬁc reason for being in a place. Anyone could be there. You might buy a ticket not even knowing who’s on the thing or why. Lollapalooza is a version of that. Coachella down to the smaller festivals too.

You have to remember that a festival should be special. If there are mounds of the same sort, they cookie-cut themselves to every degree—the way they were designed, the people that work at them, the lineups, the rollouts. It’s like, “Well, what about doing something that’s not the standard, doing something that’s di erent?” Because the audience, even though they’re not necessarily thinking it, they’re feeling it.

So that’s all part of the recipe that’s maybe what your question is pointing to. My thing is

Ten years later, Led Zeppelin and the Grateful Dead are touring the world with these massive sound systems. Maybe about ten or 15 years after that, every major city has an amphitheater built outside specifically just for concerts. And the [growth] of [basketball] and hockey ignited a whole indoor touring industry that didn’t exist before. Fast-forward another ten to 15 years, and it’s the traveling festival—it’s Lollapalooza, it’s H.O.R.D.E Fest, it’s the Vans Warped Tour, it’s Lilith Fair. Fifteen years after that, you get the destination festival. Here comes Coachella and Bonnaroo, and Pitchfork was right in that wake.

It seems like with that saturation, the specialness has gone away. Some of those things obviously survive, but the vast majority of them are pretty uninteresting and predictable. If you have a generation or generation and a half who’s grown up with that, there’s nothing to ooh and

MUSIC

continued from p. 17

ahh about. It’s just what they expect. So what about doing something di erent?

Obviously we’re going much smaller, and we’re honing into music listeners who still are really looking for new stuff and experiences. Not just people that listen to music as an accoutrement, but more the people that are really wanting to see what’s out there, see what’s next, and see things of legend that might’ve been slightly obscure to the general public or that have sort of cult followings. That’s kind of where the thing started. That’s what I understand, mostly. It’s mostly what we do at Constellation. By the looks of, let’s say, Big Ears and Le Guess Who? or Winter Jazzfest, there’s an appetite for it. I don’t need 20,000 people in the park by any stretch to make something that could be that fun [into an event that’s] special on a much smaller scale.

How has your experience as a musician impacted your approach to curation? It’s pretty unusual to have somebody who’s a working musician curate a festival like Pitchfork, let alone like Sound & Gravity.

I mean, it is [unusual]. There are some people that do it, but they do it more as something that was [typically] given to them, like, “Great, you’re the artistic director at Fill-in-theBlank Center.” But these are businesses that I built myself, so it’s deﬁnitely di erent. I own Constellation. I founded Pitchfork [Music Festival], and I founded Sound & Gravity—the backing behind it is mostly of my doing. I don’t know anybody that actually does that.

I was just playing at the North Sea Jazz Festival [in Rotterdam] for the first time. I’d been asked a few di erent times, and I could never do it before, because it’s always in July, and that was always when Pitchfork was. It’s one of the biggest jazz festivals maybe in the world, definitely in Europe. So I get to see both sides of the experience. I went there to play, and then I’m walking around the grounds, checking out how it all operates and talking to somebody who programs the thing, who a lot of times musicians wouldn’t have access to. But they speak to me as colleagues. It definitely gives me insight that I hope translates—especially for the musicians.

I was in a meeting yesterday, going through load-in times and sound checks and other stu . There’s things I can speciﬁcally tell the people that are going to be advancing those matters about whatever [jazz pianist and instrument builder] Cooper-Moore might need, because I

Sound & Gravity artists include: 1. Ganavya CARLOS CRUZ; 2. Mdou Moctar EBRU YILDIZ; 3. Third Coast Percussion SAVERIO TRUGLIA; 4. Eucademix SEAN ONO LENNON;

know Cooper-Moore, I’ve seen Cooper-Moore, and I’ve played with Cooper-Moore. I can tell you, “He’s gonna need this,” or maybe we can change this sound-check time, because I can see the setup is going to take longer.

So there’s many things I can speak to—all those years of doing a festival, speaking to all the technical people, the riggers, the sound people, and knowing what it means to unload a semitruck or get the right amps. So much of that is in my wheelhouse, and hopefully that helps everybody in the end, whether it’s the sound people or the performers and hopefully the audience as well.

5. Helado Negro SADIE CULBERSON; 6. Tarbaby JIMMY KATZ; 7. Bill Callahan HANLY BANKS CALLAHAN; 8. Andreas Røysum Ensemble with Marvin Tate COURTESY SOUND & GRAVITY

As far as curating, I have my own tastes, and I think that’s reflected in this event. If you looked at this and at Constellation and compared them to an old Pitchfork, you probably could see what was influenced by me and others that were influenced by forces that be. I’m also kind of critical about some [bookings by other promoters], where an artist might land on a festival, and I’ll look [at it] like, “This shit sucks, man. The only reason this is on is because everybody wanted to jump on the same bandwagon.” And I won’t book it, because I have my own thoughts. Of course, I could see that on the large festival circuit. They look more the same these days than ever. I see that too on a lot of the jazz festivals around the world. I think that has to do with the nature of the Internet and social media, because everybody’s looking at each other. They’re not putting together their own idea. What do you actually think? What do you actually want to book? What are you actually listening to?

Some of it makes sense, because some of [the artists] are in a cycle, meaning there’s a new record out and they’re touring, and it’s actually interesting. And some of it’s just a bandwagon effect. I’m not completely immune to that, but I am a lot more conscious about “Just because they’re doing it doesn’t mean we should. What could we do that is original?”

With this first Sound & Gravity event, it’s a little fifty-fifty on that, because the timing of getting the lineup together was a shorter runway than I would’ve liked. A big part of how I went about it was to talk to some really good agents that I’ve worked with for the better part of two decades. “You guys know me. What do you have that’s touring through or could route through that you think would be a good idea for this first new festival?” I got pretty lucky. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Do you see Sound & Gravity becoming a destination event? Or given the vision, sort of a half community event and half destination event?

Even in this ﬁrst year, we have [ticket] buyers from over 30 states. I mean, it’s not a ton, but it’s like, “All right, why do we have ten people from Arkansas?” Those aren’t the only ten people who might be interested, but maybe they’re the ten who are like, “I’m going to give this a shot this year.” I could see that growing. And I’ve definitely gotten a lot of feedback from people—some of my friends from France are like, “We bought our tickets.”

MUSIC

And that’s another reason I think we’d have that possibility, but I don’t see it necessarily being a destination event. I just think that we’ll open up more than if it just was reliant on people from Chicago.

If we pull it o , our biggest advertisers are going to be the people who come this first year, the artists and the attendees that hopefully say, “Hey, that was a really great time.” There’s no bit of advertising I could put out there that’s going to do better than that.

As a veteran festivalgoer, I think small events where everyone’s so stoked about the music are perfect places to have those conversations and to keep things growing organically.

“You have to remember that a festival should be special. If there are mounds of the same sort, they cookie-cut themselves to every degree.”

People might say, “That’s a great weekend to come to Chicago. I can see all those things, and it seems relatively affordable, and I’ve heard so much about that venue.” We have an international reputation, which is really cool. Places like Cafe Oto in London, the Bimhuis in Amsterdam, and Casa del Popolo in Montreal, they’re all very adventurous music spaces that I look at all the time and see what they’re doing, and we’re in that lens.

There’s also the small geography of it. This is going to be different from Le Guess Who?—I don’t know if you’ve been there, but it’s a very interesting space. It’s like being at an airport terminal–slash–movie complex. That’s a unique constraint. Big Ears being in the middle of downtown Knoxville is its own unique experience. Winter Jazzfest, I think they’ve been doing it the right way these last few years, where one night is in Manhattan and the other night is in Brooklyn, in these condensed areas so you can get around to everything. So you’re walking down the street, and you run into an old friend. You were gonna go check out something at eight. Then you talk to them, and it’s like, “Actually, I’m gonna go with you.” These situations happen all the time, and that’s fun as well. So you can just be on these little journeys and run into people and improvise your plans. If it was spread across all of Chicago, that would suck and it would be meaningless— you’d spend way too much time trying to get to the next place. But you know that you can walk just 15 minutes and get to the next place, and there’s 45 minutes in between set times. That’s very doable. v

m jludwig@chicagoreader.com

THE SECRET HISTORY OF CHICAGO MUSIC

Henry Threadgill turns jazz into a kaleidoscope of worlds and times

The saxophonist, ﬂutist, and composer has transformed the music over and over with Air, the Sextett, Very Very Circus, Zooid, and more.

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.

Like anybody who’s written about music for a while, I get lots of messages from publicists. I don’t envy those folks; their jobs have been getting more di cult as music journalism shrinks and digital platforms change the rules. Plus I can’t even define “country trap” or “hyperpop,” so I’m hardly the best audience for most pitches. But sometimes one hits the mark—like the announcement of a new album by saxophonist, flutist, and composer Henry Threadgill. Born and raised in Chicago, this visionary jazz musician is 81 years old, so new material is hardly something to take for granted. Threadgill is one of the most significant living figures in the Black avant-garde, but he’s not nearly as well-known as, say, John Coltrane or Sun Ra.

Like many previous Secret History subjects, Threadgill was an early member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), founded in 1965 to create a platform for the exploratory Afrocentric sounds the group has described as “Ancient to the Future.” His new album, Listen Ship (due September 26 on Pi Recordings), presents a suite for six acoustic guitars (played by the likes of Bill Frisell, Miles Okazaki, and Brandon Ross) and two pianos. According to the PR pitch, the suite uses Threadgill’s “unique intervallic syntax” (which you know something about if you’ve heard his group Zooid) to “illuminate

his idiosyncratic vision.”

“Idiosyncratic” doesn’t begin to describe that vision, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Henry Threadgill was born February 15, 1944, while his parents lived at 33rd and Cottage Grove in Bronzeville. His father was a jazz lover and professional gambler who worked for the mob. “He opened up a casino,” Threadgill told Bomb Magazine in a 2022 interview, “and while he counted the money, he would give me a handful of nickels and say, ‘Hey, Moon. Go play some music.’

in. I was thirteen years old and stood near the stage. I unzipped my mouth and said, ‘Fucking Stan Getz and Chet Baker, man!’”

(My father never called me Henry. He called me Moon.) There was nothing but jazz on the jukebox because that’s all he listened to, and he wasn’t going to be anywhere that didn’t have it. I got hooked on jazz right away.”

Threadgill’s parents split when he was three, and he stayed with his mom’s side of the family. “I loved going to my mother’s mother’s church because it was a sanctified church where people go off and speak in tongues and get wild and all of that,” he told Bomb “Afterward, at home, we’d put on little stage shows and pretend to be the preachers and the singers.”

Threadgill started playing piano at four, taking lessons when his family could a ord it. He heard the blues when they shopped at the Maxwell Street Market, and he tried to learn boogie-woogie by listening to Meade “Lux” Lewis and Albert Ammons. He had an epiphany in 1958, when he saw Chet Baker, Stan Getz, and Frank Rosolino at Englewood High School. “I remember it cost about ﬁfteen cents to get

In the Englewood High School band, Threadgill started on percussion, then took on clarinet and saxophone. Chicago had a bounty of terrific tenor players at the time, and Threadgill devoted himself to music by giants such as Gene Ammons, Sonny Rollins, John Gilmore, and Von Freeman.

Threadgill had been hanging out in nightclubs on the fabled 63rd Street strip since he was 14, and he’d watched Sun Ra’s ensemble rehearse every night he could. While still in high school he started writing music and gigging—sometimes with polka groups, sometimes in combos with friends. He earned a little money in marching bands made up mostly of veterans, playing New Orleans trad jazz or military marches in parades. It all informed his kaleidoscopic aesthetic—dissonant and melodious, sparse and lush, disciplined and wild—and he would continue to incorporate new styles for decades to come.

It’s tough to pin down dates for the major early-60s developments in Threadgill’s mu-

sical journey—he’s given several different years in di erent interviews—but I’m pretty conﬁdent of the order in which they arrived. He began studying with Richard Wang at Woodrow Wilson Junior College; he started playing in the Experimental Band, led by pianist Muhal Richard Abrams; and he toured in a gospel group with a minister named Horace Sheppard.

Wang’s students included many other future AACM members, among them bassist Malachi Favors Maghostut and saxophonists Joseph Jarman, Roscoe Mitchell, and Anthony Braxton. Threadgill got to know all of them, and they often jammed together at Wang’s encouragement. “[Jarman] was the first way-out guy I met,” he told composer, trombonist, and AACM historian George E. Lewis in the essential 2008 book A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music. Jarman, Mitchell, and Threadgill became friends and formed a study group. Threadgill loved exploring the limits of his understanding: “I used to turn in anywhere from five to fifteen versions of any harmony assignment,” he told Lewis. He listened to avant-garde

STEVE KRAKOW FOR CHICAGO READER

classical composers such as Luciano Berio and Edgard Varèse, the latter of whom he met at a University of Chicago concert. “Varèse was something I couldn’t touch,” he said. “I didn’t know what the hell was going on, and I didn’t know why I liked it.”

Among Threadgill, Jarman, and Mitchell, not everyone’s memory agrees when it comes to who introduced whom to Abrams and the Experimental Band. The Experimental Band had begun to take shape in 1961, emerging from a larger jazz workshop as the younger, more adventurous players split off with Abrams. The pianist was a mentor to many, and the Experimental Band became the nucleus around which the AACM formed in 1965. It would also spawn or catalyze many groups, including the famed Art Ensemble of Chicago. (I was lucky to see the Experimental Band reunion at the 2015 Chicago Jazz Festival, which included Abrams, Threadgill, Mitchell, and Lewis.)

Threadgill wasn’t in town to witness the birth of the AACM, though. “I met this minister out of Philadelphia named Horace Sheppard who had a troupe of the most talented people,” he told Bomb. “Horace would tell me, ‘Henry, I want you to walk down the aisle and play “Just a Closer Walk With Thee” on your alto sax. When you get to the front of the church, I want everyone to be screaming. I want you to tear the place up.’ By the time I’d get to the pulpit, people would be up on their feet screaming.”

Threadgill joined the army in 1966, hoping to pursue music, and at first it worked—he arranged tunes for army bands in Saint Louis and Kansas City. But after taking a subversive swing at a medley of patriotic tunes he’d been asked to arrange for a ceremony with local luminaries, he was reassigned to an infantry role in Vietnam in 1967, just in time for the bloody Tet O ensive. A year or two later, he returned to Saint Louis, where his military service came to an end thanks to his AACM cohorts.

“[M’Chaka] Uba got Muhal and them to send papers for me to get discharged early because I had a teaching position in Chicago with the AACM,” Threadgill told Lewis. “Then I started playing with the AACM on a permanent basis.” He also participated in the scene surrounding Phil Cohran, who’d left the AACM in 1967 and founded the A ro-Arts Theater.

In 1969 (or possibly 1970), Threadgill spent his first stint in New York, where he’s been largely based since the mid-70s. He started putting together his own bands, most notably

a trio with two of his south-side neighbors, bassist Fred Hopkins and drummer Steve McCall. At the time, Threadgill frequently collaborated with experimental theater troupes, and when Don Sanders, chair of theater arts at Co-

lumbia College, commissioned him to create music for the 1971 play The Hotel: 99 Rooms, he took the work to Hopkins and McCall.

Sanders wanted them to use Threadgill’s music as well as some Scott Joplin piano pieces. The trio enjoyed the challenge of adapting those antique tunes to a setting with no piano, and after bonding during several months of work, they kept playing together as a band after the production closed. Their wide-open sound, limber and leaping, balanced itself so adroitly between composition and improvisation that many listeners couldn’t tell which they were doing.

At first this trio simply went by the three musicians’ names, and by 1973 they were calling themselves Reflections. In 1975, they took the name Air and released their ﬁrst LP, Air Song. Air remain Threadgill’s most famous and beloved group, and they would make ten more records over the next decade or so, notably 1979’s Air Lore, which features a couple of those Joplin pieces. For two of those albums, the trio took the name New Air, with Pheeroan akLa replacing McCall. After McCall passed away in 1989, the group continued to play live with Andrew Cyrille on drums.

Everybody in Air had moved to New York by 1975, but Threadgill kept his Chicago ties alive. The AACM began forming a New York chapter in 1978, with former Chicagoans such as Threadgill, Abrams, Jarman, Braxton, Wadada Leo Smith, Lester Bowie, Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre, and Chico Freeman. Threadgill appeared on 1978 albums by Abrams (1-OQA+19) and Braxton ( For Trio ) and formed his first group as a bandleader, the nine-piece X-75. (He considered Air to be a leaderless collective.)

The lone X-75 LP, 1979’s Volume 1 , features four woodwind players, four basses, and a vocalist—including current or former Chicagoans such as Jarman, Hopkins, Amina Claudine Myers, and Douglas Ewart, who’d emigrated from Jamaica in 1963 and formally joined the AACM in 1968.

Threadgill’s creativity is, as Hopkins put it, “a continuous waterfall,” and he’s kept growing throughout his long career. In the 80s, he formed the Henry Threadgill Sextet (later versions were billed as the Sextett), which innovated the “little big band” sound. The group had seven members, but Threadgill wrote just six parts—he often counted the two drummers as one. In the 90s, he launched Very Very Circus, whose lineup included two tubas, two electric guitars, trombone or French horn, and sometimes accordion. In 1995, Reader critic Peter Margasak described the band’s wild, globe-spanning genre fusions as rippling with “surprisingly liquid, highly danceable grace.”

Since the early 2000s, Threadgill’s main vehicle has been Zooid, where he’s usually accompanied by tuba, cello, guitar, and drums. As Reader contributor Bill Meyer wrote in 2022, the band “uses intensively rehearsed investigations of harmonic interval series,

rather than scales or chords, as the foundation of its rich, constantly shifting group improvisations.” The e ect is like hearing jazz bounced o a spinning disco ball—the music is broken into dozens of fragments, but they all move together.

One of Threadgill’s compositions for Zooid, In for a Penny, in for a Pound, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2016—at the time, he was one of only three jazz artists ever to have won. In 2023, Threadgill published his memoir, Easily Slip Into Another World: A Life in Music (written with Columbia University professor Brent Hayes Edwards). Local gallery Corbett vs. Dempsey hosted a book talk that June, and it seems to be Threadgill’s most recent appearance in Chicago. Let’s hope the release of Listen Ship brings him back. v

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.

Recommended and notable shows with critics’ insights for the week of September 4

MUSIC

Beach Bunny maintain their spot atop Chicago rock with another Pool Party

BEACH BUNNY, SOCCER MOMMY, ANNIE DIRUSSO, SIDNEY GISH, GREAT GRANDPA Sun 9/7, 4:30 PM, Salt Shed outdoors, 1357 N. Elston, $58.25–$114.15. b

LAST YEAR, the Sun-Times ran a splashy feature about Chicago’s booming rock scene, which seems to want to lump together every successful local guitar band formed in the past decade, regardless of style. As a common denominator, it o ers the fact that all these groups have signed to reputable labels—and it glibly suggests that this hasn’t happened on such a scale since Billboard anointed Chicago the next Seattle in 1993. “Now, 30 years later, could it be happening all over again?” the story asks.

The thing is, it wasn’t the industry attention that made the old Wicker Park scene interesting. And in the 2020s, label deals just don’t say as much as they used to about a band’s popularity. True, when major-label A&R reps descended on Chicago en masse in the early 90s, they encouraged a ﬂurry of musical activity from hopeful artists, and you could still see this embarrassment of riches onstage at the Fireside Bowl at the end of the decade. (That late-90s scene has arguably proved more signiﬁcant: Fall Out Boy can headline Wrigley Field, but Smashing Pumpkins can’t.) But at no point has there ever been a single entity you could call “Chicago rock.” We have a constellation of overlapping communities that’s impossible to summarize. Privileging acts who’ve signed with labels or attracted the attention of out-of-town industry types is basically saying that you only need to see those trees to understand the whole forest. That framing would’ve made the Sun-Times

piece unhelpful on its own, but the story also puts a bizarre emphasis on Brigitte Calls Me Baby (a Spirit Halloween version of the Smiths) and barely mentions pop-punk powerhouse Beach Bunny. Formed a decade ago by singer-guitarist Lili Trifilio, Beach Bunny got their start in Chicago’s DIY scene, and within five years they’d become a breakout phenomenon, never again able to fit their crowd into a basement venue. The title track of the 2018 EP Prom Queen , whose bittersweet hooks carry Trifilio’s indictments of beauty standards and laments about eating disorders, became a TikTok smash the following year. Beach Bunny have since grown into a local institution on par with bands a generation older, and in 2023 at the Salt Shed, they debuted an annual mini fest called the Pool Party. Trifilio has made it her policy to fi ll the festival’s bill with indie bands led by or at least prominently featuring women, and this summer’s lineup includes acts at varying levels of fame: Soccer Mommy, Annie DiRusso, Sidney Gish, and Great Grandpa. The main attraction is of course Beach Bunny, fresh off April’s Tunnel Vision , their latest album of oh-so-sweet songs. On “Just Around the Corner,” one of my favorites, Trifilio sings with clarity and focus about our corrosive culture of convenience. It’s hard to turn the Internet grifters who’ve helped scramble our collective brains into material for a pop tune, but Beach Bunny’s swooning verses do the trick. —LEOR GALIL

SATURDAY6

Mariachi Sirenas Part of Little Lawndale in the Park, which also includes Rosalba Valdez, DJ Johnny Jones, Oveja Negra, Celestial Ministries Association marching band and drum line, La Rosa Noir, and Club Crib. 2:30 PM (festival runs from noon till 7 PM), Douglass Park Flower Hall and Formal Gardens, Ogden and Sacramento. F b

Mariachi is a male-dominated tradition, but all over North America, groups such as Mariachi Sirenas have been changing the rules. This ten-piece ensemble, which bills itself as “Chicago’s first all-woman mariachi,” was founded in 2017 when singers and violinists Ibet Herrera and Eréndira Izguerra brought together a dozen musicians to preserve and celebrate the culture and legacy of mariachi music while empowering women. (By coinci dence, their first rehearsal took place on International Women’s Day.) They’ve certainly accomplished those goals, which seem modest enough—but the ensemble’s mere existence has been met with occasional backlash and harassment. In a 2019 interview with the Tribune, Izguerra describes being berated and ridiculed during a Mariachi Sirenas concert by men who shouted at them to take off their clothes or get off the stage. They’ve been asked if they’re accompanying a man or pressured to accept less money to play. But they’ve powered through, and Chicago’s music community is better for their efforts. Mariachi Sirenas take their name from the sirens of Greek mythology, who lure sailors to their deaths with irresistible voices, but onstage their queenly poise and selfpossession suggest they’re enjoying life way too much to bother with any passing ships. O en wearing traje de charro (traditional mariachi clothing) or other folkloric dress, they trade off lead vocals and share in rich vocal harmonies while playing beautiful melodies on trumpets, violins, and traditional Mexican strings, including guitar, guitarron, and vihuela. This performance at Douglass Park is part of the inaugural Little Lawndale in the Park, a free one-day festival that invites neighbors to connect over food, local vendors, interactive art making, and live music from artists with connections to North and South Lawndale.

—JAMIE LUDWIG

SUNDAY7

Beach Bunny See Pick of the Week at le . Soccer Mommy, Annie DiRusso, Sidney Gish, and Great Grandpa open. 4:30 PM, Salt Shed outdoors, 1357 N. Elston, $58.25–$114.15. 17+

MONDAY8

Clipse Earthgang open. 8 PM, Salt Shed, 1357 N. Elston, $87.85–$207.10. 17+

As far as I know, rapper Pusha T is the only person ever to talk about flipping bricks in a kid-friendly movie: He’s in last year’s Piece by Piece, an animated documentary about Pharrell Williams that’s ren-

dered in Lego, uh, bricks. You can be sure cocaine trafficking will come up if your project involves Pusha, who in the mid-90s formed rap duo Clipse with his older brother, Malice, in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Pusha has built an enviable solo career since the duo’s dissolution in 2010, and a few years ago the brothers got back together. Pharrell (as half of the Neptunes) helped produce every previous Clipse full-length, and on their new reunion album, Let God Sort Em Out, he’s the sole producer as well as the executive producer. Since the duo’s ﬁrst run, though, Pharrell has become a huge crossover star, and as you might expect from the guy who made “Happy,” he’s gotten pretty extra in his aesthetic. Back in the day he made lean, thumping beats for Clipse, with a vivid but skeletal sound, but today his production piles on glamorous layers of rococo

ﬂourishes. Thankfully, this can’t distract from Clipse’s greatness: The back-and-forth rapport between Pusha and Malice crackles and snaps louder than Pharrell’s percussion. The two of them bring out the best in their foils on the mike (who include guests such as Nas, Kendrick Lamar, and Tyler, the Creator), and on Sort Em Out they explore lyrical territory that’s new to them. Sure, they deliver some great crack raps here, but I keep returning to album opener “The Birds Don’t Sing,” where Pusha and Malice speak candidly about family relationships and mortality as though they’re sharing intimate griefs with no one but each other. The song colors the whole rest of the album, and it makes Sort Em Out feel less like a band getting back together and more like a fresh start by brothers who’ve found solace and new creative energy using an old name. —LEOR GALIL

MUSIC

WEDNESDAY10

Castle Rat Faerie Ring and Dead Feathers open. 8 PM, Reggies Rock Club, 2105 S. State, $33.70. 17+

If a warrior queen painted by fantasy art godfather Frank Frazetta came to life and started a high- concept metal band rooted in sludgy, Black Sabbath–style riffs, you’d have Castle Rat. The band’s sound is pure doom metal, while their lyrics, artwork, outﬁts, and personas situate them in a seamless medieval fantasy universe. Front person and occasional guitarist Riley Pinkerton is the Rat Queen who oversees the kingdom—one of her reallife childhood nicknames was “Rat,” bestowed due to her mouselike front teeth. Lead guitarist Franco Vittore is the Count; bassist Charley Ruddell is the Plague Doctor; and drummer Joshua Strmic is the Druid. Castle Rat ply a sound that’s passed through many hands, and their version is excellently cra ed, demonstrating a reverence for heavy metal royalty such as Dio and Electric Wizard.

Castle Rat are really distinguished by their live shows, where they deliver theatrical, high-energy performances—in the spirit of Gwar and Ghost—to bring audiences into their universe. They’ve even created a spectacular onstage nemesis, the Rat Reaperess (played by Madeline Wright). The band started in 2019, and they took off online last year after uploading algorithm-friendly music videos to YouTube to support their full-length debut, Into the Realm—they donned furs and chain mail, swung swords, and battled monsters, in foggy abysses and in churches with stained glass windows. On the album’s ﬁrst single, “Cry for Me,” Pinkerton repeats “Cry for me, baby, cry” like a spirit beckoning from its trap in the darkened wilds, and in the video she ﬁghts the Rat Reaperess in a snow-covered forest. At press time, it had racked up more than 639,000 views on YouTube. The video for the record’s crunch-heavy second single, “Fresh Fur”—where the band rocks out against stark, low-tech back-

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 4 8PM Bob Mould (Solo Electric)

Mariachi Sirenas COURTESY THE ARTIST

Clipse COURTESY THE ARTIST

Castle Rat and their nemesis, the Rat Reaperess (at right) COURTNEY HALL

MUSIC

Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/musicreviews

grounds of lightning bolts and ﬂames—has passed one million.

Castle Rat’s second full-length, The Bestiary , which drops September 19, delves into the trappings of their fantastical realm, which include sirens, summoning spells, and paths of moss. The group covered the album’s expenses, including recording sessions with Randall Dunn (Boris, Earth, Pallbearer), with a Kickstarter fundraiser that drew on the devotion of their social media following. The band hit their initial goal of $15,000 in 37 minutes and eventually raised nearly $140,000. Hair-metal greats like W.A.S.P. and Mötley Crüe knew how to play to the power of video, and Castle Rat run with that ﬂag full tilt into a new era—one where women rule.

—MICCO CAPORALE

TV on the Radio 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 4746 N. Racine, sold out. 18+

Brooklyn four-piece TV on the Radio released their debut full-length, Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes, more than 20 years ago—which can be hard to believe because it still feels so revelatory. The album arrived three years after 9/11, and its startling genre fusions and challenging emotional depth explored the confluence and conflict between desire and fear. The music captured the tension and uncertainty of a time when a wannabe warlord president controlled the White House, violence esca-

SAVAGE LOVE

SEX AND RELATIONSHIPS

All tied up

Should I give up my kink to keep my girlfriend?

By DAN SAVAGE

Q : Longtime reader! I’m a mostly straight boy in my early 20s with a new girlfriend. I say “mostly straight” because I’m into bondage. Finding men who wanted to tie me up was always easier than ﬁnding women who wanted to tie me up.

Dan, and I’ve really enjoyed having a girlfriend for the ﬁrst time in my adult life.

Finding another girl who is into me isn’t going to be easy.

lated abroad (specifically in the Middle East and Afghanistan) and young people worried about their futures. Given the rhyming nature of history, Desperate Youth resonates with people who loved it in 2004 as well as with the generation who’ve come of age since Charlottesville.

TV on the Radio haven’t released a full-length since 2014’s Seeds, but last year they played a few gigs ahead of a 20th-anniversary reissue of Desperate Youth (which includes ﬁve bonus tracks, some of which are previously unreleased outtake or demos). That’s not to say the members haven’t stayed busy. Front man Tunde Adebimpe is also an actor, artist, and animator, and in April he released his ﬁrst solo album, Thee Black Boltz (Sub Pop), a collaboration with coproducer Wilder Zoby (Run the Jewels).

It’s a riveting personal statement about resistance, love, and grief, made a er the sudden death of his younger sister, Jumoke Adebimpe, in 2021.

Since its November release, the limited-edition deluxe vinyl edition of Desperate Youth has sold out—as have many of the shows on TV on the Radio’s triumphant current tour, their first in five years. This time around, the lineup includes Adebimpe and two other core members, multiinstrumentalists Kyp Malone and Jaleel Bunton. (Lead guitarist and programmer Dave Sitek is sitting this one out for health reasons.) Bassist Jesske Hume and two longtime live collaborators, drummer Jahphet Landis and multi-instrumentalist David Smith, will round out the band’s full, rich sound. —MONICA KENDRICK v

I met a girl at a party this summer, and we started dating. She’s beautiful, smart, and really into me, but she isn’t into bondage at all. She’s not OK with me getting tied up outside our relationship. She said I should “stop being kinky” for her, as it makes her uncomfortable to think I have sexual needs she can’t meet. She also hates thinking about me being “abused by predators.” Neither the one woman nor the half dozen men who’ve tied me up since I became sexually active were “predators.” If anything, they were all extremely kind to me. I’ve had nothing but good experiences. However, seeing my bondage photos deeply upset my girlfriend. (She asked to see them when we “laid our kink cards on the table,” which, as you recommend, we did three months in.)

I know what you’re going to tell me—break up with her—but there aren’t lots of other girls lining up to date me. I’m tall, skinny, and pretty in a twinky way that attracts male attention but turns oﬀ women. (Gay men are disappointed when I tell them I’m straight, but at least they believe me. When I tell straight and bi women I’m straight, they think I’m lying.) The last time I had a girlfriend was in high school,

Is this a case where I need to settle? (As you’ve written, “Settling down requires settling for.”) My very ﬁrst sexual fantasies were about bondage. I don’t think I’ve ever had an orgasm when I wasn’t either thinking about being tied up or actually tied up. Do I give up my kink for now—or pretend to give it up (I’ll still be thinking about it)—in the hopes that my girlfriend gets more comfortable over time? Or do I break up with her even if it means I’ll probably wind up alone the rest of my life? I sometimes wish I wasn’t like this. It honestly feels like a curse. Finding a girl who is into me is hard enough. Finding one who is also into bondage feels impossible.

P.S. I’m only 24 but I count as a “longtime reader” because Mom told me to start reading you when she found the porn I was looking at online when I was 14. I’ve been reading and listening ever since. —THAI AMERICAN BONDAGE BOY

a : At 24, TABB, you’re too young to settle for someone who doesn’t respect your sexual needs. (Please note: I said, “doesn’t respect your sexual needs,” I didn’t say, “doesn’t satisfy every one of your sexual needs.”) Even if you were 64, you shouldn’t settle for someone who shames you for having sexual needs, interests, or kinks that they won’t or can’t meet.

As a longtime reader,

you’re no doubt familiar with my “price of admission” concept. We don’t get everything we want from our sexual and/or romantic partners. Some needs go unmet, everybody has their annoying shit, and no two people are a perfect fit. Figuring out whether you want to be with someone comes down to deciding whether you’re willing to pay the price of admission. Your partner is a slob and you’re a neat freak: Is being the one who keeps things tidy without (too much) complaining a price of admission you’re willing to pay to be with them? You’re into anal, bondage, watersports, or whatever, and your partner isn’t into anal, bondage, watersports, or whatever. Is going without anal, bondage, watersports, or whatever a price of admission you’re willing to pay to be with them?

Being the one who tidies up (the price of admission I pay to be with my husband) or going without anal or bondage (etc.) are reasonable prices of admission that a reasonable person might be willing to pay to be with someone who makes them happy in lots of other ways and/or meets lots of other needs. But what your girlfriend is asking (what your girlfriend is demanding) is not reasonable. She’s not asking you to go without being tied up by her, TABB (something you might be able to live with if you were allowed other outlets), she’s asking you to reach into your erotic subconscious and rip out your kinks for her psychological comfort. That demand is equal parts unreasonable, disrespectful, and impossible, TABB. It’s a price of admission you shouldn’t be willing to pay, and it’s not one you can pay (see: impossible). That said, TABB, there are people out there with kinks they don’t get to act on because they fell in love with someone who doesn’t share their kinks and wants monog-

Tunde Adebimpe, Kyp Malone, and Jaleel Bunton of TV on the Radio COURTESY THE ARTIST continued from p. 23

amy. But there’s a difference between a loving partner who says, “You can explore this through fantasy and solo play,” and a controlling lunatic who says, “You must cut this out of your erotic imagination like it’s some sort of tumor.” The loving partner’s ask (“I’m willing to make space for this”) demonstrates respect for your erotic autonomy. The lunatic partner’s ask (“I’m asking you to kill this part of yourself”) shows no respect for your erotic autonomy, TABB, and puts you in the impossible position of having to lie to your partner for the rest of your life. And since there’s no chemo for kink—there’s no cure—you’re going to get caught looking at bondage porn again, TABB, and your awful girlfriend won’t be as understanding as your wonderful mother was.

Now, you could play the long game here—you could tell your girlfriend what she wants to hear and hope she comes around—and I’ve met people at kink events (enthusiastic participants) who weren’t into kink until they fell in love with someone who was and slowly warmed to their partner’s kinks. But they were the kind of vanilla people (or formerly vanilla people) who’d given their kinky partners permission to enjoy and explore on their own and not the kind of vanilla people who demanded that

with you getting your submissive needs met elsewhere if she can’t meet them herself. (You and your subby girlfriend can go to play parties and get tied up together and think of how much fucking fun that would be!)

Let’s Play!

their partners take their kinks behind the barn and Old Yeller ’em. (Google it.)

Finally, TABB, right now you’re telling yourself that this girl was a fluke and that she’s the only pretty girl you’re ever going to pull. Why not tell yourself that you’ve turned a corner? You could be telling yourself that you’ve grown into your body and/or aged into your face, you’re suddenly attracting female attention, and this girl is proof. But instead of telling yourself a story that builds your confidence (“Getting this girl proves I can get a girl!”), TABB, you’re telling yourself a story that tears it down. (“This girl is the only girl I’m ever going to get.”) Tearing yourself down instead of building yourself up is a choice, TABB, and it’s a dumb one.

P.S. You’re a grown ass adult man. Get involved in the kink scene where you live. Keep going to normie parties where you’ll meet women who may or may not be kinky, while also attending kink events where you’ll meet women who are definitely kinky. And you might wanna learn to switch, TABB, as most women into bondage are subs. A woman who’s just as turned on by bondage as you are—and they’re out there—won’t ask you to “just stop being kinky,” TABB, and she’s far likelier to be OK

P.P.S. Listening to you say you wish you weren’t kinky made my heart hurt, TABB, because it reminded me of how I used to wish—when I was 14—that I wasn’t gay. All the bad things came at once (disappointed parents, lost friends, crushing loneliness) and the good things took so long to come that I thought they never would. But by the time I was a little older than you are, TABB, I realized that I had gone places and done things (and people) I wouldn’t have gone and done if I weren’t gay. I realize the experiences of a gay boy and a kinky straight boy aren’t analogous, but the more you put yourself out there—the more people you meet—the sooner you’ll be able to see all the good things, people, and experiences kink brought into your life. Your kink will take you places and introduce you to people you wouldn’t have met if you weren’t kinky. And if you’re lucky, TABB, one day you’ll be with someone you love and who loves all of you and it’ll be someone you wouldn’t have met if you weren’t at that shibari workshop together or you weren’t already strung up in that dungeon when she walked in. And you’ll look at her and your life together and you’ll think, “Holy shit, I have bondage to thank for all of this.”

P.P.P.S. Send my love to your mother.

P.P.P.P.S. In case I wasn’t clear: dump your fucking girlfriend. v

Got problems? Yes, you do. Ask your burning questions, download podcasts, read full column archives, and more at the URL savage.love. m mailbox@savage.love

Tied up in knots BATUHAN DOĞAN/UNSPLASH

GOSSIP WOLF

AFTER CHICAGO RAPPER, poet, and actor Mykele Deville released Maintain in 2019, he wasn’t sure he’d ever release another album. The pandemic upended his ability to make art. “So much was going on that it overwhelmed me and I couldn’t write,” he says. “What was a really healthy practice of churning out music, it just kind of went away. And my whole life switched to, ‘How do I survive this?’” Being physically cut oﬀ from his community diminished his artistic drive. But one of his Maintain collaborators, UK-based producer Elements, encouraged Deville while he was creatively unmoored.

“He kept sending me beats, and I would write him long letters, saying, ‘America’s crazy right now, man. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to get back onstage in the way that I could,’” Deville says. “He was persistent. He would send me beat packs a er beat packs. I could’ve made, I think, about 36 songs, over the course of that time. I don’t produce; I would’ve never continued without him continuing to encourage me, like, ‘Hey man, I don’t care if you ever use this. I made this with you in mind.’” By the end of 2023, Deville had made 14 songs with those Elements instrumentals. They make up his new fulllength, Rings Around the Tub, which he self-released on Tuesday, September 2.

It’s been nearly a decade since Deville began his solo career. He released the album Super Predator in May 2016, and he followed that a few months later with Each One, Teach One Rings Around the Tub takes its strength from Deville’s bona fides as an MC— on “Sonic Screwdriver,” he raps with the coolheaded ease of a seasoned pro, his voice sliding through a thicket of jazzy drumming and blinking keys. The album should feel familiar to fans who’ve followed him since day one.

A furry ear to the ground of the local

music scene

In August, Ocean got to see his dad perform songs from Rings Around the Tub at a soldout Garﬁeld Park Conservatory show. “He got to come up there,” Deville says. “He wasn’t afraid—he touched the monitor, and he got to dance with me. I let him stay up there, and he was just there vibing.”

Deville celebrates the release of Rings Around the Tub by headlining an all-ages show at Metro on Friday, September 5. He’ll be selling the album on cassette, and he

AS WE HURTLE TOWARD FALL , the music festivals keep coming. The three-day Edgewater Music Fest debuts this weekend with a heckuva lineup. Indie rockers Cloud Nothings , disco-loving rapper Ric Wilson , and rock ’n’ rollers Foxy Shazam headline, and there’s a lot more to love among the 32 acts on the bill, including local talents such as veteran party-soul outfit the Universal Togetherness Band , suave rapper-singer Rich Jones , and wild punks Edging. The all-ages fest asks for a $10 donation per day; gates open at 5 PM on Friday, September 5, and at noon on Saturday and Sunday. The party ends at 10 PM each night.

“Some of the samples in the record are chants from protests that I did in 2020, but can also hearken back to the same exact chant I was screaming on tracks that I had when I was doing Each One, Teach One,” he says. “We haven’t really moved all that much. Rings Around the Tub is really about that kind of repetitive nature of the history that we’re in. Also, you know, yes, that’s the theme, yes, that’s the title, but this is also an exercise in me just getting back to rap and having fun.”

A lot has changed for Deville since he ﬁnished making Rings Around the Tub in 2023. In 2024, he and his partner, poet and filmmaker McKenzie Chinn , had a son, Ocean .

also plans to press it on vinyl. Otherwise it’ll only be available to stream on Soundcloud and download on Bandcamp—he’s joining a growing group of musicians removing their music from Spotify. “Pulling my art from Spotify, those things, [is] really important right now,” he says. “The discussion is getting more inflamed, not only about their investments—’cause you can always ﬁnd some dirty stuﬀ that these companies are doing—but the equitable nature of these models and how it’s not good for us. It’s not good for anybody.”

Psalm One and Living Thing open the Metro show. Tickets are $19.93 in advance, and the music starts at 8 PM.

Still further north, the two-day Evanston Folk Festival fills Dawes Park with music on Saturday, September 6, and Sunday, September 7. Iron & Wine headline night one, and Margo Price closes night two. Among the locals performing are Sima Cunningham , Kara Jackson , and Elizabeth Moen. Two-day general admission passes are $137.72, Saturday tickets are $89.85, and Sunday tickets are $77.39; children under 12 get in free. The festival begins at noon both days.

For those who prefer a more intimate gathering, Judson & Moore Distillery hosts the Lavender Prairie Queer Country Fest on Friday, September 5, and Saturday, September 6. Gossip Wolf is stoked to see that local queer country hero Andrew Sa has recruited a posse of friends to cover the music of the band Lavender Country , founded by the late Patrick Haggerty —in 1973 they released what’s believed to be the ﬁrst gay-themed country album. Tickets are $25 per day, and you can join the wait list for the remaining two-day passes for $52.06. The fest kicks oﬀ at 8 PM on Friday and 2 PM on Saturday, and you have to be at least 21.

IN CASE YOU CAN’T GET enough country, rustic-sounding five-piece Gold Dust headline Cole’s on Friday, September 5. They’re celebrating the vinyl release of their June album, Andalusia Clementine Was Right and Em Grace & the Undercuts open. Tickets are $14.45, and the show starts at 10 PM.

—LEOR GALIL

Got a tip? Email your Chicago music news to gossipwolf@chicagoreader.com.

CLASSIFIEDS JOBS SERVICES

HOUSING PUBLIC NOTICE ANNOUNCEMENTS

JOBS

ABN AMRO Clearings USA, LLC seeks Business Developers, Settlement & Custody for Chicago, IL location to work alongside IT Developers & a Product Owner to develop, run & maintain systems & processes. Bachelor’s in Finance/Econ/related ﬁeld +3 yrs exp req’d. Req’d skills: CTC Gresham; MICS or other clearing bookkeeping system; Broadridge systems (SFCM & Shark); Financial Data vendors (like SIX, Refinitiv, Bloomberg); Business intelligence tools (such as Tableau); CA processing; Settlement processing; Payment processing; ETF processing; Fixed income processing; Derivative processing (options, futures); CCP communication/ operations/Portals; CSD communication/ operations/Portals; Exchange communication/ operations/ Portals; exp. w/ diﬀerent types of databases (Oracle & Postgres); SQL/SQL-Server. Some telecommuting permitted. $126,755160,000/yr. Send resume: jolanta.lutow@abn clearing.com, Ref: JDK

HQ in Chicago, IL, Ibase Operations (d/b/a Qualitest Group) is seeking multiple professionals in the following jobs:

Team Lead - 1/2/3

$101,000.00 - $127,000.00

Manager - Senior/ Project/Test/ Technical/Account

$116,085.00 - $153,600.00

Specialist $86,584.00 - $107,000.00

EngineerSenior/Quality/ Lead $121,701.00 - $159,649.00

ACCOUNTING

SPECIALIST in Chicago, IL. Req. Bachelor’s in Acct., Finance or foreign equiv. Mail resumes to: VMG Group, CPA, LLC., 6121 N Northwest Highway, Ste.103, Chicago, IL 60631.

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CHESTNUT

ORGANIZING AND CLEANING SERVICES: especially for people who need an organizing service because of depression, elderly, physical or mental challenges or other causes for your home’s clutter, disorganization, dysfunction, etc. We can organize for the downsizing of your current possessions to more easily move into a smaller home. With your help, we can help to organize your move. We can organize and clean for the deceased in lieu of having the bereaved needing to do the preparation to sell or rent the deceased’s home. We are absolutely not judgmental; we’ve seen and done “worse” than your job assignment. With your help, can we please help you? Chestnut Cleaning Service: 312-332-5575. www.ChestnutCleaning. com www. ChestnutCleaning.com

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ARO 1 Bedroom $1,300 NEW LOFT elevator building. In-unit washer/dryer, roof top deck, private park, dog park, high speed internet, gym, on-site manager, close to EL and Lakefront! Quartz countertops, individually controlled heat and AC, stainless steel appliances, track lighting, polished concrete floors! Applicants must be income eligible - contact Leasing Office for details and requirements. Applicant with vouchers or other third-party subsidies are welcome to apply, with priority given to Veterans during the first 30 days of availability. No Security Deposit. ARO units are subject to monitoring, compliance and other restrictions by the City of Chicago’s Department of Housing. (773) 332-1600 LawrenceLoftsChicago. com Info@ LawrenceLoftsChicago.com

PUBLIC NOTICE

NOTICE OF PUBLIC SALE: The following selfstorage units contents containing household and other goods will be sold for cards by Chicago Northside StorageLakeview at 2946 N Western Ave, Chicago, IL 60618 to satisfy a lien on September 15th, 2025, at 2:00 pm at www. storagetreasures.com CC72 Stan Bartkus C03 Unok Baccia C16 Unok Baccia C36 Andy Nevarro C57 Herbert Hickerson Jr E12 Nualanong Leeamnuaycharoen G09 Nelly P Weiss O04 Andy Nevarro O10 Andy Nevarro O11 Andy Nevarro O28 Andy Nevarro P49 James Dorsey R13 Andy Nevarro T009 kimberley morris T096 Andy Nevarro T107 Andy Nevarro Chicago Northside Storage

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WHERE IS GOD?

No need for a Schindler, MLK in Heaven. No need for a Soldier in Heaven. No need for a Hero in Heaven. No need for an Einstein in Heaven. No need for those who fight hate, discrimination, poverty in Heaven. No need for a Plato, Socrates in Heaven. No need for a Doctor, Nurse in Heaven. No need for those who want to help those in need in Heaven. ALL are needed here, and God is with them. GOD IS WITH THE LIVING, NOT THE DEAD! For more visit: HeavenVs Reincarnation.com

TWRP

THE LONGEST WEEKEND 2025 + LOS ANGELES POWER DISCO

BNXN

CAPTAIN N.A.TOUR 2025

WHAT WE SAID LIVE

MOLLY TUTTLE

THE HIGHWAY KNOWS TOUR + TOWN MOUNTAIN, CECILIA CASTLEMAN

NIGHT MOVES

+ RAYBODY

THE BUDOS BAND + DANIEL VILLARREAL

FRANKIE COSMOS

+ FANTASY OF A BROKEN HEART, MOONTYPE

HAMZA NAMIRA

THE WATERBOYS + ANNA TIVEL

FOXWARREN THE 2ER + ALLEGRA KRIEGER

THE BASEBALL PROJECT FT. MEMBERS OF R.E.M. AND THE

NATION OF LANGUAGE

PANDA BEAR + DEAKIN

RUSSIAN CIRCLES + YOUNG WIDOWS

FLESHWATER

THE CALIFORNIA HONEYDROPS REDWOOD HIGHWAY TOUR

SKINSHAPE

+ SONS OF SEVILLA

MARUJA

MAKAYA MCCRAVEN + TOM SKINNER

DESTROYER

DAN’S BOOGIE TOUR + JENNIFER CASTLE

BLACK REBEL MOTORCYCLE CLUB + HUMANIST

SWERVEDRIVER

+ FACS, FRANKIE ROSE

GRANDADDY

THE SOPHTWARE SLUMP 25TH ANNIVERSARY

+ GREG FREEMAN

SASHA COLBY STRIPPED II

QUADECA

TOPS

BURY THE KEY TOUR + STARCLEANER REUNION

GEESE

THE GETTING KILLED TOUR + RACING MOUNT PLEASANT