What’s New

Erica Mei Gamble has been a key part of Chicago’s DIY experimental- and dance-music communities for more than a decade. She has several musical projects—including Sarica, A+E, and her S&M-themed goth horror duo with Sarah Leitten, Dungeon Mother—and she’s also the scene’s most diligent video preservationist. Gamble has posted sets by hundreds of artists dating back to 2010 on her YouTube channel, TemporaryCorrespondence, and nearly all are worth watching. (Seeing Gamble set up her tripod and camera before a show is a good sign it’ll be especially juicy.) For the past few years, Gamble has been recording bracingly minimal jams as Temp., and earlier this month she compiled nine of them for a CD release, Taking Notes, via Jordan Reyes’s label American Dreams. Tracks such as “What’s Beyond?” (with a haunting monologue by Leitten) and “Evening” oscillate between eerie soundscapes and glitchy, downtempo electronics.

Erica Mei Gamble created the tracks on Taking Notes between 2018 and 2022.

On Saturday, November 26, Metro hosts the fifth annual John Walt Day, which features sets by Pivot Gang rappers Saba, MFn Melo, Joseph Chilliams, and Frsh Waters as well as crew producer daedaePivot. Chicago duo DCG Brothers share the bill—they aren’t part of Pivot, but they’re fellow west siders. This wolf hopes the Pivot MCs will team up to perform their recent group singles, the sweltering “Aang” and the light-on-its-feet “911.”

The visualizer for “Aang” uses footage of Pivot Gang producer Squeak, who was shot dead in summer 2021.

Pivot Gang’s “911”

This month Chicago rapper Matt Muse is running the fourth annual Love & Nappyness Hair Care Drive. You can donate new or unused personal-hygiene and hair-care products at six drop-off points—including the Silver Room, Semicolon Bookstore, and FortuneHouse. All items will be donated to Maria Shelter and Saint Leonard’s Ministries. The drive ends Sunday, December 11, and that night Thalia Hall hosts the Long Hair Don’t Care Show with Tobi Lou, Matt Muse, and Senite and sets by DJ Ca$h Era.

The October 2021 Matt Muse single “Rapport”

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Erica Mei Gamble has been a key part of Chicago’s DIY experimental- and dance-music communities for more than a decade. She has several musical projects—including Sarica, A+E, and her S&M-themed goth horror duo with Sarah Leitten, Dungeon Mother—and she’s also the scene’s most diligent video preservationist. Gamble has posted sets by hundreds of artists dating back to 2010 on her YouTube channel, TemporaryCorrespondence, and nearly all are worth watching. (Seeing Gamble set up her tripod and camera before a show is a good sign it’ll be especially juicy.) For the past few years, Gamble has been recording bracingly minimal jams as Temp., and earlier this month she compiled nine of them for a CD release, Taking Notes, via Jordan Reyes’s label American Dreams. Tracks such as “What’s Beyond?” (with a haunting monologue by Leitten) and “Evening” oscillate between eerie soundscapes and glitchy, downtempo electronics.

Erica Mei Gamble created the tracks on Taking Notes between 2018 and 2022.

On Saturday, November 26, Metro hosts the fifth annual John Walt Day, which features sets by Pivot Gang rappers Saba, MFn Melo, Joseph Chilliams, and Frsh Waters as well as crew producer daedaePivot. Chicago duo DCG Brothers share the bill—they aren’t part of Pivot, but they’re fellow west siders. This wolf hopes the Pivot MCs will team up to perform their recent group singles, the sweltering “Aang” and the light-on-its-feet “911.”

The visualizer for “Aang” uses footage of Pivot Gang producer Squeak, who was shot dead in summer 2021.

Pivot Gang’s “911”

This month Chicago rapper Matt Muse is running the fourth annual Love & Nappyness Hair Care Drive. You can donate new or unused personal-hygiene and hair-care products at six drop-off points—including the Silver Room, Semicolon Bookstore, and FortuneHouse. All items will be donated to Maria Shelter and Saint Leonard’s Ministries. The drive ends Sunday, December 11, and that night Thalia Hall hosts the Long Hair Don’t Care Show with Tobi Lou, Matt Muse, and Senite and sets by DJ Ca$h Era.

The October 2021 Matt Muse single “Rapport”

Read More

The Chicago Bears are a bad football team with a terrible roster. To be honest, they are even worse than their abysmal record of 3-8 shows. They have one or two extra wins because of the fact that their quarterback has been good.

They also traded Roquan Smith and Robert Quinn who contributed to some of the early season success. Clearly, this is a team building for the future starting with Justin Fields under center. It is going to take some time, effort, and development to reach their goals.

On Sunday against the Atlanta Falcons, the Chicago Bears blew a lead and lost the game by a final score of 27-24. Justin Fields played great and used his legs to make plays but the team came up just short again.

As the game was coming to a close, Fields was carted off the field. It came out after that he was dealing with a shoulder injury that could be bad and could be fine. We are waiting to hear his status for this upcoming week against the New York Jets.

On Tuesday, a quote from Justin Fields started surfacing. He apparently apologized to the team because the offense failed to get it done after the defense set them up to win.

Of course, we know that Fields was playing extremely hurt and is the main reason that they have even been competitive games this year but it is a good look. Apparently, it made a good impression on the team that he did that.

Justin Fields is a very good leader for the Chicago Bears organization.

The fact that he took accountability even though he has been amazing even though the roster is bad, the team doesn’t help him stay on his feet, he is hurt, and they are a losing team really goes a long way. It is obvious that he has the leadership needed to be a starting quarterback in the NFL.

Once his play gets even better, the team adds more help for him, and he gets healthier he will be able to make this team very good. There is a lot of potential with this guy and the Chicago Bears are lucky to have him.

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The house next door to mine was torn down. My neighbors don’t quite remember the year, but the resident local historian, Maurice, who has lived on the block since the late 60s, was shipped off to Vietnam and, upon his return in 1972, the house had vanished. The product of “slum clearance” on Chicago’s west side, the home’s demolition was swiftly met by the efforts of Maurice’s mother, Audrey, who took to the land with a shovel, bulbs, and saplings. The lot soon became a garden: a grassy oasis that grows apples, roses, and other flora. A place that could have been yet another vacant lot became a gift for the people of our block.

I imagine that if I asked Audrey who the city is for, she’d say: “It’s for everyone.” And she made her own corner of this city just that.

I wax poetic about the garden next door because, as a critic who writes about the built environment, it is a blessing to be able to attend to such seemingly minor interventions designed and built by seemingly minor actors. Where I place my attention speaks volumes about my values. Blair Kamin’s new book begins with that same question in the title: Who is the City For? It’s a collection of 55 previously published reviews from his 28 years as the Chicago Tribune architecture critic, featuring new photographs by Sun-Times editorial board member, independent photographer, and author Lee Bey. The book assembles a menagerie of evaluations of some of the city’s most prominent projects: the Chicago Riverwalk, Maggie Daley Park, the 606, among others. He also includes commentary on the role of appointed commissioners and political powers in shaping our city. But I finished the book without a clear answer to the question at hand. Instead, I walked away with a different inquiry: What is the purpose of built environment criticism?

Join Lee Bey, Blair Kamin, Laurie Petersen, and Jen Masengarb for a conversation about Chicago’s architecture and urban design. Tues 11/29, 6 PM, in-person tickets sold-out, virtual tickets available from $0-15, 312-397-4010, mcachicago.org

The reviews are divided into five sections, each addressing different themes related to “the public realm.” Each review includes a postscript that updates the project with current information. I won’t spend time parsing through each review—all capture Kamin’s memorable watchdog ethos that had architects fuming or trembling every week.

But I turn my attention to his introduction, wherein Kamin attends to the fundamental question of who the city is for, through the premise of equity. 

“What can architecture, traditionally the provenance of the rich and powerful, do to make cities like Chicago more equitable, serving poor, working, and middle-class people, not just the one percent?” he writes. He goes on to define his terms of engagement: “I take equity,” he says, “to mean fairness or justice in the way that people are treated rather than the term’s economic meanings—a share of stock or the value of a piece of property after debts are subtracted.” He goes on, however, to say that evaluating “the share” in the context of public built spaces—the spaces we share as citizens such as parks and transit—can reveal for whom a city is designed and built.

Therein lies my fundamental issue with framing this book around equity: Kamin’s definition of equity might include justice, but in the stories where the idea is directly addressed, it is reduced to simply, “what happens in wealthy neighborhoods should also happen in impoverished neighborhoods.” If one place has more amenities, so should the other. 

In his 2019 article, “Rating Chicago’s Latest Wave of Parks and Public Spaces by the Three ‘E’s: They’re Better on Entertainment and Ecology than Equity,” Kamin revisits public parks—Millennium Park, Lincoln Park Zoo Nature Boardwalk, and Northerly Island—to comment on their successes creating new, engaging landscapes. Toward the end, he writes: “The trouble is location: most of these projects are along parts of the lakefront lined by affluent neighborhoods or in areas of Chicago that have gentrified or are gentrifying—in part due to the presence of these alluring public spaces. Their benefits need to be spread to other parts of the city, particularly the South and West Sides, which Mayor Lori Lightfoot and her chief planner, Maurice Cox, have targeted for revival.”

This is not justice. Instead, that ideology only addresses “fairness” using a snapshot view of “haves” and “have-nots.” It does not attend to repairing decades of disinvestment or the results of Chicago’s long-standing, systematic political decisions that blighted and starved our most vulnerable neighborhoods. Focusing on the “haves” and “have-nots” continues to center the needs of the “rich and powerful,” and, in his introduction, he extends that centering to their safety, too. He writes:

The recognition that cities are shared ventures…represents a far more viable long-term strategy than its opposite: containment of the poor, whether in ghettos, public-housing projects, or dysfunctional neighborhoods…The shootings and thefts that have spread from Chicago’s South and West Sides to the downtown and affluent North Side neighborhoods like Lincoln Park make clear the costs of failing to address the root causes of long-festering problems associated with high concentrations of poverty.

Using this logic to advocate for greater investment in Black and Brown neighborhoods frames precisely my struggle with this book. Public housing was founded under the ethos of “housing as a human right” and failed because of specific, racist political decision-making. Neighborhoods where vulnerable people struggle—not always unsuccessfully—to make their lives rich and full, despite generations of extraction, are not “dysfunctional,” nor are they “ghettos,” as Kamin refers to them; they are the results of exploitation. 

To have a “viable long-term strategy”—one that centers justice, not fairness—we must move our attention beyond comparative dichotomies. We must evaluate equity and justice in ways that don’t center the needs and desires of affluent neighborhoods, or their safety. After all, those two priorities are precisely what produced disinvestment in the first place. 

But that brings me to my first question: What is the purpose of built environment criticism? While Kamin’s writing is thoughtful and proves he can wield the pen, I cannot recommend this book to a reader seeking to understand the complexities of how architecture and infrastructure relate to equity. Instead, it comes across more as a curated selection of criticism’s past priorities. He invokes the need for the “activist critic,” citing his earlier book, Why Architecture Matters: one who, “[places] buildings in the context of the politics, the economics, and the cultural forces that shape them.” But the activist critic is limited, by Kamin’s own definition, to projects that are completed or in progress. Can critics, instead, amplify communities’ visions for the future, while practicing activist criticism? 

I might say that the next generation of critics should take a page from my neighbor Audrey’s handbook and make our task one of imagination. Criticism can, and perhaps should, actively participate in the grander project of radical, reparative world-building, while also holding powerful actors in architecture and city-making accountable for lackluster justice initiatives. No longer is this a question of who has nicer urban amenities; “who gets what” is a tired trope. Rather, critics should turn our attention to justice’s long view by not only contextualizing projects in history or politics but also in the ability of city dwellers to actualize a better future on their terms.

Who Is the City For? Architecture, Equity, and the Public Realm in Chicago by Blair KaminUniversity of Chicago Press, hardcover, 312 pp., $29 press.uchicago.edu

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The house next door to mine was torn down. My neighbors don’t quite remember the year, but the resident local historian, Maurice, who has lived on the block since the late 60s, was shipped off to Vietnam and, upon his return in 1972, the house had vanished. The product of “slum clearance” on Chicago’s west side, the home’s demolition was swiftly met by the efforts of Maurice’s mother, Audrey, who took to the land with a shovel, bulbs, and saplings. The lot soon became a garden: a grassy oasis that grows apples, roses, and other flora. A place that could have been yet another vacant lot became a gift for the people of our block.

I imagine that if I asked Audrey who the city is for, she’d say: “It’s for everyone.” And she made her own corner of this city just that.

I wax poetic about the garden next door because, as a critic who writes about the built environment, it is a blessing to be able to attend to such seemingly minor interventions designed and built by seemingly minor actors. Where I place my attention speaks volumes about my values. Blair Kamin’s new book begins with that same question in the title: Who is the City For? It’s a collection of 55 previously published reviews from his 28 years as the Chicago Tribune architecture critic, featuring new photographs by Sun-Times editorial board member, independent photographer, and author Lee Bey. The book assembles a menagerie of evaluations of some of the city’s most prominent projects: the Chicago Riverwalk, Maggie Daley Park, the 606, among others. He also includes commentary on the role of appointed commissioners and political powers in shaping our city. But I finished the book without a clear answer to the question at hand. Instead, I walked away with a different inquiry: What is the purpose of built environment criticism?

Join Lee Bey, Blair Kamin, Laurie Petersen, and Jen Masengarb for a conversation about Chicago’s architecture and urban design. Tues 11/29, 6 PM, in-person tickets sold-out, virtual tickets available from $0-15, 312-397-4010, mcachicago.org

The reviews are divided into five sections, each addressing different themes related to “the public realm.” Each review includes a postscript that updates the project with current information. I won’t spend time parsing through each review—all capture Kamin’s memorable watchdog ethos that had architects fuming or trembling every week.

But I turn my attention to his introduction, wherein Kamin attends to the fundamental question of who the city is for, through the premise of equity. 

“What can architecture, traditionally the provenance of the rich and powerful, do to make cities like Chicago more equitable, serving poor, working, and middle-class people, not just the one percent?” he writes. He goes on to define his terms of engagement: “I take equity,” he says, “to mean fairness or justice in the way that people are treated rather than the term’s economic meanings—a share of stock or the value of a piece of property after debts are subtracted.” He goes on, however, to say that evaluating “the share” in the context of public built spaces—the spaces we share as citizens such as parks and transit—can reveal for whom a city is designed and built.

Therein lies my fundamental issue with framing this book around equity: Kamin’s definition of equity might include justice, but in the stories where the idea is directly addressed, it is reduced to simply, “what happens in wealthy neighborhoods should also happen in impoverished neighborhoods.” If one place has more amenities, so should the other. 

In his 2019 article, “Rating Chicago’s Latest Wave of Parks and Public Spaces by the Three ‘E’s: They’re Better on Entertainment and Ecology than Equity,” Kamin revisits public parks—Millennium Park, Lincoln Park Zoo Nature Boardwalk, and Northerly Island—to comment on their successes creating new, engaging landscapes. Toward the end, he writes: “The trouble is location: most of these projects are along parts of the lakefront lined by affluent neighborhoods or in areas of Chicago that have gentrified or are gentrifying—in part due to the presence of these alluring public spaces. Their benefits need to be spread to other parts of the city, particularly the South and West Sides, which Mayor Lori Lightfoot and her chief planner, Maurice Cox, have targeted for revival.”

This is not justice. Instead, that ideology only addresses “fairness” using a snapshot view of “haves” and “have-nots.” It does not attend to repairing decades of disinvestment or the results of Chicago’s long-standing, systematic political decisions that blighted and starved our most vulnerable neighborhoods. Focusing on the “haves” and “have-nots” continues to center the needs of the “rich and powerful,” and, in his introduction, he extends that centering to their safety, too. He writes:

The recognition that cities are shared ventures…represents a far more viable long-term strategy than its opposite: containment of the poor, whether in ghettos, public-housing projects, or dysfunctional neighborhoods…The shootings and thefts that have spread from Chicago’s South and West Sides to the downtown and affluent North Side neighborhoods like Lincoln Park make clear the costs of failing to address the root causes of long-festering problems associated with high concentrations of poverty.

Using this logic to advocate for greater investment in Black and Brown neighborhoods frames precisely my struggle with this book. Public housing was founded under the ethos of “housing as a human right” and failed because of specific, racist political decision-making. Neighborhoods where vulnerable people struggle—not always unsuccessfully—to make their lives rich and full, despite generations of extraction, are not “dysfunctional,” nor are they “ghettos,” as Kamin refers to them; they are the results of exploitation. 

To have a “viable long-term strategy”—one that centers justice, not fairness—we must move our attention beyond comparative dichotomies. We must evaluate equity and justice in ways that don’t center the needs and desires of affluent neighborhoods, or their safety. After all, those two priorities are precisely what produced disinvestment in the first place. 

But that brings me to my first question: What is the purpose of built environment criticism? While Kamin’s writing is thoughtful and proves he can wield the pen, I cannot recommend this book to a reader seeking to understand the complexities of how architecture and infrastructure relate to equity. Instead, it comes across more as a curated selection of criticism’s past priorities. He invokes the need for the “activist critic,” citing his earlier book, Why Architecture Matters: one who, “[places] buildings in the context of the politics, the economics, and the cultural forces that shape them.” But the activist critic is limited, by Kamin’s own definition, to projects that are completed or in progress. Can critics, instead, amplify communities’ visions for the future, while practicing activist criticism? 

I might say that the next generation of critics should take a page from my neighbor Audrey’s handbook and make our task one of imagination. Criticism can, and perhaps should, actively participate in the grander project of radical, reparative world-building, while also holding powerful actors in architecture and city-making accountable for lackluster justice initiatives. No longer is this a question of who has nicer urban amenities; “who gets what” is a tired trope. Rather, critics should turn our attention to justice’s long view by not only contextualizing projects in history or politics but also in the ability of city dwellers to actualize a better future on their terms.

Who Is the City For? Architecture, Equity, and the Public Realm in Chicago by Blair KaminUniversity of Chicago Press, hardcover, 312 pp., $29 press.uchicago.edu

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Since the early 1920s, Chicago has flourished as a beating heart of cultural music export, steadily pumping its sounds, textures, and grooves across the midwest and beyond. 

It began with gospel and blues, sprawling from its roots in the Great Migration and fostering a new generation of storytellers and devotees. From that came Windy City jazz, nourished by the bustling crowds and intimate dives of Rush Street between the 50s and 70s. Then, mostly queer and Black clubs near the West Loop melded disco with R&B and electronic four-on-the-floor beats to forge Chicago house, and by the 90s, the city had become an often overlooked epicenter of hip-hop. 

Remsy Atassi, director and cofounder of production company Emulsion Lab, pays homage to the city and its rich musical tapestry with his first feature-length romantic drama Bad Animal. The partially crowdfunded film features original music from scene staples such as The Palmer Squares, Pixel Grip, Chris Crack, Malci, and more.

Cofounded in 2017 by Atassi and cinematographer Sean Robert Kelly, Emulsion Lab started as an online platform dedicated to supporting local Chicago music artists. Through blog posts, photo essays, and music videos produced on shoestring budgets, Emulsion Lab expanded their clientele between independent artists and corporate patrons. By 2018, Atassi and Kelly consolidated focus and conceptualized producing their own feature film.

“[Emulsion Lab] is now more of a development and distribution company for our indie films and other indie filmmakers in Chicago,” Atassi says. “Next year, we have a bunch of new projects that we’re trying to take under this banner, so it’s kind of evolved.”

Bad Animal feels like the natural progression for their fledgling production company, marrying the indie music locus that inspired their start with the drive for creating projects that rival the scale of their DIY counterparts. 

The filmsprawls across the autumnal Humboldt Park to the skylines of Chicago’s metropolitan center, featuring scenes set inside Roscoe Village’s Beat Kitchen (where actor, musician, and producer Rivkah Reyes of School of Rock famehad their first gig in their high school band) and by the historic Fine Arts Building.

The independent drama follows Chicago rapper Sembré (local rapper/poet and former program director of The Hideout Mykele Deville) and his romantic partner-turned-manager Marlene (Reyes). As Sembré’s latest record Bad Animal builds buzz and critical acclaim, he’s propositioned by producer Evie (Angie Bullaro) with the opportunity for a major label deal.

But as Sembré’s profile heightens, so does the scrutiny of his public image, and all the while his relationship begins to strain as Marlene wrangles with defining herself and questioning whether the sacrifices she’s made were worth the strife. 

The film flutters nonlinearly between the halcyon days of Marlene and Sembré’s early relationship and their fracturing present. Atassi confronts the pressurized scrutiny of fame and how autonomous choices can define our most intimate relationships.

Bad Animal is at its most successful when it steeps in the magnetism of its leads and Atassi allows his formalistic muscles to shape the mood. Intimate close-ups of Marlene and Sembré performing seem to excavate the intent of each song, and a later drug-fueled visual sequence impressively revels in nightmarish high contrasts and droning riffs.

Even so, the film often impedes its impact when it inelegantly overstates its themes, particularly within the brief yet pivotal conversations between Sembré and his mother. The conversations never fully trust in their subtext, but it’s not enough to grind the emotional momentum to a halt.

Romantic dramas are propelled by the connection and ineffable chemistry of their leads, and Bad Animal is no different. Reyes and Deville’s previous history as friends and classmates in the University of Illinois Chicago’s theater program is deeply felt throughout.

“Mykele and I go way back to UIC. We used to sit in the green room and run lines for Fool for Love by Sam Shepard,” Reyes says. 

Bad AnimalTV-MA, 86 min.Stream on Amazon Prime, Tubi, and Mometuemulsionlab.com/bad-animal-film

Reyes, a Chicago native turned LA transplant, learned about the film through Kelly after they completed a photo shoot together. Knowing they were scouting for rapper actors, Reyes connected them to Deville and threw their own hat into the ring to audition. 

“Mykele and Rivkah ended up actually being paired together in their audition, which is really kind of fortuitous because I didn’t know they knew each other,” Atassi says. “They had great chemistry together. A lot of my favorite stuff in the film is their mundane interactions.”

Reyes mentions how much they enjoyed their time on set, working alongside Mykele again and being able to pay tribute to the city and its vibrant community. 

“Mykele was great to work with because he’s just such a present performer. His musicality translates to how he acts as well . . . I was just really grateful that I got to be a part of a story that is so rooted in Chicago’s art scene,” Reyes says. “Some of the shots in the film just give you chills.”

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Since the early 1920s, Chicago has flourished as a beating heart of cultural music export, steadily pumping its sounds, textures, and grooves across the midwest and beyond. 

It began with gospel and blues, sprawling from its roots in the Great Migration and fostering a new generation of storytellers and devotees. From that came Windy City jazz, nourished by the bustling crowds and intimate dives of Rush Street between the 50s and 70s. Then, mostly queer and Black clubs near the West Loop melded disco with R&B and electronic four-on-the-floor beats to forge Chicago house, and by the 90s, the city had become an often overlooked epicenter of hip-hop. 

Remsy Atassi, director and cofounder of production company Emulsion Lab, pays homage to the city and its rich musical tapestry with his first feature-length romantic drama Bad Animal. The partially crowdfunded film features original music from scene staples such as The Palmer Squares, Pixel Grip, Chris Crack, Malci, and more.

Cofounded in 2017 by Atassi and cinematographer Sean Robert Kelly, Emulsion Lab started as an online platform dedicated to supporting local Chicago music artists. Through blog posts, photo essays, and music videos produced on shoestring budgets, Emulsion Lab expanded their clientele between independent artists and corporate patrons. By 2018, Atassi and Kelly consolidated focus and conceptualized producing their own feature film.

“[Emulsion Lab] is now more of a development and distribution company for our indie films and other indie filmmakers in Chicago,” Atassi says. “Next year, we have a bunch of new projects that we’re trying to take under this banner, so it’s kind of evolved.”

Bad Animal feels like the natural progression for their fledgling production company, marrying the indie music locus that inspired their start with the drive for creating projects that rival the scale of their DIY counterparts. 

The filmsprawls across the autumnal Humboldt Park to the skylines of Chicago’s metropolitan center, featuring scenes set inside Roscoe Village’s Beat Kitchen (where actor, musician, and producer Rivkah Reyes of School of Rock famehad their first gig in their high school band) and by the historic Fine Arts Building.

The independent drama follows Chicago rapper Sembré (local rapper/poet and former program director of The Hideout Mykele Deville) and his romantic partner-turned-manager Marlene (Reyes). As Sembré’s latest record Bad Animal builds buzz and critical acclaim, he’s propositioned by producer Evie (Angie Bullaro) with the opportunity for a major label deal.

But as Sembré’s profile heightens, so does the scrutiny of his public image, and all the while his relationship begins to strain as Marlene wrangles with defining herself and questioning whether the sacrifices she’s made were worth the strife. 

The film flutters nonlinearly between the halcyon days of Marlene and Sembré’s early relationship and their fracturing present. Atassi confronts the pressurized scrutiny of fame and how autonomous choices can define our most intimate relationships.

Bad Animal is at its most successful when it steeps in the magnetism of its leads and Atassi allows his formalistic muscles to shape the mood. Intimate close-ups of Marlene and Sembré performing seem to excavate the intent of each song, and a later drug-fueled visual sequence impressively revels in nightmarish high contrasts and droning riffs.

Even so, the film often impedes its impact when it inelegantly overstates its themes, particularly within the brief yet pivotal conversations between Sembré and his mother. The conversations never fully trust in their subtext, but it’s not enough to grind the emotional momentum to a halt.

Romantic dramas are propelled by the connection and ineffable chemistry of their leads, and Bad Animal is no different. Reyes and Deville’s previous history as friends and classmates in the University of Illinois Chicago’s theater program is deeply felt throughout.

“Mykele and I go way back to UIC. We used to sit in the green room and run lines for Fool for Love by Sam Shepard,” Reyes says. 

Bad AnimalTV-MA, 86 min.Stream on Amazon Prime, Tubi, and Mometuemulsionlab.com/bad-animal-film

Reyes, a Chicago native turned LA transplant, learned about the film through Kelly after they completed a photo shoot together. Knowing they were scouting for rapper actors, Reyes connected them to Deville and threw their own hat into the ring to audition. 

“Mykele and Rivkah ended up actually being paired together in their audition, which is really kind of fortuitous because I didn’t know they knew each other,” Atassi says. “They had great chemistry together. A lot of my favorite stuff in the film is their mundane interactions.”

Reyes mentions how much they enjoyed their time on set, working alongside Mykele again and being able to pay tribute to the city and its vibrant community. 

“Mykele was great to work with because he’s just such a present performer. His musicality translates to how he acts as well . . . I was just really grateful that I got to be a part of a story that is so rooted in Chicago’s art scene,” Reyes says. “Some of the shots in the film just give you chills.”

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Amy Taylor holds a freshly hand-dyed fabric. She used a shibori technique in the dying. Credit: Isa Giallorenzo

“Natural” is a word that might evoke wholesome feelings, but also blandness. Just think of a kid’s reaction when they hear they’re getting fruit for dessert. The same rationale is often applied toward natural dyes—that they are good for you and the environment, but a bore to the eye. According to fashion designer, natural dyer, and educator Amy Taylor, 35, nothing could be further from the truth. “It’s a really common misconception that natural dyes can only yield pale colors. They can yield pale colors if you want them to. But if you think about all of the [brightly colored] garments and dresses in your favorite Renaissance paintings, they all came from natural pigments,” she says. Taylor explains that synthetic dyes were only discovered in 1856, and that prior to that natural dyes were the only way to dye fabric. Would anyone daresay that a glam rococo queen like Marie Antoinette would settle for dull, hippy-dippy textiles?

Currently a designer-in-residence at the Chicago Fashion Incubator, Taylor stumbled upon natural dyes almost by chance, and never looked back. She now owns a brand called Ms. Amy Taylor, dedicated to selling natural dye kits and naturally dyed garments. The natural dye kits cost $54.99 each and include five different dyes, a scarf made with 100 percent silk, and all the materials and instructions needed to dye the scarf. Taylor also sells “wedgie-free” briefs ($45), other hand-dyed garments, and naturally dyed hair scrunchies ($8).

In addition to running her online shop, Taylor also teaches courses about natural dyes. “Education is a huge part of my platform, and I love teaching people of all ages and experiences,” she says. Taylor’s love for the subject makes her uniquely suited for the task. While talking about natural dyes in an approachable and captivating manner, she touches on the chemistry, history, technique, and philosophy involved in the process. Things can even get metaphysical, such as when Taylor mentions indigo dye baths. “Indigo baths are living baths. And if you take care of them and feed them, they can last years and years. I once asked my mentor, Akemi Cohn, for the recipe for her indigo baths—the most beautiful I’ve ever worked with. I wanted to know why my indigo baths didn’t come out as good as hers. And she said that she talks to her baths. And it’s true! It’s like talking to plants. You have to thank your indigo bath, you have to talk to it. You have to treat it like the living thing that it is,” Taylor says. 

Ms. Amy Taylor natural dye kits, garments, and instructionmsamytaylor.com

Taylor’s natural dye kits come with instructions, a silk scarf, and twine. Credit: Isa Giallorenzo

An enthusiast of wabi-sabi, the Japanese aesthetic that promotes the acceptance of transience and imperfection, Taylor is all about the one-of-a-kind quality present in natural dyeing. “Looking at these pieces that we make, there are always sections that one could argue are blemishes or defects. But what I really like to tell my students is that we have the technology now that if we want a piece that’s free of all imperfections, it’s cheaper, faster, and easier for a machine to do it. One of the really nice things about doing it by hand is putting your thumbprint on it,” she says. Though Taylor’s work is highly connected to humane and environmentally-conscious practices, she’s not an eco snob. “I would say about only 50 percent of my closet is handmade or hand-altered in some way. I think it’s not so much about excluding store-bought clothes, but about changing our psychology and thinking about our clothes more permanently and in less disposable ways. For example, one of my favorite jackets is from Forever 21. I bought it in 2015, and it still looks brand-new just from taking care of it,” she explains. 

Taylor also suggests a homemade dye bath to give new life to items such as an old white T-shirt made with natural fibers (synthetic fibers won’t absorb natural dyes). “It’s all about buying garments with the intention of wearing them until they’re unwearable, and then mending and fixing them whenever we can,” she says. Taylor wisely asks, “Has shame ever changed people’s minds about anything?”

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Chicago singer and producer Zarif Wilder, aka theMIND, has lent his gilded vocals and carefully crafted instrumentals to more hip-hop and R&B releases than I could possibly list here. He’s worked with practically every important rapper to emerge from the city in the past decade, including the three in the supergroup Ghetto Sage: Smino, Noname, and Saba. So I’m a little surprised to learn that this is Wilder’s first local headlining show, since he’s long been capable of drawing a crowd around here. This gig celebrates a new deluxe edition of his 2020 album, Don’t Let It Go to Your Head (TheMIND/Cinq). Wilder recently told Revolt he thought the original release wasn’t complete. “There were a lot of songs we couldn’t put on there due to time,” he said.

The album’s sumptuous, casually sophisticated R&B is already enriched by Wilder’s autobiographical touches and restrained vulnerability. As Tara C. Mahadevan detailed in a 2020 Reader profile of Wilder, Don’t Let It Go to Your Head is as much about the challenges faced by disenfranchised communities as it is about Wilder’s own struggles navigating a system stacked against him. His down-to-earth warmth prevents these clean, polished-sounding songs from feeling disconnected from reality, like background music at a chic boutique. Much of that warmth comes through in his singing: he can contort his downy voice into an expressive rasp or sweeten it till it bursts out of the song like light through a stained glass window. The five new tracks on the album’s deluxe version further extend comfort to the afflicted. On the dramatic “Sacrilegious,” Wilder sings about finding romantic love amid oppression and despair, offering solace with his soft, supple vocals. Even when society leaves you out of its plans and freedom seems beyond reach, he seems to say, love can get you through the day.

TheMIND Qari and Moyana Olivia open. Fri 11/25, 9 PM, Schubas, 3159 N. Southport, $25, $20 in advance, 18+

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Amy Taylor holds a freshly hand-dyed fabric. She used a shibori technique in the dying. Credit: Isa Giallorenzo

“Natural” is a word that might evoke wholesome feelings, but also blandness. Just think of a kid’s reaction when they hear they’re getting fruit for dessert. The same rationale is often applied toward natural dyes—that they are good for you and the environment, but a bore to the eye. According to fashion designer, natural dyer, and educator Amy Taylor, 35, nothing could be further from the truth. “It’s a really common misconception that natural dyes can only yield pale colors. They can yield pale colors if you want them to. But if you think about all of the [brightly colored] garments and dresses in your favorite Renaissance paintings, they all came from natural pigments,” she says. Taylor explains that synthetic dyes were only discovered in 1856, and that prior to that natural dyes were the only way to dye fabric. Would anyone daresay that a glam rococo queen like Marie Antoinette would settle for dull, hippy-dippy textiles?

Currently a designer-in-residence at the Chicago Fashion Incubator, Taylor stumbled upon natural dyes almost by chance, and never looked back. She now owns a brand called Ms. Amy Taylor, dedicated to selling natural dye kits and naturally dyed garments. The natural dye kits cost $54.99 each and include five different dyes, a scarf made with 100 percent silk, and all the materials and instructions needed to dye the scarf. Taylor also sells “wedgie-free” briefs ($45), other hand-dyed garments, and naturally dyed hair scrunchies ($8).

In addition to running her online shop, Taylor also teaches courses about natural dyes. “Education is a huge part of my platform, and I love teaching people of all ages and experiences,” she says. Taylor’s love for the subject makes her uniquely suited for the task. While talking about natural dyes in an approachable and captivating manner, she touches on the chemistry, history, technique, and philosophy involved in the process. Things can even get metaphysical, such as when Taylor mentions indigo dye baths. “Indigo baths are living baths. And if you take care of them and feed them, they can last years and years. I once asked my mentor, Akemi Cohn, for the recipe for her indigo baths—the most beautiful I’ve ever worked with. I wanted to know why my indigo baths didn’t come out as good as hers. And she said that she talks to her baths. And it’s true! It’s like talking to plants. You have to thank your indigo bath, you have to talk to it. You have to treat it like the living thing that it is,” Taylor says. 

Ms. Amy Taylor natural dye kits, garments, and instructionmsamytaylor.com

Taylor’s natural dye kits come with instructions, a silk scarf, and twine. Credit: Isa Giallorenzo

An enthusiast of wabi-sabi, the Japanese aesthetic that promotes the acceptance of transience and imperfection, Taylor is all about the one-of-a-kind quality present in natural dyeing. “Looking at these pieces that we make, there are always sections that one could argue are blemishes or defects. But what I really like to tell my students is that we have the technology now that if we want a piece that’s free of all imperfections, it’s cheaper, faster, and easier for a machine to do it. One of the really nice things about doing it by hand is putting your thumbprint on it,” she says. Though Taylor’s work is highly connected to humane and environmentally-conscious practices, she’s not an eco snob. “I would say about only 50 percent of my closet is handmade or hand-altered in some way. I think it’s not so much about excluding store-bought clothes, but about changing our psychology and thinking about our clothes more permanently and in less disposable ways. For example, one of my favorite jackets is from Forever 21. I bought it in 2015, and it still looks brand-new just from taking care of it,” she explains. 

Taylor also suggests a homemade dye bath to give new life to items such as an old white T-shirt made with natural fibers (synthetic fibers won’t absorb natural dyes). “It’s all about buying garments with the intention of wearing them until they’re unwearable, and then mending and fixing them whenever we can,” she says. Taylor wisely asks, “Has shame ever changed people’s minds about anything?”

Read More