What’s New

When we think about holistic healing, what are the tools that people have available to change their selves and, by proxy, their communities? Tonight, the youth and community equity organization Chicago Beyond hosts two Chicago artists, Fantasía “Fanni” Ariel and Eddie “EDO” Santana White, in a panel discussion about the power of healing through the arts. Both Fanni and EDO currently have work on display in Chicago Beyond’s Home for Social Innovation, a locale for the organization that they also conceptualize as a public service space. Tonight’s event will be moderated by Rome J., cultural correspondent for The TRiiBE. The talk begins at 6 PM (doors open at 5:30 PM) at 811 W. Fulton Market, Suite 300. It’s free to attend, but reservations are requested through Eventbrite. (SCJ)

At 9:45 PM, Sex Demon is showing at the Music Box Theatre (3733 N. Southport). This X-rated thrill ride from 1975 is for anyone who likes camp, queer history, practical effects-based horror, and/or hot men fucking. (I am a fan of all four, and that’s why I couldn’t resist waxing at length about this movie for our film section!) When John gives his lover Jim a necklace from a Christopher Street antique shop, Jim undergoes some major behavioral changes. Can Jim be saved from his sexy yet evil ways? Come early to find out because there will be some hot gay teaser reels at the beginning. Tickets are $11 ($8 for members). (MC)

If you’re looking for something to do after Sex Demon, float on over to Berlin (954 W. Belmont) to catch the rest of Studs & Spikes. This monthly party celebrates what’s gay about goth and punk culture, and it kicks off at 10 PM. In tonight’s installment, Exedo and Stress Positions open for Martin Sorrondeguy’s spooky postpunk band Canal Irreal. Afterward everyone’s favorite dark mistress of the DJ booth, Scary Lady Sarah, will keep the dance floor pumping till close. It’s $10 from those 21 and older to join the party, and masks and proof of vaccination are required. (MC)

Read More

The inside of Herschell Gordon Lewis’s brain (artist’s conception) Credit: Luis Colindres

In 1987, Michael Bishop was invited to join an underground band in Richmond, Virginia, whose trashy, theatrical collision of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror made them subversive standouts in the city’s punk scene. Bishop already had a reputation as a gifted bassist, and he was still in high school when he joined Gwar. 

The band’s obscenely violent onstage personas were part of an ever-evolving backstory too incoherent and ludicrous to summarize here—suffice it to say they played bloodthirsty intergalactic conquerors, and Bishop wore oversize gladiator gear and called himself Beefcake the Mighty. In a mythos-building 1989 interview for Maximum Rocknroll, his bandmate Sexecutioner claimed that Beefcake had “invented music by stretching dinosaur entrails across the freshly carved Grand Canyon.”

Even back then, Gwar’s stage show involved a phalanx of costumes and props. The band had several nonmusical members, many of whom had studied art at Virginia Commonwealth University, and they fabricated removable body parts, bloody entrails, and alien creatures. For much of 1987, the band’s headquarters—nicknamed the Slave Pit—was in the Richmond Dairy Company building, a dilapidated four-story complex with milk-bottle turrets. 

Henenlotter adores Lewis, but he might have to settle for second place behind John Waters, who paid homage to Lewis in 1970’s Multiple Maniacs, 1994’s Serial Mom, and 2000’s Cecil B. Demented. Waters included a Q&A with Lewis in his own autobiography, 1981’s Shock Value, and introduced his hero thusly: “His films are impossible to defend; thus, he automatically becomes one of the all-time great directors in film history.”

Lewis’s oeuvre isn’t to all tastes, to put it gently, and not just because he liked to throw around bathtubs of fake blood. He approached filmmaking as a businessman first, emphasizing speed, efficiency, and frugality. He was a marketing genius but at best a workmanlike director. Palmer’s book claims Lewis and his team shot Blood Feast in nine days for $24,500. When his actors weren’t on camera, they sometimes pulled double duty by slating scenes with clapboards or holding boom mikes. His crew used all matter of animal parts—chicken skin, fish eyeballs, lox, a sheep’s tongue—for gore effects. 

Lewis’s films can be rough going, clogged with awkward pacing, unnatural dialogue, and even worse acting; the framing is bland, the editing choppy. But as is so often the case with cheap, trashy movies made with more energy than skill, these failings contribute to their strange charms.

Those charms might as well have been engineered to win over Bishop and his bandmates. “Gwar valorizes the low—like, the sort of things people look at culturally and want to dismiss,” Bishop says. (Today he’s back in Gwar after many years, and now fronts the group as Blöthar the Berserker.) “Gwar’s always been interested and motivated in finding the value in that, and using that as the basis of our mode of expression. That’s how Gwar makes meaning. Herschell Gordon Lewis is a part of that formula.”

Punk history is lousy with horror hounds who share Bishop’s love for Lewis’s movies. “The films were outsider, notorious, abrasive, and over-the-top—all things one often associates with punk rock,” says artist Lisa Petrucci, owner and operator of Seattle mail-order movie company Something Weird Video. 

Petrucci’s late husband, Mike Vraney, launched Something Weird in 1990, naming it after a 1967 Lewis film. Vraney had developed his taste for B movies and exploitation fare while working in punk. In the late 70s, he cofounded Modern Productions, which booked punk and new wave at the Showbox, across from Seattle’s Pike Place Market. In the 80s, he managed punk bands, including the Accused, T.S.O.L., and the Dead Kennedys—and sometimes turned them on to Lewis’s films. 

Carlson has programmed for Austin’s Alamo Drafthouse and its annual Fantastic Fest. He’s the guy who bought a 35-millimeter print of long-lost 1987 martial-arts caper Miami Connection listed for $40 on eBay, launching it into the canon of endearingly incompetent Z movies. He grew up before you could find everything on the Internet, so he learned about punk rock and fringe films the old-fashioned way. 

As a teen Carlson worked at a record shop in Oxnard, California, and befriended an older couple who educated him in cult movies. They gave him a copy of the 1986 book Incredibly Strange Films, which opened his eyes to an entire constellation of directors who shot for the moon on shoestring budgets. “Clearly at the top of the heap was Herschell Gordon Lewis,” Carlson says. “He was the originator, and he was so prolific. And he was such a huge personality on his own.”

It’s not hard to find mash notes to Lewis from horror fiends, but the connections between his work and punk rock have been less thoroughly examined. When I decided to write this story, my idea was to collect as many of those links in one place as I could. Lewis’s gore movies hit the same sweet spot as lots of early punk.

Lewis earned degrees in journalism at Northwestern University, and in the 1950s he learned the ropes of the industrial film business. He worked in TV commercials and public relations, and he and a man named Martin Schmidhofer became co-owners of a Chicago production studio they called Lewis & Martin Films (get it?). In 1960, Lewis founded Mid-Continent Films to get into the features game—he thought that was the only way to make real money in the business. 

The company’s first movie, 1960’s The Prime Time, was filmed locally (Lewis produced but didn’t direct) and featured the cinematic debut of Karen Black. Production mistakes allegedly inflated its budget to a disastrous $100,000, and by all accounts it bombed. Mid-Continent folded after one more film. 

Lewis worked on his own after that, and this taught him an important lesson: namely, that with a skeleton crew and no oversight, he could do the work better and cheaper. 

Leaving aside Lewis’s hostility to the expense of union labor, that attitude is pretty punk. “I love the aesthetic of having a vision and not stopping to figure everything out, and not having a budget, but being so motivated with your idea that you’re going to make it happen,” says Detroit musician Amy Gore, who named her first band after Lewis’s 1972 horror comedy The Gore Gore Girls. “Film was expensive, and making a film was expensive, and that just didn’t seem to bother HG at all. And I love that about him.” 

“We could either do a film that was so loaded with sex as to be almost unfilmable, or we could do a picture that was so loaded with horror as to be equally unfilmable,” Lewis told Palmer. “And since there was an overabundance of nudie pictures, we opted for the horror angle.” Blood Feast came out that same year, and it’s since inspired generations of punks.

“The only reason the Herschell Gordon Lewis films got made, distributed, and seen, regardless of the creators’ intention, was because they didn’t have any regard for the rules—if Herschell Gordon Lewis had had regard for the rules, he would have been doing very, very different kinds of films,” says Screeching Weasel front man Ben Weasel. “He wanted to do something that was shocking and went beyond and all that. But in order to even get to that place, you have to be willing to step over a line.” 

Weasel found Lewis’s movies in the mid-80s, around the same time he got into punk. Lewis became one of the personal heroes who shaped his music. “I liked the rule breakers,” Weasel says. “I liked the ones who didn’t allow other people to tell them what they could and couldn’t do. The result of that, for me, ended up being—for one thing, I was at odds, and still am, with an awful lot of people. But I think it just dovetailed, at that time, with a sense of freedom.” 

Any town with a punk scene seems to have had at least one of those dented circles. Writing about the Cleveland scene for the Guardian in 2013, UK music critic Jon Savage credited regional TV horror host Ghoulardi, aka Ernie Anderson, as an early influence. Bob Richey, who drummed for the Pagans and currently plays guitar for Les Black’s Amazing Pink Holes, grew up watching Ghoulardi’s Shock Theater and going to horror conventions, where he met Herschell Gordon Lewis. He also pulled off something that very few other punks did: he got Lewis into a recording session with one of his bands. 

Blood Feast opened in summer 1963 at a Peoria drive-in owned by one of the film’s producers, Chicagoland movie-exhibition mogul Stan Kohlberg. When Lewis and Friedman drove down to check out the reaction on the second night of the run, they hit traffic a mile from the theater. As Lewis said in the 1975 anthology Kings of the Bs, “Blood Feast I’ve often referred to as a Walt Whitman poem—it’s no good, but it’s the first of its type and therefore it deserves a certain position.”

Outdoor theaters in Los Angeles were still playing Blood Feast nine years later, in 1972, which is how musician and movie producer Jimmy Maslon came across it. “I was blown away,” Maslon says. “I went again the next night and recorded the dialogue with a cassette recorder—and brought it to school the next day and played it for all my friends.” 

In the early 80s, Maslon and Caidin scrounged up the money to acquire the rights to Blood Feast from Kohlberg, who outright owned several of the director’s films after a bitter falling-out in the mid-1960s. “We bought the rights together pretty inexpensively,” Maslon says. Blood Feast turned out to be the first of many Lewis films he bought, and initially he figured he’d rent them to universities for screenings—but then the rise of cable TV and home VCRs provided him with an unexpected opportunity. 

The average price of a VCR in November 1984 was $500, according to a New York Times report that year. When Sony introduced its first home VCR in 1975, it cost $1,400. An RCA vice president told the Times that in fall of ’84, one in seven homes had a VCR. This led to the rise of video rental stores, which needed more than just new movies to fill their shelves. “I had these infamous horror films,” Maslon says. “So basically, I was getting flocked by requests.” 

Underground director and set designer Steve Hall began renting movies from a stereo store in San Diego in the early 1980s, before he was old enough to drive. The store didn’t carry much variety, but he could get some of Lewis’s films. 

“Nobody from my demographic would have ever known him,” Hall says. “Those movies would have been completely gone, no one would have seen them, unless it was for VHS, and hitting us all at that time—like, 14-year-olds, like little sponges, looking at that because it’s the only tape that’s available.”

Lewis’s films inspired teenage Hall to shoot his own movies on video, using inflatable dolls he’d bought at a local sex shop instead of actors. “Me and my friends, in my parents’ garage, started making these movies on Hi8,” he says. “With all, like, animated blow-up dolls in full scenarios. I have two hours of movies of them.” In the 90s, Hall began screening his films (by then cast with live humans) at the I-Beam in San Francisco and the Casbah in San Diego. “I knew all the band people,” he says. “So we would use our movies to open up for the bands.”

In 1998, Hall befriended Jim Rota, who was about to found Los Angeles heavy metal band Fireball Ministry, and hired him to edit some of his underground films. Rota had a similar personal history with Lewis, discovering the director’s movies as a teen in the 1980s through a rental spot called Castle Video in his native New Jersey. 

“There was a guy at that video store that would always put stuff aside, because he knew me and my friends would come in,” Rota remembers. “That was where I first saw Blood Feast, because that guy was like, ‘This is the first movie that showed organs. It’s the gore milestone.’”

VCRs let consumers record or copy almost anything, and when people love a movie, they want their friends to see it. As videotape trading emerged, both in person and by mail, it often went hand in glove with cassette-tape trading in punk and metal. 

“Herschell Gordon Lewis, amongst trading movies like that, that was one of the absolute top names,” says Roctober editor and Reader contributor Jake Austen. “Getting a gore film that you hadn’t seen was absolutely amazing. It felt like, in garage-rock zines, you would talk about films like that the same way you would talk about bands. Like, you should know this Australian punk band and you should know this movie. It was an expectation, but not elitist—just go find it.”

“I had some friends across the country who were often people who were in punk rock bands, who were into tape trading,” says Ben Weasel. “The one guy for me was Chris Barrows from the band the Pink Lincolns down in Tampa; he was just constantly sending me weird shit. ‘Oh, have you seen this? Have you heard of this director?’ It wasn’t just films; it was weird videos that people made that were talked about but really hard to get. And I loved that kind of stuff.”

When Mike Vraney managed punk bands in the 80s, he devoured exploitation movies on VHS. Blaine Cook, front man of the Accused, remembers Vraney’s skill at recording movies from his TV at home. “He’d have that magic finger, and he would be able to hit pause when a commercial came on,” Cook says. “We were with him just as he was starting to collect all those VHSes. We’d go over to his house, and he’d let us take stacks of tapes.”

The Gore Gore Girls would be Lewis’s final film until he came out of retirement in 2002 for Blood Feast 2. Lewis could see the industry getting crowded, and he didn’t think it’d be good business to try to compete with better-funded filmmakers: “Now the sex-film producers are turning to horror,” he told the Chicago Tribune magazine in January 1972. “The next couple of years will see a glut, with each guy trying to out-gore the other. What they don’t realize is that this kind of picture is show biz. Fantasy. If you treat it with too much reality, it will revolt the audience.” 

Lewis’s films didn’t tend to screen within big cities—they were almost exclusively drive-in fare—and often they didn’t make it out of the midwest and south. The New York City premiere of The Gore Gore Girls wasn’t till November 11, 1982, when horror zine Gore Gazette presented a showing at Club 57, a subcultural hot spot in the basement of a Polish church on the Lower East Side. It also hosted theatrical performances, punk concerts, art exhibitions, and the occasional female wrestling match. 

In May 1979, Club 57 creators Tom Scully and Susan Hannaford had begun programming a Tuesday series called the Monster Movie Club. The series had run its course by the time of the Gore Gore Girls premiere, but it made a space at the club for screenings of the drive-in trash beloved by artists in the scene. Those artists included the Ramones and the Misfits—and the latter played the first annual Monster Movie Club Costume Ball at Irving Plaza on Halloween 1979.

“Everything that was going on at Club 57—and that was just one night—everything that was going on, it was giving permission for people to express whatever idea they had, in any form they chose to express it in,” says performance artist, actor, and musician Ann Magnuson, who managed Club 57 for most of 1979 and 1980. “There was a sense of freedom, that each event, each encounter you had with people down there and their creative expressions, encouraged you to do the same.”

Club 57 brought in a who’s who of artists across scenes, including Keith Haring, Klaus Nomi, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. And the Monster Movie Club attracted key underground cinematic players, among them Frank Henenlotter, original Fangoria editor Bob Martin, and Sleazoid Express editor Bill Landis, who’d distribute his zine from Club 57. 

“The appeal of people coming to the Monster Movie Club, of course, was because of the audience participation,” Magnuson says. “Everybody was encouraged to really revert back to being a nine-year-old, or a 12-year-old, or a 16-year-old—I would venture to say a great deal of the membership never really progressed, emotionally, past those ages. But there was a lot of screaming out loud, a lot of talking back to the film—and there was a tremendous amount of that when the Herschell Gordon Lewis stuff was played.”

Magnuson enjoyed the cathartic screenings, but only to a point. “When I became exposed to the graphic violence towards men or women, but predominantly women, I got really turned off and I stopped watching any horror films made after a certain era,” she says. “Because it became very cruel and sadistic.” 

Earlier this year, fringe film site Bleeding Skull (Zack Carlson is a contributor, naturally) named Twisted Issues the 12th-best shot-on-video movie. Pinion packaged VHS copies with a cassette soundtrack of Gainesville bands, and I especially love how the film captures the city’s punk scene in its infancy. I like to think it’s fate that the Fest, a multiday blowout that’s been bringing punks from around the country to Gainesville since its founding in 2002, falls on Halloween weekend.

Other punks who are fans of Lewis have given filmmaking a shot too. In 1990, Ben Weasel made a teen vampire flick called Disgusteen with around $50 and a camcorder. (“I’m embarrassed by it,” he says. “It was terrible.”) A couple years later, Bob Richey filmed This Is Elvis’ Birthday ’92 With Mike Hudson, which he recut and re-edited during the pandemic; the new version premiered at Cleveland’s Beachland Ballroom this past July. Gwar are perhaps one of the biggest successes in this regard. The group’s 1992 music video-slash-movie, Phallus in Wonderland, earned them a Grammy nomination. 

Every Gwar concert feels a little like a Lewis production—with the important difference that Gwar’s fake blood might actually end up on you. “We’ve got three 33-gallon tanks,” says Matt Maguire, who works on Gwar’s props, costumes, and stage shows. “It’s roughly 100 gallons that go out on the crowd, if we’re lucky. Usually we drain all the tanks.”

Maguire’s coworker Bob Gorman elaborates: “It’s really like pro wrestling—it’s about things being big, and over-the-top, and being seen from the back row, as opposed to being quote-unquote good,” he says. “It’s about the idea being stronger than the execution.”A movie doesn’t have to look great to be powerful, not any more than a band has to play perfectly. Lewis proved it in cinema just as punk proved it in rock ’n’ roll. “I don’t listen to punk rock at home,” Gorman says, “but I like shows. I like to see a band live, because it’s about the spirit and the energy.”

Read More

CHICAGO — Today, Mayor Lori E. Lightfoot signed an Executive Order designating that City of Chicago departments allocate at least 50 percent of their annual advertising spending to community media outlets. More than 153 languages are spoken in households citywide, in addition to other diversity factors. Together, Chicago’s local media outlets reach all 77 community areas in all of the languages the city’s communities speak.

This is an effort that the Chicago Independent Media Alliance (CIMA) has been advocating for since 2020.

“Chicago is one of the most diverse cities in the world, and it’s only right that City government honors that diversity by supporting community and ethnic media outlets,” said Chicago Mayor Lori E. Lightfoot. “Through this equity-based Executive Order, we will ensure that City communications and information on programs are accessible to all of our residents — no matter their circumstances. This effort will also serve as an economic boon for many of our local media outlets, and strengthen the City’s relationship with the communities they represent.”

With this Executive Order, the City demonstrates its commitment to equitable access to vital information about City services and resources. It also commits to supporting the small, local media outlets that reach, cover, and hire people from all of Chicago’s communities.

“We are so excited Mayor Lightfoot is taking this first big step toward creating a more equitable playing field for the city’s marketing and advertising spending. We urge all city, county and state agencies to follow this lead,” said CIMA founder and Chicago Reader Publisher Tracy Baim. “This decision will not only ensure that Chicago’s local media can grow and support more voices; it will ensure that Chicago can be a blueprint for other cities.”

“Chicago is a leader in hyperlocal journalism. This is a significant step for advancing equity of voice in Chicago and beyond,” said Jhmira Alexander, President & Executive Director of Public Narrative. “Agency marketing and advertising dollars will offer community media outlets the chance to increase their capacity for coverage and innovation in better serving the different communities in our diverse city.” 

Chicago’s local media outlets have been advocating for this effort since October 2020, when CIMA — a project of the Reader Institute for Community Journalism linking more than 60 community media entities representing more than 80 outlets — began the work of replicating a study of New York City governmental advertising conducted by the Center for Community Media at the City University of New York (CUNY) Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. 

The New York project resulted in an Executive Order signed by Mayor Bill de Blasio in mid-2019. In 2020, the first year of full implementation, there was a multi-million-dollar shift to community and ethnic media. 

“The Newmark J-school is thrilled to learn that Chicago is following in the steps of New York City and creating a more equitable landscape for community media,” said Graciela Mochkofsky, Dean of the CUNY Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. “The New York City Executive Order and now permanent law, supported by the work of our Center for Community Media, allocates government advertising dollars to the myriad of newsrooms serving communities of color and immigrants in New York. This has strengthened the sector, effectively allowing thousands of people to stay informed and civically engaged.”

For the Chicago project, CIMA hired Sam Stecklow — journalist and researcher currently at Invisible Institute — who conducted a FOIA investigation of advertising spending by city, county, and state agencies. Unlike New York City, Chicago and sister city agencies do not handle advertising in a central fashion. Thus, FOIA requests were made to all City departments and sister agencies, other local agencies that are run by appointees of the Mayor of Chicago, and City-affiliated nonprofits that are run by appointees of the Mayor of Chicago.

CIMA Co-Directors Yazmin Dominguez and Savannah Hugueley created the City of Chicago Marketing Report (PDF) summarizing the investigation results. Overall, it found that, from 2015 to 2020, while 47.4% of advertising from city agencies was in community media, that only translated to 18.8% of total dollars spent. For what the City reported, 38.8% was spent in community media, but that was just 13% when viewed on dollars spent. 

“This project has been a goal of the Chicago Independent Media Alliance since its inception. This win could not have been accomplished without Sam Stecklow’s one-year dedication to the project,” said Co-Director of CIMA Yazmin Dominguez. “For a full picture, I encourage interested parties to read our City of Chicago Marketing Report (PDF). This Executive Order has the opportunity to be a gamechanger for Chicago’s local outlets. A more consistent and solid flow of advertising dollars will equate to stable newsrooms resulting in secure resources to fund and uplift more on-the-ground and investigative reporting.”

As part of the Executive Order, the Office of the Mayor will maintain a list of local media that exemplify Chicago’s interconnected communities. Agencies will also be able to utilize the Chicago Independent Media Directory created by CIMA. Featuring outlet statistics and audience demographics, this free media directory includes a growing list of Chicago’s independent and local media outlets in one central website. 

The Chicago Independent Media Directory was created in collaboration with Public Narrative — a Chicago-based nonprofit that has been elevating community voices in journalism for more than 30 years. Since 1995, Public Narrative has produced the Chicago Media Guide, “Getting on the Air, Online & Into Print,” which today provides contact information for over 5,000 Chicago-area journalists and media outlets. Public Narrative’s partnership with CIMA has been essential in advocating for, and creating resources to bring more revenue and support to, independent community media in the city.

CIMA information and reports: indiemediachi.org/about/

CIMA’s Chicago Independent Media Directory: cimadirectory.org

Public Narrative’s Chicago Media Guide will relaunch in November 2022. Visit publicnarrative.org/the-guide/ to learn more.

About CIMA

The Chicago Independent Media Alliance (CIMA) is a coalition of 62 independent, local, and community-driven media entities covering communities throughout the Chicago area, representing more than 80 outlets. Through regular collaboration and the creation of new revenue streams, CIMA uplifts the ecosystem in order to amplify the voices of Chicagoans. Since its founding in 2019, CIMA has helped direct more than $700,000 in funding for its members, through an annual fundraiser, matching foundation funds, and collaboration grants. Founded in 2019, CIMA is a project of the Reader Institute for Community Journalism, publisher of the Chicago Reader. See indiemediachi.org/about/.

About Public Narrative 

Public Narrative is Chicago’s premiere cultivator of narrative change and supporter of community-oriented journalism since 1989. It facilitates training, programming and resource building focused on cultivating media literacy, uplifting community voices in media, and shifting narratives around public health, public safety, and public education. Public Narrative supports more than 200 community and ethnic news outlets and for-and not-for-profit organizations through its initiatives. And it builds meaningful relationships among stakeholders to shift existing community narratives and amplify more inclusive and complete storytelling across Chicago, greater Illinois and beyond. See publicnarrative.org.

Read More

When we think about holistic healing, what are the tools that people have available to change their selves and, by proxy, their communities? Tonight, the youth and community equity organization Chicago Beyond hosts two Chicago artists, Fantasía “Fanni” Ariel and Eddie “EDO” Santana White, in a panel discussion about the power of healing through the arts. Both Fanni and EDO currently have work on display in Chicago Beyond’s Home for Social Innovation, a locale for the organization that they also conceptualize as a public service space. Tonight’s event will be moderated by Rome J., cultural correspondent for The TRiiBE. The talk begins at 6 PM (doors open at 5:30 PM) at 811 W. Fulton Market, Suite 300. It’s free to attend, but reservations are requested through Eventbrite. (SCJ)

At 9:45 PM, Sex Demon is showing at the Music Box Theatre (3733 N. Southport). This X-rated thrill ride from 1975 is for anyone who likes camp, queer history, practical effects-based horror, and/or hot men fucking. (I am a fan of all four, and that’s why I couldn’t resist waxing at length about this movie for our film section!) When John gives his lover Jim a necklace from a Christopher Street antique shop, Jim undergoes some major behavioral changes. Can Jim be saved from his sexy yet evil ways? Come early to find out because there will be some hot gay teaser reels at the beginning. Tickets are $11 ($8 for members). (MC)

If you’re looking for something to do after Sex Demon, float on over to Berlin (954 W. Belmont) to catch the rest of Studs & Spikes. This monthly party celebrates what’s gay about goth and punk culture, and it kicks off at 10 PM. In tonight’s installment, Exedo and Stress Positions open for Martin Sorrondeguy’s spooky postpunk band Canal Irreal. Afterward everyone’s favorite dark mistress of the DJ booth, Scary Lady Sarah, will keep the dance floor pumping till close. It’s $10 from those 21 and older to join the party, and masks and proof of vaccination are required. (MC)

Read More

The inside of Herschell Gordon Lewis’s brain (artist’s conception) Credit: Luis Colindres

In 1987, Michael Bishop was invited to join an underground band in Richmond, Virginia, whose trashy, theatrical collision of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror made them subversive standouts in the city’s punk scene. Bishop already had a reputation as a gifted bassist, and he was still in high school when he joined Gwar. 

The band’s obscenely violent onstage personas were part of an ever-evolving backstory too incoherent and ludicrous to summarize here—suffice it to say they played bloodthirsty intergalactic conquerors, and Bishop wore oversize gladiator gear and called himself Beefcake the Mighty. In a mythos-building 1989 interview for Maximum Rocknroll, his bandmate Sexecutioner claimed that Beefcake had “invented music by stretching dinosaur entrails across the freshly carved Grand Canyon.”

Even back then, Gwar’s stage show involved a phalanx of costumes and props. The band had several nonmusical members, many of whom had studied art at Virginia Commonwealth University, and they fabricated removable body parts, bloody entrails, and alien creatures. For much of 1987, the band’s headquarters—nicknamed the Slave Pit—was in the Richmond Dairy Company building, a dilapidated four-story complex with milk-bottle turrets. 

Henenlotter adores Lewis, but he might have to settle for second place behind John Waters, who paid homage to Lewis in 1970’s Multiple Maniacs, 1994’s Serial Mom, and 2000’s Cecil B. Demented. Waters included a Q&A with Lewis in his own autobiography, 1981’s Shock Value, and introduced his hero thusly: “His films are impossible to defend; thus, he automatically becomes one of the all-time great directors in film history.”

Lewis’s oeuvre isn’t to all tastes, to put it gently, and not just because he liked to throw around bathtubs of fake blood. He approached filmmaking as a businessman first, emphasizing speed, efficiency, and frugality. He was a marketing genius but at best a workmanlike director. Palmer’s book claims Lewis and his team shot Blood Feast in nine days for $24,500. When his actors weren’t on camera, they sometimes pulled double duty by slating scenes with clapboards or holding boom mikes. His crew used all matter of animal parts—chicken skin, fish eyeballs, lox, a sheep’s tongue—for gore effects. 

Lewis’s films can be rough going, clogged with awkward pacing, unnatural dialogue, and even worse acting; the framing is bland, the editing choppy. But as is so often the case with cheap, trashy movies made with more energy than skill, these failings contribute to their strange charms.

Those charms might as well have been engineered to win over Bishop and his bandmates. “Gwar valorizes the low—like, the sort of things people look at culturally and want to dismiss,” Bishop says. (Today he’s back in Gwar after many years, and now fronts the group as Blöthar the Berserker.) “Gwar’s always been interested and motivated in finding the value in that, and using that as the basis of our mode of expression. That’s how Gwar makes meaning. Herschell Gordon Lewis is a part of that formula.”

Punk history is lousy with horror hounds who share Bishop’s love for Lewis’s movies. “The films were outsider, notorious, abrasive, and over-the-top—all things one often associates with punk rock,” says artist Lisa Petrucci, owner and operator of Seattle mail-order movie company Something Weird Video. 

Petrucci’s late husband, Mike Vraney, launched Something Weird in 1990, naming it after a 1967 Lewis film. Vraney had developed his taste for B movies and exploitation fare while working in punk. In the late 70s, he cofounded Modern Productions, which booked punk and new wave at the Showbox, across from Seattle’s Pike Place Market. In the 80s, he managed punk bands, including the Accused, T.S.O.L., and the Dead Kennedys—and sometimes turned them on to Lewis’s films. 

Carlson has programmed for Austin’s Alamo Drafthouse and its annual Fantastic Fest. He’s the guy who bought a 35-millimeter print of long-lost 1987 martial-arts caper Miami Connection listed for $40 on eBay, launching it into the canon of endearingly incompetent Z movies. He grew up before you could find everything on the Internet, so he learned about punk rock and fringe films the old-fashioned way. 

As a teen Carlson worked at a record shop in Oxnard, California, and befriended an older couple who educated him in cult movies. They gave him a copy of the 1986 book Incredibly Strange Films, which opened his eyes to an entire constellation of directors who shot for the moon on shoestring budgets. “Clearly at the top of the heap was Herschell Gordon Lewis,” Carlson says. “He was the originator, and he was so prolific. And he was such a huge personality on his own.”

It’s not hard to find mash notes to Lewis from horror fiends, but the connections between his work and punk rock have been less thoroughly examined. When I decided to write this story, my idea was to collect as many of those links in one place as I could. Lewis’s gore movies hit the same sweet spot as lots of early punk.

Lewis earned degrees in journalism at Northwestern University, and in the 1950s he learned the ropes of the industrial film business. He worked in TV commercials and public relations, and he and a man named Martin Schmidhofer became co-owners of a Chicago production studio they called Lewis & Martin Films (get it?). In 1960, Lewis founded Mid-Continent Films to get into the features game—he thought that was the only way to make real money in the business. 

The company’s first movie, 1960’s The Prime Time, was filmed locally (Lewis produced but didn’t direct) and featured the cinematic debut of Karen Black. Production mistakes allegedly inflated its budget to a disastrous $100,000, and by all accounts it bombed. Mid-Continent folded after one more film. 

Lewis worked on his own after that, and this taught him an important lesson: namely, that with a skeleton crew and no oversight, he could do the work better and cheaper. 

Leaving aside Lewis’s hostility to the expense of union labor, that attitude is pretty punk. “I love the aesthetic of having a vision and not stopping to figure everything out, and not having a budget, but being so motivated with your idea that you’re going to make it happen,” says Detroit musician Amy Gore, who named her first band after Lewis’s 1972 horror comedy The Gore Gore Girls. “Film was expensive, and making a film was expensive, and that just didn’t seem to bother HG at all. And I love that about him.” 

“We could either do a film that was so loaded with sex as to be almost unfilmable, or we could do a picture that was so loaded with horror as to be equally unfilmable,” Lewis told Palmer. “And since there was an overabundance of nudie pictures, we opted for the horror angle.” Blood Feast came out that same year, and it’s since inspired generations of punks.

“The only reason the Herschell Gordon Lewis films got made, distributed, and seen, regardless of the creators’ intention, was because they didn’t have any regard for the rules—if Herschell Gordon Lewis had had regard for the rules, he would have been doing very, very different kinds of films,” says Screeching Weasel front man Ben Weasel. “He wanted to do something that was shocking and went beyond and all that. But in order to even get to that place, you have to be willing to step over a line.” 

Weasel found Lewis’s movies in the mid-80s, around the same time he got into punk. Lewis became one of the personal heroes who shaped his music. “I liked the rule breakers,” Weasel says. “I liked the ones who didn’t allow other people to tell them what they could and couldn’t do. The result of that, for me, ended up being—for one thing, I was at odds, and still am, with an awful lot of people. But I think it just dovetailed, at that time, with a sense of freedom.” 

Any town with a punk scene seems to have had at least one of those dented circles. Writing about the Cleveland scene for the Guardian in 2013, UK music critic Jon Savage credited regional TV horror host Ghoulardi, aka Ernie Anderson, as an early influence. Bob Richey, who drummed for the Pagans and currently plays guitar for Les Black’s Amazing Pink Holes, grew up watching Ghoulardi’s Shock Theater and going to horror conventions, where he met Herschell Gordon Lewis. He also pulled off something that very few other punks did: he got Lewis into a recording session with one of his bands. 

Blood Feast opened in summer 1963 at a Peoria drive-in owned by one of the film’s producers, Chicagoland movie-exhibition mogul Stan Kohlberg. When Lewis and Friedman drove down to check out the reaction on the second night of the run, they hit traffic a mile from the theater. As Lewis said in the 1975 anthology Kings of the Bs, “Blood Feast I’ve often referred to as a Walt Whitman poem—it’s no good, but it’s the first of its type and therefore it deserves a certain position.”

Outdoor theaters in Los Angeles were still playing Blood Feast nine years later, in 1972, which is how musician and movie producer Jimmy Maslon came across it. “I was blown away,” Maslon says. “I went again the next night and recorded the dialogue with a cassette recorder—and brought it to school the next day and played it for all my friends.” 

In the early 80s, Maslon and Caidin scrounged up the money to acquire the rights to Blood Feast from Kohlberg, who outright owned several of the director’s films after a bitter falling-out in the mid-1960s. “We bought the rights together pretty inexpensively,” Maslon says. Blood Feast turned out to be the first of many Lewis films he bought, and initially he figured he’d rent them to universities for screenings—but then the rise of cable TV and home VCRs provided him with an unexpected opportunity. 

The average price of a VCR in November 1984 was $500, according to a New York Times report that year. When Sony introduced its first home VCR in 1975, it cost $1,400. An RCA vice president told the Times that in fall of ’84, one in seven homes had a VCR. This led to the rise of video rental stores, which needed more than just new movies to fill their shelves. “I had these infamous horror films,” Maslon says. “So basically, I was getting flocked by requests.” 

Underground director and set designer Steve Hall began renting movies from a stereo store in San Diego in the early 1980s, before he was old enough to drive. The store didn’t carry much variety, but he could get some of Lewis’s films. 

“Nobody from my demographic would have ever known him,” Hall says. “Those movies would have been completely gone, no one would have seen them, unless it was for VHS, and hitting us all at that time—like, 14-year-olds, like little sponges, looking at that because it’s the only tape that’s available.”

Lewis’s films inspired teenage Hall to shoot his own movies on video, using inflatable dolls he’d bought at a local sex shop instead of actors. “Me and my friends, in my parents’ garage, started making these movies on Hi8,” he says. “With all, like, animated blow-up dolls in full scenarios. I have two hours of movies of them.” In the 90s, Hall began screening his films (by then cast with live humans) at the I-Beam in San Francisco and the Casbah in San Diego. “I knew all the band people,” he says. “So we would use our movies to open up for the bands.”

In 1998, Hall befriended Jim Rota, who was about to found Los Angeles heavy metal band Fireball Ministry, and hired him to edit some of his underground films. Rota had a similar personal history with Lewis, discovering the director’s movies as a teen in the 1980s through a rental spot called Castle Video in his native New Jersey. 

“There was a guy at that video store that would always put stuff aside, because he knew me and my friends would come in,” Rota remembers. “That was where I first saw Blood Feast, because that guy was like, ‘This is the first movie that showed organs. It’s the gore milestone.’”

VCRs let consumers record or copy almost anything, and when people love a movie, they want their friends to see it. As videotape trading emerged, both in person and by mail, it often went hand in glove with cassette-tape trading in punk and metal. 

“Herschell Gordon Lewis, amongst trading movies like that, that was one of the absolute top names,” says Roctober editor and Reader contributor Jake Austen. “Getting a gore film that you hadn’t seen was absolutely amazing. It felt like, in garage-rock zines, you would talk about films like that the same way you would talk about bands. Like, you should know this Australian punk band and you should know this movie. It was an expectation, but not elitist—just go find it.”

“I had some friends across the country who were often people who were in punk rock bands, who were into tape trading,” says Ben Weasel. “The one guy for me was Chris Barrows from the band the Pink Lincolns down in Tampa; he was just constantly sending me weird shit. ‘Oh, have you seen this? Have you heard of this director?’ It wasn’t just films; it was weird videos that people made that were talked about but really hard to get. And I loved that kind of stuff.”

When Mike Vraney managed punk bands in the 80s, he devoured exploitation movies on VHS. Blaine Cook, front man of the Accused, remembers Vraney’s skill at recording movies from his TV at home. “He’d have that magic finger, and he would be able to hit pause when a commercial came on,” Cook says. “We were with him just as he was starting to collect all those VHSes. We’d go over to his house, and he’d let us take stacks of tapes.”

The Gore Gore Girls would be Lewis’s final film until he came out of retirement in 2002 for Blood Feast 2. Lewis could see the industry getting crowded, and he didn’t think it’d be good business to try to compete with better-funded filmmakers: “Now the sex-film producers are turning to horror,” he told the Chicago Tribune magazine in January 1972. “The next couple of years will see a glut, with each guy trying to out-gore the other. What they don’t realize is that this kind of picture is show biz. Fantasy. If you treat it with too much reality, it will revolt the audience.” 

Lewis’s films didn’t tend to screen within big cities—they were almost exclusively drive-in fare—and often they didn’t make it out of the midwest and south. The New York City premiere of The Gore Gore Girls wasn’t till November 11, 1982, when horror zine Gore Gazette presented a showing at Club 57, a subcultural hot spot in the basement of a Polish church on the Lower East Side. It also hosted theatrical performances, punk concerts, art exhibitions, and the occasional female wrestling match. 

In May 1979, Club 57 creators Tom Scully and Susan Hannaford had begun programming a Tuesday series called the Monster Movie Club. The series had run its course by the time of the Gore Gore Girls premiere, but it made a space at the club for screenings of the drive-in trash beloved by artists in the scene. Those artists included the Ramones and the Misfits—and the latter played the first annual Monster Movie Club Costume Ball at Irving Plaza on Halloween 1979.

“Everything that was going on at Club 57—and that was just one night—everything that was going on, it was giving permission for people to express whatever idea they had, in any form they chose to express it in,” says performance artist, actor, and musician Ann Magnuson, who managed Club 57 for most of 1979 and 1980. “There was a sense of freedom, that each event, each encounter you had with people down there and their creative expressions, encouraged you to do the same.”

Club 57 brought in a who’s who of artists across scenes, including Keith Haring, Klaus Nomi, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. And the Monster Movie Club attracted key underground cinematic players, among them Frank Henenlotter, original Fangoria editor Bob Martin, and Sleazoid Express editor Bill Landis, who’d distribute his zine from Club 57. 

“The appeal of people coming to the Monster Movie Club, of course, was because of the audience participation,” Magnuson says. “Everybody was encouraged to really revert back to being a nine-year-old, or a 12-year-old, or a 16-year-old—I would venture to say a great deal of the membership never really progressed, emotionally, past those ages. But there was a lot of screaming out loud, a lot of talking back to the film—and there was a tremendous amount of that when the Herschell Gordon Lewis stuff was played.”

Magnuson enjoyed the cathartic screenings, but only to a point. “When I became exposed to the graphic violence towards men or women, but predominantly women, I got really turned off and I stopped watching any horror films made after a certain era,” she says. “Because it became very cruel and sadistic.” 

Earlier this year, fringe film site Bleeding Skull (Zack Carlson is a contributor, naturally) named Twisted Issues the 12th-best shot-on-video movie. Pinion packaged VHS copies with a cassette soundtrack of Gainesville bands, and I especially love how the film captures the city’s punk scene in its infancy. I like to think it’s fate that the Fest, a multiday blowout that’s been bringing punks from around the country to Gainesville since its founding in 2002, falls on Halloween weekend.

Other punks who are fans of Lewis have given filmmaking a shot too. In 1990, Ben Weasel made a teen vampire flick called Disgusteen with around $50 and a camcorder. (“I’m embarrassed by it,” he says. “It was terrible.”) A couple years later, Bob Richey filmed This Is Elvis’ Birthday ’92 With Mike Hudson, which he recut and re-edited during the pandemic; the new version premiered at Cleveland’s Beachland Ballroom this past July. Gwar are perhaps one of the biggest successes in this regard. The group’s 1992 music video-slash-movie, Phallus in Wonderland, earned them a Grammy nomination. 

Every Gwar concert feels a little like a Lewis production—with the important difference that Gwar’s fake blood might actually end up on you. “We’ve got three 33-gallon tanks,” says Matt Maguire, who works on Gwar’s props, costumes, and stage shows. “It’s roughly 100 gallons that go out on the crowd, if we’re lucky. Usually we drain all the tanks.”

Maguire’s coworker Bob Gorman elaborates: “It’s really like pro wrestling—it’s about things being big, and over-the-top, and being seen from the back row, as opposed to being quote-unquote good,” he says. “It’s about the idea being stronger than the execution.”A movie doesn’t have to look great to be powerful, not any more than a band has to play perfectly. Lewis proved it in cinema just as punk proved it in rock ’n’ roll. “I don’t listen to punk rock at home,” Gorman says, “but I like shows. I like to see a band live, because it’s about the spirit and the energy.”

Read More

Q: Can someone be both homosexual and asexual? I can’t wrap my brain around this one.

A: Sure, a person can be asexual while also being homosexual . . . because asexuality is a spectrum, and that spectrum is broad and vast and includes people who experience sexual attraction and sometimes choose to act on their sexual attraction. Basically, some asexual guys want boyfriends but don’t wanna fuck ’em at all, other asexual guys want boyfriends but don’t wanna fuck ’em much. It’s really not that confusing . . . unless you happen to be dating a guy who either doesn’t know he’s asexual or knows it and hasn’t told you, in which case you’re likely to be as confused as you are frustrated.

Q: I’m a recently divorced 53-year-old bi-curious woman living on the East Coast. I was with my ex for most of my life and he never mentioned this, but since I have begun dating, each new partner has told me how tight I am. You would think this was a good thing! I recently began dating a man who says he loves how tight I am. However, he also says it is making him come quickly. His marriage recently ended too, so he hasn’t had a lot of sexual experience either. So, I don’t know if he just comes quickly or if it’s because of me. Do you have any suggestions?

A: Maybe it’s you—maybe it’s that you’re tight (which most men regard as a good thing)—or maybe he’s a premature ejaculator and he’d rather blame you than admit to it. Either way, don’t let him stick his dick in you until after he’s made you come at least once.

Q: Why do all the gay guys in my age group—guys I like—not want me? And why do only a few men above my age group—guys I also like—want me?

A: It’s a mystery—a mystery best pondered sitting on the dick of an older guy who wanted you and got you.

Q: Any tips for safe sex during threesomes? Thinking about having a MFF threesome! 

A: There’s no such thing as safe sex, there’s only safer sex. To be completely safe, skip the threesome, stay home, and take a nice, long, relaxing bath instead. Or not. According to the CDC, every year a quarter of a million people wind up in the emergency room after a fall in the bathroom and thousands more never make it to the ER because they DIED naked, wet, and alone after falling out of their tubs. Meanwhile, fewer than 50,000 people are diagnosed with primary and secondary syphilis annually. So, you’re probably safer at that threesome—provided you don’t shower before or after it. Or ever again. (Full disclosure: Almost 700,000 people got gonorrhea in 2020 and 1.5 million people got chlamydia.)

As for making the sex safer, get tested, share your STI statuses, and use condoms. (Condoms, when correctly used, will protect you from syphilis, gonorrhea, chlamydia, HIV, and pregnancy.) Basically, follow the same risk-reduction strategies you would follow for a twosome—with one addition: if M wants to fuck both Fs, he needs to change condoms each time he swaps holes. And to make your threesome emotionally safer, all three of you should be clear about what you do and don’t want, and everyone should agree—out loud—that if someone feels left out, unsafe, or uncomfortable, they can call a time-out without the other two pouting about it.

Q: Newly nonmonogamous and dating after 16 years of monogamy. How to lighten the “let down” feeling when a date I’ve been looking forward to is over and I have to go back to my “regular” life?

A: Your marriage, aka your “regular” life, will fall apart if fun (going out, doing things, having adventures) is reserved for dates and stress (paying bills, doing chores, raising kids) is reserved for your spouse. New-relationship-energy-infused dates are effortless fun (usually), whereas keeping things fun with a spouse requires thought, effort, and MDMA.

Q: You always say that a new dad has to be willing to go with little or no sex for a long time and can’t bring up nonmonogamy. Does the same go for the mom if she’s the one who wants it more?

A: Women who’ve just given birth are usually less interested in (or capable of) sex for all the obvious reasons (physical trauma, physical exhaustion, emotional exhaustion), but studies have shown that men’s testosterone levels dip after becoming fathers, which can tank their libidos. Regardless of who wants it more, the best time for two people to discuss nonmonogamy is BEFORE they’ve scrambled their DNA together, not after. If you didn’t have that conversation before becoming parents, you should wait a year—at least—before bringing it up.

Q: In college my boyfriend found out his girlfriend was cheating on him with a friend. He told his friend he didn’t care, since he was planning to break up with his girlfriend at the end of the semester, and they both kept fucking her. She didn’t know they both knew. What she did was wrong (cheating), but I think my boyfriend and his friend did something worse, as she didn’t know she was being “shared” like this. How do I get my boyfriend to understand?

A: Sharing your boyfriend . . .

There is more to this week’s Savage Love. To read the entire column, go to Savage.Love. 

Read More

After an eccentric Monday Night Football win, it feels like the Chicago Bears have found their stride. They are pacing in the correct direction and a lot of that can be credited to not only the play on the field but the entirety of the coaching staff.

After weeks of tumultuous play, it seems as if the Bears finally got the memo that football is a team sport and in order to win, there has to be a full team effort.

The defense was remarkable. Jaquan Brisker had an amazing pick that ended Mac Jones’ night and Roquan Smith had eight of the defense’s 48 tackles. They also forced the Patriots to punt the ball away four times which is amazing.

On a wet and rainy day similar to that of opening day in Chicago, Justin Fields was trusted to throw the ball and the usage of the run game was only in opportunities where it was needed.

The Chicago Bears won a big game led by Matt Eberflus and Justin Fields.

Fields tossed for 179 yards with one touchdown. He also had one on the ground. It seemed as if his receivers had stepped up and locked in on a deeper level than they started the season on. Fields only threw seven incompletions and one interception.

Sure, Fields still took some licks but that can be expected after losing lineman Lucas Patrick early in the game.

Following the game, Matt Eberflus’ voice resonated nationwide and his postgame speech shows that he is just as in on winning, as the rest of the team, and the fanbase. The leadership that he displays is second to none in recent Bears history right now.

The Bears are on the cusp of a great end to the season, and finally firing on all cylinders. Not saying a playoff run is imminent or that the Bears are going to win the Super Bowl, but now gameday may not be as bad for Bears fans.

Read More

On a Sunday afternoon in mid-September, Jackie Harvey stepped out of her home in Woodlawn for a breath of fresh air, only to notice flashing lights from several police vehicles and ambulances filling her street. 

She walked down the block to find out what was going on, seeing several of her neighbors amid the swelling crowd. As they looked on, one police officer attempted to resuscitate a young man using CPR. Another young man was being wheeled on a stretcher by EMTs to the open doors of an ambulance. Harvey saw blood suffusing his clothes. He had been shot. 

Harvey, an administrative assistant at Cook County Hospital with 29 years of experience, says that witnessing the aftermath of a mass shooting that left two men dead and two seriously injured was traumatic, even for her. So she understood when a relative of one of the victims arrived at the scene hysterical with grief. 

What she could not understand was why a police officer handcuffed the man. The officer took the cuffs off only after other community members explained the familial connection to one of the victims and demanded his release. 

“If I would have gotten involved, because I’m emotional and hysterical too, they probably would have handcuffed me,” Harvey said.

Harvey wondered whether the officer had never received sensitivity training, which could have prepared him to deal with a distraught relative. And why, out of the 20-some emergency responders on the scene, was there not a single person on hand who could offer counseling services after such a horrific event? 

One reason such services aren’t yet available has to do with the overall lack of mental health resources available to residents living in neighborhoods such as Woodlawn. Despite the frequent traumatic instances of violence thereabouts, the city has engaged in decades-long divestment from operating mental health centers. 

Back in 2012, Rahm Emanuel closed Woodlawn and Auburn-Gresham’s public mental health clinics as well as four others across Chicago in a continuation of the policies of his predecessor, Richard M. Daley, who had shuttered several before. In all, Emanuel and Daley closed 14 of the city’s 19 mental health clinics.

On November 8, residents of the Sixth, 20th, and 33rd Wards will vote on a nonbinding ballot initiative that asks whether they want to change course on that trajectory and reopen the city-run mental health clinics in support of a new dispatch system to send mental health professionals and EMTs instead of police officers to mental health emergency calls. 

In an impromptu interview at the Whitney Young Library in Chatham, community residents Richard Rosario and Brad Redrick indicated their support of the initiative. They said that reopening the clinics and dispatching care workers, not cops, made intuitive sense. Why send cops to deal with situations they’re not trained for?

“This should have been done so long ago it ain’t even funny,” Redrick said. “I used to work in mental health . . . and [people struggling with mental illness] are a vulnerable population that needs that kind of consideration.”

Tynisha Jointer, a former social worker at Deneen Elementary School who lives in Chatham, said that people in her neighborhood avoid calling the police because of fears that they will harm the very people they are called to assist. “Having an [alternative] outlet could definitely be helpful for families . . . supporting folks who are struggling with mental illness,” she said.

Although the referendum is nonbinding, it is part of a sustained effort by a group of community organizations known as the Collaborative for Community Wellness (CCW) to press the mayor and City Council to include funding for the development of a citywide mental health crisis response system in the city’s 2023 budget. In 2020, 33rd Ward alderperson Rossana Rodriguez Sanchez introduced a resolution that would have established such a system. 

Since September 2021, the city of Chicago began piloting a co-responder program, pairing police officers with mental health workers and paramedics in Crisis Assistance Response and Engagement (CARE) teams. CARE teams operated in a handful of neighborhoods on the southwest side during weekday hours. The teams were dispatched to over a hundred mental health crisis calls in the past year. In none of those cases was an arrest made or a use of force reported, according to Allison Arwady, Chicago’s public health commissioner.

Although Arwady has insisted police officers’ presence is essential to ensuring the safety of the other responders, in only one case out of 134 did a CARE team member sustain a minor injury. Organizers of the referendum contend that including officers on CARE teams is unnecessary at best and dangerous at worst. 

According to Cheryl Miller, a lifelong Chicagoan and former cabdriver who is now the public health organizer for Southside Together Organizing for Power (STOP), one of the groups that is a part of CCW, officers’ training teaches them to establish control over a situation, using force whenever a person is noncompliant, even if that person cannot readily comply because of their mental illness. 

“If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything you see is a nail,” Miller said. 

Debates on the 2023 budget begin soon, as does voting on candidates for all 50 aldermanic seats, so the referendum comes at a time when city officials may be more susceptible to public pressure.

And for Kennedy Bartley, the legislative director at United Working Families and who also worked on the referendum campaign, the organizers’ vision is about more than just providing essential mental health services—it is also about getting back the 125 unionized medical worker jobs, most of which were held by Black and Brown people, that Emanuel cut in 2012. 

“We believe that we don’t need to privatize our care,” Bartley said. “Governments are responsible for providing for safe and healthy communities.”

Read More

Angel Day makes freewheeling underground pop as Yesterdayneverhappened, and their new second album, The Demon at Dusk (Loveshock/Daybreak), zips around with such restless energy you might think they never sleep. The Chicago producer and vocalist has a knack for bricolage and an ear for the cutting edge, evident in the album’s effusive collision of dance music, hip-hop, and R&B; their local Daybreak parties book Black and Black trans artists working to reshape nightlife around the country. Day blends an ocean of sounds with great care, steering their songs into joyful abandon and stopping just short of unrestrained chaos. On “Brimstone Juju,” Day raps with unbothered cool over a craggy landscape built from jackhammer bass, a cyclone of drum ’n’ bass percussion, and reversed synth notes that sound like a haunted organ. It’s an impressive feat to maintain equanimity amid such pandemonium, and throughout The Demon at Dusk, Day provides a demonstration of how liberating it can be to ride out a tornado of your own creation. It’s often a great way to have fun too.

Yesterdayneverhappened This release party for The Demon at Dusk includes an interactive art installation. Ayeeyo, Swami Sound, El Brujo, and Marceline Steel open. Fri 10/28, 5 PM, Congruent Space, 1216 W. Grand, free, all ages

Read More

Women love true-crime stories—so much so that SNL spoofed the fascination a few years ago with a song about women relaxing alone at home watching their favorite “Murder Show.” Fans of the podcast My Favorite Murder (aka “Murderinos”) are overwhelmingly female. When you’re raised from an early age to think that rape and murder are occupational hazards of your gender, maybe morbid laughter and obsessive research are two coping mechanisms—a way of saying to the world, “I’m not afraid, really. They’re just stories.”

Jennifer Rumberger’s The Locusts, now in its world premiere with the Gift Theatre, blends a crime procedural with a family drama to explore generational trauma around violence against women. It has its share of mordant humor, as well as a hopeful insistence on the power of reclaiming one’s own story as a survival mechanism. But it’s also a grim reminder that patriarchy is all about controlling women, instilling terror in their daily lives, and killing them for sport or spite on occasion. Sometimes that happens through “lone wolf” men. Sometimes it’s official state policy. (If you think abortion bans aren’t a form of government-sanctioned serial killing, you haven’t been paying attention.)

The Locusts Through 11/19: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM, Theater Wit, 1229 W. Belmont, 773-975-8150, thegifttheatre.org, $38-$45 ($35 seniors, $25 students)

Ella (Cyd Blakewell) is an FBI special agent who’s been sent back to her hometown of Vero Beach, Florida, to help the local cops catch a serial killer. Ella left home as soon as she could, in large part because she somehow survived being kidnapped and raped as a teenager. She remembers very little of the attack, but signs of her PTSD are there if you look for them underneath her let’s-get-down-to-business exterior. That standoffish demeanor initially pisses off Layla (Jennifer Glasse), the police chief, who assumes Ella just looks down on the yokels. But young officer Robbie (Patrick Weber) is fascinated—until his first visit to one of the killer’s crime scenes leaves him reeling.

Ella’s pregnant sister, Maisie (Brittany Burch), whose couch she’s crashing on, remembers to string up some Christmas lights in the living room because Ella is still afraid of the dark. By contrast, Maisie’s daughter, Olive (Mariah Sydnei Gordon), writes tales of girls seeking vengeance against their attackers and dreams of being a writer in New York, much to the delight of her senescent grandmother (Renee Lockett), who ends up having quite a story of her own to tell. But then Olive’s friends start disappearing, and just surviving seems like a formidable enough challenge.

Rumberger has noted that part of the inspiration for her play (deftly directed here by John Gawlik) was reading about the early life of Mary Shelley. The author of Frankenstein never knew her mother, feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who died shortly after giving birth to her, and she faced ostracism for her relationship with Percy Shelley, whose first wife killed herself. She turned that personal trauma into exteriorized monsters, much as Olive does with her fiction in the play. (At one point, Robbie refers to the electric chair as a “reverse Frankenstein”—electricity used to end a “monster,” rather than animate one.)

And while the brutal murders happening in town are foregrounded, it’s clear that Ella and Maisie also have unresolved issues around the suicide of their mother and the death by cancer of their father, as well as the existential dread of living in an ever-redder state. Maisie takes it as a personal affront that MAGA people have moved into their old family home in a town that seems to be dying on the vine. (The mall is gone, for one thing.) The decay feels palpable in Chas Mathieu’s set, hung with tattered swathes of cloth and with cartoonish cutouts of orange trees in the background, and in Trey Brazeal’s sickly shadowy lighting.

So there’s a lot heaped on the dramatic plate here, and not everything feels like it gets the development it deserves. The resentments between Ella and Maisie in particular feel like they’re swept away pretty quickly. (Though in fairness, having a killer stalking the streets probably makes old sibling rivalries feel like small potatoes.) What does stick is the way that each of the sisters has chosen a different way of dealing with their early traumas. Maisie, a nurse, cares for others in a hands-on way, while Ella is more comfortable in an office, analyzing crimes from a distance in order to achieve justice. Blakewell and Burch excel as two women who love each other, but have found it easier (at least in Ella’s case) to express that love from afar.

One thread throughout the play is that our insistence on rewarding girls for being “nice” is a form of grooming them for their own abuse. That guy with the crutches you stop to help with his packages may be setting you up. (Hello, Buffalo Bill!) It’s an interesting observation—being raised with awareness of your vulnerability as a woman, yet also being expected to serve others and put their needs ahead of yours, adds up to an unwinnable dynamic for assessing risk, when even just politely turning down a stranger’s advances on the street can get you battered or killed. (That’s not even taking into account the much higher likelihood of women being beaten or murdered by men who claim to “love” them.)

Rumberger, who has previously written pieces for Chicago’s horror-centered WildClaw Theatre (her Night in Alachua County from 2017 has some narrative similarities to what she’s doing here) doesn’t sugarcoat much. Blakewell’s monologues as Ella, particularly an absolutely searing cri de coeur near the end, sometimes feel as much like the playwright’s own anguished observations as they do the character’s. But Rumberger remains refreshingly unsentimental and steely-eyed in her vision of a world where women have to save themselves and their stories from everyone who reduces them to objects. 

At one point, Ella tells Robbie about the women whose murders she’s investigated, and how she mourns for all the things they could have done. Their killers get famous. The women stay dead. So we laugh to scare away the shadows, knowing that the monsters are real. And we wonder if watching one more true-crime documentary will give us the key to survival, or numb us to the point of apathy.

Read More