After COVID quashed touring for much of 2020 and 2021, we seem to have collectively agreed that anyone celebrating a significant album anniversary could do their victory lap whenever they damn well pleased. Of course, Berlin-based Canadian musician and artist Merrill Nisker has never asked for or needed anyone’s permission, not even before she dropped her 2000 debut album as Peaches on the indie scene 20 (ahem) years ago. The Teaches of Peaches stood out for its unrelenting sexual frankness and became one of the defining documents of the electroclash boom of the late 90s and early 00s; “Fuck the Pain Away” and “AA XXX” straddled the underground and mainstream to make dance floors in clubs of every caliber horny and hazardous. Defiantly filthy, sly, and playful, The Teaches of Peaches was a statement for a generation shaped by riot grrrl, homocore, and Queer Nation. Move over, cock rock—the clit is it.

Peaches has continued to push boundaries in her songwriting and in finding new ways to combine her passions for music, performance, and sexual freedom. In Berlin in 2010, she debuted her one-woman show Peaches Christ Superstar (a stripped-down spin on the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical that’s as loving and earnest as it is campy and subversive), and in 2012 she released the semi-autobiographical musical Peaches Does Herself. She also sells a signature massage oil via her website. Her sixth and most recent full-length, Rub (2015), features guest appearances by the likes of Kim Gordon and Feist, and it’s as raunchy as anything Peaches has done, holding its business open like a sheela-na-gig—she refuses to fade into invisibility and decorous middle age. Last year, she took on the pandemic and U.S. politics with the hilarious single “Pussy Mask” (Third Man), which she released with a ridiculously fun animated video that has to be seen to be believed.

On her Teaches of Peaches anniversary tour, Peaches performs the record in its entirety with a jaw-dropping visual spectacle. Twenty-plus years since its release, the album doesn’t just hold up as entertainment—I’d argue it’s more important than ever. Peaches lit the torch for so many artists who’ve emerged since, and the hysterical overreaction to Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s 2020 hit “WAP” proves her music still has the capacity to shock. Right-wing culture warriors will always attack reproductive autonomy, protections for sex workers, and the right of self-determination for everyone across the gender spectrum, but with her message to live freely, authentically, and sexually in one’s own body, Peaches drowns that shit out.

  Peaches Sophie Powers opens. Sun 8/21, 9 PM, Metro, 3730 N. Clark, $35-$149, 18+

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A guard came to my cell this morning and asked me if I wanted to hear a joke. Without waiting for me to reply, he said “women’s rights,” and burst out laughing.

I didn’t find it very funny at all.

June 24 was a sad day in the history of our country. The day they overturned Roe v. Wade, the day they took away an established constitutional right. They didn’t change it, they didn’t curtail it, they simply . . . took it away. Anytime our rights are stripped from us, it should be concerning to every American.

It’s the Supreme Court that’s the joke! Politics isn’t supposed to have any place in law. When you become a justice of the Supreme Court, you’re no longer a Republican or a Democrat; your duty isn’t to one party, but to the law. Previously, the Supreme Court struck down a New York law restricting concealed weapons, saying in part that “no state can make a law restricting a constitutional protection.” Then, they turn around and do the exact opposite, saying it’s up to the states to do away with constitutional protections altogether! How can you trust this Court? It’s not the Supreme Court of the United States; it’s the Republican Supreme Court.

We are hearing that these justices are originalists, which means that they take the Constitution literally, and hold only to what is in the original document. That view is extremely shortsighted, and ignores the fact that our Constitution was written 250 years ago. The country has grown and evolved, the population has grown, our morals have evolved (for some of us), so why do we insist on sticking dogmatically to the originality of 250 years ago? It seems counterintuitive that our country can evolve but our beliefs can’t.

Let me be clear: I am pro-choice. I think that a woman has the right to do with her body what she chooses. It’s not my personal business, and it certainly isn’t the government’s business! Some people feel differently, and that’s fine; in America we are all entitled to our own opinions. But one of the biggest problems I have with the pro-life movement is that it’s fundamentally a Christian religious belief. According to the very Constitution they so love to hold to, there is supposed to be separation of church and state. There are many people in this country who are not Christians, and they shouldn’t be forced to live according to the Court’s religious dictates.

The reasoning of the Supreme Court to overturn Roe was that the right to abortion was not expressly written in the Constitution, and therefore it isn’t a right! It’s a ridiculous line of reasoning. There are many rights we have that are not expressly written into the Constitution. The Constitution itself makes allowances for that. The Ninth Amendment states, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” But in its opinion overturning Roe, the Supreme Court is effectively saying that if a right isn’t written into the Constitution, you don’t have it.

In recent weeks, states have made their true intentions known. It’s not just abortion rights that are affected. States have proposed, passed, or implemented many restrictions that go beyond abortion: banning mail-order medication, criminalizing sharing information about abortion, and even banning librarians from using the word “abortion” in conversations with patrons. In some states, fellow citizens have been formally empowered, offered bounties, or afforded whistleblower protections for helping enforce abortion laws. This legalizes the stalking and harassment of pregnant women and medical personnel.

Most people aren’t familiar with the Comstock Act. This was federal legislation that was instituted in the 1870s. The act outlawed not just contraception but literature that contained information on preventing pregnancies. These laws actually led to raids on bookstores! Rights to privacy and free expression guaranteed by the First Amendment were considered “secondary rights” behind the right of the government to control women’s reproductive choices. With Roe overturned, we may see similar laws back on the books.

America is becoming an Orwellian “Big Brother” state. The force of law protects people who watch you, restricts your movements and even your conversations. All we’re waiting for now is a Bureau of Abortion Investigation to kick doors in. Make no mistake, it’s coming.

A class of women not often talked about are those detained in jails and prisons. We all know the horrible case of the ten-year-old rape victim in Ohio who was forced to go to another state in order to have an abortion. Incarcerated women have nowhere they can go. Barriers to abortion access in the community are amplified among women who are incarcerated. Abortions are already more difficult to obtain for people of color, those living in rural areas, and low-income individuals—and many of these same people are more likely to be incarcerated.

Access to abortion during Roe v. Wade was severely limited anyway; now, post-Roe, pregnant women in jails and prisons across the country will be forced to continue unwanted pregnancies, facing harsh birthing conditions from being shackled while giving birth, to receiving poor prenatal care.

“Denying incarcerated women access to abortion, and thereby conscripting them to carry pregnancies while being incarcerated, subjects them to, depending on where they are, potentially unsafe and harmful conditions,” Carolyn Sufrin, a researcher and associate professor of gynecology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, told NBC News in June. “This makes the case for why we shouldn’t be incarcerating pregnant women in the first place, if we’re conscripting them to conditions where they will have no say in their pregnancies and limited abilities to access the care that they need.”

There are women in jail who have been raped, and others who have been raped while they were in custody. In states where abortions are illegal, women will be forced to carry their rapists’ babies to term. People don’t often think about abortion as connected to criminal justice, when oftentimes, incarcerated people are ground zero for having their rights stripped away.

“[T]heir rights are going to stand or fall with the rights of the people in the state who aren’t incarcerated,” Alexa Kolbi-Molinas, deputy director of the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project, told NBC News. “If there’s no federal protection, if there’s no state constitutional protections, and a state makes it illegal, that’s probably going to be the end of it.”

This is why it’s more important than ever that we vote. We need to codify Roe v. Wade, and do the same for same-sex marriage. We need to stem the tide of these “Big Brother”-type laws, or this may just be the beginning of the end for many of our rights!

Anthony Ehlers is a writer incarcerated at Stateville Correctional Center who contributes a regular column to the Reader.

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Last Sunday, stuffed with antibiotics, numbed by painkillers, and facing a date with an oral surgeon the next morning, I made my way to the International Museum of Surgical Science for an artist’s talk by James R. Wilke.

It’s not the best way to visit this unique repository for the medical devices of yesteryear, but it did result in heightened attention to the skulls of folks who had their headaches cured by drilling holes in them, braces straight out of medieval torture chambers, and mural-sized artworks commemorating antique C-sections and amputations, blood and all. This very interesting place, housed in a 1917 landmark mansion on DuSable Lake Shore Drive, is not for the faint of heart.

“Pox Americana”Through 8/28 at the International Museum of Surgical Science, 1524 N. DuSable Lake Shore Dr., Mon-Fri 9:30 AM-5 PM, Sat-Sun 10 AM-5 PM, imss.org, $18 ($14 seniors, students, educators, and military with ID, $10 children 4-13, children under 3 free)

Wilke, a multifaceted artist—actor, singer, composer, lyricist, puppeteer, director (with a regional Emmy on his résumé), producer, miniaturist—but primarily a writer, was the museum’s spring artist-in-residence this year. Sunday’s lecture (served up with wine and a demonstration of his mellifluous baritenor) was the capstone event of his residency projects, which included the completion of a play, a novel, and the creation of an exhibit, with smallpox as a common focus. The exhibit, “Pox Americana,” up through August 28, occupies two rooms of the museum. On the main floor, it consists of a series of handsome text panels laying out the long, global history of the disease. The second room, up three flights of stairs and through a warren of galleries on the fourth floor, has more text panels, fleshed out with art and artifacts like 19th-century etchings making it clear that anti-vaxxers are nothing new.  

The parallels to COVID were top of mind from the beginning, Wilke says, though he aimed for viewers to come to that conclusion themselves: “I didn‘t want to hit them over the head with it.” But he had no way of knowing, when he started work on the residency projects in February, that another virus would soon make the subject of smallpox directly relevant.

That’s because there’s no vaccine exclusively developed for MPV, which both the World Health Organization and the Biden administration have declared a public health emergency. The two used for it are smallpox vaccines. And of those two, ACAM2000, which the U.S. had stockpiled in mass quantity, turned out to not be the safest for the population with the most monkeypox cases so far—men who have sex with men, a significant number of them dealing with HIV.

The other vaccine, Jynneos—which requires a two-shot regimen, 28 days apart—is suddenly in such high demand and short supply that, earlier this month, the U.S. government authorized cutting the dose to one-fifth of what it had been. The reduced dosage is said to be effective if injected in the skin instead of the layer of fat beneath it—a procedure also said to be more difficult to execute.

In his talk last weekend, Wilke said smallpox, which we know has been around since roughly 10,000 BC, “may have been the most deadly disease in human history,” decimating America’s Indigenous population and killing a half billion people in just the final 100 years of its long reign. Thanks to vaccination, WHO declared the world free of it in 1980, making it, Wilke says, “the first-ever globally eradicated human disease.”  

Wilke’s other residency projects include a young adult novel, Spiritania, intended to be the first in a series (it’ll have a launch at the museum November 17), and a play he wrote that’s an adaptation of Toni Morrison’s 2008 novel, A Mercy. Wilke, who once gave up a life in art for a career as a CPA, noted that Morrison’s story, set in the 17th century, tells of Africans in America who brought with them the knowledge of inoculation—the introduction of a small amount of matter from a smallpox pustule into the bloodstream—the technique that eventually led to the invention of vaccines.

But with the eradication of smallpox in the 20th century, routine vaccination for it was abandoned. The result: several generations of humanity more vulnerable than their grandparents to monkeypox.

In June, when Wilke had to finalize his text for this exhibit, he had a question: “Are we on the cusp of yet another serious pandemic from monkeypox?” He didn’t foresee, he says now, how quickly whatever he wrote then would be out of date.

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At 74 years old, being the third-generation owner of Central Camera Co. is the only job Albert Donald Flesch—Don to his customers—has ever known. When he watched his 123-year-old store burn down amidst the civil unrest that swept the city in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, he had one reaction: “We’re going to rebuild it and make it just as good or better.”

On the evening of May 30, 2020, the pandemic raged on without an end in sight. Confrontations between police and demonstrators had escalated, and the Loop became the scene of riots and looting. Central Camera Co. wasn’t spared. Don perched on a metal fence wrapped around a patch of grass across the street from Central Camera, near the entrance of DePaul University’s College of Computing and Digital Media, and turned on the flash of his camera. He took pictures of the scene unfolding before him until the roll of film ran out. He reached into his pocket for his phone to take a few more, only to find that its battery ran out because of the countless calls he’d received earlier about a break-in at his store while he was at his home in suburban Skokie. So he did the only thing he could do that night. He sat and watched.

Don looked on as people smashed the storefront windows and walked out with bags of valuable inventory that generations of his family had dedicated their lives to collecting and selling. He watched as black smoke billowed through the front door. And he watched as everything but the store’s vintage neon sign that read “Since 1899” in big bold neon letters went up in flames.

But Don says that as thousands of people marched through the Loop, he wasn’t angry with the demonstrators or what happened to his store. He was just upset about what enraged them in the first place: George Floyd’s murder.

When the fire trucks arrived, more than two dozen firefighters worked for hours to extinguish the blaze. In a corner of the store’s shattered storefront window, Don saw the first camera his grandfather had ever sold was still on display, flipped over on its back. It was an antique Kodak folding camera, sent back to the store years later in a box with a note from a customer who explained that his father had bought the camera for him from Don’s grandfather. As Don inched closer, a fireman warned him to keep away. Breathing in the smoke was dangerous, and the fire was still burning. He needed to create a diversion to reach in and grab it. “I said, ‘Oh, what’s that?’ And [the firefighter] turned and looked up, and I grabbed it and stuffed it under my armpit,” Don recalled, laughing at the success of his distraction.

Don snuck in every day during the week after the fire to search for family belongings and items that would help the business bounce back, such as the phone books. The floors were destroyed, the walls blackened, and the tiles in the back office so damaged that a misstep would send someone slipping through them. He searched unsuccessfully for the diary his grandfather, Albert Flesch, who founded the store, carried with him when he immigrated from Hungary to Chicago at only 13 years old. Though Don had the diary translated, copied, and distributed to the rest of the family years before, the original copy was lost in the fire.

Two years after the fire, Don stands in the store’s original location, wearing his signature black beanie, a camera perpetually hanging from his neck. Renovations aren’t completed yet, but he reopened the store out of necessity. It’s a clean slate: a white-walled warehouse that is starkly different from the crammed, vibrant time capsule of a store that once was. He glazes over some variation of the events that unfolded to curious customers several times a day, offering glimpses of the devastation the store endured. Days after the fire, the staff set up two tables on the sidewalk and talked with customers. They relocated to a temporary spot next door in November 2020. The store set up a GoFundMe campaign for the repairs and raised about $35,000 in the first hour. “Although this is a tough time for the store, it doesn’t compare to the loss of George Floyd’s life and the countless other Black lives lost,” the page says.

Central Camera Co. is from 10 AM to 2 PM Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday. Carolina Sanchez

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Rodrigo Pulido sat on a bench beside his tent in Touhy Park in July, watching over the tents of two other houseless residents who were gone to work a day shift.

Pulido has lived in the park for four months. He perched alone on the bench beside a large tray of cooked meat a stranger gifted him so that he could disseminate it to the 20 or more other people who stay in the park.

Now, a plan to build a men’s shelter near the park has divided residents of the surrounding community.

Pulido moved to Chicago from Mexico in 1999. He’d lived with his ex-wife and four kids for 20 years, working as a full-time carpenter on South Boulevard in Evanston and making up to $750 a week. Pulido, whose nickname in the park is Chilaquil, would leave $600 of that with his family, even after he and his wife divorced. Now he has cirrhosis, a liver disease, and can’t work.

His kids and ex-wife still visit at least once a week to check on him, ask about his needs, and invite him to meals. But he doesn’t want to worry them. And, besides, he has more than enough food, he said with a genuine smile, punctuating all of his sentences with a cheerful “I no lie!”

“My friend just took a little bit on the plate,” Pulido said, gesturing to the still mostly full aluminum pan.

He became friends with one of the restaurant owners bordering the park because he often cleans up around the area. In exchange for his generosity, the owner heats up Pulido’s food, or gives him trays of hamburgers, tamales, and more to share with other park residents.

Pulido has been friends with guys in the park for a decade; one of his friends, whose “house” he’s watching, has lived in the park for 18 years.

You wouldn’t know it if you didn’t live there, but the park, nestled in Chicago’s northernmost neighborhood, is segregated. Tents are arranged around groups of Black, Latino, and white occupants, but Pulido insists that he gets along with everyone. “Wherever you want to live I don’t care no matter what, because the park is not mine.”

Alderperson Maria Hadden (49th Ward) recently gave her support for North Side Housing and Supportive Services (NSHSS) to open a 72-bed men’s shelter at 7464 N. Clark, about a block north of Touhy Park. The facility would be the only shelter targeted toward homeless single men on the north side of Chicago.

Laura Michalski, the executive director of NSHSS, said the fact that it is a men’s shelter is one of the organization’s challenges. Neighbors respond better to emergency shelters for women and children, because they’re seen as a more vulnerable population.

NSHSS has been providing emergency shelter in Chicago since 1983. In 2021, it moved its Uptown facility from a crumbling 96-year-old building to a temporary outpost at a Super 8 Motel.

The new men’s shelter will replace the motel, adding 22 beds and more communal spaces for programming.

Hadden hosted three community dialogues for neighbors to “share their strong opinions.” One of those meetings occurred on the evening of Monday, August 1, at Pottawatomie Park. Alderperson Hadden opened the meeting joking that people behave better face-to-face than online, “and that’s why we’re doing this in person.”

One of the main concerns folks have, Hadden told the crowd, is that opening the facility would encourage other houseless folks to gravitate toward Rogers Park. In response to these particular concerns, NSHSS changed plans to move a Ravenswood drop-in center to Rogers Park.

“Will there be any mental help in this program?” asked one resident. “Because taking people off the streets who have just been homeless is a mental decision. Once you used to living out on the streets, it’s a process to get into that.”

Yes, Michalski responded, case managers are incorporated into the program, and the shelter will be a permanent supportive housing program.

Antoine Alexander, once homeless himself and a 13-year resident of Rogers Park, was one of the most vocal at the August 1 meeting.

“My question is, first of all, this does not eliminate the homelessness in Touhy Park,” Alexander began. “[A shelter] brings more homeless people into the area. We have plenty of homeless people in the area. We don’t need to bring more into the area.”

A low murmur and clap emphasized Alexander’s points.

Another resident, Jose Camacho, said he remembered when there was just one tent in Touhy Park. Then there were two, and the number kept growing, he said. “When the park empties out because of the shelter,” Camacho asked Hadden, “what’s going to happen with the new people who come to live in Touhy Park?”

“I don’t have an answer for you right now,” Hadden said. “But I actually will tell you, that’s part of what we have to work out with the city and with the park district.”

Lester Jones, 59, has been staying in a tent in Touhy Park for only a few weeks this year. Jones, who is Black, wore a red and white Adidas shirt, black pants, and red and white Adidas slides.

He’s originally from Mississippi—which you can hear when he talks—and came to Chicago at nine years old. He never left.

He said the park is better in the summertime, when the tents are more useful against the weather.

Jones was released from prison only a few weeks ago, where he was incarcerated for seven months. He’s been staying in the park since. Before that, he had an apartment on W. Fargo Avenue. Thresholds, an organization that helps provide health care and housing to people with mental illnesses or substance abuse disorders in Illinois, helped him snag an $850 studio. He said he could pay that with an old job he had moving beans, rice, and more from warehouses for international shipment, but he hurt his knee and now it’s too messed up for heavy labor.

He spends his free time watching movies with his older sister, who lives off the last Red Line stop at 95th on the south side, when he can, and she’ll cook for him. By the end of the night, she usually encourages him to stay south because riding the Red Line at night is risky, and Jones worries about his own safety.

Jones and Pulido both want to return to where they are originally from.

“I like to travel all over,” Pulido said. He added he’s only in Chicago to see a friend. “He’s coming to look and say bye because I’m trying to go into Mexico again.”

“I’m going back down to Mississippi to live,” Jones told me. He’s still counting on Thresholds to help put him in an apartment on the south side.

Jones knows of a shelter on Canal Street, Pacific Garden Mission, but said staying there feels like being in a cage, because residents have to be back in the house by 6:45 PM. If he could, he would stay north past the summer.

“It’s much better, quieter. I like being by the lake, too,” he said.

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There’s a reason you rarely see Zorro: The Musical, the 2008 show inspired by a masked Spanish hero (conceived of by Johnston McCulley in 1919 and since the subject of numerous books and movies) who defeats evil and tyranny by expert swashbuckling. Scratch that. There are myriad reasons. Among them: 

Zorro: The MusicalThrough 8/21: Wed 1 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 2 and 8 PM, Sun 2 PM, North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, 9501 Skokie Blvd., Skokie, 847-673-6300, musictheaterworks.com, $19.50-$106

The musical (score by John Cameron and the Gipsy Kings, book by Stephen Clark and Helen Edmundson, lyrics by Clark) offers a deeply racist take on “gypsies,” reducing a complex culture and ethnic identity to a slur and a series of stereotypes centered on fluttering scarves, flowy skirts, and cartoonishly seductive women. The score is almost as monotonal as Gregorian chant. The plot is incomprehensible. 

 But perhaps the most glaring issue with Music Theater Works’s production, directed by Adrian Abel Azevedo, lies in the way it juxtaposes grimness with guffaws. As to the latter, Zorro offers a dictator who ruthlessly imprisons anyone who questions him and uses the military against peaceful citizens. There is an attempted gang rape. In one prolonged scene, we see the Guantánamo-like specter of a hooded prisoner, hands bound. But all the day is, we’re to believe, repeatedly saved by Zorro (Cisco Lopez), a Hamburgler-like clown who is as believable a hero as a week-old cheeseburger. Further, watching Nick Sandys’s fight choreography is akin to watching children trying out their new souvenirs from the Medieval Times gift shop.  

The technicals in MTW’s production don’t help. The cast is swallowed up by the stage, leaving the impression that Jacqueline and Richard Penrod’s expansive set is vastly underpopulated. The ensemble often seems to be singing in a different key than music director Justin Akira Kono’s nine-person pit orchestra. As for the flaming “Z” Zorro is known for, it’s about as fiery as a wet bag of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. The entire endeavor clocks in at two hours and 45 minutes, including one 15-minute intermission and too many laborious scene changes to count.

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Alison Bechdel’s family, captured first in her 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home and then in a Tony Award-winning 2015 chamber musical (music by Jeanine Tesori, book and lyrics by Lisa Kron), feels right at (uneasy) home on the intimate Copley Theatre stage in downtown Aurora. Presented as part of Paramount’s “Bold” series of seemingly more challenging fare than that at the flagship theater across the street, Jim Corti and Landree Fleming’s staging is practically note-perfect—as emotionally rich an experience as you’ll find anywhere onstage right now.

Fun Home Through 9/18: Wed 1:30 and 7 PM, Thu 7 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 2 and 8 PM, Sun 1 and 5:30 PM, Copley Theatre, 8 E. Galena Blvd., Aurora, 630-896-6666, paramountauroracom, $67-$74

Three actors portray the budding cartoonist at different times of life: Emilie Modaff’s grown-up Alison serves as narrator and tour guide, looking back on life in small-town Pennsylvania with her closeted and mercurial father, Bruce (Stephen Schellhardt), who teaches high school English and runs the family funeral home (hence the title), and mother Helen (Emily Rohm), who seemingly keeps her emotions buttoned up until it’s time to go onstage at the local community theater. (Shades of Revolutionary Road.)

Small Alison (Maya Keane on the night I attended, alternating in the role with Milla Liss) tries to make sense of all the things that aren’t said in the family’s beautifully renovated vintage home, where everyone operates at a distance from each other, and where her “tomboy” ways and nascent artistic instincts are both smothered by her father’s obsession with order. He can’t control the chaos of family life, though, any more than he can control his attraction to younger men and boys. “We can make it better than a cartoon,” Schellhardt’s Bruce hollers at his daughter as she tries to explain why she chose that genre for a school project. He’s both proud of her talent and utterly dismissive of how she chooses to apply it, and that paradox runs throughout their relationship.

Medium Alison (Elizabeth Stenholt) acts upon her own closeted yearnings at Oberlin when she meets a woman, Joan (Devon Hayakawa), who turns her topsy-turvy, as expressed in the lyric, “I’m changing my major to Joan.” Music director Kory Danielson’s seven-piece band brings lovely texture and nuance to Tesori’s gorgeous score. If you’ve never seen this show, or have only seen it on a big proscenium stage, it may well be worth the trip to Aurora for this bountiful, aching embodiment of Bechdel’s story.

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Chicago Reader 2022 print issue dates

The Chicago Reader is published in print every other week. Issues are dated Thursday. Distribution usually happens Wednesday morning through Thursday night of the issue date. Upcoming print issue dates through December 2022 are:

9/1/20229/15/20229/29/202210/13/202210/27/202211/10/202211/24/202212/8/202212/22/2022

Download the full 2022 editorial calendar is here (PDF).

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2023 print issue dates

The first print issue in 2023 will be published three weeks after the 12/22/2022 issue, the final issue of 2022. The print issue dates through March 2023 are:

1/12/20231/26/20232/9/20232/23/20233/9/20233/23/2023

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MONDAY, AUGUST 29

The Sniper (1952) Dir. Edward DymtrykThe Sniper is really the first Hollywood mainstream film about a serial killer. And it’s all set in San Francisco. It is one of the early films that delves into psychology and kind of what is retrospectively a ham-fisted manner with censorship and so on, but it’s really a serious movie.

The Face Behind the Mask (1941) Dir. Robert FloreyThis stars the great Peter Lorre in what is really kind of a bookend performance to his unforgettable turn in Fritz Lang’s M, where he plays an immigrant coming to New York, passing the Statue of Liberty, and he gets horribly scarred in a fire, and he has to turn to crime to make a living. It’s like the American immigrant story, turned on its head. 

TUESDAY, AUGUST 30

All the King’s Men (1949) Dir. Robert RossenNow there’s a film that has relevance. Someone could flip a coin and say maybe Willie Stark (Broderick Crawford) is preferable to what we’ve had in the White House recently. All the King’s Men was the Best Picture winner for 1949. Crawford won the Oscar for best actor. Mercedes McCambridge, in an unforgettable performance, won best supporting actress. It’s really a great, dark film.

Scandal Sheet (1952) Dir. Phil KarlsonAnother Broderick Crawford film, Scandal Sheet was really the emergence of one of the great action directors of the 1950s, Phil Karlson. Scandal Sheet was adapted from Sam Fuller’s novel The Dark Page, starring Broderick Crawford and John Derek. Karlson made a whole slew of really gritty, violent film noirs in the 1950s. After Scandal Sheet there was Kansas City Confidential, 99 River Street, Hell’s Island . . . One of his last movies was the 1973 film Walking Tall, which set new standards for violence. And made him a millionaire in his retirement.

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 31

Detective Story (1951) Dir. William WylerThat was based on a very famous Broadway play, directed by William Wyler, and includes great lead performances by Kirk Douglas, who’s turbocharged in this, and Eleanor Parker, who was nominated for best actress for her performance. The thing that Wyler did is that it’s a filmed play, but he took it and he let it breathe. He also used a lot of the original Broadway cast, including Lee Grant, who is still with us, who was blacklisted shortly after this movie.

711 Ocean Drive (1950) Dir. Joseph M. NewmanKind of a weird title, but it’s really something that gave birth to the 1950s Kefauver hearings on organized crime. It’s where Edmond O’Brien is this electronic phone company whiz who parlays his talent into running a wire service for the Mafia in Los Angeles. He climbs to the top of the heap and finds out it’s a long fall down to the bottom. It was shot all over Los Angeles on location and also shot in Palm Springs. A lot of great location photography, and it ends with this spectacular climax filmed at the Hoover Dam.

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 1

Playgirl (1954) Dir. Joseph PevneyWe close with two films that are not on DVD, Blu-ray, or streaming. One is called Playgirl with Shelley Winters as a chanteuse in New York trying to protect her friend—from the heartland of America—from the predatory designs of all these bad New Yorkers. This is really Shelley Winters unbound. You want to see the ultimate Shelley Winters scenery-chewing performance? This is it. This film was essentially in a vault until 2019, when I was able to talk to Universal and they made a DCP (digital cinema package) for us to show. We screened it in Hollywood at Noir City there and I screened it in 2021 in Palm Springs. And that’s been it. It’s not anywhere else, but it’s quite a picture.

The Cruel Tower (1956) Dir. Lew LandersThis is another overlooked, forgotten movie with John Ericson and one of my favorite noir actors, Charles McGraw, as steeplejacks cleaning the tops of churches. You’ve got a love triangle, double crosses, and everything just piles up like a blender running on high speed. It’s a campy, fun movie. And so I’m excited that the audience in Chicago is going to be able to see both of these movies that are not available to be seen presently anywhere else.

Noir City: ChicagoAugust 26-September 1Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. SouthportFull schedule and pricing at musicboxtheatre.com/events/noir-city-chicago-2022

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It’s been a few years since Noir City: Chicago emerged from dark alleyways celebrating film noir, movies that embody the seedier side of everyday life. The pandemic paused the festival, an event that showcases a slate of films where the lines of good and bad are stylishly blurred in postwar America, but this year it’s back at the Music Box Theatre.

Noir City: Chicago returns on August 26 with amiable Film Noir Foundation (FNF) founder Eddie Muller (of Turner Classic Movies’s Noir Alley) hosting an opening-night tribute to the late James Caan (Thief from 1981, 1993’s Flesh and Bone). After the weekend, film historian Alan Rode takes over presenting a week of movies, including several rarely seen noirs. Fans have welcomed the event’s return with open arms this year in Boston, Hollywood, Seattle, and the Bay Area.

“It’s very gratifying. A lot of people tell me that the Noir City shows are the first thing that they’re going back to a theater to see,” Muller says, adding the appeal of noir serves as a “gateway” to classic movies for people who don’t typically watch black-and-white films.  

“They’re sexy and sinister,” Muller says. “They’re hard-edged and witty without being dopey.”

Anne Hockens, director of communications for the FNF, says female characters in noir films attract people as well, because the women aren’t ornaments or in need of rescuing.

“I think people tend to say they are either the femme fatale or the good girl, and they go way beyond that [in noir films],” says Hockens. “They’re not just there in relation to the male characters. They have a purpose and a story arc. And there’s a lot of film noir where women are the central characters.”

Noir City: ChicagoAugust 26-September 1Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. SouthportFull schedule and pricing at musicboxtheatre.com/events/noir-city-chicago-2022

According to Rode, it’s easy to appreciate movies serving as a time capsule for midcentury aesthetics and themes we’re all familiar with.

“The stories are basically about the human condition. Lust, larceny, people who know what they’re doing is wrong. And they do it anyway,” Rode says.

This year’s films include political corruption (All the King’s Men, 1949), mob-rigged gambling operations (711 Ocean Drive, 1950), a paranoid invalid no one believes (1948’s Sorry, Wrong Number), an angry cop frustrating everyone (Detective Story, 1951), a newspaper with shady reader-baiting practices (Scandal Sheet, 1952), and of course, murder. 

Although the FNF team loves showcasing noir films at screenings and events, their real mission is preservation; they’re dedicated to rescuing, restoring, and presenting Hollywood’s lesser-known noirs. To date, the FNF has restored 14 movies, funded the striking of 15 new 35mm prints, and fostered the return of seven more. The Argyle Secrets, a recent restoration project, will be screened in a B-movie marathon on Saturday, August 27.

“We’re preserving the communal experience of being together in the dark watching these films on the big screen,” Rode says, “the way that they were intended.”

Muller says creating the FNF came out of necessity, when he was first asked to program festivals decades ago.

“I would say, ‘Wow, here’s a great movie that people don’t know about. We’ve got to show this,’” Muller says. “And then there wouldn’t be a print of that film.”

He thought asking the studios would make them available, but that wasn’t the case. 

“Then it became, ‘Why are we not using the profits from our film festival to find these films and restore them, so they don’t vanish?’”

While the FNF focuses on film noir, Muller hopes others can create a space for films facing obscurity.

“I kind of wish somebody [would do] this for westerns and screwball comedies and 50s science fiction movies, because the same thing is going to happen with those movies as well,” laments Muller.

He’s introducing a double bill on Sunday the 28th, Flesh and Fantasy (1943) and Destiny (1944), as an example of an altered movie, now on the big screen in its intended form.

“It’s an anthology. Flesh and Fantasy has three chapters, and there was a fourth chapter, but the studio removed the fourth chapter and released it a year later as a standalone movie. And so this is the only way you can see all four chapters together,” Muller says.

Along with the festivals, the FNF draws people into the noir experience with a quarterly digital and print magazine, a website highlighting noirs on TV, interviews with Muller, and other noir-soaked stories.

In June 2020, when COVID closed theaters everywhere, Hockens and Muller started a bimonthly “Ask Eddie and Anne” Facebook Live conversation that continues today. 

“It’s supposed to be sort of just a way to keep in touch with people, since we weren’t doing the festivals. Then it sort of snowballed,” Hockens says.

“We don’t approach it like scholars, know-it-alls trying to impress each other,” adds Muller. “I love hearing the weird questions that people come up with. It’s just fun.”

But the live events are special for Muller, where he holds court with fans between movies.

“When I got into all this stuff back in the early 70s, if somebody did what I do now, they would have had him arrested. Right? People would go to the manager and say, ‘There’s some nut up here talking all about this movie. Can you have him removed from the theater, please?’”

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