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

Don’s grandfather and Central Camera Co.’s founder Albert Flesch grew up in the small town of Polgár in eastern Hungary. Don described it akin to Fiddler on the Roof, a movie adaptation of a Broadway musical about life among the small Jewish communities set in the Pale of Settlement of Imperial Russia at the turn of the 20th century. Albert left his native Hungary after his bar mitzvah to flee forced conscription in the army. He walked to Venice, Italy, and embarked on a voyage to Ellis Island. Writing in Hungarian, Albert documented his trip and arrival to New York, where he took a train to Chicago and lived with a relative.

Years later, Albert started his career at the camera department of Siegel-Cooper, a discount department store on State Street in the Loop. Upon this introduction to the world of photography, Albert opened Central Camera Co. in 1899. As business expanded, he relocated twice, permanently settling at the store’s present location on 230 S. Wabash in 1929. “What is State Street and Madison Street to Chicago? It’s the double zero, it’s the central part of Chicago. So I think that’s where the name came from,” Don says, referring to the street location of the department store his grandfather was first introduced to cameras at. “I don’t know where he learned it. Diary doesn’t say it.”

Albert died of a heart attack in 1933 at 56 years old, 15 years before Don was born. Although Don never met him, his memory was kept alive through his journal and by his two sons, Don’s father and uncle, who took over. Don helped out in the store as a schoolboy in the 1950s and then started working there full-time in 1968, when he was 20 years old.

The staff referred to each Flesch family member by their initials to allow for quicker communication through the paging system. When Don’s father says he wanted to hear “A.F.” for Albert Flesch over the pager again, Don decided to go by that. His nickname eventually made its way back—mostly because Don rhymes with his twin brother’s name Ron—but, to this day, he still signs every document with a capital “A” and two lines coming out of one side to make the “F.”

Plastered to one of the store’s otherwise bare walls is a blown-up photograph of what it once looked like. Stacks of inventory filled shelves that reached a midway point at the double ceilings, and thousands of cameras sat in lit-up display cabinets that lined either side of the store. Every inch of the space was crammed with something from the past. “The store was a historical living museum,” Don says, affirming his determination to rebuild it in the same way. He plans to once again display the first camera the store ever sold and hang portraits and photographs of his grandfather, father, and uncle at the store.

As its staff work to get the store back on its feet, Central Camera Co. is bringing in two in-house processing machines for affordable same-day development of 35mm and 120mm color and black-and-white film, as well as photo scanning. There is never a dull moment at the store, which is open from 10 AM to 2 PM Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday. If it’s not the customers, young and old, revolving in and out, it’s the telephone that never seems to stop ringing, or the staff chatting, laughing, and working. “That’s Al and his grandson,” Don says, greeting an older man and a teenager with two big bear hugs as they walk through the large glass double door entrance. Don asks them about a recent trip they had and how their family is doing.

Moments like these are not uncommon. Don often remembers which customer had what problem the last time they came in.

The renovated store is not yet as jam-packed with inventory as it once was, but there’s no shortage of cameras.

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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In March 2021, Gossip Wolf was bowled over by the debut demo from local grindcore crew Organ Failure. The band packed four merciless rippers into three thoroughly unwholesome minutes, whetting this wolf’s appetite for even more disgusting noise to come! Late last month, Organ Failure followed up with the delightfully putrid Neurologic Determination of Death, whose 17 tracks fulfill that promise and then some. On “Recycling Gangrenous Tissue” and “Rampant Organ Theft,” drummer Max Rivera, bassist Ryan Reynolds, guitarist Sean Scott, and singer Ted Soukup wield an impressive command of nail-gun blastbeats, unsavory guitar murk, and execrating vocals. The album is available on Bandcamp (name your price) and on cassette and CD from Headsplit Records; on Friday, September 9, Organ Failure play Live Wire Lounge with Vulnificus, Deterioration, HanzXGruber, and Brilliant Behemoth.

Organ Failure’s new album is out on Headsplit Records from Portland, Oregon.

On Thursday, August 18, Chicago musician Ava Cherry visits Gman Tavern to celebrate her recent book, All That Glitters. In the 1970s, Cherry collaborated with her paramour at the time, David Bowie, and sang backup for the likes of Luther Vandross and Chaka Khan; she also followed her own dreams of stardom. Curtis Mayfield coproduced her 1980 solo debut, the disco-inflected Ripe!!!, and she issued two more LPs for Capitol that decade. She’s still making music too! Cherry will read from All That Glitters and talk with critic and Reader contributor Aaron Cohen. Tickets are $30 and include a signed book; the talk begins at 7:30 PM.

Ava Cherry’s 1980 solo debut, produced by Curtis Mayfield, Bobby Eli, and Gil Askey

On Sunday, imaginative multidisciplinary Chicago rapper Sol Patches dropped her first album in a year and a half, Ordinary Circles. She threads gentle house production, relaxed rapping, and audio collage into heartfelt experiments such as the tender, hiccuping “Distant Solstice”—she’s one of the boldest voices to emerge from Chicago hip-hop the past decade.

The credits for Ordinary Circles say it was made in New York, Chicago, Berlin, Reykjavík, and Venice.

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If there’s one thing artsy homos love, it’s Letterboxd. It’s probably the most popular social networking site for culture gays—well, maybe after Twitter. The site expedites answers to important questions like: “What kinds of culture interests you?” “Which streaming services can you access?” “Do you know how to torrent?” and “If you ran a meme account, what would your general vibe be?” Goodreads is for straight people and YA tenderqueers; gays who fuck use Letterboxd. That’s what makes the Pioneers of Queer Cinema series at Gene Siskel Film Center this month a true event “for the culture”: it’s a broad survey of movies made by queers, for queers that offers at least one tasty morsel for every kind of Letterboxd gay. (People who don’t fit that description might enjoy stuff, too—I just don’t know any.)

All the headliners are treasure map films—which is to say, it’s easy to follow directions to find them, or they take you to a familiar point about queerness. Many are currently streaming—or have, in some recent past: The Watermelon Woman (Showtime); The Living End (Criterion); Parting Glances (Tubi); Blackstar: An Autobiography of a Close Friend (Vimeo); and Paris Is Burning (HBO). There are films to remind you of the ways queerness is Complicated™ (Coming Out Under Fire, Nitrate Kisses, Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives), Harvey Milk died for our sins (The Times of Harvey Milk), and women can be homos, too (Desert Hearts, also streaming on HBO). Whatever curiosity or affirmation you need from a feature film, the Film Center has it programmed, and it’s always a treat to see gay movies in a room full of people who share some common language of experience.

But where this programming really shines is the openers. The Pioneers of Queer Cinema series is presented in partnership with the UCLA Film & Television Archive, which holds the largest public collection of moving images by LGBTQ+ makers in the world. Almost every film opens with a short or two by landmark filmmakers selected from the vaults—many of which have never been digitized. So if, say, you needed another excuse to see Gregg Araki’s AIDs-era road crime romance The Living End (big “if”—everyone should experience the director’s acid-candy storytelling on the big screen!), you should jump at the chance to experience it in tandem with If Every Girl Had a Diary and Oblivion. 

The former is an early short by multimedia artist and Le Tigre cofounder Sadie Benning, who uses a lo-fi, confessional style to capture the anger and frustration of being a twentysomething subject to sexism and homophobia in 1990. And the latter is a late-60s silent movie that makes poetry of an erotic experience by splicing and collaging moments: figure studies, lights, gardens, and things. Presented before The Living End, the films lay out some of the emotional stakes for Araki’s characters, drawing not only on a collective sense of queer outrage but also connecting the characters’ desires to a lineage of the beautiful and sublime that’s queer right down to the storytelling approach.

All of the shorts are chosen to accent themes in the feature while emphasizing that much of what makes queer filmmaking “queer” isn’t just the subject matter—it’s approach. The series is a who’s who of the biggest dykes and faggots subverting cinematic expectations, with selections from luminaries such as Kenneth Anger (of Lucifer Rising and Hollywood Babylon fame); Mike Kuchar (an acclaimed schlock master who they’ve selected a most not schlock-y short by); and Todd Haynes (perhaps best known for Carol, but real heads know him for Velvet Goldmine or even Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story—which, by the way, has been restored but is still being strangled by rights issues. Tragic!). But there’s some real hidden treasure, too, like Always On Sunday, a 1962 film by the Gay Girls Riding Club, a drag troop who would make elaborate spoofs of camp favorites like All About Eve and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?. In fact, the programming includes a number of shorts across eras that explore gender subversion and transness, which is refreshing at a cultural moment when trans people are being systematically threatened. The selections underscore how much trans history is out there—and how effectively it’s already been hidden or denied.

Pioneers of Queer CinemaGene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State; through 9/4General admission $12; students and youth $7; Film Center members $6; current students and faculty of the School of the Art Institute, and staff of the Art Institute $5

If there are any criticisms to be made of the Pioneers of Queer Cinema series, it’s that the programming is a bit polite. John Waters may be so well known as to be passé, but there’s a notable lack of him—or anything that rivals his talent for dada debauchery. Rape isn’t funny, they say, and as a rape survivor, I know this to be true. And yet? Divine being raped by a lobster in Multiple Maniacs is downright hilarious, and I do not want to have to pretend otherwise, for reasons that should be obvious. To me, this kind of tension—and eschewing respectability in a world that does not respect us—is the crux of queerness. To that end, where’s the BDSM? The absolute schlock? The trans men? Their absence is notable—though maybe that’s not the Film Center’s problem to fix. To me, this oversight only begs for more frequent and robust queer film programming.

The Pioneers of Queer cinema lineup is great for queer culture newbies as much as seasoned snobs practically running micro cinemas. Oh, the furtive debates and robust Letterboxd updates I anticipate! Now tell me: Do you hate movies, or do you like to fuck?

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Patrixia reigns supreme in digital clubspace. It’s where the 29-year-old DJ feels empowered to be her spookiest, silliest Latinx self. Locally, she’s known for DJing goth and industrial parties at venues such as Berlin and House of Vans, but online she has a rabid Twitch following who tune in three days a week to hear her blend reggaeton and cumbia with industrial and techno. What started as an eleventh-hour attempt to make extra money during the pandemic has become Patrixia’s full-time job, and she expects digital performances to become the future of clubbing. 

Patrixia was born in Chicago, and her DJing draws on her emotional journey growing up in the Belmont Cragin neighborhood—which led to a love affair with all things danceably macabre. Now she shares that passion with people across the world, performing in games like Final Fantasy and Animal Crossing. She also has a less formal music project, Choke, with her partner, Garrett Vernon of Replicant.

As told to Micco Caporale

I was always fascinated with synthesizers. When I was little, I fell in love with Selena. She was my idol. To this day, I love Selena. A lot of her music has synthesizers. My dad’s side of the family were Tejano musicians, which is that same genre of music. So synthesizer music was always around me. I’ve always loved Depeche Mode, and by high school, I was really into bands like Ladytron, CSS, and the Faint. And that set me on a path for minimal wave and goth. I didn’t find Wax Trax! until I was 25—which I hate admitting, but it’s true!

When I was about ten, I got into emo, and I was in an emo band in middle school. I played bass and sang. It was hard to keep a band going that young, though. Our guitarist moved to the suburbs. We couldn’t find a drummer. As much as I wanted to keep being in a group, I really couldn’t. 

Growing up, it was just me and my mom. My older brother and sister had moved out. We didn’t have a lot of money. I started experiencing depression around 12, and when I got to high school, that was hitting really hard. I was in AP courses, so I was swamped with homework all the time. I tried to keep my schedule full so I wouldn’t have any time to think.

Patrixia x DJ Baby BerlinThu 8/18, 8 PM, Sleeping Village, 3734 W. Belmont, free, 21+

PatrixiaOther acts and cover charge TBD. Thu 8/25, 10 PM, Berlin, 954 W. Belmont, 21+

I think my mental health was so bad from living in poverty. Belmont Cragin is a predominantly Latinx neighborhood. It’s poor and working-class. A lot of us grew up very fast. We saw friends get hurt or die from being in gangs. I didn’t have a good relationship with my dad. . . . I had a lot clouding my mind. I also didn’t have the means to find new bandmates. I couldn’t just go out looking for people or jump across town to practice. If I couldn’t access it through my school or neighborhood, it wasn’t going to happen for me.

I went to a vocational high school, and me and my friends would sit in our graphic-design class listening to Pandora. That led me to this whole world of electroclash. I found Peaches—Peaches was so influential on me! Like, I was a virgin listening to “Fuck the Pain Away,” but it was just such a jam!

This was around 2007. The only dance music I had heard was house, footwork, and Detroit techno. This was such a different sound. It just exploded my brain. I’d sit there trying to pick stuff apart, like, “OK, what’s making this sound?” And then, “Ooh, this sounds like this.” Those were some of my best days as a kid.

When I was 22, I graduated from UIC and got a social media internship at JBTV. I learned how the music industry works and met my mentor, Greg Corner. He was the music director and programmer at JBTV, and he was DJing an indie night at Beauty Bar at the time. I remember dancing there one night, and I was already imagining mixing what I was hearing into other songs. I approached Greg and was like, “I want to be a DJ.” And he was like, “Yes!” In 2017, he got me a Wednesday-night spot at Debonair, and I learned as I went. 

It’s funny. I was never super confident in my DJing and never expected to support myself with it. I thought I’d always be a behind-the-scenes music worker. After my time at JBTV, I started working in music, doing pretty much anything that’s part of concerts. When COVID-19 hit, I was set to go on tour doing merch for a band. Five days before shutdown, our tour gets canceled, and I lose all my DJ gigs. I was like, “What am I going to do?”

I got a couple grants for music workers, but by August 2020, I was burning through my savings quickly. I was horrified. I knew a lot of DJs had gone on Twitch, and some of them were getting paid for it. I was like, “Well, I know how to DJ. . . . ” 

Patrixia focuses on EBM and industrial music in this 2021 mix.

Before Twitch, I wasn’t a very interactive DJ. I figured I’d spin while people worked from home, then get on the mike and be like, “Drink your water,” “Get up and stretch”—stuff like that. If you have Amazon Prime, you can get one free Twitch subscription per month, but it still puts money in the streamer’s pocket. So I advertised that on Instagram, and immediately I got $50 worth of subscriptions. Then a month later I got to $100 in subscriptions. People would Venmo tips during my sets too, so I made about $200 that September.

In October, a friend hooked me up with a warehouse job. It was part-time, so it wasn’t enough for rent. I’d work at the warehouse, then come home and stream. One day this girl emails me like, “Hey, I saw you on Twitch. I play this game called Final Fantasy, and I was thinking of opening a nightclub in the game and having a DJ. Would you be interested?” 

I don’t want to say I was weirded out, but I definitely was suspicious. She was like, “We get together virtually. We’re happy to pay you.” And I was like, “Logistically, I don’t know what you mean, but if you’re willing to pay me, yes, absolutely!” She paid me $150 to DJ for a couple hours on Twitch while her and her friends hung out in the game. I didn’t even have the game.

Patrixia (facing forward at center, with wings and horns) livestreams a DJ set in Final Fantasy. Credit: Courtesy the artist

Fifty or 60 people showed up to my stream, and I was like, “Whoa, this girl brought me a lot of viewers and she’s paying me!” I was playing darkwave and just . . . goth music, and these people were like, “Oh my god, what is this? It’s so cool.” They started throwing down money on my channel. That first night, I made about $400. I was sobbing on camera—just mascara running. And they were like, “This is awesome, do you want to do it again next week?” About a month later, I was making more money online than I was making at the warehouse, so I quit.

Playing for that girl and her club didn’t last very long, but she kept encouraging people to come to my channel and book me for their clubs. Then people who’d seen me play for her would reach out. I’m on a break from playing virtual clubs right now, but gamers have always brought me a lot of viewers, and then some of those become subscribers. 

This Patrixia mix begins with a remix of Selena’s “Techno Cumbia.”

We have a whole community with inside jokes. I’m really interactive on Twitch, like dressing up in different outfits and using props and Snapchat filters. Just being silly. I’ll say, “It’s techno cumbia time,” and that means I’m going to mix Selena’s “Techno Cumbia” with Nine Inch Nails and play this video that mixes Selena clips with Nine Inch Nails clips. I have specific emojis for it and everything. People get really excited. I love mixing Latinx music with darkwave and industrial. 

Ruido FestPatrixia plays Sat 8/20 at 4:30 PM on the Fiesta Stage. The festival runs Fri 8/19 through Sun 8/21. Union Park, 1501 W. Randolph, single-day passes $105.74-$260.24, three-day passes $208.74-$620.74, all ages

ARC Music FestivalPatrixia plays b2b with Greg Corner on a day and time to be announced. The festival runs Fri 9/2 through Sun 9/4. Union Park, 1501 W. Randolph, single-day passes $129-$179, three-day passes $279-$1119, 18+

Twitch is my bread and butter now. I’ve had nights where I’ve made $1,000. One time in January, I made $8,000. It still freaks me out thinking about it, because I grew up with no money. Seeing that amount . . . it was surreal. A lot of times I’m only making $120 a stream, especially in the summer. I get more money from streaming during the winter, but this has opened up a lot more in-person opportunities. I’m playing festivals for the first time. A lot of that has come from showing I have over 4,000 followers on Twitch. Actually, I just hit 4.5k, and I have over 500 subscribers.

I feel much safer online. If someone’s acting up, I can just ban them. When I was DJing in person, people would grab me. They’d linger around the DJ booth or try to get my number or refuse to leave. People you don’t know bring you drinks and try to pressure you to drink them. It makes me nervous. Are they gonna be waiting for me outside the club at five in the morning? Will this person follow me home? A lot of shitty things have happened DJing in person, and you can’t always count on the club to support you.

DJing online has opened my eyes a bit. There’s a lot of people who club online for different reasons. I have parents who put their kids down and online clubbing is their night out. Some people have been like, “I have autism, so I don’t feel comfortable at clubs. I club in Final Fantasy.” A ton of people tuning in are immunocompromised, or they live in the middle of nowhere. I’m like, man . . . we should’ve had these options a long time ago.

I think in-person clubs should be aiming for hybrid scenarios, because I think this could be the future of clubbing. Of course, clubs would have to change their infrastructure. There’s a lot of technical aspects and showmanship involved. But places like Lollapalooza and Tomorrowland do big livestreams. It’d be cool to see them utilize that to its full capacity.

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