I can’t imagine summer in Chicago without the Chosen Few Picnic & Festival, and that’s not just because this grassroots house-music gathering is celebrating its 30th annual installment (plus two years online during the pandemic). It’s also because house music—and Chicago—would be very different if it weren’t for the Chosen Few DJ collective. Chicago’s gay Black nightlife scene birthed house, and the Chosen Few helped turn it into a movement among young Chicagoans of color. At the time, the members of the Chosen Few were part of that demographic: Wayne Williams was still in high school when he founded the crew in 1977. The second permanent member was his stepbrother, Jesse Saunders—in 1984 he’d release what’s widely considered the first house 12-inch, “On and On”—and in 1978 the crew became a “Few” when Tony Hatchett joined. The collective took on four more members in the decades to come, adding Alan King (1980), Tony’s younger brother, Andre (1981), Terry Hunter (2006), and Mike Dunn (2012). The members haven’t all lived in the same place for most of that time, and their annual festival began as an excuse to get everyone together. It helped that the Hatchett family already hosted a reunion picnic behind the Museum of Science and Industry every Fourth of July, and in 1990 the rest of the Chosen Few showed up to spin informal DJ sets. 

As house music became the soundtrack for Chicago, the Chosen Few made Independence Day weekend the date of a bona fide local tradition. Their festival brings around 40,000 house heads and their loved ones to Jackson Park, where folks set up tents and steel-drum barbecue grills and dance. Over the course of the day, all seven Chosen Few members spin solo sets, and they always leave plenty of time for guests—this year’s lineup includes 1990s Basement Boys hitmaker DJ Spen, Yoruba Records founder Osunlade, and New York DJ Natasha Diggs, a favorite of much of the esteemed Soulquarians collective. I recommend you arrive early, to make sure you’ll catch R&B powerhouse Dajae no matter when her set turns out to be—my money’s on her belting out her legendary 1992 Cajmere collaboration, “Brighter Days,” with its palpitating ooh-oh-ah-ee hook. But there’s no bad time to show up to Jackson Park. Few events manifest carefree summer joy as reliably as the Chosen Few Picnic.

Chosen Few Picnic & Festival The day’s lineup includes the Chosen Few DJs, Osunlade, DJ Spen, Teddy Douglas, Natasha Diggs, J Star, D Train, and Dajae.  Sat 7/2, 8 AM – 10 PM, Jackson Park, 63rd at Hayes, $60-$475, all ages

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I can’t imagine summer in Chicago without the Chosen Few Picnic & Festival, and that’s not just because this grassroots house-music gathering is celebrating its 30th annual installment (plus two years online during the pandemic). It’s also because house music—and Chicago—would be very different if it weren’t for the Chosen Few DJ collective. Chicago’s gay Black nightlife scene birthed house, and the Chosen Few helped turn it into a movement among young Chicagoans of color. At the time, the members of the Chosen Few were part of that demographic: Wayne Williams was still in high school when he founded the crew in 1977. The second permanent member was his stepbrother, Jesse Saunders—in 1984 he’d release what’s widely considered the first house 12-inch, “On and On”—and in 1978 the crew became a “Few” when Tony Hatchett joined. The collective took on four more members in the decades to come, adding Alan King (1980), Tony’s younger brother, Andre (1981), Terry Hunter (2006), and Mike Dunn (2012). The members haven’t all lived in the same place for most of that time, and their annual festival began as an excuse to get everyone together. It helped that the Hatchett family already hosted a reunion picnic behind the Museum of Science and Industry every Fourth of July, and in 1990 the rest of the Chosen Few showed up to spin informal DJ sets. 

As house music became the soundtrack for Chicago, the Chosen Few made Independence Day weekend the date of a bona fide local tradition. Their festival brings around 40,000 house heads and their loved ones to Jackson Park, where folks set up tents and steel-drum barbecue grills and dance. Over the course of the day, all seven Chosen Few members spin solo sets, and they always leave plenty of time for guests—this year’s lineup includes 1990s Basement Boys hitmaker DJ Spen, Yoruba Records founder Osunlade, and New York DJ Natasha Diggs, a favorite of much of the esteemed Soulquarians collective. I recommend you arrive early, to make sure you’ll catch R&B powerhouse Dajae no matter when her set turns out to be—my money’s on her belting out her legendary 1992 Cajmere collaboration, “Brighter Days,” with its palpitating ooh-oh-ah-ee hook. But there’s no bad time to show up to Jackson Park. Few events manifest carefree summer joy as reliably as the Chosen Few Picnic.

Chosen Few Picnic & Festival The day’s lineup includes the Chosen Few DJs, Osunlade, DJ Spen, Teddy Douglas, Natasha Diggs, J Star, D Train, and Dajae.  Sat 7/2, 8 AM – 10 PM, Jackson Park, 63rd at Hayes, $60-$475, all ages

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A person is more than the sum of their parts, but sometimes it is crucial to examine the parts so the sum can be better understood. In her debut documentary writer-director Rebeca Huntt examines the details of her Afro Latina heritage to provocative effect, embracing the beauty as well as the scars that blight her and her family’s history. A self-proclaimed daddy’s girl, she’s especially close with her father, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic who came to the United States to escape General Trujillo’s despotic rule; her mother, with whom she has a more complicated relationship, hails from Venezuela, where Huntt (nicknamed Beba by her mother) as a younger girl enjoyed a certain lyrical freedom she’s never experienced stateside. She also profiles her siblings, an older sister and brother who are similarly complex, likewise impacted by generational trauma and the difficult living arrangements (the whole family shared a rent-controlled one-bedroom apartment near New York City’s Central Park) that exacerbate strained familial tensions. Lastly, Huntt interrogates her college experience at Bard, where she was but one of a handful of minority students, and what’s come after, delving into the unique circumstances of temporarily dallying among the privileged class and exiting that fabled microcosm with more questions about their inborn entitlements than answers. Huntt doesn’t let herself off the hook, however, confessing past indiscretions and generally showcasing some of the more impudent parts of herself with aplomb. Poetically shot and edited, it’s an audacious coming-of-age documentary-memoir that’s wholly singular to the filmmaker herself. R, 79 min.

Gene Siskel Film Center

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Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis is a maximalist dream. It’s a loosely focused biopic of one of America’s greatest musical creations that jumps and shimmies through the early infatuation of the young Presley with the Black gospel music of his downtrodden youth, to the stardom of his 20s and 30s, and through his decline into drugs and despondency. Flashes of color, lightning cuts, and the camera spins and needle drops are at times overwhelming, but it’s an overall enjoyable experience that washes over you in waves of excitement.

Austin Butler does an excellent job expressing the barrage of emotions that Presley undergoes in his meteoric rise and fall, evoking pathos through his eyes. And the performances throughout the film are poignant reminders of the lasting impact Elvis has on American pop culture.

Luhrmann’s film is best described as hagiography; events seem to happen to Presley—run-ins with the law, financial crisis, family drama—without any real insight into how our hero causes or contributes to them. Even the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy are shown less in terms of their cultural impact and more as things that cause Elvis to have a bad day. Elvis’s relationship with the Black community is portrayed as one of a friendly enthusiast who’s welcomed into the fold and suffers more consequences from the white political elite than the Black musicians who were unable to reach his stature due to their race, who he uses as mentors and confidants.

More confusing than some of the quick cuts, temporal shifts, and squeaky-clean race relations is Luhrmann’s choice to utilize manager Tom Parker (Tom Hanks) as the narrator of this story. He’s a character who I doubt even a mother could love, played with an accent from Hanks that can most charitably be described as “ethnically insensitive to Cajuns.” It’s a bizarre choice of a narrator who offers surprisingly little insight into his actions and who we spend more time hating than wanting to learn information from. PG-13, 159 min.

Wide release in theaters

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Last Saturday night at the House of Wah Sun in North Center, Mark Chiang lingered at the table of a few of the night’s last customers. His wife, Young Ja Kim, had already wheeled over the egg rolls, crab rangoon, and heaping platters of crispy chow fun, cumin lamb, and Sichuan green beans, but Chiang was preoccupied by the imminent relocation of his Cantonese-Mandarin restaurant to a recently shuttered Golden Nugget two miles to the west in Irving Park.

“If can I would stay here,” he said. “I don’t want to go but I take this opportunity. Twenty-one years I been here and it’s finally time.”

Kim was simply ready to call it a night. “Will you leave them alone?” she said as she scooted past. “They came to eat.”

The House of Wah Sun’s original location opened across the street from the Davis Theater in 1947, making it one of the city’s oldest operating Chinese restaurants. But it maintained a low profile over the decades, relative to the nearby 95-year-old Orange Garden with its once-dazzling, now-darkened neon sign (now in the possession of a similarly weathered rock star). And perhaps the House of Wah Sun’s rep has suffered from confusion with Uptown’s comparatively juvenile Hong Kong-style barbecue specialist, Sun Wah (35 years).

Both names translate into roughly “New Chinese,” but the House of Wah Sun is a neighborhood institution that traffics in a nostalgic style of Chinese American food that hardly feels new, but is executed at a level that surpasses its remaining fellow dinosaurs.

Customers are invariably greeted inside the doors by a giddy dancing wooden Buddha, and in contrast, Kim, whose MO is initially stern but ultimately endearing. There’s a full bar known for its sweet, potent Mai Tais and Zombies in ceramic tiki ware, and a sprawling menu that covers all the classic Chinese American bases and then some.

Chiang says it’s little changed since he bought the place from founder Melvin Gin, a World War II navy vet who served primarily Cantonese dishes at his original carryout spot, and at the current location, which he opened in 1978.

Back then Chiang—who’s 61—was still a kid in Daegu, South Korea, one of thousands of Chinese expats from the northeastern Shandong Province who dominated the nascent restaurant economy there. “For a Chinese born in Korea, they don’t give us opportunity,” says Chiang. “You cannot work in the bank—they’re not gonna hire you. A lot of other fields are really limited. We actually work in the restaurant as no choice.”

At 24, Chiang was working in a 600-seat Mandarin restaurant in Seoul’s Gangnam District when he left for the U.S., where a prep cook job was waiting for him at Yu’s Mandarin in Schaumburg. He didn’t train to become a chef until he lit out for St. Louis, where a friend opened a new place. Three years later he returned to Yu’s, where he began cooking and where he met Kim—and two of his current chefs: his brother-in-law Fung Chin and Ping Du, a graduate of the Culinary Institute of Sichuan (the same school Tony Hu attended).

When Chiang bought the House of Wah Sun he inherited Gin’s peanut butter-kissed egg roll recipe, along with the predominantly Cantonese menu, to which he added Mandarin and Sichuan dishes. He opened right after 9/11, and business was slow at first, but they slowly built it. Those egg rolls, 600 to 800 handmade each week, put their two daughters through college (one’s a doctor now, the other a chemical engineer). Wok-toasty almost-caramelized fried rice with fat chunks of pineapple had something to do with it too; as did soup swimming with chubby wontons and thick slices of barbecue pork; swollen egg foo young saucers that might levitate if they weren’t smothered in sheets of thick, glossy gravy; and salt-and-pepper shrimp fried so delicately you can eat the shells. These are some of my favorites anyway—there are nearly 100 items on the menu, including that Sichuan-style cumin lamb, served sizzling atop a bed of fragrant cilantro, a newer addition and a hint of things to come.

Gin, until he passed away six years ago, was also Chiang’s landlord, but for the last 11 years, he’s been on a month-to-month lease. Late last year Gin’s children sold the building to a developer, and Chiang was told he had until the end of 2022 to get out. After more than two decades of 13-hour days, he was thinking of retiring in five years or so, but now he had to scramble.

The rent’s higher at the old Golden Nugget, but he won’t have to share the parking lot (like he would have with the COVID testing center that almost moved in until he threatened to leave)—and the taxes are lower. The Buddha’s coming with him, and so are his chefs, and he sees a market in Irving Park for some of the iconic dishes he prepped as a young man in Seoul, such as the black bean noodles zha jiang mian, the spicy seafood soup jjamppong, and the sticky sweet hot chicken wings known as gampongi. The new neighborhood has historically been a stronghold for this particular Chinese-Korean hybrid cuisine, but Chef Ping, who went to culinary school in Chengdu, will also introduce more rigorously Sichuan dishes such as whole fish hot pot and the Taiwanese beef noodle soup niu rou mian.

Chiang, who also handles the restaurant’s deliveries in his Prius, is just waiting for his final health department inspection before he can open in the new place at 3234 W. Irving Park.

Kim is coming too, of course. The customers, “they come to see me,” she says.

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A person is more than the sum of their parts, but sometimes it is crucial to examine the parts so the sum can be better understood. In her debut documentary writer-director Rebeca Huntt examines the details of her Afro Latina heritage to provocative effect, embracing the beauty as well as the scars that blight her and her family’s history. A self-proclaimed daddy’s girl, she’s especially close with her father, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic who came to the United States to escape General Trujillo’s despotic rule; her mother, with whom she has a more complicated relationship, hails from Venezuela, where Huntt (nicknamed Beba by her mother) as a younger girl enjoyed a certain lyrical freedom she’s never experienced stateside. She also profiles her siblings, an older sister and brother who are similarly complex, likewise impacted by generational trauma and the difficult living arrangements (the whole family shared a rent-controlled one-bedroom apartment near New York City’s Central Park) that exacerbate strained familial tensions. Lastly, Huntt interrogates her college experience at Bard, where she was but one of a handful of minority students, and what’s come after, delving into the unique circumstances of temporarily dallying among the privileged class and exiting that fabled microcosm with more questions about their inborn entitlements than answers. Huntt doesn’t let herself off the hook, however, confessing past indiscretions and generally showcasing some of the more impudent parts of herself with aplomb. Poetically shot and edited, it’s an audacious coming-of-age documentary-memoir that’s wholly singular to the filmmaker herself. R, 79 min.

Gene Siskel Film Center

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