Robert Glasper has seemingly endless creativity and drive. The pianist, producer, and arranger has released nearly 20 albums; he’s written or produced music for the likes of Herbie Hancock, Common, and Brittany Howard; and he’s scored several films, including the 2019 documentary The Apollo about the famed Harlem theater. Though Glasper is rooted in jazz, he can shift between styles, sounds, and collaborative settings with the fluidity of molten metal.
Glasper demonstrates his versatility and ambition in the four albums he’s released in 2024. In June, he leaned into his relaxed, meditative side with Let Go, which invites you to unwind and reset. Two months later, he explored a crucial ancestral through line in Black American music with Code Derivation—jazz helped pave the way for hip-hop with its cool, urbane sounds and boundary-defying experimentations, and the two styles continue to respond to and shape each other. To unpack that relationship, the record includes two versions of most of its songs—a live studio cut featuring Glasper and his band, followed by a remix (guest producers include Black Milk, Hi-Tek, and Glasper’s son, Riley). October’s Keys to the City: Volume One captures Glasper’s energy and magnetism by compiling performances from several years of his annual Robtober residency at New York’s famous Blue Note club (for the 2024 edition, he played 49 shows in 25 nights spread over five weeks). And the brand-new In December mixes twinkling holiday classics such as the “Joy to the World” (with vocals from R&B singer Alex Isley, daughter of Ernie Isley) and original songs that address the holiday through a modern lens that scuffs up the usual sentimentality and nostalgia. On “Memories With Mama,” guest singer Tarriona “Tank” Ball honors Black mothers who work overtime and max out credit cards to put a smile on their kids’ faces at Christmas.
Robert Glasper Mon 12/2 – Fri 12/6, 6 PM and 9:30 PM, City Winery, 1200 W. Randolph, $55–$78 (both shows Fri 12/6 sold out), all ages
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Jamie Ludwig (she/her) joined the Chicago Reader in 2017.
She is the associate editor and branded content specialist at the Reader.
Ludwig lives in Chicago. She speaks English and can be reached at [email protected].
Cloud Nothings formed in Cleveland and leveled up in Chicago. The trio, which evolved from a solo project of songwriter and guitarist Dylan Baldi, traded the sprightly power pop of their 2011 self-titled debut for serrated postgrunge skronk on 2012’s Attack on Memory, recorded with engineer Steve Albini at his Chicago studio Electrical Audio. Cloud Nothings brought a similar rawness to their John Congleton–produced 2014 album, Here and Nowhere Else, where Jayson Gerycz’s relentless drumming supports Baldi’s ragged vocals and squalling guitar. The band play with so much exertion that they sound near exhaustion, like a car careening ahead on an empty gas tank.
In the ensuing years, Cloud Nothings have cycled through personnel and styles of indie rock, but songs from Here and Nowhere Else have remained staples of their set lists. On “I’m Not Part of Me,” Baldi’s straightforward lyrics and joyfully repeated lines embrace the thrill and terror of independence. It’s one of the best rock songs of the past decade. These two Empty Bottle shows conclude Cloud Nothings’ fall tour, which celebrates the tenth anniversary of Here and Nowhere Else—a milestone Baldi recently admitted in a press statement he wasn’t sure they’d ever reach. “It feels good to be here in 2024 still playing music and making records,” he said.
Cloud Nothings Armlock and Farmers Wife open. Sat 11/30 – Sun 12/1, 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $25 (Saturday show sold out), 21+
“The Lute is Eternal,” proclaims the text that concludes the ten-minute video to Jozef van Wissem’s 2023 single “The Call of the Deathbird.” The Dutch composer’s gruff vocals appear throughout the short film, shot in the vast Soviet mausoleum outside Warsaw, but his singing (and the relatively angelic voice of Hillary Woods) directs the listener back to the intricate, meditative sounds of his main ax. The strings of his Renaissance-vintage instrument stand in for the silenced voices of all the people who died in the city during World War II, as well as the more than 20,000 World War II soldiers buried in the mausoleum. Van Wissem lived in Warsaw during COVID lockdown, and it’s easy to connect the empty spaces depicted in the video to the eerie quiet of the pandemic’s early days.
The deathbirds to which van Wissem refers are actually extinct birds, whose voices he sampled from a record and electronically modified. He first used them on his 2022 soundtrack for F.W. Murnau’s silent film Nosferatu, where you can also hear him playing programmed rhythms and distorted electric guitar. Van Wissem is returning to Chicago for the first time in five years to perform that soundtrack live at the Music Box Theatre during a screening of Murnau’s film, which precedes by three weeks the debut of Robert Eggers’s new version of Nosferatu.
Jozef Van Wissem Van Wissem provides a live score for F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent film Nosferatu. Wed 12/4, 7 PM, Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport, $15–$18, all ages
Minneapolis trio Prize Horse play pensive, moody posthardcore whose burnished surfaces and carefully structured negative spaces give it remarkable depth. On their first full-length album, February’s Under Sound (on Chicago-based label New Morality Zine), they telegraph their affection for shoegaze with thunderhead-size riffs that can blot out the sky. Prize Horse also sound like big fans of fourth-wave emo outfit Title Fight—specifically their brawny, sullen 2012 album, Floral Green, which provides a frame of reference for Under Sound. Prize Horse aren’t just following an earlier band’s blueprint, though, and they assert their identity in the details of their music: Jon Brenner dials back his snappy, athletic drumming to play a sparse and muted intro for “Dark Options,” for instance; bassist Olivia Johnson adds bottom-heavy heft and unexpected harmonic complexity to the chord progressions; and guitarist Jake Beitel sings with a gentle, sighing lilt no matter how noisy and turbulent the music gets. When all three members pull together just right, the calm moments of Under Sound land with the same force as its ferocious climaxes—a sure sign that Prize Horse have the chops to make good on the promise of this debut.
Prize Horse Greet Death headline; Prize Horse and Low Animal open. Tue 12/3, 8 PM, Subterranean, 2011 W. North, $17 plus applicable fees, 17+
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Leor Galil (he/him) started writing for the Chicago Reader in 2010. He joined the staff in 2012 and became a senior staff writer in 2020.
Galil mainly covers music, with a singular focus on Chicago artists, scenes, and phenomena.
He’s won a handful of journalism awards; he’s won two first-place awards from the Association of Alternative Newsmedia (for music writing in 2020 and arts feature in 2022) and a Peter Lisagor award (for Best Arts Reporting and Criticism in 2022).
Galil lives in Chicago. He speaks English and can be contacted at [email protected].
Abby Sage makes gauzy folk-pop that evokes a romantic sense of decay, like a pink-wigged Marie Antoinette raking her finger through the frosting of a cake encrusted with maggots. Sage’s debut album, The Rot (Nettwerk), dropped in March, on the heels of one of last year’s biggest TikTok trends: bed rotting, which refers to staying in bed all day and doing as little as possible. The idea is that, if left to such inactivity indefinitely, you could decompose from it. Just the right amount, though, can be restorative. On The Rot, Sage moves through the emotional complexities of coming-of-age and its accompanying loneliness, change, and sexual awakening as if she’s slowly rotating a kaleidoscope: “Milk” sounds breezy and sweet despite its defiantly sour lyrics (“I wanna drink my milk in my own filth”); “Hunger” captures the tenderly rabid appetite of first sexual encounters; and “The Rot” advises you to “lean into the rot” and “fester like the fruit” as a form of rebirth. Her visceral, aching vocal delivery bestows upon her lines a magical potency that makes decomposing feel as transformative as it is ugly.
Though Sage is still growing into her sound, the visual aesthetics she uses to contextualize it are mature. She distinguishes her videos with the use of meticulously crafted papier-mâché elements, which sometimes make cameos at her concerts. Inspired by the fantastical world-building of Talking Heads circa Stop Making Sense and Florence & the Machine, Sage uses subdued color palettes and quiet settings, such as spacious rooms and open pastures, so that the elegant subtleties of her masks, puppets, props, and gestures really pop. Though her arty, earthy, feminine minimalism seems like it would appeal to would-be tradwives (and maybe it does), she’s hardly one to relinquish her voice to conform with tradition—or with anything else. In March, she withdrew from South by Southwest in support of a free Palestine, joining more than 80 artists protesting the festival’s ties to the U.S. armed forces and defense contractors who’ve been propping up Israel’s military. Sage is a musician with many faces, and she lives for beauty even through pain.
Chicago Reader staff writer Micco Caporale (they/them) is an award-winning journalist and Korn-fed midwesterner bouncing their way through basement shows, warehouse parties, and art galleries.
They’re interested in the material, social, and political circumstances that shape art and music and the subcultures associated with them.
Their writing has appeared in outlets such as Nylon, Pitchfork, Buzzfeed, In These Times, Yes! Magazine, and more.
When not nurturing their love affair with truth, beauty, and profanity, they can be found powerlifting.
Caporale lives in Chicago. They speak English and you can reach them at [email protected] and follow their work on Twitter.
Alan Mills, 68, came to Chicago to pursue a law degree at Northwestern and subsequently became involved with Uptown People’s Law Center (UPLC). This year he plans to step down from the executive director role of the organization, a position he has held for a decade following over 20 years as UPLC’s legal director.
My mom had been active in the civil rights movement in Baltimore, where I grew up. One of the first [times when] people had thrown blood onto draft records in order to protest the Vietnam War happened in Baltimore, led by Philip Berrigan, who was one of my mom’s friends. He was defended by a lawyer who was also active in the civil rights movement, so my mom knew him as well. She thought that what was happening at trial was actually more important than what was happening in school, so she pulled me out of school so I could go to the trial.
About the same time, I was reading a slightly fictionalized biography of Clarence Darrow, a famous defense lawyer from Chicago in the early 1900s. So, I’m like, I want to do some sort of civil rights thing. I didn’t really know what that meant, but from then on, I really wanted to be a lawyer.
I ended up in Chicago—and in Uptown—sort of by accident. My wife and I got married at the end of college. We both really wanted to go to Ithaca. I wanted to be in Cornell’s law school and she wanted to do environmental science, but I was only waitlisted at Cornell. So we said, “All right, well, we’re into Northwestern, so I’m going to come here.”
We knew one person in Chicago, and she lived in Uptown. So we stayed with her and found an apartment a couple blocks away. My wife got involved in a political campaign on behalf of who subsequently became Alderman Helen Shiller. [Shiller] was an activist here in the neighborhood.
One of the pieces of that larger pie that Helen was involved in was the Uptown People’s Law Center. By the end of my first year of law school, my wife said I should go knock on the door and see if they need any help. And they did. And I’m still here 45 years later.
UPLC started out as a survival program modeled after the Black Panther Party. Back when we moved to Uptown, there was a food co-op, there was an after school program, there was a printing press, there was a college, [and there] was a legal center. When I started volunteering here [at UPLC], there weren’t lawyers on staff. It was mostly run by two people: the executive director and the receptionist, both from the community, both who’d gotten some informal legal training but who were by no means lawyers. So, it was very much part of the organizing arm. They would advise tenants as to what their rights were and then find volunteer lawyers to take on stuff they couldn’t resolve informally. Over the decades, those other programs dissolved or ended or whatever happened. We’re the last people standing, really, of that original organization.
The kinds of social connections that there were when I first moved here just don’t exist anymore.
Walter Tunis ran our welfare defense program for many years. He was himself a welfare recipient, and, even though he was largely illiterate, had learned enough about the regulations to go and argue with people. But when he’d lose a case, he wouldn’t go to court. He would organize 100 people to picket in front of the welfare office. It’s a different way of approaching a legal problem—from a very community-based, community organizing perspective.
When we moved Uptown, it was a majority-poor community, and most of those poor people lived in privately owned housing. Today, neither of those things are true. It’s not a majority-poor community, and most of the poor people left live in some form of subsidized housing. I think, in many ways, it’s made the neighborhood worse. The kinds of social connections that there were when I first moved here just don’t exist anymore. You just don’t see as many people on the street hanging out together, playing with their kids, socializing on their front porches. It just doesn’t happen in this neighborhood anymore. I think the neighborhood character has really deteriorated significantly.
Our prison work in particular was started by the founders of UPLC, who firmly believed that when a person went to jail or to prison from the neighborhood, they were still part of the neighborhood and should be treated as a neighbor, rather than some other alien out there who’s in prison. And that’s how we started doing these cases—people from the neighborhood who went to prison. It’s since expanded so that we’re doing everything statewide.
The first big case we did was about access to the courts by people in solitary. That case went on for literally 18 years. We lost, and, in some ways, it’s like 18 years right down the drain. On the other hand, it turns out, if you want to do prison litigation, doing access to court cases is a great way to get your name known in the prison system. I met hundreds of people during those 18 years that were trying to get into court, and my name spread throughout the prison system, and we met a bunch of really wonderful people. That, I think, is really the basis for all the work we’ve done.
“This system took 50-plus years to build. We shouldn’t be surprised that it’s gonna take a while to dismantle.”
We’ve always had a case about solitary. It’s a long-term project to say the least, which, unfortunately, is necessary. As somebody smarter than me said, “This system took 50-plus years to build. We shouldn’t be surprised that it’s gonna take a while to dismantle.”
On the one hand, it’s hard. You know you’re gonna lose a lot. You’re gonna see a lot of suffering. You’re gonna see a lot of trauma. On the other hand, it’s some of the most fulfilling work I’ve ever done. I have no clients who are more grateful to our work than prisoners, because they have so few people who support them.
I was representing a prisoner who got beat the crap out of in prison. We went through a week-long trial, and the jury came back within a half an hour and ruled against us. I thought we had a really strong case, and I was really upset. And he’s like, “You know, I’m not. I got to go on the stand and tell my story. That never happens in prison. Then the guards got on the stand, and you got to ask them questions they had to answer. We as prisoners never get to ask questions of guards. So the very fact that we went through this process was empowering.” That also helps you keep going. When you lose, you still win.
I think our biggest victory was closing the supermax prison [Tamms Correctional Center, open until 2013 in southern Illinois]. I don’t want to say that it was [because of] the lawsuit alone. In fact, it probably wasn’t even the largest part of it. There was also a lot of community organizing going on—some very creative organizing. Parents ended up being one of the main forces, at least in the early days—people whose kids were at Tamms. They formed what was called the Tamms Committee. It had some internal problems, but it really did highlight the issue and build solidarity among prisoners and their family members. And then it was also taken up by some of the anti-prison activists. It became a real movement in Chicago.
They organized a group of photographers, and they wrote prisoners at Tamms, saying, “Tell us what you want a picture of, and we’ll send somebody out to take it and send it to you.” It was just a way to humanize people inside the prison. They also used mud to put stencils down all over Chicago. “Tamms is torture,” or something along those lines. That made some of the art bulletins and newsletters and magazines. Then there were things like takeovers of trains, which got good publicity. It was a really good, creative organizing effort, which we had nothing to do with directly. But we worked in tandem with those people. Our advantage is we had a lot of contact with people inside. Their advantage is they had a lot of energy and organizing experience.
Credit: Elijah Barnes for Chicago Reader
I’m planning on stepping down as executive director. My hope is to go back to being a part-time staff attorney so I can continue to do some litigation—particularly against the prison system—but not be responsible for this place anymore. Forty-five years is a nice round number.
I took over the executive director job ten years ago, not exactly voluntarily. Our longtime former executive director died unexpectedly, and the board sort of said, “You’re the only one who can step in and do this.” And at that point, I’d done litigation for about 30 years, and I’m like, “Well, it’d be interesting to learn a new skill. That’s something that’ll be a new challenge.”
I now feel like I’ve done that. I won’t say I’m perfect at it by any means, and I’m sure if I stuck around another ten years I’d continue to learn. I certainly don’t want to take personal responsibility for the whole thing. The board had a lot to do with it. And the people who work here have a lot to do with it. And, obviously, our clients, who are willing to trust us with their lives, had a lot to do with it. But this organization is now, I think, in a stable place where somebody can make some mistakes and it won’t be disastrous.
This was originally published in the 2024 edition of our People Issue, the Reader’s annual special of first-person stories, as told by your neighbors, classmates, and the weirdo at the end of the bar.
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Ron Camacho, 69—artist, sometime organizer, “ex-gangbanger, ex-alcoholic, with a lifetime in the struggle,”—is one Chicago’s greatest living history keepers. He was never going to have a small life. Ron’s mother Louise (Lou) was Ojibwe, and, along with Ron and her other children, was enrolled in the White Earth Reservation of Minnesota. His great-great-grandfather, George Bonga, was the first Black man born in Minnesota and served as the official witness to the treaty signing that created the reservation.
Ron’s biological father, Valentine (Tony), was Mexican American. A white man named Louie was Ron’s stepfather. As Ron grew up, Louie was abusive to him, seemingly because Ron wasn’t his blood. Eventually, to protect her son, Ron’s mother divorced Louie and returned with Ron to Uptown, where they had lived earlier in his childhood. Uptown was then a poor and working-class neighborhood as racially and ethnically diverse as his own family.
Through the mid 20th century, Uptown was sometimes called “Hillbilly Heaven” after the number of white families who were migrating there from Kentucky, North Carolina, and the rest of Appalachia. Simultaneously, in an effort to shirk their treaty obligations, the federal government initiated a program in the 1950s to bus Native Americans from their reservations to cities across the U.S., aiming “to weaken reservation populations and assimilate them into mainstream society.” One of those cities was Chicago. Uptown, with the affordable housing that drew in hillbillies, Black Great Migration families, and others, became the beating heart of the city’s Native American community.
As a young adult in the late 70s, Ron joined the Intercommunal Survival Committee (ISC), a group of mostly white activists organizing Uptown’s white poor on behalf of the Black Panthers. The ISC’s headquarters was on Wilson Avenue, which was then territory of the Wilson Boys, a gang of young white men from Appalachia. Despite not being white, Ron was one of the Wilson Boys: like others, he was told to join or leave the neighborhood. Whether because of his personality, his mixed-race background, or a honed survival skill, Ron was adept at building and maintaining relationships across race lines. His resourcefulness is one of the reasons the ISC recruited Ron to join their efforts. As a person of color, he offered a perspective they didn’t have, but as a gang member who knew how to survive against the law, Ron sometimes engaged in dangerous work . During the following decades, while many others in the ISC went on to work as lawyers, alderpeople, and other city workers, Ron spent years in prison.
I don’t know why I got political. Sometimes I think I have an ear for things other people don’t. In Minneapolis, my stepfather, Louie, was very abusive to me. I didn’t understand until I was about eight and I started taking punishment for all of my siblings. Everything was cool until my curls started growing out.
My ma tried to make peace between me and Louie. She got him to become a scoutmaster, fed his ego. He could command the room. One day, he took us scouts to sing Christmas carols at the penitentiary. That was a hip thing; he and I had compromised on something. Us kids were scared–this was the big house! But then, you know, we’d sing our little jingle bells, and then the house just come down, and us little boys were in shock with the noise. [Laughs]
I must have been 12 when my ma and I moved into the fourth floor of the Leland Hotel. In 1967, it no longer had the piano in the lobby, but it was still kept up. One couple worked the desk. The woman was stately, a grand ol’ gal in big earrings. You knew she knew allllll the stories. From the fourth floor, I could look right there, over the el structure going over towards Lawrence. It was me and my ma against the world.
When I was 13, the [1968] DNC happened. I had already experimented with LSD. I liked thinking about these new ideas, like protests. I remember seeing Wild in the Streets. It influenced me. After that, I got a military shirt [laughs] and bell bottoms. Oh man, we was after bell bottoms. Later, Mike James would use [the term] “rising up angry” from lyrics in a song in the movie. [James, a Chicago organizer and artist, cofounded Rising Up Angry, a radical white working-class organization active on the north side in the 60s and 70s; Rising Up Angry was also the name of the newspaper the organization published.]
Before I was involved in ISC, there was the Native American group. There were seven of us in Menard [a state prison in southern Illinois]. I was 21 or 22. Seven [Native Americans] in the whole joint, five of us from Chicago. A couple of us knew each other, so it was easy for us to start working together, and we copied other Indigenous religious movements going on at that time. We could meet once a week, and that was our freedom of religion. We put in a grievance that we had a right to our own thunderbird medallions. They had just won in other states already, other districts, that you could grow your hair long if you were Indian. That’s when we hit them with freedom of religion, and we won.
It was me and my ma against the world.
When I got out, how I got connected to Slim was through Randy Lockhart, one of the Boys, who went off into the military. [Slim Coleman, a lifelong radical activist who organized to help elect Mayor Harold Washington, was also a member of the ISC.] Slim basically said of me, “Try and organize that brother, he knows everybody.” Randy was in the committee a year or two before me. After I got out of jail in ’77 or ’78, we talked..
Big D’s family was from Alabama. They had been in Uptown for a couple generations, and they were just a prominent patriarchal kind of family. D was still in the joint. We sent Keep Strong magazine [the ISC’s newspaper] to everyone in the joint. Big D wrote back a letter to the editor with cuss words about the Black Panthers. The gut reaction was, “Panthers? Nobody gonna be bossing me about nothing.” I edited it, and helped a letter exchange between Big D and Slim. Slim wrote a rebuttal, explaining it wasn’t just for the Black Panthers, it was for everybody. And just before me, the committee did a Christmas food giveaway from the stage of Aragon Ballroom, and that worked too. Food distribution doesn’t know color. Big D concurred that programs for the people were good, and they started taking down rebel flags in bars.
Alan Mills [of the Uptown People’s Law Center and a former member of ISC] hit the ground running when he joined. I don’t remember any other newcomer so eager to get into the thick of it, so confident, and without any battle trophies yet. He was younger than I, and he wasn’t scared of me.
When I moved in with the ISC, it was dissolving into the Heart of Uptown Coalition. I was the youngest male. I had been the youngest Wilson Boy when I joined, when we were told, “Either join, or don’t get caught in the hood anymore.” After Randy left the ISC, for the committee, I basically got shoved into the role of chief security along with some other men, because I knew all of the Boys on the avenue, I’d just left everybody on good terms, and I had spent the least time of [the Boys] in jail. I joined the ISC because, when it came down to it, when the party cleared, there was still good things happening. They had a food co-op going on; everybody let down their defenses to go get cheap food. They had the first kind of—they called it “welfare defense.” You didn’t have to go stand in line down at that welfare office, let people intimidate you and put you on hold. We could send somebody down there with you, help take you through that. We had some heroes there, so devoted to defense, that I wholly expect that the welfare application process in Chicago now is a result of what guys [in ISC] like Walter Tunis did, down there arguing all of these points.
I could organize meet and greets with the other Indians in their apartments. The other thing that happened was we started a youth program. Now, half the kids would see me and think, “Oh, we’re gonna have some party,” but nah, we’re gonna play softball! We’d get a couple diamonds at the lake. I really didn’t do a lot of the hands-on coaching, but I was a supervisor—other members did the paperwork. And the thing is, without realizing it, we had taken on a couple Black teams into the white. And the Latinos were part of one softball team.
Joining the ISC gave me a new respect in the neighborhoods. Instead of the gang, I was doing something good. Sometimes it was like, “I’m a part of the furniture. Where are you gonna put me? I’ll be up in a corner.” It was part of the most dangerous times of my life. Looking back, in one way, I do get to say, “Hey, my way worked too.” But in another way, I know that I suffered so much that I didn’t have to. I really thrashed myself, and I don’t know how to take that out of my memories. There was positives outside of myself, but internally, I had demons to deal with.
Ron at his desk Credit: Elijah Barnes for Chicago Reader
For a while, I hung around. I [was] still, in a pinch, the go-to guy to help with trouble. But for the most part, you were gonna find me in a pine box, if I kept drinking at that rate. I don’t know if there was any other way for me, but it was my choice. I had to go on all the rides. I coulda worked for the city, but I turned it down. I was asked to leave the org in ’82 by Marc Kaplan, because of my drinking. Still, when I was in the joint, Marc [Northside Action for Justice organizer and former member of ISC] would bring my kids to visit me.
Back then, some [ISC members] would check me on stuff I had no right to do. There were good lessons involved. And I loved the kids. We’d have child development, where one parent one night a week would have all the kids, give them enrichment. There was always this knowing, no matter what: “Hey, I help pay the rent so those kids can learn.” A few years ago, when my son died, that generation, they reached out. I was so thrilled they remembered me. One of them reached out [and said] that they used to [sneak] into my room to wake me up. Nobody wanted to wake me up, but I’d hear that little voice (“Rrroooon”) and I’d never get mad. They were good kids, all of them.
My biggest pride is in quitting drinking. I wouldn’t be alive without the ISC. For me, once you put a value on the act of survival, if you can learn early that, “Hey, you’re gonna gain something here, if you don’t get dead.” No matter what, if together, that was as far as we got? Then that’s as good as it was. And hey, that’s OK! But I also got to say, I made the team. I wasn’t blonde-headed, I got curly hair, but I made points, too.
Editor’s note as of November 18, 2024: this story was edited after its initial print publication for clarity and to add information culled from an additional interview with Ron Camacho.
This was originally published in the 2024 edition of our People Issue, the Reader’s annual special of first-person stories, as told by your neighbors, classmates, and the weirdo at the end of the bar.
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Roberto Herrera, 37, grew up in Rogers Park, where he began learning to dance with his family. In 2018, he opened Latin Techniques Dance Studio in Albany Park. The studio is now located in Portage Park, where Herrera teaches students—beginners and beyond—how to dance cumbia, salsa, bachata, and guaracha. In addition to offering private and group classes (and teaching specialized choreography for events like quinceñeras and weddings), Latin Techniques hosts dance socials two Fridays every month, where students from all levels, as well as members of the general public, can mix, mingle, and move.
I grew up in Rogers Park up to the age of 14, 15. Then I moved to Albany Park. I have four sisters and a brother. Recently my brother just passed away—two years ago. I went to Kilmer School from preschool all the way to seventh grade, and then I graduated from Gale School.
I started with cumbia, because my parents are Mexican, so cumbia’s a very popular dance in Mexico. And also in Colombia. My mom was the one that taught all my siblings when we were kids. Just growing up, I kind of learned the other genres. Salsa is more like a Cuban and Puerto Rican dance; my mom didn’t know anything about that, so I had to take classes for that. I also took classes for another dance called guaracha, which is more of a Mexico City dance. But cumbia and guaracha, those are the ones that I pretty much grew up with and just learned along the way. My mom would always make parties, like almost every weekend. So that’s how my passion grew since I was a kid.
I took salsa classes at Dance Chicago starting around 19. And then for guaracha, I took those classes at another dance studio that was in Rogers Park, called Key 2 Dance, until I was like 21, but unfortunately, that one closed up after COVID. I did go to another studio to take some ballet, because it’s something that everyone has to learn.
Roberto Herrera at Latin Techniques Dance Studio Credit: Yijun Pan for Chicago Reader
People come to my dance studio because they say they forget about their problems.
Before I opened my dance studio, I was working at a pharmacy; I worked there for about eight years. At Key 2 Dance, where my friend Oswaldo taught me how to dance guaracha, he wanted me to also help teach. At first, I didn’t want to, because I didn’t feel that confidence to teach people how to dance. But then he helped me. I did that off and on between the ages of 23 and 27. After a few years, one of my ex-students, Alex, contacted me, and he was like, “Hey, Robert, when are you gonna start teaching again?” I told him, “Well, you know, I don’t have any plans of returning to teaching.” I was working at the pharmacy, so that was pretty much my job.
He contacted me back in 2017, and then he told me that his friend had a studio in Albany Park. He was like, “You should come back and teach again.” I was like, “You know what? If your friend allows me to teach, then I’ll probably think about it.” So then he contacted me maybe a few days later and told me that his friend had decided that I can teach at the studio. I started getting all this clientele. I put my classes on Facebook, on Instagram, and then a lot of people were contacting me.
[Herrera opened the first location of Latin Techniques Dance Studio on Kedzie in 2018 and moved to the current Portage Park location in February 2024.]
I was afraid. I took the leap of faith, because I didn’t know if this was gonna work or not. But, thankfully, it did all work out.
Because of social media, for one, Latin dancing has become very popular—people kind of already know what each Latin style is. Even with other cultures, even non-Latin people, they already know what’s salsa or what’s bachata or what’s cumbia, because it’s becoming so popular. When they contact me, they do ask me, “So what’s the easiest dance? Or what’s the hardest one?” I do sometimes recommend my students to maybe take the easiest genre, which is bachata. And then they can work their way up from there. But if someone wants to learn salsa, which is the hardest one out of the three that I teach, I make them aware that it is pretty difficult.
During COVID, I did have to close for about six to seven months. I fell into a depression. I got the SBA [Small Business Administration] loan—that helped me to maintain my studio, because I still had to pay rent, you know? I was doing Uber Eats, unfortunately. That’s what made me depressed back then, because I was like, “Man, I have my own business and I have to work for another company?”
I still had guidelines to follow with the whole COVID thing [after reopening], but people did start coming back.
Roberto Herrera at Latin Techniques Dance Studio Credit: Yijun Pan for Chicago Reader
People come to my dance studio because they say they forget about their problems. They just go there, have fun. I have had students that have gotten married and have kids together. I tell them, “I’m gonna charge you guys extra for that.”
But yeah, it’s definitely a place where they feel comfortable. They have a good time. They forget about their problems. I didn’t know that until my students kept telling me that. I didn’t know I made an impact for each one of my students in a good way, you know? So that makes me really, really happy that I can make a difference in everyone’s lives.
This was originally published in the 2024 edition of our People Issue, the Reader’s annual special of first-person stories, as told by your neighbors, classmates, and the weirdo at the end of the bar.
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Orr, who often performs as Monsieur Bombastic, is a concept-driven Chicago-based drag king. His performances straddle themes of body horror, sex, and death.
In his acts, he often puts his body through physical extremes like ingesting ink and spitting it out, or gluing feathers to needles with which he pierces his body. Ore grew up as a visual artist in Texas before moving to Chicago to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has an MFA from the film department there. His bachelor’s, also from SAIC, explored painting and illustration.
I grew up exhibiting my work at galleries in Texas, Chicago, California, and Germany—I’ve been doing this since I was very, very young. My works were ballpoint ink illustrations. I’ve been on social media since I was 12. When I posted my work online, people took an interest. I couldn’t travel to places like California or Germany, but I either reprinted the work or the curators asked me to ship those drawings. In Germany, I was a semifrequent artist submitter to Semioculus, a collage, dark-art zine collective. My illustrations depicted the human body going through different states of transformation. And while it is perceived as body horror, I try to depict my subject as extracting pleasure from the pain. They’re never literally in pain, but they are embracing those visceral experiences, like bodies melting into their environments, or holding their organs.
I noticed I was developing community online as I was posting my work, and so posting became like a weekly regimen. Fast-forward, I loved video games and wanted to be a video game designer, so I did character-based work. I created characters, wrote stories for them, and had them inhabit worlds. They always had, like, a horror-esque edge to it, because that’s what I was interested in. And then a lot of life changes happened for me. I had a lot of deaths in the family, and I started becoming more and more fascinated with decay and the natural curiosity of life after death. I wanted to be a mortician, so I started doing more anatomical drawings. And that’s when I started getting into more body horror philosophically, where I’d draw inspiration from anatomical medical studies as early as ten. I just continued making these characters, and they grew increasingly less about design and more about just trying to make compositions to express their stories.
Monsieur Bombastic is my nonsensical drag king character who has evolved dramatically over the past two years. I got into drag quietly and secretly. I was in grad school when I started throwing myself on open stages so I could experiment with method acting. At the time, I was writing about a drag performer, and I wanted to get into the drag scene so I could better communicate his story. You can only learn so much from books or being an audience member.
How do I describe him to you? He’s always been a very unpredictable, chaotic kind of figure who poses to be a very sophisticated gentleman. But he’s proved he has no control of himself. He’s consumed by lust and greed and has always been a tragically written character. So often he dies at the end of the number. He’s spontaneous and all over. I grew up listening to a lot of nu metal and heavy metal, and I wanted a heavy-metal persona. I grew up drawing lots of clowns too, so his appearance is partially inspired by that. But he became his own being. Some of the elements are still there, but now he’s less of a human, and he’s more of a humanesque creature that is battling with very human desires. That’s how most of my performances are developed now. I am transmasc nonbinary, and Monsieur Bombastic is a king. He is masculine but presents very androgynous.
I grew up drawing lots of clowns.
In one of the more recent burlesque-y acts that I’ve developed, I’m in all black wearing long white hair. I have long elf ears and resemble a dark elf with an eerie, seductive, menacing presence. And Mr. B is singing to a song by Fever Ray, a very queer, trans singer. Fever Ray’s vocal performance is alluring, satisfying, [with an] ethereal voice—but it has a very sharp edge to it, kind of like a snake’s tongue. It’s how I always imagined Lucifer trying to seduce his victims into sin. Mr. B starts off singing that, and as they strip down, they reveal that their body is completely decrepit and covered in gore; it’s rotting. They pretend that they die, and they succumb to this reality—naked but wearing thigh-high boots. I stand there lifeless for a second until it transitions to a death-metal song called “Body/Prison” by Health. It’s very ambient but very rough, dark.
And so the vibe completely changes, as if Mr. B’s true form has now shown. This is a monster who wants to devour, who’s consumed by lust. The act goes into traditional relaxed moves where I’m grinding on the floor and grinding on my boa almost entirely naked. Eventually I tear off the flesh from my body. It’s designed in such a way that gives a satisfying skin peel until my chest is exposed and, oftentimes, my pasties pop off—or I don’t wear pasties at all. My bare chest is exposed, and it’s regular human flesh underneath. Then I remove what is basically a codpiece that I made out of silicone that resembles a flayed dick. So that’s already there, but I remove the back piece and I reveal a jeweled butt plug. I reveal hole in the club. It was partially inspired by my philosophical research of Georges Bataille. “The Solar Anus” is one of the writings. Bataille talks a lot about sex and death, the corrupt man, and the eroticism of death. I’m very fascinated with the interaction of the little death, of orgasm to dying.
Credit: Kirk Williamson for Chicago Reader
But in the very beginning, I just threw myself on the weekly open stage at Roscoe’s Drag Race every Tuesday night around 11 PM. I would roll into either work or class early the next morning on two or three hours of sleep, a little bit of glitter still plastered on the side of my face. That’s a weekly competition that attracts a lot of up-and-coming performers and artists by virtue of being one of the only open stages around. After my first year performing, I was not only a semiregular face at Open Cabaret at Newport Theater, but I was offered the opportunity to coproduce the first all-king show.
Monsieur’s journey went from very unruly and pretty unapproachable onstage. And then offstage, I was just very shy and timid. But through the checks and balances of figuring out what it means to be a performer who wants to engage artists and audiences, it’s just been a process of remaining stubborn and continuing to perform whatever opportunity was given to me, and Monsieur naturally evolved. I feel fortunate that I’m pretty comfortable with where I’m at. I’m steadily booked. I’m just going to continue to explore more abstract storytelling visually. I’m going to continue to develop my F/X work and hopefully make engaging stuff for people to enjoy.
This was originally published in the 2024 edition of our People Issue, the Reader’s annual special of first-person stories, as told by your neighbors, classmates, and the weirdo at the end of the bar.
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After graduating culinary school, Javauneeka Jacobs, 27, has spent most of her career—apart from an internship at Disney’s Epcot—working at current and former Rick Bayless restaurants like Xoco, Leña Brava, Cruz Blanca, Topolobampo, and the flagship Frontera Grill.
I grew up in a farm town. I had a cornfield in my backyard. As kids, you just meddle around with things. I had no idea it was field corn. They use it to feed cattle, and it’s hard. It’s not for consumption. When I was ten or 12, I picked some, and I put them on the stove. I’m waiting, waiting, the house smells like corn, but I’m waiting. My mom wakes up from her nap. “Why do you have this field corn in a pot?” I’m like, “I’ve been cooking it for hours.” She’s like, “It’s not gonna cook.”
We were not farmers. My parents are from the south side of Chicago, born and raised, and as they started to have a family, they moved out to the suburbs and bought a home in Harvard, and that’s where I grew up.
My mom grew up with a lot of southern food. There were six of us all day. It would seem like we didn’t have anything in the house, and then all of a sudden we had this big meal on our table. She was always creative and just doing stuff from her heart, very intuitively.
I wasn’t allowed in the kitchen. Even though I wasn’t physically cooking with her, I was doing a lot of watching. Couldn’t ask any questions, nothing. It was just her thing, and she didn’t want to take the time to show this kid what to do when she just needed to cook and get it done. That was her safe space, and that’s what she loves to do. I always loved to eat. Anything you put in front of me was really good because she’s a good cook.
As I got a little bit older, I tried to repeat what she was doing. And I also watched a lot of cooking shows. They were able to explain it to me. I just started putting it together. I remember having my notebook and then presenting it to my mom, like, “Can you cook this?” Sometimes she would cook it, and sometimes she would say, “Oh, let’s not do that.”
I’ve always had a garden. My mom always had a garden, so when I started ag class [in high school], I [could] actually choose what I’m gonna plant and we could do it better. That’s always been like a part of me. How can we make this place better? Being in those classes and seeing how everything is the circle of life, how we need each other to survive. If I’m a chef, then I have a little bit more control over that, because I’m gonna choose what I grow or what I cook with.
Jacobs working at Rick Bayless’s Frontera Grill Credit: Kirk Williamson for Chicago Reader
I didn’t have exposure to restaurants. Our fancy dinner was Applebee’s. But where you got the good food was at people’s houses. My best friend, she’s from Zacatecas. I remember going to her house, and her mom would be making pozole, or she’d be cleaning nopales. I would ask her mom, “How do you do that?” And my friend would get upset: “Did you come to cook with my mom, or did you come to hang out with me?”
That was the first time I had a taco. I didn’t know what cilantro and onion was, and I was eating it. And [saying], “Whatever’s on here, it tastes so good.” The first time I had a tamale, I didn’t know how to eat it. I bit into the husk and they were laughing at me.
When I was in junior high, my dad was like, “You need to figure out what you’re gonna do for the rest of your life. You should think of something that’s not gonna go away.” I was going really hard in sports. I was in basketball, track, cross-country, and I performed really well, and I did receive scholarships.
I think I had the epiphany: everyone’s gotta eat. And so, “Hey, I like the cooking channel. I love food. I love chemistry and biology. I wonder if I can combine that with cooking and see where that gets me?”
I looked up culinary schools. I had everything organized, so I presented it to my parents, and I said, “I’m not gonna take any scholarships. I am going to go to culinary school.” And my dad’s reaction was: “Being a chef is not a real job.” My mom’s [was], “She’s doing what she wants to do, and I’m gonna support her.”
I ended up going to Le Cordon Bleu. School started at 10. So I took the 7 AM train for two hours. My first week, I’m in love. This is for me. This is like having your own science experiment and being able to eat it too. I learned everything that I wanted to. And then I really wanted to get some hands-on experience, a year into culinary school, and I kind of wanted to move out because of the commute. I ran around just trying to get a job, and I got turned away from 30 different restaurants. I was really discouraged.
I was really close with my chef instructor, who had taught someone that was the chef of Xoco, and they needed someone to come in for a stage. I staged for two weeks, and eventually they gave me a job.
As far as my career, I think that this is the place that I want to be.
I wanted to work at a restaurant who had the same morals as I did: Are we working with our local farms? From a cook’s perspective, it was a full circle moment for me. I wasn’t destined to come to a Mexican restaurant. I just really wanted to work at a good restaurant that I was going to learn and grow at. The fact that it was Rick Bayless, the fact that it was Mexican food, the fact that we’re doing all this stuff with the community, and we’re working with farmers, it was just really full circle to me. After hearing so many no’s, they were all for good reasons, because now I’m here.
I was very fortunate to get that. I was really killing it. I put tiny empanadas on the menu for an amuse for Topolo. And they’ve been on the menu for like five years now.
And then [the] pandemic happens and [they’re] doing whatever they could to bring people back to work. They started doing Topolo 2.0, which was held up in the library, and Rick asked me if I wanted to be his culinary assistant for his YouTube channel. He trained me how to write a recipe, how to test a recipe, and it was really cool, super intimate. I learned a whole different side of things, like how to do a swap. How does the TV world work?
We started getting a little bit busier in the restaurants. I was 24, and I became the youngest sous-chef at Frontera Grill. Everything I’ve learned, including at Disney, has helped me with this job because I run the production kitchen and we make huge batches of tamales and stuff like that.
I’ll arrive to work around 7–7:15, and I’ll start consolidating the walk-in, doing my inventory, everyone’s prep list. And we taste dishes every day. So I’ll write the dishes that we’re gonna taste for the day. And then we just get right into the prep list. I try to get a lot of my prep done before we open up, so I can expo the line. Around 11:30 we open up for service. And then we finish service around, like, two to three o’clock, depending on how busy we are. And then I’ll just wrap up the kitchen. Then if I’m up to it, I’ll go to the gym again and go home, go on a walk with my dog. I’ll tend to my plot in the community garden.
My balcony is not very big, but it’s definitely full of lots and lots of plants. It’s facing east. We get amazing sunlight. I have figs. I have raspberries, lemon in a pot. We have lemongrass, ginger, eggplants, tomatoes. I have some flowers, and basil, thyme, rosemary, all of that, all the regular herbs and chiles.
We have this rule at home where we don’t cook any Mexican food. But as far as my career, I think that this is the place that I want to be.
This was originally published in the 2024 edition of our People Issue, the Reader’s annual special of first-person stories, as told by your neighbors, classmates, and the weirdo at the end of the bar.
