Karen Hawkins The difference in the texts I got over the weekend from Black friends and other folks of color versus the ones I got from white friends is a good place to start for why I reached out to this particular group of writers for essays. Last Friday feels like a year ago. In the e-mail I sent that morning asking for these essays, I put it this way: As I edited these essays, I cycled through all of the stages of grief....
It was close to 11 AM on Tuesday, January 5, when Cook County circuit court Judge Martin Moltz said in open court that he thought Governor J.B. Pritzker’s eviction moratorium is “utter idiocy.” According to an attorney representing a property owner, the eviction case before Moltz, which had been filed in October, was a “post-foreclosure matter.” The former owners who had lost their house had allegedly illegally reentered it. The new owners, Kirkland Group—a Tennessee-based real estate investment firm—were trying to get an eviction order from the judge, but since this was a residential case, Moltz was bound by the moratorium....
In 2014, Absolutely Not singer-guitarist Donnie Moore and his sister and bandmate, keyboardist Madison Moore, founded Glitter Creeps as a monthly punk-rock LGBTQ DJ night—an alternative to “typical” gay nights, as Donnie explained to me in last year’s Best of Chicago issue. Over the past two years Glitter Creeps has grown by leaps and bounds, evolving into a monthly live-music series at the Empty Bottle featuring LGBTQ-friendly bands from Chicago and all over the world....
Consider the following fighting words. They’re the end-of-year message from the executive vice president of the Illinois Policy Institute to the friends of IPI. Bold new ideas don’t matter much if no one knows what they are. IPI offers content to media outlets around the state, and among the news shops that take advantage of it is the Sun-Times. It carries op-eds by Scott Reeder, executive editor of IPI’s media arm, the Illinois News Network....
Rob Mazurek came up through Chicago’s jazz community, and the Chicago Underground Duo (his long-standing partnership with drummer Chad Taylor, which has past lives as a trio, a quartet, and an orchestra) attests to his ongoing identification with the city’s heritage of genre-defying improvisational music. But Mazurek, whose artistic practice encompasses free improvisation, large-scale composition, sound and light installations, and painting, is as restless geographically as he is creatively. This summer Astral Spirits Records will release three CDs of music inspired by his sojourns in other parts of the world....
Maybe you heard about the launch and abrupt crash last weekend of Peachy Vegan Ice Cream, a popsicle cart that announced its arrival on Instagram in the shadow of the Illinois Centennial Monument in Logan Square. The owner, John Lawrence Geary, was swiftly run off the Square by virtual outcry denouncing him as a gentrifier encroaching on the turf of the paleteros who’ve been rolling default vegan pops in the neighborhood since forever....
Under the name Cut Worms, Max Clarke conjures deeply nostalgic, comforting sounds and bygone eras, evoking the sweet close-harmony singing of the Everly Brothers and the irresistible Merseybeat hooks of early Beatles. While the surface of his tunes on the recent Hollow Ground (Jagjaguwar) appear ripe for joyful sing-alongs, the words that fall out of his mouth in catchy, hypertuneful bunches convey a darkness at odds with the warmth of his vintage pop touch....
The 11th annual Hyde Park Jazz Festival kicks off tomorrow with a typically packed schedule of diverse sounds, focusing on some of the city’s most important and creative forces while making room for a selective smattering of national and international attractions. In this week’s paper I highlighted a couple of duo performances by Nick Mazzarella & Tomeka Reid and Andrew Cyrille & Bill McHenry, but naturally there’s much more that’s worth your time....
The Organizers of local R&B dance party Bump & Grindcore want each and every one of their monthly ragers to be “a safe space for people of all shapes, colors, orientations, and gender expressions to get nasty all up on each other.” Gossip Wolf has attended their R. Kelly tribute and one or two totally mental Pitchfork afterparties, and they definitely aren’t just blowing smoke. Do you know how hard it is to get purple lipstick out of fur?...
I came across the following exchange on the alumni listserv of a famous journalism school: Does anyone work at CQ / or have a login and could share full text of this story? Thanks so much!
Improvising drone trio Good Willsmith—aka Natalie Chami of TALsounds and Hausu Mountain cofounders Max Allison and Doug Kaplan—dropped their previous release, a collaboration with avant-pop duo Dustin Wong & Takako Minekawa called Exit Future Heart, in 2018. Somehow that seems like decades ago, but if any local band can bend the laws of spacetime, it’s Good Willsmith. Two weeks ago Hausu Mountain finally released a new Good Willsmith album: the live tape HausLive 2, recorded from the audience by band pal Joel Berk during an April 2019 set at Sleeping Village....
In between acts at his comedy variety show, Caleb Says Things with Friends, Caleb Hearon takes a seat. “Y’know, this is my show. I could just sit here and talk about me for the next hour,” he says. “I won’t though . . . unless?” He takes a pause, raising his eyebrows and theatrically looking around the room, as if hoping someone will let him do it. “Haha, yeah, that’d be crazy,” he continues, “....
Santiago-born singer-songwriter, composer, and film director Álex Anwandter has been dubbed the prince of Chilean pop, no small honor given that the country’s vibrant post-dictatorship scene attracted the first South American Lollapalooza in 2011. Anwandter identifies as queer and has a large LGBTQ+ following, and at the 34th annual Guadalajara International Film Festival this year he received the Premio Maguey Queer Icon award, given to artists who support or embody an open, transgressive, and sexually diverse culture....
At only 22 years old, the Chicago Fire Football Club is fairly new. It’s a baby league amongst other sports teams that have hundreds of years of unpacking to do. There’s still time to address concerns, to undo the wrongdoings, and to improve the league to make it its own. For Chicago Fire supporters like Meredith Miklasz and Jake Payne, that’s exactly what they are set out to do. “I’m very femme,” Miklasz says....
At some point early one evening at Stephanie Izard’s new Duck Duck Goat, I looked up and wondered, “Who are all the dead Chinese?” That’s because the walls of that particular semi-isolated dining room (one of several) are covered with sepia-toned portraits of old-timey Asian people, like a gallery of ghosts, each one tagged with a circular red sticker. A server explained that these incongruous dots are meant to draw the eyes upward when the lights go down and the photos fade into the wallpaper, but they just looked like someone had forgotten to remove price tags after returning from the flea market....
The Reader’s archive is vast and varied, going back to 1971. Every day in Archive Dive, we’ll dig through and bring up some finds. This week Mike Sula reviews Mordecai, the new fine-dining restaurant that has joined Big Star and Smoke Daddy in the Hotel Zachary, across from Wrigley Field. According to Sula, it’s another hit from chef Matthias Merges and his hospitality company, Folkart Management. Merges has been busy lately—it’s just six months ago that he and celebrity chef Graham Elliot (Top Chef, MasterChef, et al) opened the Randolph Street spot Gideon Sweet....
Chicago rapper Lil Durk dropped his debut mixtape nearly nine years ago, and he’s since matured into one of drill’s most consistent, influential, and successful artists. His four previous major-label full-lengths have all peaked in the top 50 of the Billboard 200, including August’s Love Songs 4 the Streets 2, which debuted at number four. His flair for melody and his no-bullshit hooks have helped give rise to a new wave of drill artists, including everyone’s new favorite Chicago rap sensation, Taurus Bartlett—better known as Polo G....
Lollapalooza will no doubt eat up way more than its share of the music ecosystem’s attention when it kicks off Thursday, but thankfully there’s a lot more going on in town. On Saturday, for example, the Wabash YMCA in Bronzeville hosts the Chicago Poetry Block Party, which not only celebrates poetry but also music and other arts. Rapper and prison abolitionist Ric Wilson is on the bill, and he’s getting ready to drop the follow-up to last year’s The Sun Was Out: an EP called Soul Bounce....
Michael Buckner/Getty Images RIP Manoel de Oliveira Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. • That renowned Portuguese filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira has passed away at the age of 106? —Drew Hunt • About women, “weird stand-up,” and the second comedy boom? —Drew Hunt
Q: Every day I see ambulances, police cars, and fire trucks hauling ass down the road while masses of (mostly shitty) drivers scramble out of the way. Yet I’ve never seen an emergency vehicle crash or even bump into another vehicle, or a light pole, a parked car, etc. How often does it happen? —Jacquernagy, via the Straight Dope Message Board A: Oh, often enough. In the early 00s, when an uptick in cop-car fatalities lined up with a long-running decline in violent crime, it was looking like vehicle crashes had replaced getting shot as the leading cause of line-of-duty death for U....
