Salon is the word that popped to mind when I first heard about ArtNight Chicago. It used to be a thing. Not the place we go for a haircut (in spite of COVID-19, that’s still a thing), but those wine-fueled conversational forums that got their start in the 17th century and were still going strong in the 19th. Wiki defines them as gatherings, usually in the home of an “inspiring host,” where guests amuse each other and “increase their knowledge,” just by talking....
AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Cook County commissioner Jesus “Chuy” Garcia before the first runoff debate last week. They meet again tonight, with the debate airing on Fox 32 from 9 to 10 PM. From the Fox Chicago News Facebook page: “If you had the opportunity to ask one of Chicago’s mayoral candidates a question, what would it be? Leave yours in the comments below and we’ll do our best to pose it to the candidates during the 2015 Chicago Mayoral Debate Thursday at 9 p....
Kyle Sullivan Primo Mendoza When I first spoke to Primo Mendoza on Monday he couldn’t wait to get out of the hospital. Monday evening the local singer-songwriter, who played in recently defunct duo Desert Soap, was recovering from an angioplasty. Doctors at Mount Sinai inserted a stent in his heart and cleaned out an artery Monday afternoon, and now Mendoza has three stents in his main artery. He was hospitalized January 4 after an accidental carbon monoxide poisoning, and he finally left Thursday afternoon after a follow-up procedure on Wednesday....
Sun-Times Officer Robert Soto was killed with a friend in 2008. Authorities say a hit was put on Jeffrey Scott for cooperating with authorities investigating the killings. When authorities arrested Jeffrey Scott in 2010, he decided it was time to cooperate and start talking. About everything—including the murders. Yet without cooperating, he could face more than 25 years in prison, away from his two young children. And he would have to keep carrying around what he knew about the killing....
In the days between summer and fall, past scorching July with Oktoberfest looming, almost nothing hits the same as a grilled sausage with mustard and a crisp beer. Chicago’s love affair with cased meats and beer is well-established; with the arrival of German immigrants in the 1850s, sausage making and its supporting condiment entered Chicago’s culinary scene indelibly. The city’s craft beer history goes back even further, to 1833. Chicago-based distributor Louis Glunz long carried Wostyntje Mustard Ale, which was regularly imported along with another Belgian mustard beer, Melchior....
In June the Department of Housing and Urban Development proposed a sweeping change in how it calculates rent payments for Housing Choice Vouchers, aka Section 8. Now the Chicago Housing Authority is worried that the change might lead to a mass displacement of voucher holders who would see the value of their vouchers decrease. But fair housing advocates are more worried that HUD’s proposal could prevent voucher families from moving to better neighborhoods....
A lot of theories about how Chicago hip-hop was supposed to operate have been shattered by the events of the past decade—the idea that only one local rapper in a generation could make it big, for instance, or the insistence that the city had a singular sound. While drill became the dominant underground wave, proving that young Chicago rappers and producers with few means or connections could build their own cottage industry outside the mainstream, a panoply of other artists showed how many dimensions the scene actually has: the Era devised “footworking with words,” DLow brought bopping’s euphoric sound to the Billboard Hot 100, and Supa Bwe mined the melodic aggression of screamo years before “Soundcloud rap” broke....
ARTIST: Samuel Nigrosh SHOW: The tenth and last annual Chili-Synthesizer Cookoff presented by Brett Naucke and Beau Wanzer and featuring defending champion Whitney Johnson competing against Cooper Crain, Tom Owens, and Alex Inglizian at the Empty Bottle on Sun 2/9 MORE INFO: Samuel Nigrosh
Singer, rapper, poet, author, and songwriter Margret Wander—better known by her stage name, Dessa—has been one of the most prolific and multifaceted members of Minneapolis hip-hop collective Doomtree since she joined it in the mid-2000s. Her 2018 LP, Chime (Doomtree), is one of her strongest, poppiest, and most electronic-influenced releases yet. The album is equal parts reflective ballads and emotionally charged bangers, and tracks such as “Half of You” wouldn’t sound out of place in a mix of 1980s Top 40 hits....
The Reader‘s Cocktail Challenge event series returns Thursday, this time with the theme “nostalgia.” Based on the ongoing column in which bartenders challenge each other to make a drink with a chosen ingredient, the evening at Salvage One will feature nearly 20 professionals competing to create cocktails that evoke childhood (or another period of life about which they’re nostalgic); there’ll be drinks inspired by s’mores, Sour Patch Kids, ginger peach lollipops, and Jungle Juice, among others....
Times change. Does sportsmanship? Does the code of the warrior on the playing field, or the sportswriter pondering the combat from the Olympian aerie of the press box? Once they understood that Holmgren had actually told his defense to lie down, writers were apoplectic. In the Sun-Times, Rick Telander denounced the coach’s situation ethics. “It undermines the integrity of the sport itself,” Telander wrote. “So unbelievable was it that a coach in the biggest pro game of the year ....
It could have been a metaphor, a cliché even, except it was real. Someone threw her away. Literally folded her small body into a garbage can, covered her in grass clippings, and shut the lid. This was in an alley, in a Black neighborhood, on Chicago’s distant south side. Those details are not meant as shorthand to signal murder and mayhem. The alley was free of debris and sat behind a chain of tidy single-family homes, the compact houses and yards as neatly arrayed as place settings....
You may have noticed recently that there are a lot more animals (usually, but not always, dogs) in places where they didn’t used to be. Like on the floor in front of the airplane seat next to you, sans carrier, eagerly awaiting takeoff. Before we get into the details of that story, a few definitions are in order. Emotional support animals are a relatively new phenomenon that has been growing in popularity over the past decade....
In 1992, Nasir Blackwell was desperate. He had been convicted of murder and sentenced to be executed. While incarcerated in Pontiac Correctional Center, he visited the law library—a six-by-nine-foot cell, most of its books published in the 50s—and picked up a volume on homicide. “I began studying law. I was studying history, and so I began studying the history of jurisprudence. I could not believe how law was man-made,” he says....
The first time I saw Gabriel Garzón-Montano in concert was at South by Southwest in 2017. His appearance had generated a lot of buzz; a song from his 2014 EP, Bishoune: Alma del Huila, had been sampled for Drake’s 2015 track “Jungle,” and the multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter had recently released his debut full-length, Jardin. Partway through his performance, he had an audio issue with his keyboard, and as sound technicians addressed it, he kept the crowd engaged by unexpectedly delving into his Colombian heritage: he grabbed a mike and launched into an impeccable a cappella version of the traditional Afro-Colombian fisherman’s tune “El Pescador,” singing in Spanish and gyrating his hips, and then returned to his reconnected keyboard to complete his set....
ARTIST: Ryan DugganSHOW: The Blackout Fest at Empty Bottle on Fri 5/15 and Sat 5/16MORE INFO: ryanduggan.com
Remember those giant but strangely juicy and fruitful tomatoes from your grandparents’ backyard garden? Did your mother have a prize-winning squash at the county fair? If your mom or your grandparents are still around, ask them if they kept any seeds. Seed libraries have been around for centuries. The structure can be as simple as a few labeled envelopes filled with harvested seeds from favored plants. Most seeds last for a long time if kept cool and dry....
Rick Rowell/ABC The plunging neckline was a very purposeful decision. This season of The Bachelor, ABC’s beloved televised hazing ritual, has already produced some memorable moments, hasn’t it? Who could forget the time Megan didn’t know that New Mexico is a place that’s in the United States of America? Or when labia exhibitionist Jillian dazzled Bachelor Chris Soules by asking him whether he’d “rather have sex with a homeless girl ....
Fantagraphics Books About three years ago, when she was 27 and single and awaiting the publication of her second book, the graphic memoir Relish: My Life in the Kitchen, comics artist Lucy Knisley had the opportunity to do some traveling. She spent one September in Europe, speaking at a comics conference, visiting friends, and having a sweet but doomed relationship with a Swedish man who lived on a commune. Six months later, she accompanied her grandparents on a Caribbean cruise as their caretaker....
Inside a west suburban bungalow-style home, Alejandra* sits at a small table in her newly remodeled kitchen and asks me if it’s OK if she smokes during our interview. I say yes. She hops off the stool and makes her way behind the counter, pulling out a rolling tray from an old shoebox. She apologizes that we weren’t able to meet. The garden apartment she rents in Pilsen, she says, is built like a fortress....
