I woke up Sunday to the sounds of sobbing. I read about it in a front-page Tribune story filled with self-pitying Republican quotes from . . . Having read the article, I had a decision to make. Did I feel even a teeny-tiny tidbit of pity for these Republicans? Or did I write them off as a bunch of self-serving hypocrites? Like Mayor Lightfoot on the elected school board, which she wholeheartedly supported as candidate Lightfoot—only to vociferously oppose as Mayor Lightfoot....
In 2010, Camilo Medina and Javier Forero, natives of Colombia who grew up in Miami, moved to Chicago to attend the School of the Art Institute. They settled in Lakeview and tried to immerse themselves in the neighborhood’s music scene, but they had a hard time finding other aspiring musicians on the same wavelength—people with an interest in 50s and 60s pop, ideally who also spoke Spanish. They did manage to connect with another SAIC student, Guillermo Rodriguez, and in 2013 they started the band that would eventually become Divino Niño, with Rodriguez on guitar, Forero on bass and vocals, and Medina on guitar and vocals....
Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, October 18, 2017. CTU president Karen Lewis recovering from a stroke in the hospital Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis is in the hospital recovering from a stroke she suffered last week. “I woke up, couldn’t move my left leg, my left hand,” she told NBC Chicago. Lewis—who survived an aggressive form of brain cancer last year—is expected to recover and has no speech issues....
If there’s anything Eternals front man Damon Locks isn’t good at, Gossip Wolf doesn’t know about it—dude is not only a great musician but also a fine visual artist, a fun dancer, an inspiring teaching artist, and a dependable dance-floor DJ! On Friday, November 10, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, he’ll craft a “sound essay” titled Right On, Be Free as part of the evolving installation Open 24 Hours by Chicago artist Edra Soto....
The Bauhaus art school may have closed in 1933, but its influence on visual design has endured. Melding crafts and fine art with an emphasis on simplicity and utilitarianism, the Bauhaus movement helped define the modernist aesthetic. Hedwig Dances artistic director Jan Bartoszek pays tribute to these groundbreaking artists with her in-development dance project Futura; two of its numbers are presented in “Point | Line | Plane,” a program that highlights the company’s focus on incorporating sleek visual elements into choreography....
A few years ago, some friends joined me in writing a Passover Haggadah that borrowed the tunes of Beatles songs. We named it “You Say Shalom, And I Say Shalom.” None of us is particularly observant (we’re more Jew-ish), but we longed for the days when matzo was a delicacy and grandpa chugged the glass of wine left out for Elijah—the prophet who is said to attend seders in spirit form, thirsty for that sweet, sweet Manischewitz—when nobody was looking....
Built around the demos of Detroit-based singer, guitarist, and pianist Alexandria Maniak, Shortly has evolved from an emo-tinged indie-rock solo project into a full-fledged band. The four-piece group show their promise on their debut EP, Richmond, released on Triple Crown last September. On standouts “Finders Keepers” and “Spare Time,” Shortly strike a balance between fragility and propulsive momentum, accenting Maniak’s quivering, beautifully vulnerable voice with reverbed-out rock. On “Finders Keepers,” a tune that wouldn’t sound out of place on an American Football album, Maniak sings of friendship lost and garments left behind: “All I have is a flannel shirt you gave to me / All you have of mine you can keep / I don’t want it back now,” she sings....
Kevin Yatarola for Lincoln Center Eighth Blackbird One of the ways Eighth Blackbird has distinguished itself over the years is by flirting with the genre-agnostic outlook of Kronos Quartet: they function as a new music ensemble that sometimes looks beyond its own borders for repertoire. More often than not, however, Eighth Blackbird has played music written by folks best known for their rock affiliations, and tonight they deliver a program at the Old Town School of Folk Music that puts the focus largely on that facet of its work....
Long-running German group the Notwist perfected their airy combination of lovelorn indie rock and tender electronic sounds nearly two decades ago, but once they got it just right, they apparently decided never to repeat themselves. They preceded the new Vertigo Days (Morr Music) with an instrumental album steeped in the wallpaper aesthetics of library music (2015’s Messier Objects) and a live full-length whose tension and aggression contrast with the relatively restrained feel of their studio work (2016’s Superheroes, Ghostvillains & Stuff)....
Michael Gebert Rich Bowen, coauthor of Hot Dog Chicago A snarkier example of the book’s reviewing, though accurate as of the mid-2000s. The place is a cell phone store now. The idea of devoting serious writing to joint food wasn’t very old—Calvin Trillin and Jane and Michael Stern had only been doing it for about a decade at that point—and a certain air of sarcasm might have been a defense mechanism....
