Life is spooky and scary enough these days, so even if traditional haunted houses were open in Chicago, most of us would skip the eerie sights and sounds in favor of a nice night alone with a bucket of candy. We may have the beginnings of a real-life I Am Legend (or for Vincent Price fans like me, 1964’s The Last Man on Earth) LARP out there these days, but maybe it’s best to keep on keepin’ on....
Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago. An associate design manager at a financial technology firm, 27-year-old Katrina Wolf started developing her trademark mix of “a little weird, a little masculine, a little trendy, and a lot of streetwear” when Bria Salvador-French of Lincoln Park’s Smith & Davis Salon gave her a bowl haircut five years ago. “Since then I have been really engaged with fashion,” Wolf says....
Five months since CPS removed Dr. Michael Beyer, the principal of Ogden International School, from his position, he’s still getting paid but can’t return to work. CPS officials never explained why, having had the OIG’s report since June, they’d only moved to fire Beyer in November. But this wasn’t the first time he’d gotten in trouble with the district. In the information vacuum, speculation and conspiracy theories proliferated: maybe the mayor’s office wanted to tank the success of the Ogden/Jenner merger by pressuring CPS to remove Beyer, thereby making it less likely that a rich and poor school would merge in the future?...
This year’s New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival seemed beset by bad juju: the Rolling Stones begged off due to Mick Jagger’s heart surgery, and Bob Seger bowed out, blaming a scheduling conflict. But Diana Ross, fresh off her “Diamond Diana” residency in Vegas, showed up in a big way. In the first Jazz Fest performance of her six-decade career, she absolutely killed it, holding the audience in her thrall as she ran through 90 minutes of her hits....
The Chicago Reader has announced the hiring of Adam M. Rhodes as the alternative paper’s first-ever social justice reporting fellow. The position is made possible by a generous grant from the Field Foundation. Prior to Medill, Adam was a general assignment reporter at the legal newswire Law360 in New York City, where he focused on financial deals and regulation and the federal court system. He earned his bachelor’s in journalism from the University of Central Florida in Orlando....
We’ve been secretly distilling and nobody knew,” Adam Smith says. He’s mostly joking: Maplewood Brewery & Distillery hasn’t exactly been hiding the distilling side of its operation. (It’s right there in the name.) But in the nearly three years it has been making spirits, it hasn’t released a single one. Aside from festivals where Maplewood has poured tastes of its whiskey, rum, and gin, the public has never had a chance to taste any of them....
So you can’t go to the theater because (gestures weakly toward everything). Sure, there are streaming productions galore right now—even if they lack the communal experience of live performance. But there is also a special thrill to curling up with a great script and becoming a director in your own mind, imagining how this world on the page looks and feels in three dimensions. Mark Larson’s Ensemble: An Oral History of Chicago Theater (2019, Agate Midway Books) is an exhilarating, exhaustive (700 pages and 300 interview subjects) overview of the organisms that made Chicago theater world-class, from the 1950s on, focusing on artists and companies both legendary and overlooked....
John Sanchez reckons he downs 12 cases of bubbly a month. “I don’t drink pop, or juice, or anything diet, so I usually come here for the bubbly,” he shouted. “It’s cheaper.” We were struggling to hear each other in a sun-beaten Clearing parking lot on a recent morning while he loaded two-liter bottles of Poland Spring Sparkling Water into his trunk. Every few minutes a Southwest Airlines 737 roared up from Midway across South Cicero Avenue, but Sanchez made it as loud and clear as a mountain stream that he was a devoted regular at Continental Sales Lots-4-Less....
Precautions intended to slow the spread of COVID-19 have resulted in the widespread cancellation of concerts and the temporary closure of the great majority of Chicago’s music venues. Many people working in live music—artists, road crews, promoters, venue staff—are losing most or all of their income during this crisis. Baton Show Lounge Carol’s Pub Concord Music Hall Elastic Arts has its usual donation page, as well as a GoFundMe whose proceeds will be split 50/50 with affected artists and performers...
Ours is a time ripe for tall tales. So Pete Beatty’s yarn about two brothers’ adventures in an imaginary 1837 Cleveland fits the bill. Neither the archaic speech nor the dubious claims of its characters feel out of place in an era when the simplest fact is questioned and debated ad absurdum. Yet, unlike the daily inanities which plague the citizenry in 2020, Beatty’s Cuyahoga (Scribner) is a faithful attempt to make his readers feel better....
[content-7] The CTA says, on the contrary, that the schedules were actually devised to make sure the pilots succeed. Since north-siders are often viewed as squeaky wheels who get more than their fair share of resources, Pawar realized he’d had better luck achieving his goal if he joined forces with south-side advocates to lobby for an equitable restoration of bus service. (Lincoln Park alderman Michele Smith and Bridgeport alderman Patrick D....
There’s productivity, and then there’s what these five local labels accomplished in 2016—more than just pad their catalogs, they’ve established themselves as tastemaking powers outside the communities that birthed them. In no particular order: Not Normal Tapes Not Normal Tapes founder Ralph Rivera plays in writhing, noise-gnarled sociopolitical punk band the Bug, but even if you discount that group’s exploits, the label still had a very healthy year—of particular note are excellent releases from Oakland’s Baus (who mostly sound like the Monks being forced through a sausage grinder) and Kentucky’s Quailbones....
The pandemic has encouraged folks to be experimental in all forms of life. It doesn’t always have to be something monumental—some people are just trying a new spice in the kitchen. Nevertheless, that experimental flair that 2020 introduced is coming to fruition in 2021. There’s a freedom of letting go of our typical routines, especially right now when everything is so unpredictable. The artists in the series come from all types of backgrounds....
The title of Gavagai, an internationally coproduced art film playing this week at Facets Cinémathèque, refers to a word in a made-up language invented by American philosopher W.V. Quine in his thesis on the indeterminacy of translation. I won’t pretend to understand Quine, but thankfully he’s not discussed in the film, which in fact contains little dialogue. Rather, cowriter-director-cinematographer-editor Rob Tregenza employs the term as a clue to the movie’s opaque content....
If the members of infamous UK pop-rock band the 1975 had grown up in the U.S. and listened to more pop punk than emo, they’d probably sound a lot like Waterparks. The Houston three-piece have become poster boys for the sleek, sugary suburban pop-punk sound that will forever say “Warped Tour.” That style faded out of the zeitgeist a year or two before Fall Out Boy went on hiatus in 2010, which is perhaps why few outlets aside from Alternative Press (the magazine of record for the Warped tour set) have paid much attention to Waterparks....
Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Thursday, November 3, 2016. Jason Van Dyke’s attorneys are still trying to access Laquan McDonald records for first-degree murder trial Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke’s attorneys are still fighting to see Laquan McDonald’s juvenile records even though the courts have refused them access to them twice previously. Defense attorney Daniel Herbert said during a status hearing that he’s asking for access to the records from the Illinois Department of Child and Family Services a third time....
Lookman Adekunle Salami cannot be contained. The British artist, who performs as L.A. Salami, maneuvers between blues, rock, and folk so effortlessly it seems almost ethereal. On “The City Nowadays,” a single from his 2016 studio debut, Dancing With Bad Grammar (Beat Records), his subtle use of electric riffs and drums to guide the listener in and out of his raplike verses and harmony-laden hooks is enough to settle one into his philosophical roller-coaster ride....
Courtesy the artist Unholy Two live Columbus noise-rock staple Unholy Two will be making a rare Chicago appearance at the Burlington in Logan Square tomorrow night, Friday, April 10. The brutal collective, whose lineup at one point in time featured Bim Thomas from Obnox and This Moment in Black History on drums, has been working up sonic destruction for the better part of a decade, but it was on last year’s Talk About Hardcore LP, which came out on 12XU, when they really honed their punishing formula....
Far be it from me to give advice to Joe Biden, a candidate I never supported during the primaries and still sort of wish would get off the ticket. It’s funny to watch everyone from Biden to writers for the New York Times fall over themselves to say nice things about Bernie—even though they never had anything nice to say about him while he was still in the race. Berniecrats fall into three basic categories, at least when it comes to voting for Dems....
Update: To help slow the spread of COVID-19, these shows have been postponed until further notice. Ticket holders should contact the point of purchase for refund or exchange information. Lyrics aren’t the only way for musicians to communicate political messages, just the most obvious. When the Knife turned their live show for 2013’s Shaking the Habitual into a group study in Queer Space Jazzercise, they deliberately obscured which performers were the Dreijer siblings, making a point about equitable collaboration by dissolving the hierarchy of star and supernumerary....
