Chicagoans is a first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. This week’s Chicagoan is Eman Hassaballa Aly, digital communications manager and Muslim. “In public, nobody really talks to me. When I used to take Metra to work, it was hard to get anybody to sit by me, even when I had a good seat on a busy train. And when I walk into a room, the assumption is that I’m not from here....
On an Amtrak platform in Springfield, I met that rarest of Illinoisans: a woman who divides her time and her loyalties between downstate and Chicago. Pat Staab lives in the state capital most of the time, but she was on her way to Chicago, where she keeps a condo in River North. “I’m from New York,” she told me. “I need a big city.” As a result of her peregrinations between upstate and down-, Staab is well versed in how the state’s rival regions view each other....
Aside from being a smorgasbord of contemporary art from around the globe, Expo is also where some of the world’s most stylish artists, gallery owners, curators, and writers congregate to discuss and collect artworks (or, you know, party) for four days straight at Navy Pier.
Two years ago the Chicago Tribune Media Group tweaked the chain of command at its monthly magazine, Chicago. Editor Elizabeth Fenner wasn’t getting along with the magazine’s publisher, Richard Gamble, so it was determined that she would report instead to Gerry Kern, editor of the Tribune newspaper. But Kern didn’t make himself seen, one of the magazine’s writers says, and the change barely registered on the staff. Homan’s appointment looks harmful in almost too many ways to count....
Deadpool, the new Marvel Comics adaptation, broke countless box office records during the past week, and this week it claims another distinction: the first Marvel release to earn three stars from the Reader. Leah Pickett has our long review about the movie’s crafty appropriation of the 70s antihero formula. Also this week, we’ve got new reviews of: The Camera Obscura, a 2008 drama about a Russian-Jewish refugee who becomes the unhappy wife of an Argentinian farmer, presented by the Spertus Institute and introduced by critic Alejandro Riera; Eisenstein in Guanajuato, Peter Greenaway’s re-creation of the Mexican travels of Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein; Race, a biopic of Olympic great Jesse Owens; Risen, a Christian mystery thriller about a Roman soldier charged with finding the missing body of Jesus ....
In a world of primping Bachelorette contestants and flowery Insta influencers, a badass rocker such as Traci Trouble can feel like a true heroine. Trouble has been a reliable contributor to Chicago punk, pop punk, and rock ’n’ roll for pushing two decades, as a singer and bassist for groups including Hotlips Messiah, Paper Bullets, and the Wanton Looks. She sounds like Joan Jett, minus a few years and packs of cigs, and she cuts a charismatic figure onstage—like the gatekeeper of a better universe where one spin of a Buzzcocks record would replace everyone’s anxiety meds and photo-filter apps with grit, grime, and the truth....
Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, June 15, 2016. Orlando shooting victim Angel Candelario-Padro had recently relocated from Chicago Former Chicago resident Angel Candelario-Padro, 28, was one of nearly 50 people murdered in the Pulse nightclub shooting early Sunday morning in Orlando. His former coworkers at the Illinois College of Optometry are mourning his death and remembering his kindness and vibrant personality. The memories are recent, as he’d only left Chicago for Orlando in March....
Q: My boyfriend and I met online to explore our kinks. We’d both been in relationships with kink-shaming people who screwed with our heads. Since we weren’t thinking it was more than a hookup, we put all our baggage on the table early and wound up becoming friends. Eventually we realized we had a real connection and started a relationship where we supported our desire to explore. I’ve never been happier....
Q: Oh master, how did the terms nuts and bananas come to refer to something or someone crazy? —Shane Adams Cecil responds: How did any word ever come by a new meaning? It’s not like Noah Webster just announced it in the newsletter one week. No, someone tried using an existing word in some novel way, and it stuck. That’s how language evolves, much as it may bug those weirdos who insist that decimate can only mean “kill a tenth of....
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association announced today that its musicians, chorus, board, and staff have agreed to institute organization-wide salary cuts to mitigate the financial impact of coronavirus-related cancellations. And how long will the cuts be in place? Indefinitely: “We are prepared to keep these arrangements in place while closely monitoring this rapidly changing situation. The goal is to take care of our people and take care of the organization and to be ready to come back for our community....
The Mad Men finale was the real thing. Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. • The Columbia Journalism Review‘s withering critique of how the media have reacted to Seymour Hersh’s Bin Laden scoop? —J.R. Jones • About why saffron threads are so expensive? —Sue Kwong
AP Photo/Christophe Ena Hansel, so hot right now Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. • Noted criminal defense attorney Thomas Durkin on allegations that the Chicago Police Department operates a “black site” for detainees? —Mick Dumke • About the secret history of “Flaming Moe’s”? —Drew Hunt
“Sadly, I’m the 100th white guy standing up here tonight,” remarked Nick Bowling at the Jeff Awards ceremony last October as he accepted his trophy for best director of a musical. Then he pointed to his corecipient, Lili-Anne Brown, and said, “It’s time to change, and this is where it starts, right here.” The audience responded with the night’s only standing ovation. Recently, these four freelance directors—and friends, judging from their easy laughter and off-the-record banter—sat down at Chez Moi, a French restaurant in Lincoln Park....
John Ross Bowie’s 90-minute drama purports to be about the creation of the Ramones’ album End of the Century, but it’s actually about a quartet of posturing man-children whose most memorable characteristics are homophobia, misogyny, and surliness. In addition to the four Ramones (Justin Goodhand as Joey, Cyrus Lane as Johnny, Paolo Santalucia as Dee Dee, and James Smith as Marky), Bowie gives us a camped-up version of record producer Phil Spector (Ron Pederson), seen here as a pistol-packing cross between Liberace and the drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket....
We’ve picked 16 of Chicago’s most talented chefs—from such restaurants as Fat Rice, Topolobampo, Blackbird, Dos Urban Cantina, Analogue, and more—and challenged them to cook a dish using one of four chosen ingredients this Friday in the West Loop. That’s where you come in: Get a ticket to this year’s Key Ingredient Cook-Off, sample all 16 dishes, then vote for your favorite. To reveal the four special ingredients—chorizo, plantains, achiote seeds, and tomatillos—that will be used at this year’s “South of the Border”-themed #KICO, we’ve harnessed the power of pancake artist Dancakes....
Tatiana Hazel’s musical career put down its first root a decade ago, when the Chicago Latinx artist taught herself to play guitar at age 11. Two years later, she started uploading acoustic, heart-on-sleeve originals to YouTube—some of which have since been viewed more than 40,000 times. Hazel has evolved her sound over time, and a few years ago she began rolling out glossy pop material that brings together swooning R&B melodies, Caribbean riddims, and silken electronic production....
What’s important about Natalie Y. Moore‘s new book is less that it’s about Chicago’s south side, and more that it’s of the south side, deeply and lovingly, in a way journalism about the area rarely is. That’s partly due to Moore’s day job: she’s WBEZ’s south-side bureau reporter. Yet it’s also because The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation isn’t simply a work of journalism, but a combination of reporting with policy analysis and prescription and, most compellingly, memoir....
Since debuting in 2015, local electronic duo Grün Wasser—aka vocalist Keely Dowd and producer Essej Pollock—have steadily broadened their apocalyptic EBM by adding new sounds. On Friday, October 4, they drop the new album Not OK With Things (on vinyl and cassette via Texas label Holodeck Records), and it’s easily their most diverse work yet. Advance tracks “Stranger’s Mouth” and “Driving” bristle with nervous energy, suspended between subtle pop hooks, chilly synth tones, and scattered drum patterns....
A young adult novelist puzzles through fame, nostalgia, and the tedium of the everyday in Chicago playwright Will Coleman’s crisp show for Death & Pretzels Theater. Helvetica Burke has been making up stories since she was little. Now that she’s a professional author of fairy tale-like stories, her interactions with jaded grown-ups like her husband, who think of the imagination as a means of coping with life’s ordinary dull tasks, become strained....
Gossip Wolf has known Sullivan Davis since he started working at dearly departed local record store Logan Hardware almost a decade ago. When Davis replaced Seth Dodson as the Hideout’s talent buyer in 2015, this wolf was sure that the storied dive’s bookings were in good hands—and all the amazing shows since then have more than justified that confidence! Alas, all good things come to an end. In a bittersweet Instagram post last week, Davis announced that he’ll be leaving his job at the Hideout in a few weeks....
