“If your aim is to see your neighbors die, don’t fill out the census,” census researcher Andrew Reamer tells those who have asked him how important the census is over the last few months. In the middle of a pandemic, he says, the stakes have never been higher for census completion. “In a way, in a very strong way, filling out the census is like wearing a mask in public....
This remarkable combo from Cleveland only formed at the start of 2016, but they’ve grabbed my attention with a flurry of recordings since then. Led by producer RA Washington, Mourning [A] BLKstar features a trio of dynamic singers—James Longs, LaToya Kent, and Kyle Kidd—and an indeterminate number of musicians. The ensemble traffics in a gritty strain of DIY Afrofuturist soul music, balancing hip-hop production techniques with lo-fi experimentation that bathes sultry grooves in darkness, either in scratchy samples or washed-out synth tones....
In 2014 former Chicagoan David Grubbs published a wonderful book called Records Ruin the Landscape that explores the historically conflicted relationship between experimental music and recordings of it. Grubbs, who made his name in the bands Squirrel Bait, Bastro, and Gastr del Sol in the 80s and 90s, generally had his first encounters with 1960s experimental music—New York School composers, Fluxus artists, pioneering minimalists, the improvised sound works of UK group AMM—through recordings, yet many of those artists expressed antipathy toward them, insisting on the experiential nature of their work....
A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. Electro-Acoustic Dubcology I – IV by Norman W. Long Central Air Radio on WHPK Chicago artist Jared Brown runs this weekly radio show on WHPK 88.5 FM, broadcast every Tuesday at 11 AM from the south side (Woodlawn, Hyde Park, Kenwood). It features mixes by local underground DJs as well as Jared’s impeccable selections, but what really makes it stand out are the interviews with artists, political thinkers, and bringers of change....
ARTIST: Adam Luksetich SHOW: Cafe Must Thrash featuring Throne of Iron, Midnight Dice, and DJ Lidia Vomito at Cafe Mustache on Sat 2/1 MORE INFO: Adam Luksetich/Cafe Must Thrash
Voting early for Chicago mayor, clerk, treasurer, and alderman won’t automatically opt you out of the endless ads, flyers, and candidate forums, but we can only hope that someday there’s an app for that. Voters can update registration, register for the first time, or change their names or addresses at the polls. You just need two forms of government-issued ID, one of which has your current address. Click here for a list of acceptable forms, which include a utility bill or report card....
Indie singer-songwriter Gabrielle Smith broke out in 2015 under the name Eskimeaux. Since then, she’s changed the name of her project a couple times, and last year she made her debut as the front woman of Gabby’s World—which released Beast on Beast (Yellow K) in November. Though Gabby’s World positioned as a fleshed-out band and Smith does tour with a core group of musicians, the project seems more like the next step in her personal artistic trajectory....
In just the past couple of weeks, theaters have started sending out announcements that they’re getting ready to reopen. Second City is already welcoming audiences back with Happy to Be Here on the mainstage and Out of the House Party at Second City e.t.c. Goodman plans to open its doors with Jocelyn Bioh‘s School Girls; or, The African Mean Girls Play, directed by Lili-Anne Brown, on July 30. (The show was in previews in March 2020 when the COVID shutdown hit, and a recorded performance from that truncated run was available as a streaming show for a time last year....
Trippy Chicago trio Dark Fog have definitely hit a deep vein of psych productivity. When I e-mailed guitarist and bandleader Ray Donato to ask about their new album, meaning Living the Past . . . Killing the Future, he sent me a link to a completely different new album, Make You Believe. And neither of these releases is October’s Our Secret Society. Way to make every other band on the planet look like slackers, guys....
Chicago rapper Cdot Honcho doesn’t mess around. His rapping often sounds like a kind of carefully controlled yelling, clear and intense even when he doesn’t ever seem to pause for breath, and his most commanding performances feel downright cutthroat. Cdot has been perfecting this approach to the mike since he began his local ascent a few years ago, so that on the new self-released H5 he’s not just tough as nails but also surgically precise....
The events of last week were unthinkable until they happened—including the weeks-long closure of Chicago’s beloved live-music venues (along with bars, restaurants, and many other businesses) to slow the spread of COVID-19. Blacks’ Myths, Blacks’ Myths II Bill Nace, Both
In the mid-70s, David Ranney quit his position at the University of Iowa, where he was a tenured professor of urban planning, and moved to Chicago for a job at the Workers’ Rights Center, a free legal clinic for industrial workers run out of a southeast Chicago storefront. When money got tight, Ranney decided to look for work at one of the many factories in the neighborhood. Armed with a made-up work history and a couple of friends willing to act as fake references, he landed a position at a shop that built centrifuges....
AP Photo/Mandel Ngan Breaking: Obama gave a speech last night. Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, amuse, or inspire us. • That Mayor Emanuel will submit an ordinance today to take control of 21 acres of parkland for U. of C.’s bid for the Obama library? —Gwynedd Stuart • About the 109-year-old woman who attributes her longevity to avoiding men? —Aimee Levitt
Q: There’s this boy—he’s 29; I’m 46 and female. We met when we were 23 and 41. I was not and am not into little boys. The Kid chased me, and I turned him down for months—until I got drunk one night and caved. It was supposed to be a one-night stand, but it isn’t anymore. We’ve never been “together,” because the Kid wants kids and happily ever after and all that horseshit, and I don’t (and I’m too old even if I did)....
In next week’s paper I preview the upcoming MCA concerts by Eighth Blackbird, which will premiere an all-new program of commissions by bold composers’ collective Sleeping Giant. These concerts, part of the group’s yearlong residency at the museum, come just a few months after their latest album, Filament (Cedille), which earned them yet another Grammy nomination for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance; Eighth Blackbird have won the award three times so far....
The title town of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri seems like the very model of traditional small-town America, radiating charm and tranquility. Neighbors keep in touch, and the crime rate is so low that the police station shuts down at night. But after the savage rape and murder of a local teenager goes unsolved for seven months, the victim’s fed-up mother, Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand), rents three billboards outside town and uses them to shame the popular police chief, Willoughby (Woody Harrelson)....
What’s the most deeply uncool place you could be forced to hang out in in these wild times? Is it a private elephant ranch operated by the NRA? Nope. Is it a serial masturbators’ support group? You’re wrong. Is it a white supremacist drum circle? Close. It’s Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s private golf club in Palm Beach, Florida. Given the inordinate amount of time President Circus Peanut has spent there and at other golf clubs during his term to date, country clubs carry such a stigma that I wouldn’t bank on them if I were a restaurateur looking to open a fresh concept in a big blue city—and that’s even before you ponder the long history of private clubs that practiced exclusivity based not just on socioecomic disparity but on race and religion too....
If I’ve matured as a critic over the last many years, it’s in coming to realize that criticism isn’t about a relentless search for individual masterpieces but about seeing the connections between works,” writes Dave Kehr in the afterword to Movies That Mattered: More Reviews From a Transformative Decade, a new collection of critical essays he published in the Reader and Chicago magazine between 1975 and 1985. His claim is overly modest—the pieces in this book demonstrate that Kehr always approached criticism this way, whether he knew it or not....
Three-layered flesh” is the translation of the Korean word samgyeopsal, or what English speakers refer to less vividly as pork belly. Meat, fat, and skin stack up as the most popular cut on the grill among Koreans, and you can find it at pretty much every barbecue house in the city and suburbs. What you don’t find very often—the way you would in Korea—are samgyeopsal specialists: operators who focus on belly, capitalizing on a national-size appetite for crispy, spitting-hot mouthfuls of pig belly, dredged through salty sesame oil and wrapped in lettuce leaves with a smear of funky soybean paste and a sliver of griddled garlic....
Some people might be surprised to learn that Little Italy is not River North. The sheer volume of new Italian restaurants opening there and on Randolph Street in recent years seems unsustainable, and yet they keep coming. And with historically Italian enclaves like Taylor Street and Heart of Chicago now just pale shadows of themselves, the perception is almost understandable. But the stretch of Harlem Avenue dividing the city from west-suburban Elmwood Park (and thereabouts) has for decades maintained a stronger Italian-American presence than anywhere else in the region....
