In the Thai horror film Ghost Lab, Thanapob Leeratanakachorn plays Wee, an introverted young residency doctor who spends all of his time at the hospital. When he’s not on duty, he’s quietly caring for his comatose mother. Wee’s coworker Gla, played by Paris Intarakomalyasut, is quite the opposite, a lighthearted prankster and charismatic boyfriend. But every time Wee is at his mother’s bedside, Gla is working on a secret project all his own....
When I interviewed the executive director of what was then Rape Victim Advocates a few years ago, she told me they recommend saying these three things when someone discloses that they’re a survivor of sexual violence: 1) I believe you; 2) it’s not your fault; and 3) you have options and resources. The recent airing of Lifetime’s Surviving R. Kelly documentary series fueled this list of Chicago organizations making that third one a reality for tens of thousands of survivors every year....
As befits a pair of master percussionists at the height of their powers, Hamid Drake and Michael Zerang often play abroad. In recent months Drake has toured Europe with Joe McPhee and the DKV Trio, and played an incendiary duet with Malian xylophonist Aly Keita at the Sant’Anna Arresi Jazz Festival in Sardinia. Zerang has performed gigs in Slovenia and the United Arab Emirates with Karkhana, an electric jazz band that includes musicians from Cairo, Beirut, and Istanbul....
John Corbett’s introduction to the Reader‘s overview of the 2019 Chicago Jazz Festival began: “An old pair of shoes, the United States Postal Service, a loving spouse—when things have been around awhile, it’s all too easy to take them for granted. The Chicago Jazz Festival has been with us for more than four decades.” With any luck your favorite footwear is holding up—and your relationship too, if you’ve got one—because 2020 has been hell on the other two....
“I’ve been a dancer all my life,” says CounterBalance founder Ginger Lane. Trained primarily in ballet, Lane performed, taught, choreographed, and briefly owned a dance studio in Wilmette before a spinal cord injury in 1984 resulted in quadriplegia. Yet Lane did not allow her injury to sideline her. Instead, she channeled her creative energy into independent living and disability rights at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (now the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab), where she provided peer support services and disability awareness training, before joining the independent living center Access Living to coordinate its Arts and Culture Project in 2008....
Welcome to the Reader‘s weekday news brief. Governor Bruce Rauner won’t say if he holds moral responsibility for veterans’ home deaths Governor Bruce Rauner says Illinois is taking “aggressive action” to keep Quincy Veterans’ Home resident, “but he declined to say if he bears any moral responsibility after more cases of Legionnaires’ disease were found at the facility following a 2015 outbreak that left a dozen people dead,” according to the Tribune....
In 2016, Chicago alt-country singer-songwriter Isabel Olive began performing and recording as Half Gringa, a name that refers to her Venezuelan ancestry. As she told music writer Britt Julious in the Trib that year, she wants to use Half Gringa to explore complicated questions about ethnicity and identity. Olive knows she’s unlikely to find easy answers, or even complete ones, and she articulates that on her new self-released second album, Force to Reckon....
By Mike Sula By Ben Joravsky By Melanie LaForce By Hunter Stuart By Ashley Mizuo By Steve Heisler
Who knew that flanking a mutative hip-hop personality with old-school Ghostbusters, Batman, and Wrestlemania pinball machines would feel so right? For the fourth year in a row, Kool Keith—who has also gone by Dr. Octagon, Dr. Dooom, and a slew of other monikers—will descend upon Chicago’s most legit arcade bar for a merry evening of performance and carousing that’s been anointed “A Very Kool Xmas.” Spawned in 2014 from a playful Twitter back-and-forth between Keith and Logan Arcade mensch and owner Jim Zespy, the event has become a bizarro, well-oiled holiday get-down featuring the idiosyncratic and colorful vet rapper working through his deep catalog about the future, space, and the future in space....
As DJ C, Chicago producer Jake Trussell has developed a gift for extracting the DNA from an eclectic variety of pop subgenres, then scrambling their nucleotides and recombining them—and his manipulations not only illuminate the hard-to-see strands connecting parallel musical histories but also encourage anyone with at least two brain cells to dance. Throughout the new Do Radly (Mashit), Trussell experiments with artful, ambitious hybrids: on one track he might blend smoky blues guitar and sparse, electrifying hip-hop drums spiced with dub effects (“Super Flyover”), while on another he’ll combine pinprick garage synths, mellow upright bass, solemn contemporary-classical strings, and a loopy keyboard that sounds like futuristic reggae (“Wellsweep”)....
AP Photo/File RIP Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, amuse, or inspire us. • About the deadly New Year’s Eve stampede in one of the world’s great urban riverfront spaces? —Deanna Isaacs • That Bono may never play guitar again? —Brianna Wellen
The longer jazz exists, the more it broadens and splinters into new directions—a situation that in recent decades has not only made it harder to define but also to determine its high-water marks. That’s one of the reasons I admire the wide net cast by Chris Anderson, who runs the Jazz Art Record Collective, a live-music series that enlists local musicians to interpret some of their favorite albums front to back....
On Halloween, Auburn-Gresham one-stop shop and hip-hop hot spot Exclusive773 handed out bootleg rap CDs by Chicago rapper G. Herbo to trick-or-treaters. That evening owner Steve Wazwaz tweeted a video of fans gleefully clamoring for them. Their enthusiasm went through the roof after one of Wazwaz’s employees casually activated his phone’s video-chat program and turned the screen toward the kids so they could talk to his friend: G Herbo himself. I can’t blame the kids for freaking out....
The Reader’s archive is vast and varied, going back to 1971. Every day in Archive Dive, we’ll dig through and bring up some finds. Until 2005, it was not illegal in the state of Illinois to impersonate a firefighter. And so a band of men in Lake County, led by a former volunteer in the county sheriff’s reserve deputy unit, purchased an old fire truck and incorporated themselves as the Lost Creek Fire Company....
On a Sunday morning at New Home Missionary Baptist Church in South Austin, Reverend Mack McCollum waits till the service is well under way to make his entrance. He knows that pacing himself for the long haul always beats making a reckless rush. A banner in the stairwell of this west-side church celebrates his lengthy career: “60 Years Preaching / 55 Years Pastoring / 85 Years Young.” The building itself, constructed in 1996, is relatively modern, but the music inside on this day is mostly time-honored gospel....
When things got dark in 2020, some bands leaned into anxiety, loneliness, and rage, but others embraced silver linings—especially if COVID shutdowns allowed them a more relaxed pace of life that helped them refocus and pursue quieter personal interests that might otherwise get pushed to the back burner. And if there’s a musical equivalent to the pandemic home-baking movement, Causa Sui’s new Szabodelico would qualify. The Danish four-piece have spent the past 15 years blending heavy psych, desert rock, Krautrock, and more, but with Szabodelico they nod to the mix of jazz, pop, and folk developed by the album’s namesake, legendary Hungarian guitarist Gábor Szabó....
UPDATE Friday, March 12, 10:20 AM: this event has been canceled through March 26 or until further notice. Refunds available at point of purchase for tickets through March 26. A year ago, Second City unveiled Algorithm Nation or the Static Quo, a grim affair featuring simulated onstage shootings and torture as well as an extended rant from an unapologetic female Trump supporter. In its place, we now have the 108th main-stage revue, Do You Believe in Madness?...
Governor Rauner recently professed appreciation for African-American entrepreneurs, which gives us a chance to answer this all-important mathematical question: That led to headlines like this one in the Sun-Times: “Rauner: I’ve done more for African-Americans than ‘any other governor.'” Anyway, at the church, Rauner went on to say that “black entrepreneurs take the risk, but they’ve got extra burdens, more barriers, more discrimination, more lack of access. And we’ve got take that down, eliminate those barriers and get equal access....
Chicago rapper Phil G clearly loves hip-hop’s golden age; his proclivity for skeletal percussion that bisects the air every time a drum beat kicks in and the stylistic elements that have flavored his oeuvre show a predilection for the types of bygone soul and jazz that served as the base for hip-hop’s teenage years. Recently, this affection showed up in the form of Chuck D’s booming voice, courtesy of Public Enemy’s “Shut ’Em Down” (off Apocalypse 91 ....
Whether Augie March turns out to be the hero of his own play, or whether that station is held by the ensemble of strong-willed eccentrics around him, David Auburn’s new stage adaptation of Saul Bellow’s classic The Adventures of Augie March hasn’t quite decided. But in Charles Newell’s production for Court Theatre, he’s on a hugely entertaining and sometimes moving journey. What it lacks in narrative arc, it more than makes up for in heart, wit, and poetry....
