AP Would MLK approve of closing libraries in his honor? The Chicago Public Library wants you to know that it will not be open on January 19. Martin Luther King Day is a federal holiday, so it’s also being observed in places like Evanston and Oak Park. (King’s actual birthday is January 15, but the holiday is always the third Monday of the month.) Evanston and Oak Park libraries, however, will be open....
King Ripple, a 2015 psychedelic-horror short film starring Keith Stanfield (Short Term 12, Straight Outta Compton) and directed by DePaul University sophomore Luke Jaden, is one of several student-directed shorts boosted by the public television series Film School Shorts. The weekly half-hour program, which begins airing its fourth season on Chicago’s WTTW 11 this Sunday, is the exclusive online distributor of King Ripple and The Listing, another of Jaden’s shorts, as well as several other films that “push the boundaries of broadcast....
If the 30s are the new 20s, and the 20s are but an extended adolescence, then we may never have to grow up at all if we live long enough. Sam and Leo—”Team FatGay,” as they term themselves—are doing their darnedest to steer us to that brave new world. These thirtysomethings stay up all night eating Chinese takeout, popsicles, and cornflakes; watch Top Chef and Grey’s Anatomy; play Super Mario; and lip-synch their way through choreography from Sister Act II....
Chicago’s Like Rats have been at it for more than a decade. Consisting of current and former members of earth-shaking metal and hardcore acts such as Weekend Nachos, Hate Force, and High Priest, the band started as a brutal, tough-guy hardcore act. But by their second full-length, 2016’s II, they’d begun to incorporate overtly heavy tones and death-grunt vocals into their powerviolence-leaning punk. And the brand-new Death Monolith (Hibernation Release) feels like the band just threw up their hands and said, “Fuck it, we’re a death-metal band now!...
Rappers Klevah Knox and TRUTH, known collectively as Mother Nature, have worked tirelessly to ascend through the Chicago scene over the past few years. COVID-19 threw a gigantic roadblock in their path—the same way it did for almost anyone who isn’t a billionaire using a society-shifting pandemic to get billions of dollars richer—but the duo’s labor has continued to bear fruit. Last year Mother Nature worked for the first time with venerated local hip-hop label Closed Sessions, releasing an EP called Portalz....
Wilmette native Kristine Flaherty, aka rapper K. Flay, had to leave home to find inspiration in another onetime local: Liz Phair. Last year Flaherty told Billboard that when she discovered Exile in Guyville in the late 2000s, it introduced her to a universe of alternative rock acts fronted by women “who are such bad asses—and not being bad asses for the sake of it, just being themselves and saying something and standing behind something....
It’s month eight of the pandemic, and while some might be wishfully thinking about enjoying a drink from their favorite bar or ordering their favorite meal in person in the hopefully not-too-distant future, others are waiting for when they can indulge in pleasures that are harder to order to-go. “Yes, they’re about sex,” says Gary Wasdin, executive director of the Leather Archives & Museum. “We don’t run from that, we don’t hide from that because, you know, sex is awesome....
ARTIST: Plastic Crimewave SHOW: Dead Meadow, Plastic Crimewave Syndicate, and Killer Moon at Double Door on Tue 5/17 MORE INFO: Crimewave’s Reader archive
After noticing trash cans overflowing with furniture and school supplies on move-out day at the University of Michigan, Ian Vamossy was amazed to discover what others left behind. “I found working iPads and iPhones, bags and bags of clothes, ceramics, tools, knickknacks, unopened food,” he says. Since leaving Ann Arbor and arriving in Logan Square, the 23-year-old has continued to find treasure—silver jewelry, antique furniture, a busted Marcel Breuer Cesca chair (retail $1,595)....
Marcos Hernández is a restless person, his speech rapid and his hands continuously busy. He and three friends—Juan Herrera, Carolina Duarte, and Tonatiuh Ayala—chat around a conference table under fluorescent lights in what would look like a nondescript office space were it not for the raised platform in one corner, where a drum set and other bits of music gear hint at the sound and sociability once hosted here. On a warm Sunday afternoon in May, I’ve joined them on the second floor of a former commercial office building adjoining what used to be a metal-recycling business at 3200 S....
October’s Triple Double (Firehouse 12), a fantastic sextet album from drummer Tomas Fujiwara, includes a piece called “For Alan” that’s largely a duet between the bandleader and drummer Gerald Cleaver—but it opens with a recording the 39-year-old Fujiwara made when he was just ten. That recording includes a snippet of a lesson he was taking from master drummer Alan Dawson, who’s best known for his work with saxophonists Booker Ervin and Sonny Rollins....
For the past decade or so, there’s been a heavy influx of gnarly rawk bands from down under who know their dark Aussie-punk history. Contemporary groups such as Deaf Wish, Amyl & the Sniffers, and No Sister seem to have absorbed into their own DNA the damaged sonic splatter of their fucked-up Oz ancestors: the Cosmic Psychos, the Scientists, Feedtime, and the godfathers of them all, the Boys Next Door/the Birthday Party....
Chicago has grown into a full-on hub for summer music festivals. We’re home to some of the biggest and most beloved fests on the planet, and every weekend from late spring to early fall you can find outdoor music happening on city streets big and small. But why should the warm months get all the fun? Six years ago, the folks at the Empty Bottle had the genius idea to host some bands outdoors in the frigid cold of February, and what seemed like a surefire bomb has grown into one of their most popular annual events....
The Handsome Family September 18 Chance the Rapper’s Magnificent Coloring Day September 24 Lyric Opera opens its season with a new production of Das Rheingold, the first work in Richard Wagner’s mighty four-opera Ring cycle. It will be followed over the next three seasons by new productions of each of the others, culminating, in the spring of 2020, in an orgiastic undertaking: the presentation of the full cycle three times in three weeks....
Pat Badani’s seven-day meal plan includes a recipe for greens that calls for “a measure of moral evaluation.” She recommends that, on day two, readers serve a particular protein when “the wriggling stops.” On Tuesday, when it’s time for “Cultures and Ferments,” the directions read: She connects her attraction to the most popular room in the house to her childhood growing up in a large Italian family in Buenos Aires that gathered each Sunday after church when she and her two brothers helped their Nonna roll out and shape the gnocchi before lunch....
Fish & Cat Girlhood, one of the more talked-about French dramas at last year’s Cannes film festival, begins a weeklong run at Gene Siskel Film Center on Friday; written and directed by Celine Sciamma (Tomboy), it focuses on bad girls in an African-immigrant community on the outskirts of Paris. Check out our review here, plus our review of Fish & Cat, a slasher-cum-narrative-puzzle-box that opens this year’s Festival of Films From Iran at Film Center....
The news, released in the run-up to Monday’s inauguration, that Illinois’s new governor, J.B. Pritzker, will be doubling the salaries of his top aides with money from his own pocket brought to mind a few things I heard at the MLA convention, held here in Chicago earlier this month. Well, right after it brought to mind the phrase “banana republic.” But a couple of big open questions hung over the discussion: How well do online students do in comparison to those who’ve had traditional, in-person teaching?...
Chicago foursome Peel play the kind of swashbuckling rippers that demand to be called “rock ’n’ roll” (don’t even think about using the whole “and” in there) and that sound like they could’ve poured out of a jukebox four or five decades ago, depending on the tune. At least, that’s the case on their new self-released EP, Never Not Dead, which they celebrate tonight. The recording follows Peel’s second album, September’s Goes Bananas (get it?...
Foundational British street-punk band Cock Sparrer formed in 1972, but their most recent album, 2017’s Forever, shows the troupe still at the peak of their powers. (Colin McFaull’s voice is roughly a half-octave lower than in the band’s early days, but that’s hardly a quibble.) Aside from Blitz and the Cockney Rejects, the majority of the oi! and street punk that poured out of the UK during the Thatcher era has aged reprehensibly, and from the vantage point of 2019 seems perilously apolitical....
If there’s a harder-working local band than country quartet Dan Whitaker & the Shinebenders, Gossip Wolf doesn’t know ’em! After honky-tonkin’ through one of their two-hour Saturday sets at Cole’s, this wolf is usually tonked out—especially regrettable when Dan and the band go on to play from 10 PM till 1 AM at Bernice’s Tavern in Bridgeport the same night! As if their endurance didn’t do the trick, the ‘Benders prove they’re the real deal with the new LP Truck Ride, which includes bouncing, steel-guitar-laced instrumental “Stony Island Stomp” and barreling barroom belter “Booze Is Good....
