As Pride Month unfurls amid plague and long-overdue global upheaval, you have to ask yourself one question: What would Marsha P. Johnson do? Get your dollars out You don’t get to look away The elephant in the room “I tell stories about growing up queer with Mexican and Guatemalan parents, sometimes with Spanglish. I’ve had little old ladies say to me, ‘I didn’t understand every word you said, but I know exactly what you were talking about....
CST Media Peter Lisagor Speaking personally, the Headline Club’s Lisagor Awards dinner has become a big deal in recent years because I get to stand in front of the crowd with my friend Len Aronson, say a few words, and make a presentation. Applause rings in our ears. Last Friday’s dinner marked the fourth time that we’ve given a Chicago journalist the Anne Keegan Award for Distinguished Journalism, which Len founded to honor his late wife, a former Tribune columnist....
Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago.
Ghostemane is a white rapper from Florida who was reared on punk, metalcore, and other strains of aggressive music that had some modicum of accessibility and a fragment of crossover success. In a June interview with taste-making rap podcast No Jumper, he said, “The fans of my stuff now would have been fans of the Devil Wears Prada or Bring Me the Horizon—Myspace shit back in the day—it’s like the same audience....
Q: I’m an early 30s hetero woman in a monogamous relationship with my mid-30s hetero guy. We’ve been together ten years, married seven, no kids. We have a lot of fun—traveling, shared hobbies, mutual friends, etc. We have sex fairly regularly, and it’s not bad. However, his primary sexual fetish and main turn-on is furry porn—namely, cartoon images. He doesn’t self-identify as a furry; he doesn’t have a fur suit or fursona....
Gossip Wolf has loved local rockers Lifestyles (featuring members of Lil Tits, Touched by Ghoul, and Foul Tip) since they released a scorching demo in 2014—at the time, this very column described it as a “Babes in Toyland-style alt-rock apocalypse.” Last week the band dropped their debut full-length, Friends, via Bandcamp, and next week Chicago label Automatic Recordings releases the LP. The album has this wolf feeling “Sub Pop grunge in a sweaty-assed basement” vibes—it even closes with a song from the perspective of suicide cult Heaven’s Gate, who famously tried to catch a UFO ride off earth from San Diego in 1997....
Tue 11/8: Someoddpilot (1539 N. Damen) hosts Election Party on Mars, a fitting way to end this campaign season of extraterrestrial madness. The intergalactic-themed dance party features drinks, snacks, survival kits, and a champagne toast when the results are announced. 6-11 PM 11/10-2/20: The Museum of Science and Industry (5700 S. Lake Shore) unveils “Where the Wild Things Are: The Works of Maurice Sendak,” featuring 50 original works of art by the beloved artist and author....
For no reason other than that everything sucks right now, why not indulge in some nostalgia? Victory Auto Wreckers (and the story behind this classic ad) And, of course, the king of the car dealers, Bob Rohrman
Q: My wife got drunk at a vacation house we rented with a bunch of friends and cheated on me with my best friend in the hot tub. They didn’t have sex but they did other things. I wasn’t there but there were eight other people in the hot tub and the jets were on so no one else saw what was going on “under the water.” My wife told me about it afterward and I was hurt but also kind of excited....
In May 2012 the Chicago Department of Transportation released its “Chicago Forward” agenda, including the stated goal of eliminating all traffic deaths by 2022. That target was inspired by the international Vision Zero movement, which began in Sweden in 1997. It’s based on the notion that road fatalities and serious injuries aren’t simply unavoidable “accidents” but rather outcomes that can be prevented through engineering, education, and enforcement. But it seems likely the devil will be in the details when it comes to ensuring Chicago’s safety program is a net positive for all residents, particularly those in low- to moderate-income communities of color....
Currently just 144 Lathrop units are occupied. But remaining residents and allied neighborhood groups have continued to challenge the CHA’s redevelopment plans, drawing public attention to the importance of preserving the large stock of family-friendly public housing units in an integrated neighborhood with ample job opportunities, access to transportation, and good schools. Another point of concern is the possibility that project-based vouchers—a five-to-20 year contract between a private owner and a housing authority to maintain a privately owned unit as public housing—will make up the bulk of the replacement units....
The alternative-rock boom of the 1990s resulted in lots of outre musicians landing major-label deals that would’ve been unthinkable in any decade before or since. Chicago four-piece Cupcakes, who emerged in 1996, both exemplify and transcend that era. On their sole album, 2000’s Cupcakes, released on Dreamworks, they mold arena rock bombast, power-pop hooks, and dance ecstasy into freewheeling jams whose clean polish glistens even when the songwriting doesn’t quite shine....
Q: Here’s a non-COVID question for you: I’m a queer white female in a monogamish marriage. I vote left, I abhor hatred and oppression, and I engage in activism when I can. I’m also turned on by power differentials: authority figures, uniforms, hot guys doing each other. Much to my horror, this thing for power differentials plus too many WW2 movies as a kid has always meant that for my brain (or for my pussy) Nazis are hot....
You’re right, UITM: Mary shouldn’t have hidden this from you. But she assumed—incorrectly, as it turned out—you would have a problem with those texts. It was a reasonable assumption on her part, since swapping flirty texts with a stranger is regarded as “out of bounds” by most. While this makes Mary’s failure to disclose look a little worse, we live in a culture that defines absolutely everything as cheating—don’t get me started on the idiocy that is “micro-infidelities” and the idiots pushing that toxic concept—and as a consequence, people not only lack perspective (oh, to live in a world where everyone regarded harmless flirtation as no big deal!...
Gossip Wolf got hooked on local experimental pop trio White Ppl late last year via their debut single, “Ilovemybb.” Rapper-producer Ano Ba and singers Elly Tier and Cado San (none of whom is white) transform bits of rap, indie rock, outre dance, folk, and soul into enchanting songs. On Saturday, April 13, White Ppl play the Whistler’s monthly Brasstax series alongside the DJs who organize it. The free show starts at 10 PM, and the Brasstax crew are accepting donations to raise funds for Hoist Fest—a daylong event at Subterranean on Sunday, May 26, where White Ppl will play with Rich Jones, Jordanna, Jovan Landry, and more....
Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Monday, November 28, 2016. CTA will extend the Red Line south by five miles in a $75 million project A project that’s been talked about forever may actually be close to happening now. The CTA will spend $75 million to extend the Red Line south by more than five miles, according to the Tribune. The transit agency and Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced the plans Sunday....
It’s hard to describe the otherworldly (and interspecies) connection that comes with holding a squawking hen, but in a year of no touching or socializing, it was a defining high point. I discovered Nettelhorst Elementary School’s chicken coop on a neighborhood walk and dove headfirst into the community of “Chicken Tenders” that care for these nine charismatic ladies (names include Popcorn, Princess Fluffy Butt, Regina George, and Rosie). They were born in March 2019, the coop broke ground a month later, and Lake- view hasn’t been the same since....
At any given time I probably have about a half dozen or so Co-op Hot Sauces in my kitchen. Since 2004 Mike Bancroft, founder of the youth arts education center Co-op Image (and Sauce and Bread Kitchen), has pushed an endless and inventive variety of hot ferments to support his cause. Whenever I run across them I can’t stop myself from stashing one in the old shopping basket. Bancroft is a prodigious collaborator too, something I hinted at in the headnote to the Lime Chili Munchy Jax recipe he gave us for this week’s Cannabis Issue....
I can’t say I love everything I’ve heard about the premise of the new musical that’ll premiere at Lyric Opera this week: it sounds like a journalist is the major villain in the piece. The point being that the south side is more than, and different from, the picture most people have of it from what they hear or read in the media.
For a long time I thought the name of this local psychedelic-sludge powerhouse was related to the “bog people”—those scarily well-preserved ancient corpses that turn up from time to time in peat bogs in Europe, often baring signs of violent deaths that have made some archaeologists think they were human sacrifices or executed criminals. Which is pretty damn metal. It turns out that’s not the case at all; their name means” Faces of the God,” using the Polish word for god....
