In a strange way it was a blessing when Sunday afternoon’s severe thunderstorms put the Lyrical Lemonade Summer Smash on hold. The Douglas Park festival had barely started its second day—it was around 2 PM, and Maryland rapper IDK had just removed the Reagan mask he’d worn for his grand entrance—when a voice cut through on the PA telling the crowd that the music would stop till the weather cleared up....
Netflix Ellie Kemper as the unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt When 30 Rock aired its final episode in 2013, television lost something special. Tina Fey created a universe in which there was no ceiling for silliness, women could be powerful cynics, and an NBC page could be immortal. More importantly it was a world that was filled a high laughs-per-minute quota while shedding light (sometimes overtly, sometimes subtly) on issues from gender equality to FDA regulations....
Chicagoans is a first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. This week’s Chicagoan is Kelly Baron, 27, “agnostic atheist.” Anyway, I grew up in a godless household. Once, when I was probably four, my cousin, who’s nine years older, took me in her arms and showed me a picture. She said, “This is a man named Jesus, and he lives way up in the sky. He sees everything we do, and he’s here to protect us, and he loves us no matter what....
Chicagoans is a first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. This week’s Chicagoan is Jana Kinsman, 31, the bicycling beekeeper. After that, that’s when I started Bike a Bee. We place beehives in community gardens on the south side. We place the hives in spring, and then we take care of them throughout the year. We own all the equipment, we harvest all the honey, and we sell it....
At one time or another over the years, the City Council’s been inhabited by drunks, philanderers, cokeheads, bribe takers, wire wearers, and various other miscreants of every race, creed, and color. But in all those years no alderman’s been exiled from his own brood—until now. Refused how? Ramirez-Rosa says his attendance at caucus meetings is as good as that of most of the members who voted to remove him. He suspects the real reason the caucus ousted him is that they were sucking up to the mayor....
Things it would be good to inherit from a famous playwright father: deep industry connections, flawless technique, a broad handle on what being an artist is about. Things it would be less good to inherit from a famous (belligerent, out of touch) playwright father, but which Ella (Amanda Caryl Fink), his actress daughter, is irremediably saddled with in Halley Feiffer’s astonishing play: everything else. Love has strings in this taut, searing two-hander, directed by Cole von Glahn for First Floor Theater....
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....
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?...
In one of Chicago’s most tumultuous 24-hour periods in recent memory, the city withstood a night of momentous civil unrest followed by a day of unsettlingly violent storms. By coincidence, I spent much of the duration listening to an oddly suitable soundtrack: Immersion, the latest full-length by Denver metal trio Primitive Man. Plenty of bands make music that feels overwhelming, but Primitive Man really earn this album’s title, plunging you so deep in the muck you have to dig yourself out....
Norway’s Ulver debuted in 1993 as a howling black-metal outfit, but since then front man and composer Kristoffer Rygg has steered his ship into such different waters you can hardly say it’s going a-Viking anymore. (If you want to hear Ulver at their heaviest since their early days, I’d recommend their collaborations with Sunn O))), 2003’s “Cut WoodEd” and 2014’s Terrestrials.) But almost any questions you could have about the life, times, and journey of this band should be answered in Wolves Evolve, the book companion to their new Flowers of Evil (both via House of Mythology), which is a memoir, scrapbook, and manifesto in one....
When I started watching Tiger King—the hit Netflix series—I was like the rest of you, hooting and howling at the show’s weird and wacky characters. Don’t laugh too much at these characters, folks. They’re not really all that different from the people you’ve been voting for. Not much different than you and me. It’s just that Joe seems a little less frightening than Carole. Which is odd, as he’s the one serving a 22-year sentence for hiring a hit man to kill her....
“Can’t a black man just wanna hang himself for pleasure?” —Darnell in Hang Man Except, we quickly find out, this isn’t a lynching. Not exactly, anyway. It seems the black man hanging from the tree—a guy named Darnell, residing until that moment in what the script calls a “a shit town in Mississippi”—gets off on autoerotic asphyxiation, i.e., masturbating while he strangles. He’s done it many times before in the solitude of the woods, where he’s beyond the reach of the people whose money he’s gambled away and, per Portnoy, the mother who drives him nuts enough to seek release in dangerous sex....
Of all the crystalline moments I cherish in Princess Cyd, which is playing this week at the Gene Siskel Film Center, one particular shot stands out: Miranda Ruth (Rebecca Spence), a novelist in her 50s, is walking out to sunbathe in her backyard, wearing a purple swimsuit she hadn’t remembered owning for years; by her side is her 17-year-old niece, Cydney (Jessie Pinnick), who’s staying with her for a couple weeks....
Not only is Illinois facing a shortage of surgical masks and respirators, so is the entire world. Bulk purchases of face masks have left many hospitals without the tools to effectively protect themselves and their patients. Those at the front lines—nurses, doctors, and health care workers—need this protective gear in order to reduce the risk and spread of COVID-19. A few days ago, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a piece that suggested health-care personnel can create homemade masks as a crisis response to the shortage....
