Friday, June 8 Front Porch Stage Wrigley Square 11 AM Blues in the Schools with Katherine Davis, Tim Gant, Tino Cortes, Alan Burroughs, and Stone Academy students 12:15 PM Jimmy Burns solo 1:30 PM Jimmy Johnson duo 2:45 PM Lurrie Bell & Eddie Taylor Jr. with the Bell Dynasty 4 PM Guy King solo 5:30 PM Tail Dragger 6:45 PM Rockin’ Johnny Burgin 8 PM Giles Corey Crossroads Stage...
When Mike Bush was 12, all knees and soft eyes, he won a scholarship to attend youth classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. It was summer 1968, hot and angry and hopeful, and while it would end with young anti-war protesters getting beaten with billy clubs by Chicago police at the Democratic National Convention downtown, it began with Mike, a young Black aspiring artist from the Wild Hundreds by way of Memphis, slinging his bag of paper and pencils over his shoulder and stepping out into the sun....
Michael Gebert Joe Woodel at Husky Hog Bar-B-Que Yesterday I talked with Husky Hog Bar-B-Que owner Joe Woodel about how he got into competition barbecue—the romance of competing mano a mano with smoke and fire. Well, today’s more about the gritty reality of having a food truck and a stand-alone restaurant and trying to make a living making barbecue. Husky Hog is in Bridgeport, a rare example on the south side of Tennessee-style barbecue, which doesn’t revolve around rib tips and hot links like most south-side barbecue....
One of my last great group restaurant meals was in February. All the essential elements for a swell time were present: a long, loaded table occupied by interesting, (often) hilarious people; a nearly empty dining room that afforded us the company of the owners, who treated us like their own; an array of some 13 astonishing dishes, paired with about half as many BYO wines (the likes of which I’ll probably never taste again)....
Following the tragic nightclub shooting in Orlando, Chicago’s upcoming Pride Month celebrations feel more significant than ever. While it’s been difficult to find joy between vigils and crucial discussions about safety, the LGBTQ community has always known how to celebrate in spite of violence. Here’s a list of events happening around the city that offer solidarity, sun, sand, and some seriously good snackage. Chicago Pride Parade Chicago Fire star Monica Raymund serves as grand marshal of this year’s parade, which stretches between Lakeview and Uptown and showcases 150 different participants....
A little more than two years ago, the Chicago Tribune published an editorial urging the City Colleges of Chicago to sell its public television station, WYCC, channel 20. “Everyone remembers the disastrous parking meter deal. This isn’t like that,” the Tribune concluded. But on November 27, the station went dark. What happened? This is significant in retrospect because, as the bids for WYCC dropped below $100 million and then much lower, City Colleges didn’t drop out but like the proverbial frog in the pot over a fire, hung in till it was cooked....
Historically, residents and aldermen in wealthier north- and northwest-side wards have been more vocal about pushing for bike lanes and racks than their south- and west-side counterparts. That’s one reason why the lion’s share of cycling infrastructure has been concentrated north of Madison. “In the past, the city’s philosophy has been that the communities that already bike the most deserve the most resources,” Slow Roll Chicago cofounder Oboi Reed (now a Streetsblog board member) told me at the time....
My 88-year-old grandfather Jose Garcia only has two pictures from his childhood. Both are with his older cousin Carlos, whom he affectionately calls his brother. Born in Mexico in 1930, my grandfather never met his father, and, when he was still very young, his mother left him in the care of her sister. His Aunt Margarita raised him, but it was Carlos who made sure he stayed in school and out of trouble....
As we stood astride bicycles in the shadow of Alison Saar’s Monument to the Great Northern Migration last week, Bronzeville-based transportation advocate Ronnie Matthew Harris, 47, told me that community organizing is in his blood. Go Bronzeville started as an initiative of the Chicago Department of Transportation, along with similar programs in Pilsen, Garfield Park, Albany Park, and Edgewater. The programs educate residents on how sustainable transportation can help them save time and money and improve their health....
Performance artist and self-described “creative practitioner” Baraka de Soleil addresses the distinct and intersecting legacies of race and disability, often by using dance as a tool to explore the aesthetics of each. Tomorrow (Friday, February 19) at Gallery 400 he will conduct “The ‘Good’ Body (Chicago Edition),” a lecture presented by Bodies of Work, an arts and culture organization within the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Department of Disability and Human Development, as part of its “Exposure” series....
In 2012, a teenage Claire’s employee from Daytona Beach, Florida, going by the X-Men-inspired alias Kitty Pryde released “Okay Cupid,” a dreamy and dreary cloud-rap track that quickly went viral. Just months later Kitty (the Pryde was quickly dropped) started collaborating with fellow Internet hip-hop sensation Riff Raff, and by 2013 she was touring with Danny Brown (at the peak of his XXX-era hype) in support of her excellently quirky and catchy D....
I’m often in the position of introducing Chicago to New Yorkers who’ve never before spent time here. Writer friends land on a book tour; old college pals pass through for family weddings; publishing colleagues come by on business. You can have a good sense of Manhattan even if you’ve never set foot there—the movies have seen to that—but Chicago isn’t as familiar to the outsider. Watching ChiRaq, The Blues Brothers, and Perfect Strangers in quick succession won’t do a thousandth of what Woody Allen accomplishes in an opening credits sequence....
At first glance, the premise of Bob and Tobly McSmith’s cruise-ship-ready cash grab sounds like the sort of ironic musical-theater spoof that would be conceived by the irreverent and clever sketch writers and improvisers over at iO or the Annoyance—maybe for $10 a ticket in a late-night slot. And in the hands of those kids who are discovering the iconic series two decades after the fact, there’s probably some legitimate comedic material to be wrested from nostalgia for both the 90s and the heyday of must-see-TV network sitcoms....
The first public comment at February’s City Council meeting wasn’t about vaccine access, or the Office of Inspector General report on the Chicago Police Department’s brutality during last summer’s protests, or even the mayor’s decision to ease business capacity and social distancing restrictions while the pandemic raged. Over 100,000 Indian Americans live in Chicago and Hadden’s 49th Ward is one of the most diverse in the country. The ward overlaps with the Devon Avenue area, where a large proportion of the city’s South Asian Americans live and work....
When Robbin Carroll bought a home in Englewood with plans to turn it into a center for promoting peace, she was met with skepticism from some in a community that had been hit hard by poverty and violence. She did that in part by hiring a local contractor not only to fix up the house but to train Englewood residents in carpentry. “I couldn’t sit back and watch people in this city be OK with poverty and violence day after day,” said Carroll, who worked in jewelry sales before becoming a yoga teacher and starting I Grow Chicago....
Before cofounding Chicago ska band Heavy Manners, singer Kate Fagan released the 1980 new-wave single “I Don’t Wanna Be Too Cool” b/w “Waiting for the Crisis”—a bouncy, rollicking call-out of drugged-up hipster trash backed with one of the Reagan era’s catchiest paranoia jams about the military-industrial complex. After the record’s second pressing burned in a house fire, it became something of a collector’s item, and this week Brooklyn label Manufactured Recordings is finally reissuing the seven-inch (with two unreleased bonus tracks)....
T here’s fastback Mustangs, there’s tight pants, there’s Afros, there’s ancient Dutch farmers walking along with palsy . . . it’s the human comedy,” says Paul Petraitis. He’s describing the 45 minutes of film he and John McNaughton shot in 1970 in their south-side neighborhood of Roseland and have recently started digitizing. “Fifty years in production and we just started last Thursday,” their editor, Bob Brandel, jokes. These 45 minutes will be the centerpiece of a documentary the three old friends hope will explore Chicago’s history and culture and the way race and economics have affected the city....
Sue Kwong One of the greatest pleasures of reading is not just the act of getting a chance to explore someone else’s brain and someone else’s world for a while but also emerging from a book and arguing about it with somebody else. The Seminary Coop was, last Saturday, kind enough to give some of the Greatest Chicago Book tournament judges and readers a forum for an hour-long argument....
QI found this in an online sex ad: “Straight guy with an addiction to massive cocks in my ass.” This “straight guy” went on to mention his girlfriend. Can a person really identify as straight while wanting to be fucked by men? I understand that straight guys can like ass play too, but it’s not like he wants to be pegged by his girlfriend or use a dildo on himself. He’s straight-up (heh-heh) looking for hung dudes to fuck his ass....
The cover art for theMIND’s new album, Don’t Let It Go to Your Head, shows a young Black couple kissing with plastic bags over their heads. Photographed by Nolis Anderson, it’s a take on René Magritte’s 1928 surrealist painting The Lovers, which shows two people—one in a jacket and tie, the other in a top that exposes what could be a white shoulder—kissing through white cloth wrapped completely around their heads....
