Posts

When I rode the Red Line from Uptown to downtown during the morning rush last week, my rail car was as packed as a sardine can by the time we left the Belmont stop. Damon Lockett, a copywriter who commutes daily from Edgewater to River North, told me that overcrowded trains are typical during peak hours nowadays. The flyover, and the rest of the modernization plan, recently got the federal go-ahead after passing an environmental review by the Federal Transit Administration....

Basing a punk band on an obscure character invented by a Canadian comedy troupe whose criminally underrated half-hour sketch show went off the air in the mid-90s seems like a bit of a stretch, to say the least. But Chicago guitarist Andy Slania went ahead with it anyway. Today Slania operates Stonewalled Records, which released the Eradicator’s self-titled ten-inch in 2015 (the project’s debut) as well as its self-titled full-length in October....

Q: I’m a cis bi guy in my 40s who doesn’t have a lot of experience with other men. I’m happily married to a wonderful woman who knows I’m bi, and while we’re presently monogamous, we’ve talked about opening things up. If that happens, I’d like to casually hook up with a guy once in a while, but I’m a little anxious about gay hookup culture. 4. Is the “top shortage” I’ve read about a few times a real thing?...

When Barack Obama was elected in 2008, a lot of us who gathered in Grant Park thought a new day had dawned. It turned out the old day had plenty of life left in it. Millions of people who thought Obama’s election was a terrible thing to happen to America continue to think this eight years later, and they’ve constructed elaborate, fictitious justifications for this belief: Obama was born in Indonesia, and he’s a Muslim socialist, he has a two-part plan to disarm America and conquer it from within....

For 30 years now Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin has been escaping into the early cinema, shooting and editing his eerie, eccentric comedies in the style of silent films and primitive talkies from around the world. Archangel (1990), his sophomore feature, draws on the heroic imagery of the Soviet cinema; The Saddest Music in the World (2003), his biggest critical success, recaptures the rickety magic of the earliest screen musicals; and his recent triumph The Forbidden Room (2015) is a fever dream of reheated Saturday-matinee genres—the submarine drama, the jungle adventure....

Q: My husband left the picture recently, and I’m now a single mom supporting an infant in Toronto. I work a retail job and am drowning financially. I hooked up with a guy I met on Tinder, and I didn’t warn him that I’m still nursing because I didn’t even think of it. Luckily, he really got off on it—so I was spared the awkwardness of “Eww, what is coming out of your tits?...

The world of quarantine is paradoxical, with our immediate environments smaller and more constrained even as the big existential issues grow ever more ominous. What does it mean to live, to love, to dream in such circumstances? Just seeing a crowd of people gathering on a sunny day in West Town’s Walsh Park is enough to trigger nostalgia in a time of pandemic. But the show also begins with the cast giving a rapid-fire rundown of “everything we remember that we love about Chicago....

Poet, singer, and performer Marvin Tate has been a steady presence in Chicago’s artistic fringe for several decades, working with Leroy Bach’s art-funk band Uptighty back in the 90s while also fronting his own multidisciplinary omnibus D-Settlement. But I’d never paid him much more than passing attention until I caught him a few times in Mike Reed’s Flesh & Bone project, in which his presence, sense of rhythm, and language grabbed me by the throat....

One of the most spectacular characteristics of Detroit’s Protomartyr is just how spectacularly understated they remain as a postpunk force, even with the recent release of their fourth full-length and Domino Records debut, Relatives in Descent. Subtlety in postpunk is par for the course—the subgenre is essentially defined by its minimalistic structures, exercises of negative space, and detached nihilism—but on their new record, Protomartyr’s sound is giant without ever verging on arrogance....

Brian Jackson / Sun-Times Media Mayor Rahm Emanuel, accompanied by police superintendent Garry McCarthy, discusses his crime-fighting strategies with state legislators in September. During his first campaign for mayor four years ago, Rahm Emanuel kept talking about police. But within weeks of taking office, Emanuel stopped talking about hiring cops. Instead, over the course of his first term, the number of officers on the force dropped from about 10,900 to 10,600....

In Holy Trinity Church School’s massive basement, rendered whimsically creepy by cheap Christmas lights, tangled tree branches, utilitarian scaffolding, and immense translucent plastic curtains, veteran Chicago director Dado turns David Lang’s Pulitzer-winning choral work—based on Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Match Girl”—into an ethereal, decentered performance installation for Facility Theatre. For 40 tantalizing, indecipherable minutes, about a dozen silent performers engage in repetitive, enigmatic actions, both concrete and abstract, while eight vocalists sing about an abused, Christ-like beggar girl who freezes to death on New Year’s Eve....

In a city whose theater scene is rooted in an “ensemble” aesthetic, it’s rare to see a local actor given above-the-title billing, as is the case with Porchlight Music Theatre’s presentation of “Hollis Resnik in Sunset Boulevard.” But the marketing choice is apt in this case: it takes a local star of Resnik’s talent, skill, and cachet—honed and earned over almost 40 years of memorable performances—to artistically and commercially justify a revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s mediocre 1993 musicalization of Billy Wilder’s classic 1950 film noir....

When British novelist Evelyn Waugh caught the first London production of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, he described it as “an intolerable Irish-American play about a family being drunk and rude to one another in half-darkness.” Sounds like your typical Thanksgiving dinner to me. The home is open to the public nowadays. Last summer, as a matter of fact, I took the tour, following an incongruously cheerful guide as she rattled off her spiel about the building’s history as a habitat for addiction and limitless sadness....

“I knew I was bound to get a few pictures in today, so I had to bust a fit,” admits Jason Bell Jr., a 19-year-old fashion student and entrepreneur from Bloomington, Indiana. Dressed in a coat handed down by his grandfather, he considers his style “a work in progress”: “clean and comfortable, like a dapper grandpa. It’s the thin line between old fashion and this generation’s style,” Bell says. The apparel merchandising student at Indiana University was in Chicago to direct a photo shoot for Urban Genius, a lifestyle brand he created in high school with friends Drelen Williams and Derreke Johnson....

This award-winning 2008 musical by Brian Yorkey (book and lyrics) and Tom Kitt (music) began its life as a 10-minute rock musical, Feeling Electric, that was inspired by a Dateline NBC story about electroconvulsive therapy. (One of the most moving parts of the show remains the dramatization through music and dance of how it feels to experience ECT.) Despite all the Drama Desk Awards, Tonys, and the Pulitzer, the show has not transcended its roots as a kinda cool, kinda experimental rock musical based on a kinda weird premise: getting in the head of someone struggling with bipolar disorder who eventually receives ECT....

As Peter Margasak pointed out in his recent feature on Third Coast Percussion, classical percussion ensembles are a relatively recent phenomenon. So when someone writes a strong new piece, percussionists are liable to talk. “Ghost Music was written during 2007 and 2008,” explains Sargent. “I was working on several pieces for solo percussion and percussion ensemble around that time for ringing metal instruments and became especially interested in the sonic signatures of small bells: by listening to them struck in different orders for long periods of time, details of their sonorities started to have a real familiarity and causality in the ear....

Michael Gebert Antique cars have only one place to go for a dog, Superdawg. One hot dog in Chicago towered over all the others. Actually two hot dogs, both towering over Milwaukee Avenue near Devon: Superdawg, the Tarzan-dressed 12-foot-tall hot dog with glowing eyes, and his skirted female companion. They were nicknamed “Maurie and Flaurie,” which by an amazing coincidence happened to be the names of the couple who owned Superdawg....

This past weekend Pilsen welcomed its third record store in a year: Shady Rest Vintage & Vinyl, at 1659 S. Throop. Owners Nuntida Sirisombatwattana and Peter Kepha, a longtime couple, officially opened the shop Saturday. They’re also longtime vinyl collectors, and knew the ins and outs of crate digging before they met. Prior to finding a permanent storefront, they’d sell their wares at record fairs—which increasingly exhausted them. “I would pretty much carry the entire store with us,” Kepha says....

This weekend, Pilsen’s Thalia Hall hosts Levitation Chicago, the second edition of the midwestern satellite of the Texas-based festival formerly known as Austin Psych Fest. From Thursday, March 10, through Saturday, March 12, no fewer than 18 of the freakiest and most far-out acts around will grace Thalia’s stage. Reader writers have covered some of the festival’s performers already (including Israeli shoegazers Vaadat Charigim, scuzz-rock pioneers Royal Trux, and German experimental collective Faust), but they’ve only scratched the surface of these massive lineups....

Neither Tom Selleck nor Steve Guttenberg nor Ted Danson have anything on this crew of 19th-century Sierra gold miners, who are unexpectedly thrust into fatherhood after a vagabond dies in their cabin shortly after giving birth. Isolated from society and unable to track down the boy’s next of kin, romantic partners Old Jake (Michael D. Graham) and Hoke (Fiore Barbini) decide to raise the boy (Henry Lombardo) as their own along with the help of their international, all-male team of laborers....