Windy Citizens is a new series profiling people we think you should know. The debut Windy Citizen is Chantelle Branch, 38, a domestic violence specialist. This is her story as told to Sarah Nardi. Out of nowhere, he hit me. He hit me so hard that my contact popped out of my eye. And I remember thinking, “Oh my god, I’m driving.” I couldn’t believe he did that. And what’s crazy to me is that I just kept driving....
“You’re not real,” Berenice (Elizabeth Debicki) venomously tells her boyfriend, art critic James Figueras (Claes Bang) in Giuseppe Capotondi’s film The Burnt Orange Heresy. It’s a charge regularly leveled at critics, who are often portrayed as fake, facile parasites—carping wannabes who don’t understand the truth of art. The film dutifully reproduces most of these stereotypes. But it also, almost despite itself, suggests that it’s not critics who are inauthentic, but the labor relationships in which they find themselves....
Carlos Santana is arguably one of the most influential guitarists of all time; born in Jalisco, Mexico, the musician, bandleader, and longtime social activist has been incorporating Mexican, Latin American, and other international sounds into rock ’n’ roll and blues since the mid-60s. Now 72, he’s won practically every prize the music industry has to offer, racking up ten Grammys, three Latin Grammys, a Kennedy Center Honors medallion, a Billboard Lifetime Achievement Award, and more....
This year only six rock albums have topped the Billboard 200 (as of press time, anyway). Two were by aging alt-rock titans (Foo Fighters and Linkin Park) and three were by aging aughties “indie-rockers” working with major-label budgets (LCD Soundsystem, Arcade Fire, and the Killers). The sixth album was the recently released Science Fiction by Brand New, a band that has been thriving on the fringe of the mainstream since 2000....
When the shutdown hit a year ago, the Neo-Futurists were one of the earliest to adapt to creating digital theater. Within days of the stay-at-home order, they were figuring out how to convert their signature late-night hit, The Infinite Wrench (itself born out of Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, the original “30 plays in 60 minutes” show that was reimagined after founder Greg Allen pulled the rights) into an ongoing offering on Patreon....
UPDATE Friday, November 1, 4 PM: Line-up has changed for both concerts and Vivian Girls and Young Guv will not be performing either show. Refunds available at point of purchase; visit the Empty Bottle’s site for more information. Toronto’s Ben Cook is well-known as the front man for early aughts tough-guy hardcore outfit No Warning and as the third guitarist in posteverything punk collective Fucked Up, but the bulk of his discography consists of a seemingly unending stream of multifaceted solo releases under the alias Young Governor, which he often shortens to Young Guv....
Beth King, 44, is deputy director and director of development and communications at Intonation Music, a Bronzeville-based organization that helps Chicago youth make music on their own terms. She believes that music is community, and that community is where meaningful change starts. My father, who is legitimately kind of a con man—when I moved in with him at 13, he was a professional gambler—was so excited. He was like, “Every job in the world is sales....
Jessica Swale’s 1896-set drama should come with a trigger warning. I mean, perhaps I’m projecting, but when an esteemed scholar (“he dines with Darwin, for crissakes!”) starts lecturing on why women are physiologically unfit for education (the brain leaches blood from the reproductive organs) and pronounces educated women a threat to the very foundation of all humanity, I high-key wanted to vault over the front row and punch him in his fucking foundation, even though he was in 19th-century Cambridge University, bedrock of Western education and hardly an outlier in the sciences....
About six months before rapper-producer Kevin Abstract launched wildly popular hip-hop boy band Brockhampton in early 2015, he dropped his debut mixtape, MTV1987. Abstract had tapped a few guests to contribute vocals, including an aspiring pop artist from Chicago’s west suburbs named Jack Larsen—that’s him singing the sublime hook for “27.” Larsen has since joined the roster of Chicago hip-hop label Closed Sessions, and in October it released his ambitious debut album....
This story was originally published by City Bureau on June 5, 2020. Lee was the third of seven detainees who have died after contracting the virus at Cook County Jail. Since then, almost 1,000 Cook County Jail employees and detainees have tested positive for COVID-19; two corrections officers and one court deputy have also died, according to WTTW. Like 98 percent of inmates at Cook County Jail, Lee was awaiting trial....
When the COVID-19 crisis subsides long enough for the concert circuit to start up again, you’ll want to see Chicago electro-R&B duo Drama live. But in the meantime, their new debut LP, Dance Without Me, might just be the record you need to get through your social isolation. An album for sad-but-sexy people everywhere, Dance Without Me continues the lush musical explorations of love and loss that the group began on the sultry, synth-driven 2016 EP Gallows, building urgency with the narratives in their lyrics as well as the tempos of their tracks....
Baltimore improviser Bonnie Jones hasn’t released any recordings of her work for more than half a decade, but before that self-imposed hiatus she made a series of highly abstract efforts using low-budget electronics. Her finest work features distinctive European improvisers including Andrea Neumann and Christine Abdelnour, and implants microscopic gestures and refined interaction within abrasive noisescapes larded with sine tones and garbled feedback. For improvisers, recordings are imperfect documents of a practice that’s meant to be experienced in person, but Jones’s operates with a heightened sense of community ethos....
The Beat Kitchen in Roscoe Village hosts a respectable variety of entertainment in its downstairs performance space, including singer-songwriters, pop-punk bands, a weekly bluegrass brunch, and the recently popular Heavy Metal Yoga sessions. But devoted fans of Chicago’s creative-music scene come to the club for something that happens in its much smaller upstairs room: the long-running Monday-night residency of Extraordinary Popular Delusions. Extraordinary Popular Delusions Almost every Monday, 9 PM, upstairs at Beat Kitchen, 2100 W....
Early this fall I zeroed in on a flash of orange out of the corner of my eye, perched on the gray bark of a large oak tree just off the intersection of Hamlin and Irving Park. I couldn’t believe my luck. It was a Laetiporus sulphureus, aka a chicken of the woods mushroom, fruiting directly across the street from Independence Park. I snapped a photo and confirmed the ID with a fungi-foraging friend, and by lunch I had it sliced up in a saute pan, sizzling in butter....
Clooney (right) in Tomorrowland This post contains spoilers. I suppose such practical questions don’t really matter when you’re dealing with a giant metaphor. In any case, Clooney’s star power helps to keep one from thinking about them too hard, as does the movie’s inherent goodwill. The final twist of Tomorrowland is that Clooney and a new legion of geniuses use their time in the utopian city (which exists in another dimension than ours) to create solutions to problems in our world....
“Raaaah! Aaaaaaaaaah! Raaaaaaaaaayaaaaaaah!” French producer Gautier Serre, aka Igorrr, starts off his 2017 album with three hysterical quivering shrieks that segue into a headbanging death-metal crunch, courtesy of Teloch from Mayhem and drummer Sylvain Bouvier. Over it all, vocalist Laurent Lunoir emits a phlegm-flecked ranting burble—like chipmunks being devoured by piranhas, or vice versa. Serre, who’s also part of the death-metal band Whourkr, has been releasing Igorrr material for 13 years, and Savage Sinusoid (Metal Blade) continues what is by now an expected tradition of unexpected what-the-fuckery....
When the Upright Citizens Brigade announced that it was closing its training center and theater in Manhattan last week, it illustrated the challenges of keeping improv and sketch alive during a pandemic shutdown. But for several institutions and individual instructors, Zooming over to the online world has opened up some new possibilities and also allowed them to keep an income stream coming in as their stages remain dark. Yet only a couple weeks into the process of teaching online, Carrane says he can already see the benefits....
One of the albums I’ve listened to the most so far this year is Much Less Normal, from Vancouver electronic musician LNRDCROY, aka Leonard Campbell. Originally released on Bandcamp and cassette in 2014, the album recently saw a vinyl reissue on Firecracker. I’m not sure if I’d technically count it as a 2015 release, since I heard and saw nothing about it last year, but it likely would have landed on my year-end top ten list for 2014 had I known about it....
courtesy of Nonesuch Records Abelardo Barroso The story sounds partly apocryphal, but who am I to second-guess? Cuban singer Abelardo Barroso—who as a singer in the legendary and deeply influential Septeto Nacional was one of the most important voices behind the island’s son explosion in the 1920s—had fallen on hard times by the mid-’50s. He hadn’t cut a record in 15 years, and it had been even longer since he had a been a creative force....
Thinkstock Privacy shmivacy My sister just flew into Chicago on an evening flight that after one delay and another landed at two in the morning. There were no apologies from the crew as the passengers shuffled off the plane, just as there had been no complimentary food or beverages from the crew either during the flight or during the hour the plane sat fully loaded at its gate in Los Angeles....
