Q: My wife asked me to write to you about our situation. We’ve been married for fifteen years. I am 50 years old and my wife is a decade younger. We are a heterosexual couple with kids. I am a submissive male and I like to play with my ass using different sized dildos. I enormously enjoy being penetrated with sex toys. A few years ago I introduced the idea of a FLR—female-led relationship—to my wife and she accepted it....
It’s impossible not to think of Muhammad Ali when viewing O.J.: Made in America, filmmaker Ezra Edelman’s absorbing five-part, seven-and-a-half-hour documentary about the rise and fall of O.J. Simpson for ESPN’s venerable 30 for 30 series. When Muhammad Ali died on June 3 at the age of 74, the world didn’t just mourn the loss of a gifted athlete, it also lamented the loss of a fiery political figure. He was someone who spoke truth to power, who through his actions declared that “Black Lives Matter,” who refused to let the world forget that he was both black and Muslim, no matter what the cost....
Where are some Chicago places that you go when you just need to get out of the house and get a change of scenery? When things are falling apart it’s hard not to rush to judgement and anger, or turn off and wallow in sadness. In tough times it’s more important than ever to make sure that we’re taking care of ourselves and centering our emotions in a place of calm and compassion, so that we can then go out and do the good work that our families and communities need us to....
Is this a great time for a new play about how Americans go all NIMBY if someone wants to build a mosque in their neighborhood? But Khoury didn’t anticipate that by the time his play opened the likely Republican presidential nominee would be announcing that “Islam hates us.” —Playwright Jamil Khoury “Each playwright got the same photo as a starting point,” says Khoury, who’s Syrian on his father’s side and Slovak-Polish on his mother’s....
Courtesy Steven McClellan McClellan and his ill-fated petition Steven McClellan was a political neophyte when he began canvassing the 43rd Ward this fall talking to residents about community issues and collecting signatures for his campaign petition. “I was afraid of doing anything illegal,” he says now. “I thought I could go to jail. I made sure I did it the correct way so there would be no issues.” He was careful to ask all the signers if they were registered voters and if they’d already signed another petition because duplicate signatures don’t count....
Swiss trombonist Samuel Blaser lets his curiosity and versatility flow from project to project, whether he’s recontextualizing baroque music by Monteverdi and Machaut in an improvisational context or exploring the chamberlike dynamic of reedist Jimmy Giuffre’s early 60s trio with Steve Swallow and Paul Bley. Two dazzling new recordings offer further proof of his agile improvisational acumen. The most recent, Oostum (No Business), is an intimate series of duets with American drummer Gerry Hemingway where his playing moves between richly melodic, garrulous passages that exploit his horn’s extroverted personality to snorting, crab-walking flatulence to intensely muted conversational mutterings where he seems to be channeling human whispers....
This is a bait and switch: I’m a cyclist, and I support bike infrastructure. I use and mostly appreciate protected bike lanes. But the way Chicago lays out its protected lanes sets traps for cyclists. I’m talking specifically about lanes that cross side streets, where only traffic on the side street has to stop. (Milwaukee Avenue is a good example.) Cyclists traveling at cruising speed thus ride directly across the path of drivers turning onto the side street—and when traffic is light, drivers often make these turns with little to no warning....
As I’ve watched Alderman Danny Solis escape one precarious predicament after another over the last 30 or so years, I’ve reached the obvious conclusion—the man’s got more lives than a cat. As I wait for the next chapter in his saga, I figure it’s a good time to sort through a few of the many lives of Danny Solis. Zoning chair: In 2009, Daley made Solis chairman of the zoning committee, a prized council position because it brings developers before you looking for zoning changes....
As a long-standing liberal reformer, I should be outraged by the ongoing federal corruption probe that’s encircled key members of my beloved Democratic Party. Like I was, I don’t know, a Republican writer for a Republican newspaper. We’ve got one in town. So I have a model or two to emulate. And it’s not just corruption. Apparently, the Republican Party now sanctions sexual assault. In the last couple of years, at least 17 women have accused Trump of everything from rape to sexual harassment....
For the last several days I’ve been trying to think of something nice to say about Barbara Byrd-Bennett’s three-year tenure as CEO of the Chicago Public Schools. The best I could come up with is that she put a genial face on the dumb ideas that popped out of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s brain. As you probably know, Byrd-Bennett took a paid leave of absence last week, just a couple of days after word broke that the FBI was investigating her role in the awarding of a $20....
This show is a special treat for several reasons, but first and foremost, it’s a triple release party. Staggeringly heavy Iowa City doom trio Aseethe are about to release their third full-length, Throes (Thrill Jockey), which they recorded in Chicago with Shane Hochstetler. The album addresses climate change and the rise of fascism, and proves that Aseethe are not going gently into that good night. Instead they present a gradual, inexorable apocalypse that can’t be averted once it starts to build its somber momentum....
Kitchen 17 kitchen17.com Deep-dish pizza is a pretty unlikely candidate for a vegan imitation. Can you guess why? Because a single traditional slice typically features a threatening cliff of mozzarella—never mind the chunks of sausage and pepperoni struggling against the grease that seeps out from beneath the layer of marinara on top. But the unpretentious, all-vegan Kitchen 17 in Lakeview reimagines the Chicago-style gut bomb with a lineup of its own experiments, including the Buffalo Chik’n Deep Dish, the Jalapeño Popper Deep Dish, and the Fully Loaded, which consists of house-made “ricotta,” roasted red peppers, giardiniera, olives, artichoke-spinach filling, pepperoni, and house-made “sausage....
I can’t blame anyone for holding off on listening to LA rapper Johnathan Porter, better known as Blueface, whose rapid ascent has girdled his image with “industry plant” insults, and whose viral celebrity eclipses the music he’s ridden to fame. Just over a year ago, he had only one mixtape under his belt, but he’s already realized that marketing his personality was more important for building a fan base than how many releases he put out—and since then, he’s gone from total obscurity to having enough buzz to tour in major venues....
Following the February 14 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida, student survivors wasted no time mobilizing their fight for gun control through the Never Again movement and capturing the nation’s attention. It turned out that many of the leaders were active in the school’s theater program, a fact that was “utterly unsurprising” to Alicia Senior-Saywell, the program director for the Belmont Theater District. Senior-Saywell and Wishcamper say the idea started with Daniel Burns, who graduated from Stoneman Douglas in 2008....
Sometimes it really is, as they say, all in the timing. I happened to walk into the Art Institute’s Charles White retrospective last month just as the show’s curator, Sarah Kelly Oehler, was launching into a tour for a tiny clutch of people that included someone I recognized: Chicago’s low-profile first lady (and onetime AIC staffer), Amy Rule. The exhibit features a wall map of Chicago locations frequented by White as he grew up here....
Chris Ware’s Monograph (Rizzoli) is part autobiography, part art manifesto, part greatest hits, all contained in a 13 x 18-inch hardcover. Throughout his 30 years of writing and drawing comics, Ware has always pushed the medium forward through his inventive layout and compositional schemes, his questioning of the relationship between word and image, and his deep examination of how memory and imagination shape the way we tell our stories. Monograph touches on many of his career highlights with Ware himself as our often caustic, self-deprecating, but ever-insightful guide....
AP Lyndon Johnson delivered the commencement address at Howard University in June 1965. A half century ago this month, the U.S. economy was booming, Democrats controlled Congress, and a Democrat bent on helping the disadvantaged was in the White House. The nation seemed poised to confront its most stubborn social problems—even, perhaps, the chasm between black America and the rest of America. He asked Goodwin, then 33, to bear that in mind as he wrote the speech for the Howard commencement....
When Heather McEntire’s longtime collaborator in Mount Moriah, Jenks Miller, became busy with the demands of parenthood, she found herself piled up with songs without an outlet to release them. Spurred on by her friend Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill, the songwriter decided to step out on her own. The music on her debut solo album, Lionheart (Merge), pushes toward a more traditional vision of folk rock than Mount Moriah. It luxuriates in the confessional mode of a singer-songwriter, with gorgeous arrangements including passages of aching pedal-steel caresses from Allyn Love; honeyed harmony singing from Angel Olsen (with whom she’s been touring as a keyboardist), Tift Merritt, and Amy Ray; and lilting melodies shaped by guitarist William Tyler....
UPDATE Thursday, March 12: this event has been canceled. Refunds available at point of purchase. Gómez, who says he has read the book around 18 or 20 times, wanted to embody the world that Sánchez created and include all of the central themes that make the protagonist’s journey so challenging. This is especially important because although not everyone’s upbringing was the same as Julia’s, a lot of the struggles she faces ring true for many....
Last weekend was an auspicious one for Chicago Opera Theater. On Friday, at DePaul University’s handsome Gannon Concert Hall, COT presented The Life and Death(s) of Alan Turing, an opera in progress by composer Justine F. Chen and librettist David Simpatico. This one-night concert performance was the culmination of a weeklong workshop, and there’s no doubt some fine-tuning to come (the second act needs trimming), but it was a revelatory evening, worthy of the man who invented the modern computer and facilitated the Allied victory in World War II by breaking the German military’s secret code—only to be prosecuted and chemically castrated by British authorities for homosexual activity, which was then illegal and heavily policed....
