Q: I’m a cis bi woman, and I mainly have sex with people with penises. I have a really gross problem, sorry. It’s been an issue for as long as I’ve been sexually active—but in the past few years, it seems to have gotten worse. If I am being penetrated vaginally, especially if it’s vigorous (which I prefer), and I orgasm, sometimes I poop accidentally. If I try to clench up to keep this from happening, it doesn’t work and I can’t orgasm....
Chicago postpunks Ganser are working on a three-song cassette called Audrey—last month Gossip Wolf reported on the band’s Kickstarter campaign for the tape and its supporting tour, which closes on Valentine’s Day (and doubles as a preorder sale). Today Ganser released the title track of Audrey, where funereal synths waft over frigid, spindly guitars that stab out a forlorn melody. The yearning vocals sometimes descend almost into a mumble, and the more difficult they are to understand, the more mysterious and alluring they seem....
Kevin Warwick, Reader associate editor Sly Stone, High on You Beginning with the vibrant patchwork jeans that the shirtless, levitating Sly wears on the cover, this jam of a solo album—missing any call-out to the Family Stone—is yet another lesson in tweaked-out funk from one of its pioneers. Sly’s silky vocals (and the funky gospel choir backing him) groove along in a strut that oozes absolute cool, but it’s all about the bass, man: the walking slap bass of the title track, the distorted bass twang of “Who Do You Love?...
Flipping through television channels. Flicking through radio stations. They’re quotidian actions—until they’re not. When you’ve lived through a year like 2020, every frequency delivers the same nightmare from a different angle. On Now (International Anthem), Chicago sound collagist Damon Locks and his Black Monument Ensemble confidently grasp the tuning dial of history. Like 2019’s Where Future Unfolds, the new album blends Locks’s archival samples with the talents of a generous and bountiful collective of musicians and singers—and it somehow packs an even greater wallop than its predecessor....
By now the Chicago Bulls’ lineup changes for the forthcoming season are old news, but there’s no wrong time to pay tribute to the outgoing players. Tonight future New York Knicks center Joakim Noah is the subject of a free good-bye party at Slippery Slope that features an original art auction, a Joakim Noah photo booth, and DJ sets from a few local musicians—among them new age dude Joshua Patterson (aka the Druid Beat), garage-pop wizard Paul Cherry, and electronic producer David Beltran, aka Starfoxxx, who makes mural homages to local sports figures as Bae Cutler....
Globalization, defined by Merriam-Webster as “the integration of national economies through trade, investment, capital, flow, labor migration, and technology,” is a seismic force reshaping countries and their populations. Many regard this as a contemporary phenomenon stemming from advances in transportation and communications, but if you want to delve into the beginnings of globalization, look to the trans-Atlantic slave trade that from the early 1500s to the late 1800s linked Europe with Africa and the New World....
There were at least 1.3 billion reasons to oppose the Lincoln Yards TIF deal—until, under intense pressure from local residents, Sterling Bay scrapped plans to build a soccer stadium. I’ll get to that $1.3 billion, but first, to review . . . And now, I’ll reveal how much Rahm’s latest TIFs will cost you and how the mayor’s proposing to spend your property tax dollars. Don’t blame me—I’m only the messenger....
Michael Gebert Meat and vegetable empanadas, La Sirena Clandestina Fifty-two thousand empanadas. That’s La Sirena Clandestina general manager Joe DiTola’s estimate of how many empanadas the Fulton Market South American bar and restaurant has served since opening in late 2012, mainly because everybody who comes in orders an empanada or two—everybody. “When we first opened, every ticket said one meat and one vegetable empanada and ceviche, one meat and one vegetable empanada and ceviche,” DiTola says....
Blood Wedding Federico García Lorca’s poetic tragedy is transplanted from the author’s beloved Andalusia to California during the Great Depression in this production directed by Daniel Ostling. It’s still the story of nuptials derailed by hate and lust, and the language (translated from Spanish by Michael Dewell and Carmen Zapata) is still earthy and passionate. But the look is rough-hewn and dusty. With the sole exception of Kareem Bandealy’s fiery take on the bride’s ex (whom she is most assuredly not over), the acting also has the sort of dry, taciturn quality that would be better suited to a Dorothea Lange photo than to Lorca’s full-blooded poetry....
Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place. At the time Berkow was living in a tiny room at the Red Herring, run by campus arts and activism organization the Channing-Murray Foundation, which is affiliated with the Unitarian Universalist church. Berkow had convinced a draft board that as a conscientious objector he’d do his alternative service at the coffeehouse (his adoptive father was also a minister at the church)....
E The head-scratcher for me was that the CTA has been planning to implement off-board fare collection along the Loop Link bus-rapid-transit corridor for years. But nearly six months after that route launched last December, prepaid boarding still hasn’t materialized. But the transit agency says there are several reasons why the Belmont station, which is also served by the #82 Kimball bus, is a good location for the program’s maiden voyage....
Dimensional Stardust is a splendid sonic antidote for the spirit-damping insults of a year that can’t end soon enough—growth and transcendence are programmed into the album’s DNA. The Exploding Star Orchestra’s leader, multi-instrumentalist Rob Mazurek, started out playing idiomatically correct hard bop in Chicago’s jazz bars in the 1980s. These days he lives in Marfa, Texas, and he’s as likely to spend his days jamming electronic noise, painting abstract canvases, or designing metal and light installations as he is to play music that operates within the jazz continuum....
QA big congrats to Caitlyn Jenner on her big reveal and lovely Vanity Fair cover! But I am having a crisis of conscience. On one hand, I support people’s right to be whoever the heck they want to be. You want to wear women’s clothing and use makeup and style your hair? You look fabulous! You want to carry a pillow around with an anime character on it and get married to it, like a guy in Korea did?...
Julia Thiel Freda’s Floral Sparkler, from Rogers Park Social In honor of the current exhibit “Vodou: Sacred Powers of Haiti,” the Field Museum recently asked several local bartenders to create cocktails inspired by the spirits of Vodou (the most common spelling of the name of the Haitian religion; it’s also written Vaudou, vodon, Vodun, Voodoo, or Voudou). Known as Lwa (or Loa, or L’wha), the spirits appear to have very specific tastes and preferences....
Who in their right mind would try to book dozens of more or less unknown local rock bands for a multiday festival in a northwest suburb of Chicago in the dead of winter? If you answered “Ian,” then you’ve already realized I’m talking about Ian’s Party—whose first annual installment, in January 2008, took place at the Clearwater Theater in West Dundee (now the RocHaus) and the Gasthaus in Elgin (now defunct)....
A Christmas Carol: An Evening of Dickensian Delights Rachel Martindale’s 80-minute adaptation of Dickens’s revered novella is stripped to its essentials, as is Fury Theatre’s bare-bones staging, which Martindale directs and stars in. Jettisoning high production values (the set is two changing screens and a plain bench; the lighting effects are “on” and “off”), Martindale focuses almost entirely on Dickens’s florid language and hypnotic imagery. She and her two costars tell the story with candor and simplicity, much as your extroverted friends might at their annual holiday party....
Logging in at a little more than an hour, Writers Theatre’s production of Caryl Churchill’s 2002 two-hander is a brief and thought-provoking meditation on human character and identity. Set in the near future, at a time when the cloning of human beings is medically possible though not yet socially accepted, the play consists of a series of conversations between a father and son, all concerned with the son’s discovery that he is just one of “a number” of clones....
Imagine you’ve spent months at a time on the road with your band for more than two years running, bouncing between opening slots, festival appearances, and headlining sets in the U.S., Mexico, Canada, and Europe. You’ve been enthralling audiences with the frenetic yet tightly controlled energy of your immersive live show, supporting a bold and proudly unconventional debut album. Continued efforts to flatten the curve of the pandemic mean they’re now self-isolating separately and confined to livestreaming their performances....
When British guitarist and vocalist Anna Calvi released her self-titled debut album in 2011, it felt like she’d emerged as a fully formed icon. Drawing from rock, punk, opera, and flamenco guitar, Calvi combined talent, eclecticism, and swagger in a way that had less in common with indie songwriters of her generation than with the likes of Annie Lennox, Prince, and Nick Cave. After putting out her third full-length, 2018’s Hunter, she wrote music for season five of Peaky Blinders, and insofar as that job asked her to delve into the mind of crime boss Tommy Shelby, it might’ve inspired her to look at her recent work with fresh eyes....
What makes a person withdraw from the seen and known world most people live in in favor of an environment fashioned solely according to his or her own visionary fantasies? Failure, disappointment, opportunity, true ecstatic experience? In the case of Eddie Owens Martin, it seems it must have been some combination of all those that transformed a son of sharecroppers in rural Georgia into the berobed creator of Pasaquan—the immersive art environment Martin worked on for the last 30 or so years of his life....
