With the City Council-led process known as reapportionment ready to begin, the time has come for me to offer my guide to ward mapping. So we care more about sacred principles when it comes to electing Chicago aldermen than presidents. I can’t justify our system—only try to explain it. Or we could put 50 aldermen in a back room and let them do their thing. As practical as it sounds, there are drawbacks to having computers blindly redraw the wards....
As excuses never to leave the house go, Cristiano (Rolando Serrano) has more than his fair share. He’s a former world champion at competitive online soccer who made so much money gaming that he could support his whole extended family, all without getting off the couch except to travel to tournaments. He had plans to shock the FIFA community by one day revealing his secret queer lover, but now that lover is dead; shortly after he died, Christiano’s father died too....
Before Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 was released in theaters a little more than a month ago, Hollywood insiders speculated that the movie could be a rarity: an intellectually rigorous blockbuster that could connect with mainstream audiences and Academy voters. Once 2049 underperformed at the box office it was treated as a misfire, proof that audiences don’t like to be challenged, or that the marketing campaign didn’t try hard enough to appeal to millennials or women, or that the distributor’s overzealous attempt to police spoilers wound up constricting the conversation around the film....
Back in the 1880s, railroad magnate George Pullman became a pioneer urban planner of sorts when he decided to design and build a model town where his employees could live and build railway cars without having to face the crime and temptations of the city or a long commute. With the help of architect Solon Spencer Beman and landscape architect Nathan F. Barrett, he created an entire town from scratch on 300 acres near Lake Calumet, just south of what was then Chicago’s southern border....
We are facing a test and we are failing. Police and prosecutorial reformers across the country are watching us and Kim Foxx. They are watching the media attack her for the Jussie Smollett investigation and prosecution, watching the success of forces invested in taking down her mission and vision of reform. Across the country reformers like Kim Foxx are learning to be afraid. Kim’s changing the conversation, bringing prosecutors into neighborhoods disinvested for generations and struggling with violent crime....
2018 saw the legalization of hemp in all 50 states and subsequently there was a huge boom in the CBD oil market. Before you could only buy CBD oil from a few companies, but now there are hundreds, possibly even thousands of businesses that let you buy CBD oil. It’s become almost impossible to track, a simple search on Google for “CBD oil Near Me” or “Best CBD Oil” sees more and more businesses and brands pop up every day....
Todd Rosenberg Brian Jagde as Mario Cavaradossi and Tatiana Serjan as Tosca in Lyric Opera’s production of Puccini’s Tosca On January 12, Lyric Opera general director Anthony Freud announced that Misha Didyk, the Ukrainian tenor scheduled for the leading role of Mario Cavaradossi in Puccini’s Tosca had dropped out of the production “for personal reasons.” The production, on the other hand, directed by John Caird and commissioned for Houston Grand Opera when Freud was there, is as dark and gloomy as the opera is tragic....
Halfway through the first act of Falsettos, Trina, a woman whose husband has left her for a younger man and who is on the verge of remarriage to her husband’s therapist, sings, “I’m tired of all the happy men who rule the world. They grow—of that I’m sure. They grow—but don’t mature.” But the men in William Finn and James Lapine’s 1992 musical (revived under Lapine’s direction at Lincoln Center in 2016 and now making a brief but glorious touring appearance here) are neither as happy nor as powerful as Trina imagines....
This year’s incoming freshmen at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign can choose from among roughly 1,400 registered extracurricular groups: more than 100 athletic clubs, including Badminton for Fun and Numenor Foam Fighting, “a full contact sport based on medieval combat”; close to 100 fraternities and sororities; and more than 100 cultural organizations, among them the Phoenix Improv Company, BeatBox Club, and a LARPing society called Elysium on the Prairie. But once those students finish school, not many will continue to care about the stuff they did to amuse themselves between classes, even if they thought at the time that a role in, say, the Illini Voter Coalition might look good on a resumé....
Like a host of contemporary playwrights, New Yorker Jen Silverman hasn’t fully discerned the difference between creating characters and assembling signifiers. In her 2015 play, given an unfailingly agreeable Steppenwolf staging under Phylicia Rashad’s good-natured direction, she erects two strategically differentiated fiftysomething women from theatrical sign posts. Sharon is Domestic Innocence: an Iowa divorcee who doesn’t go out much, thinks most New Yorkers are gay, and uses words like “joshing” with a straight face....
Winter can be a stressful time, especially around the holidays, but Andrew Bird’s annual string of hometown shows at Fourth Presbyterian Church, which he’s christened “Gezelligheid” after the Dutch word for conviviality or coziness, have the potential to temporarily melt away seasonal anxieties. The multi-instrumentalist and songwriter has played in many settings throughout his illustrious career, and because I’ve seen him in a wide variety of them, I’ve concluded that these solo performances are where he’s most eager to explore....
Bay Faction are a band with roots in cyberspace. In 2013, lead singer James McDermott was studying at Berklee College of Music in Boston when he posted a call for bandmates on a Facebook page for local musicians. The only replies came from two fellow Berklee students, bassist Kris Roman and drummer Connor Godfrey (later replaced in Bay Faction by drummer and producer Alex Agresti). The band found a pocket of success among fans of east-coast emo (especially in the r/emo subreddit) for their 2014 self-titled debut EP, which has a sound akin to contemporaries such as Modern Baseball and Glocca Morra....
Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, November 16, 2016. Undocumented immigrants worry about their futures despite “sanctuary city” promise from Rahm Mayor Rahm Emanuel has promised that Chicago will remain a sanctuary city and will not deport any undocumented immigrants no matter what president-elect Donald Trump threatens. But invited to speak at the mayor’s press conference on the subject Monday, 21-year-old Mexican immigrant Luiz Gomez criticized both Emanuel and U....
The members of Detroit art-rock group Saajtak met at the University of Michigan in the early 2010s, when all four participated in an improvising ensemble called the Creative Arts Orchestra. They’ve since carried the experimental traditions they explored as students into their work in Saajtak and into their individual creative pursuits—each has developed such an impressive career that their CVs could fill a chapbook. Bassist Ben Willis composes music for dancers in a theater troupe called Nerve; percussionist Jon Taylor reframes ancestral Eastern European Jewish songs in new-music compositions as part of the ensemble Teiku; electronics maestro Simon Alexander-Adams has presented his multimedia art at Coachella; and vocalist Alex Koi has performed at the Toronto Jazz Festival....
DJ Hank, 27, moved to Chicago from North Carolina in 2011 to become a bike messenger. He began producing footwork tracks within a year, after befriending members of the influential Teklife collective. In April, Louisville label Sophomore Lounge issued his first 12-inch, Traffic Control. I fired up Google one day and started calling all the messenger companies I could find. In retrospect, that was probably crazy to be a bike-messenger manager in Chicago getting an e-mail like, “Yo, I’m this 18-year-old kid....
There’s a dangerously high likelihood that a group of white guys who heavily incorporate rapping and hip-hop aesthetics into their sound will fall into that odd frat-rock zone occupied by jam fans and Dave Matthews acolytes. Manwolves started as an after-school activity by Evanston Township High School students in 2012, have sidestepped such a cheesy fate, at least for the time being. On September’s self-released A Safety Meeting, they perform with uniform tightness while wading through languid melodies....
Famous—or notorious—overnight, the recent letter to University of Chicago students from the dean of students letting them know “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” had no place on campus set off the best kind of debate. Neither side’s completely right or completely wrong and both value a good education. Where they disagree is primarily in their perspectives—always a good thing to compare. Back in the day at the University of Missouri (which, I concede, I easily sentimentalize), college itself was thought of as a safe space, a place where it was safe to be an atheist or a Trotskyite or an unwashed bum....
The first time Kenyan singer-songwriter J.S. Ondara heard the music of Bob Dylan, he was blown away. As a bow-tie-wearing, poetry-writing teenager, Ondara often felt out of place among his peers, but listening to America’s most famous folk troubadour inspired him to set his own verses to music. In 2013, at age 20, Ondara won a U.S. green-card lottery and moved in with an aunt in Minneapolis, where he took up acoustic guitar (he chose the city in part because it’s located in Dylan’s home state of Minnesota)....
For 25 years, Tim Kinsella has led his band Joan of Arc through a multitude of changes: members have come and gone, and the group’s sound has evolved and (occasionally) purposely devolved. Now, with the release of Tim Melina Theo Bobby, Kinsella is bringing the project to an end. Named for the musicians who comprise the final Joan of Arc lineup, Tim Melina Theo Bobby is a fitting eulogy for the band that also serves as an entry point into their sprawling discography....
Think The Dukes of Hazzard meets Night of the Living Dead, but more reliant on stereotype than the former and minus the gruesome tension or production values of the latter. This is the general gist/aesthetic of Three Crows’ pretentiously plodding Language of Angels. Naomi Iizuka’s 80-minute drama features a group of vowel-drawling, gun-toting, beer-guzzling, speed-shooting, trailer-living, car-wrecking strippers and sheriffs and good ol’ boys, fighting and smoking and boozing in a cave, and perhaps a mountain ledge as well....
