On Friday night I was up so late reading—making the best of my election-related insomnia—that when the networks started calling it for Biden around 10:30 the next morning, I was still asleep. Though I’d been spending a truly inadvisable amount of time on Twitter, I didn’t learn Trump had lost from the Internet. Instead I was woken up by crowds of people screaming for joy in the street, honking their car horns, and banging pots and pans....
Since 2008, photo crew GlitterGuts have been key documenters of Chicago’s nightlife scene. They’ve brought their cameras to Zine Fest, Girls Rock! Chicago events, nearly all of Beauty Bar’s happenings, and practically every show by turbocharged cabaret collective the Fly Honeys—if a GlitterGuts photographer had a booth set up, you knew you were at a great party. The pandemic’s destruction of nightlife has of course hurt GlitterGuts too—for the past 11 months, they’ve relied on portraits and the occasional outdoor event....
Q: I had a stroke a year ago. The woman I was dating at the time stepped away. I have no hard feelings but I long for intimacy again. I am profoundly grateful that I don’t have any major outward injuries from the stroke, but my stamina is still very low and might always be. That makes me self-conscious and insecure about sex. Would it be “oversharing” if I told someone about my stroke before we go to bed for the first time?...
Singer and guitarist Sophie Brochu has been a mainstay in the Chicago shoegaze scene for nearly a decade, both with the five-piece Videotape and in the live lineup of Scott Cortez’s long-running Astrobrite. In 2017 Brochu debuted her own project, the introspective Fauvely, with the excellent Watch Me Overcomplicate This, and on Friday, May 17, she releases her best work yet—the EP This Is What the Living Do (via local label Diversion)....
South-side native Kwyn Townsend Riley, aka Kwynology, is in love with the city of Chicago. Her hopes for its people, her pride in its culture, and her appreciation of its influence on her individually were recurring themes in my conversation with her. They also appear in her recent poem “Windy.” In the emphatic spoken-word piece that is as sobering as it is starry-eyed, Kwyn delivers a sermon on what her hometown means to her and expresses her gratitude, optimism, criticism, and vision for “Windy,” which she personifies as a hurt person who only wanted to “burn blunts, blow trees, and do poetry, and be free” but has ended up burning “childless dreams....
As the sky turned pink and baby blue on the east end of 71st Street in Englewood, teachers and staff from Carrie Jacobs Bond Elementary School began to arrive for a four-hour picket on the first day of their strike over stalled contract negotiations with Chicago Public Schools. Bundled up with union T-shirts pulled over thick hoodies and warm coats, they exchanged cheerful greetings, set up a table of donated food for kids, and handed out picket signs....
Since Frownland (2007), director Ronald Bronstein’s divisive and darkly comic character study of a New York door-to-door salesman who alienates everyone he encounters, the best American independent films have tended to revolve around protagonists whose surly demeanor gets them relegated to the margins of society. Drew Tobia’s See You Next Tuesday (2013) deals with an impoverished, pregnant store clerk, the Safdie Brothers’ Heaven Knows What (2014) with destitute heroin addicts, and in both cases their revolting character traits are tempered by the wretched hands they’ve been dealt....
Shortly after the pandemic shut down the theaters, Fleetwood-Jourdain Theatre artistic director Timothy Edward Rhoze joined a Zoom meeting of more than 40 artists, all leaders of Evanston’s many arts organizations. “As artists, we have a pulpit to spread love to this community. I felt like it was time for us to stop operating out of a vacuum and start pooling our intellect, our ambitions, our talents,” he said. “I was sort of crying after the meeting, I was so moved by what Tim said....
Modernity and history comingle uneasily in downtown Springfield. State workers, lobbyists, and tourists pass along a patchwork quilt of ordinary paved roads and old-timey cobbled boulevards dotted with Subways, Starbucks, Abe Lincoln statues, and souvenir shops. The servants of the state go about the government’s business in mundane-looking office towers or under the silver dome of the capitol building, while visitors shuffle in and out of structures crafted to resemble the city from our favorite son’s pre-Great Emancipator days—including the Old State Capitol that’s now a museum of bygone legislation....
Sex work is not a monolithic culture of human trafficking and abuse. Conversations that break stigmas, explore empowerment, and encourage consent are a huge part of the adult industry. This isn’t to say that people don’t become involved in sex work because of unfortunate circumstances or that human trafficking isn’t an alarming concern—those fears are valid. But as a former sex worker and current artist, I know what it can be like to be in the adult industry in the public sphere....
Marshan Allen emerged from prison in clothes unfit for the midwestern winter: a standard-issue gray hoodie and sweatpants, a pair of slippers. He boarded a van that drove him to the front parking lot of Stateville Correctional Center. It was December 2016, and 40 miles northeast rose the orange glow of Chicago. The van slowed to a stop. The door opened. From the huddled welcome party of family and friends and lawyers came a shout: “Hallelujah Jesus!...
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. During his decade with Hooker, Odom cut a single in 1966, billed to Andre Odom, for small Chicago label Nation Records. In 1969, as Andrew “Voice” Odom, he recorded his debut LP, Farther on Down the Road, which featured Hooker and pianist Johnny “Big Moose” Walker....
Red Square redsquarechicago.com On a Sunday afternoon not long after Mayor Rahm Emanuel was forced into a runoff in his bid for a second term, Jesse Jackson sauntered through the men’s locker room of the Wicker Park sauna Red Square wearing nothing more than a towel and flip-flops. The reverend’s six-foot-three-inch frame entered my line of sight while, beer in hand, I rested on a chaise lounge in front of a bank of TVs aflicker with sports....
Liturgy has been a punching bag for metal’s genre police at least since the 2009 release of its first full-length, Renihilation. Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, front man of this New York-based band, had been releasing solo demos as Liturgy since 2005, but in ’09 he made the fateful decision to publish the philosophical manifesto Transcendental Black Metal: A Vision of Apocalyptic Humanism as a sort of companion piece to Renihilation. It described transcendental black metal as, among other things, “the reanimation of the form of black metal with a new soul, a soul full of chaos, frenzy and ecstasy,” and its heady tone and lofty criticisms of traditional “hyperborean” black metal couldn’t have been better engineered to infuriate the reactionary gatekeepers of the metal tribe....
Since 2019 Buenört Collective have been using their platform to create welcoming spaces to explore multiculturalism—specifically, the fantastic variety of Afro-Latinx music. This Chicago-based group of multidisciplinary artists and DJs describe themselves as a record label, a booking agency, and a party incubator, and their latest project is Las Flores del Ahora, the long-awaited fourth album by avant-garde flamenco group El Sombrero del Abuelo. The idea for the collective, whose name is a Spanish-language pun on “Malört,” arose in 2018, when a group of four friends—Hayes, Buhler, McNulty, and Bello—realized they had similar philosophies about music, art, and nightlife....
QMy partner is 31 years older than I am. I know the math: he’ll be 60 when I’m 29. But that isn’t the problem. The issue is he’s been a lifelong bachelor and never been monogamous. He’s fucked hundreds of women and is close friends with a lot of his former fuck buddies. Because of our four-year friendship before we hooked up, I know a lot about his sex life. The problem isn’t jealousy—and it isn’t knowing he’s fucked every woman he’s friends with or that he fucked someone else after declaring his love for me....
At the start of 2018, Tumblr user swordlesbianopinions posted, “Petition to give Carly Rae Jepsen a sword. I like her and think she should have one.” From this, the Canadian pop star’s fans launched a social-media campaign that culminated at Lollapalooza last summer, when someone hurled an inflatable sword onstage during Jepsen’s performance of “Cut to the Feeling.” She brandished the weapon, and Twitter exploded in rapture. Jepsen is no stranger to viral fame; in 2011, she was propelled from relative obscurity to the front pages of international pop culture when Justin Bieber tweeted about the catchiness of her breakout single (and biggest hit to date), “Call Me Maybe....
Mike Sula Special hot & spicy (ma la) and Mongolian herbal, Little Lamb Hot Pot Amid Chinatown’s recent restaurant boom, hot-pot joints in particular have proliferated. The city’s army of young Chinese students and professionals can’t seem to get enough of this communal feed. Some have come and gone, but many have endured, and there doesn’t seem to be much sign they’re slowing down. In fact, chains from mainland China have gotten in the game, the latest being Little Lamb Hot Pot, located in the long-vacant former Penang space, the first midwestern outpost of an international franchise with close to 600 locations across the globe....
Sun-Times Media Dick Mell still throwing his weight around in his old ward. Dick Mell may have stepped down from his job as alderman, but he’s hardly given up his clout in the 33rd Ward. All fine and well, except that Dick Mell happens to head that particular organization. In fact, it’s not a stretch to say that Dick Mell is the 33rd Ward Regular Democratic Organization. Supporters of the former Alderman Mell also helped get the new Alderman Mell on the ballot for this election....
Here’s a mix of online and in-person events and things to check out for the next seven days. Be good to yourself and others (because that’s what Chicagoans do). Fri 7/30, 6 PM, and Sat 7/31, 3 PM: Free Street Theater presents A Summer of Grief, Relief, and Joy, a free showcase from ensemble members. Two free and all-ages performances are scheduled for this weekend: Friday evening at Clark (John) Park, 4615 W....
