DEAR READERS: I’m on vacation for three weeks—but you won’t be reading old columns in my absence, and you won’t be reading columns by anyone who isn’t Dan Savage. You’ll be reading new columns, all of them written by Dan Savage, none of them written by me. A: A problem you and I share! The fun is in the chase, the excitement of someone new, and that first time. You may return for a second or maybe a third time—but then what or who is next?...
This week sees the release of one of the most anticipated movies of the summer, Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. I’ve avoided reading about the film, as I want to be surprised by what Tarantino has been cooking up, but I know that it takes place in the title location during the late 1960s. This sounds like fertile ground for a movie narrative, as Hollywood was undergoing great change at this time....
I promise I haven’t lost my club-girl persona and I promise I won’t wear hiking boots to the bar, but I can’t deny that my closet has a little (okay, a lot) more Northface than it did last year. I’ve totaled a lot of miles, and it all began at the beginning of the pandemic when my partner quit smoking and I started to lose my mind. We needed to get moving....
As I lurch deeper into the overgrown woods of middle age, I’m grateful I still have friends who can surprise me with bonkers records I’ve never heard of. This isn’t because bonkers records I’ve never heard of are in short supply—it’s a big world out there—but rather because most folks give up on seeking out unfamiliar music well before they turn 50. Formed in 2018 by Belgian multi-instrumentalist Guillaume Cazalet, Neptunian Maximalism is a confounding collective with an unstable lineup....
Chicago rapper Herbert Wright III, better known as G Herbo, has become the kind of public figure whose smallest social media movement is fodder for the content mill. When Herb’s girlfriend, Taina Williams, recently blocked him on Instagram, the nonevent inspired blog posts at Complex, HotNewHipHop, and Bossip. Thankfully, whatever strains and pressures come with this level of celebrity don’t seem to have impacted Herb’s music. On his latest album, 25 (Machine Entertainment Group/Republic), he’s still doing what launched him to fame in the first place: dispensing vivid, complex verses about growing up in a neighborhood beset by gun violence that also express deep empathy for survivors, victims, and bystanders....
For those who dream of living inside a Miami house with a suite of Chippendale chairs and a loud sofa—and where it never stopped being 1987—there can be no entertainment more joyous than this sequel to last year’s smash from Hell in a Handbag Productions, The Golden Girls: The Lost Episodes. Picture it: three women of a certain age who no longer feel like hiding their unflagging desires And make the women drag queens....
You can tell a lot about a place of business by its bathroom. Are the facilities pleasantly lit, or are they so dim you can barely see the outline of your own body parts? Is the air laden with perfume that smells better than anything you’ve ever worn on your own body, or does it make the word “foul” seem inadequate? Is it a room where you feel comfortable enough to rest, or would you rather, um, evacuate?...
After years as one of the most prolific and unrelenting noise artists in the U.S., veteran LA experimentalist John Wiese seems to have deliberately altered his modus operandi. His discography lists more than 400 items under his own name as well as projects like Sissy Spacek, Leather Bath, and others, but over the last half decade his output has screeched to a near halt. That said, if he only intermittently drops a title like the recent one-sided record Escaped Language (Gilgongo), I’m OK with it....
Alex Katz—whose drawings are the subject of a retrospective at Richard Gray’s Chicago and New York galleries—is one of the most successful artists alive, but I’m baffled as to why that’s the case. Coming of age during the era of abstract expressionism and pop art, Katz carved out a niche with his flat, billboard-style drawings and paintings of his friends and family and their surroundings. His subjects couldn’t be picked out of a lineup, his landscapes aren’t on any map—he’s not much for specifics....
QI’m a male grad student who is technically engaged to a female grad student. She has numerous positive qualities, but she is repulsed by sex. She is very sensitive about her repulsion and becomes distraught when I broach the subject. She says that even the thought of doing anything sexual with me elicits a panic attack. She also insists that she is “broken” because, in the hopes of preventing me from leaving her, she forced herself to go further than she felt comfortable....
Watching Summer in the Forest, a new documentary that screens this coming week at the Gene Siskel Film Center, I discovered a new hero in Jean Vanier. An author, philosopher, and administrator, Vanier founded L’Arche, a community based outside of Paris for individuals with developmental disabilities, in the 1960s and continues to manage it today. His goal for L’Arche was to create an inclusive community where anyone could live a meaningful life, and Summer in the Forest shows multiple residents as they socialize, work, (or, in some cases, enjoy their retirement), and reflect on what it means to be happy....
The first half of Theater Oobleck‘s A Memory Palace of Fear is ingeniously disappointing. After checking in with an officious loan officer who poses problematic questions (“Why are you?” came my way), skittish, white-haired real estate agent Constance arrives, welcoming you to the open house. It seems you’ve signed up to tour a dilapidated home, its massive cardboard facade a jumble of cliches from commercial haunted houses and bad horror movies....
MC and Second City Citizens member Rich Jones raps with an unflustered poise—he drops rhymes with a heap of confidence, but never lets his assurance throw off his calm vibe, which feels as much of an extension of his personality off the mike as it is when he’s rolling with the beat. Jones has a taste for throwback instrumentals that jell with his laid-back persona—his sonic interests pop up on February’s Love Jones, a three-song collaborative EP with producer Krush Love....
To ease the surreal feeling of watching baseball games with no fans in the seats, Gossip Wolf has been searching out new summer pastimes—like laughing at conservative sticks-in-the mud as they freak out about Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s hilariously raunchy smash “WAP” (and its hilariously raunchy music video). Ben Shapiro‘s epochal self-own (keeping his wife’s “p-word” dry to own the libs!) is even cringier than the clean version of the song, which replaces “wet ass pussy” with “wet and gushy....
About Face Theatre’s midwest premiere of this empowering Bryna Turner-penned comedy explores the connection between academics and feminists Mary Emma Woolley and Jeannette Marks during their time at Mount Holyoke College in the early 20th century. The women never publicly acknowledged a romantic relationship, but Turner pulls from the historical record (and takes some liberties with modern language) to paint an intimate picture of a couple struggling to find common ground while playing active roles in the growing women’s suffrage movement....
In the last week or so, on the cusp of the city’s partial reopening, there was a cluster of cancellations from its largest venues and events. The 2020 season is over, at least as far as live, in-house performance goes at Lyric Opera, Joffrey Ballet, Ravinia, and the Grant Park Music Festival. Pull up the covers and go back to sleep; maybe we’ll see you next year. Translation: this is going to be so hard for us, don’t expect it to happen anytime soon....
Q: I’m a 35-year-old woman. I recently discovered I’m a size queen. (Is it OK for me to use this term?) This has been brewing for a while as I have dabbled with purchasing larger and larger cucumbers and fucking myself with them after a good wash. I use a condom and tons of lube and it’s been amazing. Are there any safety or health concerns I should be aware of?...
The Lawrence Arms were born out of the same suburban punk network that gave us Slapstick, Alkaline Trio, and Rise Against, and for the past two decades they’ve been working to become the quintessential Chicago band. The trio’s aesthetic is so specific and well-worn that it can come across as self-parody: three white dudes, including one with a pretty voice and one with a boozy rasp, sing loud, anthemic punk songs that name-drop various Chicago intersections, bars, and venues and glorify the downtrodden working-class misfits of the midwest....
For those of us who roll eyes at the accoutrements of Big Woo, Bari in Deborah Zoe Laufer’s Be Here Now might be our antispiritual guide. From the opening scene, where she silently resists the soothing instructions of a yogi, we know she’s a tough nut. And who can blame her? She’s on the verge of failing to finish her dissertation on nihilism, she’s stuck in a small town where the only job she can get is at a “fulfillment center,” packaging cheap made-in-China Buddhas (with the tags ripped off so the bosses can pretend to be selling Tibetan goods), and she can’t find a buyer for her dead parents’ house because ....
Gardening keeps Milton Sewell grounded. The 56-year-old North Park resident embraced the isolation brought on by the pandemic by leaning on his hobby. Throughout the spring and summer, he’d scout backyards belonging to friends and church members, converting bare, patchy spots into small fruit and vegetable gardens. “I was always in constant fear that I would come out of remission,” he recalled. Sewell talked about being physically exhausted and mentally drained, until he reached a breaking point: “I just cannot go back to another hospital....
