The beauty of Ike Holter’s 2017 play about a young Latino seeking justice after being beaten up by a cop is how deftly Holter avoids the temptation of simple didacticism and instead turns a sensational incident into the catalyst for a complex morality tale. Over 90 taut minutes Holter presents us with a story full of flawed, deep characters. No one in the play is completely honest, and everyone’s motives are tainted....
São Paulo singer-songwriter and guitarist Sessa called his 2019 debut Grandeza (Boiled), which means “greatness” in Portuguese. The record lives up to its title; Sessa’s stripped-down, minimalist bossa nova is both dreamy and raw. His beguiling combination of amateurishness and suaveness, as well as the juxtaposition of Spanish guitars with female backing vocals and Afro-Brazilian percussion, recalls Baden Powell and Vinicius de Moraes’s great 1966 Os Afro Sambas. “Flor do Real” could almost be an outtake from that record, if not for its trippy, sexy lyrics: “To live in the guts of those who make us horny / It’s good / Fucking is the pleasure of sound,” Sessa and his backing vocalists sing (in Portuguese) with detached innocence....
Shannon Noll wasn’t sure what to expect going into top surgery, partially because for so long they thought it would never be possible. But once they got a job with a tech company that offered insurance covering the procedure, they were surprised by some of the choices that had to be made. “They asked me where I want my nipples put back on, and I was like, ‘Does anyone want them not in the normal place?...
The last five years have been terrible for Chicago barbecue. For reasons I still don’t fathom, a relentless plague of half-assed new barbecue restaurants multiplied as insidiously as split-face concrete block, and provoked a kind of fury in me that would ignite my hair every time I had to sit down and write about it. This largely north-side problem was compounded when the great Honey 1 BBQ relocated to Bronzeville after ten underappreciated years in Bucktown, where the Adams family was hounded by condo-dwelling NIMBYs panicked by its sweet porky perfume....
If you’ve got a craving for tropical bass but can’t wait for CumbiaSazo‘s next party at Double Door a week from Saturday, clear your schedule for the night of Sunday, March 20. That’s when East Room hosts the latest Red Bull Music Academy event, headlined by Peruvian tropical bass duo Dengue Dengue Dengue. Since 2010 Lima-based producers Felipe Salmon and Rafael Pereira have cooked up sweltering, dub-heavy, psychedelic cuts with the hazy allure of a humid day (and without any of the clammy moisture)....
When you first walk into the American Writers Museum, you walk right into a timeline of American writers that spans more than 400 years. You take that long hallway to reach an open space often used for talks with authors debuting new books. Throughout each and every space, there’s something to learn—with great quotes from great writers like Octavia Butler lining the walls. “There was so much rich content there, in video and and other materials, to sit down and scope out a way to put it online, to take the curriculum pieces we had for schools and make them available for download, and to just make it as interactive and engaging as possible in the spirit of the exhibit that we’d put together,” Cranston says....
The Bardy Bunch Set in 1974, Stephen Garvey’s musical parody almost literally mashes up the Brady bunch and the Partridge family, locking them into mortal scenarios out of Shakespeare. Keith P. and Marcia B. have gone all Romeo and Juliet even as Laurie P. and Greg B. are backing into romance a la Beatrice and Benedick from Much Ado. Mike and Carol B. are advancing their careers using the Macbeth method....
The Impostors Theatre Company wraps up its inaugural season with Footholds, an anthology of five short plays tied together by one shared conceit: a stack of red construction paper used in various ways. While most local theaters produce a single show (oftentimes running longer than necessary), it’s delightful to see a variety of engaging vignettes written by Chicagoans. Maria Welser’s Refraction explores life’s meaning through the metaphor of the life span of a star, a unique take on our shared journey and the search for purpose....
If you ask Google to translate “Bonjintan” from Japanese into English, it will tell you the word means “ordinary person”—but there’s nothing ordinary about the leader of this international quartet. Akira Sakata, born in Hiroshima early in 1945, has had a dazzlingly varied career: he’s a marine biologist who lectures on water fleas and biodiversity; a former television comedian and media personality who once appeared in a Seiko watch commercial with Grace Jones; and a jazz saxophonist whose work encompasses smooth adaptations of Japanese folk and toe-to-toe slugfests with the likes of Peter Brötzmann....
When the word “academic” is applied to jazz, it’s not necessarily a compliment. But these three players, all of whom teach at universities, make music that could keep you at school till the sun comes up. The success of General Semantics, the debut album by Northern Illinois University’s Geof Bradfield (tenor and soprano saxophones, bass clarinet), DePaul University’s Dana Hall (drums), and UC Berkeley’s Ben Goldberg (B-flat and contra-alto clarinets), derives from the trio’s collective engagement with diverse stylistic fundamentals as well as their understanding of the connections between different eras of jazz....
There’s a Viagra Triangle-like quality to the Tronc-Gannett romance—whose latest turn is that they’ve called the whole thing off. But the other day, just when it looked like Tronc and Gannett would be walking out together, the deal fell apart. The Wall Street Journal explained that during the canoodling, Gannett shares fell 54 percent in value and two of its major lenders pulled out. And what now? With Gannett out of his life—at least for now—could Ferro, if only to allay boredom, try to consolidate both major Chicago dailies under his command?...
As election night unfolded—and the reality of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s reelection became too obvious for even the most delusional of us to ignore—I had to fight the urge to drown my sorrows in copious quantities of red wine and reefer. Dowell reminded us that in politics as in basketball it takes both an “inside and outside” game to produce a winning team. It’s pretty obvious that we moved him to the left....
On the morning of Election Day, there seemed to be little doubt which image would appear on the cover of the issue that we’d send to press Wednesday before dawn. Piggybacking on Cubs fever, illustrator Johnny Sampson depicted a victorious Hillary Clinton being hoisted on the shoulders of a racially diverse baseball team as she unfurled a W flag. The Democratic nominee seemed like a sure thing—she started the day as the favorite with a 70 percent chance of winning, according to FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver, who’s perhaps the most prominent of the many data analysts who’ve had to eat crow in the days since Trump’s upset....
The 1943 Harlem riots broke out on August 1, just a few days after the photographer Gordon Parks moved to the neighborhood. He considered shooting the chaos around him, but decided against it. “The police would only think I stole the camera and take it from me,” he wrote in a memoir years later. “Harlem Is Nowhere” was intended to focus on the Lafargue Mental Hygiene Clinic, the first racially integrated psychiatric clinic in New York City....
William Powell, author of The Anarchist Cookbook, died this past July at age 66. Published at the height of the counterculture movement in 1971, the book is a how-to guide for manufacturing bombs, weapons, and LSD, a subversive method of advocacy for a violent overthrow of the U.S. government. Powell and The Anarchist Cookbook are thoroughly examined in filmmaker Charlie Siskel’s latest documentary, American Anarchist, which screens as part of the Chicago International Film Festival this weekend....
That’s right, age 104. The premise of the film is that a boy is inexplicably born with a condition that causes him to age four years every hour; in other words, he’ll die within a day. A nurse, Jess, skillfully acted by Yale MFA grad Baize Buzan, kidnaps the child to ensure he gets the chance to experience the world outside of a hospital ward. From there Tom of Your Life is part road-trip movie, a leisurely drive through rural Wisconsin (farms!...
It was a dark and stormy night last Wednesday when the Evanston Library board met to discuss the fate of its long-standing used-book sale. You wouldn’t have guessed from the meager turnout that the cancellation of the quarterly event, and of the book-donation program that fueled it, has evoked some real passion in the community, especially among the volunteers who ran and staffed the sale, and worked year-round sorting a mountain of donations....
Jennifer “Nuky” Phạm, 37, helps run the Celebrate Argyle campaign and books musicians and artists at pop-up events for Haibayô, whose cross-cultural creative collaborations aim to energize the Asia on Argyle district. Phạm is a Chicago-born Vietnamese American and co-owns her family’s business, Mini Thương Xá Pharmacy. She also serves on the board of directors for the Uptown Chamber of Commerce and on the associate board for the Chinese Mutual Aid Association....
A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. Electric Wizard, Wizard Bloody Wizard Only time will tell if the new Electric Wizard LP will join Dopethrone and Come My Fanatics . . . in the doom-metal canon—as much as I like the bass playing on this one, I’d prefer less blues-rock and more evil down-tuned slop. But I’m just happy they’re still out there, trolling the pious hypocrites who have to believe in covens of satanic baby killers in order to maintain their self-serving persecution fantasies....
Gossip Wolf has long enjoyed the illuminating writing of Reader contributor, festival programmer, gallery owner, and record producer John Corbett. Every bookshelf should have copies of A Listener’s Guide to Free Improvisation and his crackerjack essay collections Microgroove and Extended Play. Last month, the University of Chicago Press published Pick Up the Pieces: Excursions in Seventies Music, in whose 78 chapters Corbett takes a characteristically kaleidoscopic view of the polyester-and-punk decade....
