Kossi* hadn’t planned to leave his home in West Africa that day. His wife was pregnant with their second son, and he owned a successful shop that sold the colorful swaths of secondhand clothes from Europe and China that were so popular among his country’s youth. But when an anti-government demonstration broke out nearby, and soldiers came into his shop and started arresting his customers, he knew he had to find safety....
Jim Becker and Joe Adamik are resolute sidemen and longtime fixtures of Chicago’s live-music scene. The former often plays fiddle, guitar, and banjo in rootsy settings, both straight and twisted, while the latter appears most often these days drumming with jazz and improvisational combos. Their partnership began in 2000, when they were both members of polymorphous rock band Califone, and carried on when Iron & Wine recruited most of Califone in 2010....
The limousine as petri dish in Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis It’s been a while now since David Cronenberg opened a film with a proper credits sequence, as opposed to printing a few titles and leaving the remaining credits for the end. Until recently, the credits sequence had been a mainstay of his work. The Canadian filmmaker often said in interviews that he valued the convention since it created a buffer zone between reality and the world of the film....
The story Anthony Whitaker tells in his 90-minute country-and-western musical is the stuff of George Jones and Tammy Wynette songs: Donna (ably played by Kelly Combs), a southern gal in her late 20s/early 30s, tries to restart her life after she d-i-v-o-r-c-e-s her high school sweetheart after years of an abusive marriage. Or it could be, if Whitaker—who wrote the book, the songs, and the lyrics—was a stronger storyteller. The elements are there for a good yarn: a relatable problem, potentially interesting country-song characters (shrill, Bible-thumping little sis, kindly neighbor, hard-drinking ex), a southern setting (Greenville, South Carolina, circa 1980)....
Welcome to Flopcorn, where Reader writers and contributors pay tribute to our very favorite bad movies. In this installment, digital managing editor Karen Hawkins celebrated this weekend’s Super Blood Wolf Moon by watching Under the Cherry Moon, Prince’s follow-up to Purple Rain, with her sister Valerie, cousin Diane, and partner Samantha. She hopes they someday find it in their hearts to forgive her. Prince both stars and directs, and legend has it that after the massive success of Purple Rain, the studio greenlit the project without seeing the script by first-time screenwriter Becky Johnston....
When Jill Hopkins saw a post on the Facebook discussion group Ukrainian Village Neighborhood Watch about a proposal to hire private security guards to patrol a portion of the neighborhood in cooperation with the Chicago Police Department, it raised red flags. Host of the talk show Morning AMp on WBEZ’s sister station, Vocalo, Hopkins lived in Ukrainian Village in the 2000s, and she regularly checks the neighborhood watch group, along with similar pages in a few other communities, as part of the research for her broadcast....
Most folks use December to wind down the year’s final projects and prepare for some old-fashioned holiday hibernation, but this past December 7 local rappers Joshua Virtue and Ruby Watson dropped their debut EP as Free Snacks. Virtue and Watson display the casual chemistry of consistent collaborators on Eat Good Tape, and their punchy delivery enlivens the EP’s relaxed, funky, sample-heavy production. On Tuesday, January 15, Free Snacks perform at the Empty Bottle—their first headlining gig since Eat Good Tape came out, and thus a de facto release party....
Thinkstock What it feels like to stop paying student loans (dramatization) I don’t know whether Megan McArdle intended to pay Lee Siegel a compliment. Probably not. Siegel, a cultural critic who used to go to Columbia University, published an essay in the New York Times last week explaining why he blew off his student loans. Then McArdle wrote an essay for Bloomberg View—reprinted in the Tribune—marveling that Siegel “described his decision in the least sympathetic terms possible....
Michael Schmidt/Sun-Times Governor Bruce Rauner and Mayor Rahm Emanuel at the memorial service for Ernie Banks on January 31 at Fourth Presbyterian Church. The church’s gallery has served as a polling place, and it’s been the best in the city for both Rauner and Emanuel. “I’m honored that so many hardworking Chicagoans have put their trust in me,” Rahm Emanuel said on his website before last Tuesday’s election. This is the mayor’s turf—within a mile or so of the lakefront, from downtown north, up to about Uptown, where incomes, and his support, begin to fall....
Now in its 43rd year, this Black Ensemble Theater classic, written and directed by founder and CEO Jackie Taylor, is an enchanting production with BET legends and talented newcomers at the helm. From a young volunteer usher excitedly welcoming me to “the Kingdom of Other” on the afternoon I attended to the boisterous and ever-capable backing band atop the stage, the show stands on a foundation of joy and positivity that carries throughout the familiar story....
On an empty stretch of beach outside the city of Delft, the Netherlands, small herds of an ostensibly unidentifiable species ramble slowly across the sand. They parade in a delicately rhythmic procession, bleached white by the sun. Brittle vertebrae form pointed arches, ribbed vaulting, and buttresses reminiscent of Gothic architecture. Poised against an endless expanse of blue sky, the creatures’ gossamer wings undulate in the breeze. As the tide rises, the animals recede toward the dunes where, with a strong gust of wind, they can be swept into the air and down the beach like tumbleweeds....
On January 7, 2013, shortly before 2 PM, Chicago police officers Kevin Fry and Lou Toth were driving westbound on 75th Street, in a poor, African-American section of the South Shore neighborhood. They were in plainclothes in an unmarked Crown Victoria. As they approached Essex Avenue, a silver Dodge Charger, northbound on Essex, cruised through a stop sign and turned left on 75th, not far in front of the officers. The driver was alone in the car....
Q: I found your column after a Google search. I saw your e-mail address at the bottom and was hoping for some insight. My issue is this: Two years into our 23-year marriage, my wife declared that she didn’t want to kiss me or perform oral on me. Several years ago, she had an affair and confessed that she not only kissed this other person but performed oral on them as well....
On Thursday, November 29, a group of music venue owners who’d just organized themselves as the Chicago Independent Venue League (CIVL) held a press conference to announce their opposition to Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s fast-tracking of Lincoln Yards, a hugely ambitious mixed-use development along the North Branch of the Chicago River. The members of CIVL say the project won’t just make the city’s homegrown music economy less competitive—it also has the potential to sink it completely....
Like the earliest practitioners of film, the men and women who made silent pictures, today’s writers, directors, producers, and actors often come to moviemaking through other disciplines. Film is a collaborative medium; except for some rarified experimental efforts, it requires a team. But you don’t have to go to Hollywood to realize your vision, whether it’s for mass distribution or a niche audience. Two recent Chicago independent productions, The Curse of the Tempest Jewel (2015), a film noir-style caper, and The Spy Who Knew Me (2017), a riff on James Bond, are narrative features modest in scale but big on ambition, starring a local ensemble of young performers with Down syndrome....
In the Basement Tomorrow at 7:30 PM, radio and TV personality Adam Carolla will be at the PortagePatio Theater to introduce a screening of Road Hard, a new comedy that he stars in, cowrote, and codirected. The movie’s a subtle prank in the vein of Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation—it looks like a straightforward piece of autobiographical fiction, but it contains much more fiction than autobiography. The central joke is that Carolla’s autobiographical stand-in, like Kaufman’s in Adaptation, is nowhere as successful or socially competent as he is....
I was killing time with the boys in a bar Tuesday night when I suddenly realized: Holy shit, Billy C’s about to make another one of his fabulous convention speeches. Within an instant, I was on my bike, racing home as fast as I could pedal. And yet, he’s still got the great Clintonian moves—his timing and pace are perfect. He can still make his voice catch with emotion. I feel like I’m watching a great old quarterback limping to the huddle to lead his team on one last march up the field....
Dan Goldberg Mindy Segal’s Brownie Krinkles There have been (and are about to be) a lot of good new cookbooks released by local authors lately. I’m going to try to excerpt recipes from each of them as they come out. First up is Cookie Love, by pastry superchef and Hot Chocolate proprietor Mindy Segal (with Kate Leahy, a food writer based in Oakland, California). This is simply a lovely book, chock-full of cookie porn, with some 60 recipes broken down into categories like drop cookies, shortbread, sandwich cookies, bars, spritz and thumbprints, etc....
Before Annie Russell became a news editor at WBEZ by day and stand-up comedian by night, she was a college student who wanted to make a real statement with a one-act play. Russell describes the work as a cross between the film Garden State and an episode of Law & Order: SVU, a revelatory piece about date rape. Years later, she found the play buried on her hard drive. It wasn’t quite as profound as she remembered....
Local singer-songwriter Constantine Hastalis has one of the finest record collections of anyone I know. What’s most admirable about it is its focus: virtually every LP is psychedelic rock, pop, folk, or experimental music from the late 1960s and early ’70s. Many of the releases are obscure, and more recognizable records tend to be imports or rare editions of famous albums. At one point, Hastalis was posting pictures of highlights from his library to Instagram, but he’s since discontinued the practice....
