Posts

Cello and electronics player Fred Lonberg-Holm, who lived in Chicago until 2017, and Norwegian drummer Ståle Liavik Solberg are the Party Knüllers. The name of the duo is a bit deceptive; their freewheeling approach to improvising is more like a friendly (but not too friendly) game of street ball than Andrew W.K.-style headbanging. But they do adhere to one rule of partying—no matter how much fun you’re having making music, it’s even more fun when the right friends join in....

Lincoln Square artist Lothar Speer recalled the time in 1991 he was called to O’Hare Airport to pick up a shipment of Keim paint. He’d ordered it directly from its German manufacturer for an outdoor mural he planned to create. Keim is an expensive, mineral silicate paint whose colors bind tightly to surfaces and can last decades, so Speer was horrified to see a customs inspector don rubber gloves and reach into the buckets to check for contraband, precious liquid pigment dripping from his arms....

For much of the last half century, the paranoia and tyranny of the McCarthy era in America has seemed more like a bizarre anomaly than an evil that could easily reappear. And that story is an old one: virgin meets cad. Timothy Laughlin (tenor Jonas Hacker) is a recent college graduate—an endearingly dorky, devotedly Catholic intern at a D.C. newspaper seeking a future in public policy. A chance meeting with Hawkins Fuller (baritone Joseph Lattanzi)— a dashing Harvard graduate, state department careerist, and serial seducer—lands him a job on a senator’s staff and introduces him to the exhilaration and heartbreak of first love....

Gannett upped the ante Monday, letting Tribune Publishing shareholders know it would now pay $15 a share to take over the company. The original offer was $12.25, and the value of the stock when Gannett made it in April was about $7.50. Gannett’s behaving like an army laying siege, dropping leaflets onto the rabble within that say, We come to free you. Rise up and open the gates. It’s tempting to think that when one destiny is weighed against the other, control of the Chicago Tribune by the Gannett chain instead of Ferro doesn’t look so bad....

Thinkstock No matter how little space you give some writers, they try to fill it with a world. Frank Stewart is one of these writers; marketed as a bridge columnist and allotted about 160 words a day, he presides over a cast of characters who preen, smolder, blunder, lick their wounds, and occasionally make the kind of off-tune remark that lands Stewart in trouble with the front office. “Pat vetoed that one,” Stewart told me—speaking of Patrick Fitzmaurice, his editor at the Tribune Content Agency, which syndicates him....

COVID-19 has struck Illinois in force just as the spring gardening season is starting. If you’re a gardener in Chicago, you’ve probably already ordered and started germinating your seeds, plotted your now-dormant backyard or balcony plot (or pots), and made a wish list of seedlings you’d like to buy from garden centers and the various community plant sales scheduled to begin in May (see below). I talked with a pair of gardening experts about why home and community gardening is more important now than ever, and what they had to say is encouraging....

The Nashville-born, Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter Sunny War is known for her clawhammer fingerstyle guitar playing, vivid autobiographical lyrics, and distinctive sound that starts at the crossroads of blues, country, folk, and punk, and only expands from there. She left home as a teenager to busk on Venice Beach and in San Francisco with friends she met in local punk scenes, and since then she’s battled homelessness, substance abuse, and domestic violence....

Mr. Jukebox (Third Man) is the title of the debut album by Nashville singer and fiddler Joshua Hedley, but it’s also his nickname—a walking encyclopedia of country music history, Hedley plays requests at the drop of a cowboy hat. On this album, his devotion to classic country is clear: there’s the faux-Nudie suit he sports on the cover, pitch-perfect arrangements recalling the glory days of producers Owen Bradley and Chet Atkins, and melodies of the kind that George Jones and Conway Twitty would elevate into works of art....

In a darkened room, four overhead projectors snap on. A picture of a street in Bronzeville slides onto a movie screen. Behind one of the projectors, Jyreika Guest and Eunice Woods drop two paper cutouts onto the glass surface and move them back and forth. Onscreen, the silhouettes of two well-to-do white women circa 1950 stroll down the street. “Is this it?” they coo. “Is this where the Negro poetess lives?...

Charles-Geneviève-Louis-Auguste-André-Timothée d’Éon de Beaumont lived a revolutionary life in revolutionary times. He began his singular career under Louis XV as both secretary to the Russian ambassador and undercover spy. After a stint as a French dragoon, he became minister plenipotentiary to the British court (while also covertly helping to plan an invasion of England), a position he lost six months later due to insolent behavior. When the king ordered him home, he refused, and after escaping multiple attempts at kidnap and arrest, he published a volume of his diplomatic correspondence, exposing state secrets and turning himself into a celebrity....

It’s been said a trillion times: Chicago is a city of neighborhoods. With some 246 of them, it would stand to reason that the task of choosing the city’s worst would be nigh impossible. After all, what makes a particular neighborhood worse than any other? Is it the crime rate? Underperforming schools? Undesirable housing stock? Lack of cultural amenities? As I chewed the question over, I kept landing on the same answer: Chicago’s worst neighborhood is the one that is least representative of the city—demographically, politically, culturally....

When a playwright’s words define a world as fully as George Bernard Shaw’s, concert readings work just fine. And when an ensemble has been as well trained in the nuances of Shaw’s wit as ShawChicago’s regulars, it’s easy to sit back and enjoy the human badinage. The company’s longtime artistic director, Robert Scogin, died in October 2018, but its current staging of Arms and the Man, directed by Mary Michell, is a solid tribute to his legacy....

Michael Brosilow Sean Fortunato and Sophie Thatcher Though it’s often staged at high schools, The Diary of Anne Frank—with its heavy Holocaust references, clunky diary passages, and complex character dynamics—is actually a difficult trick to turn. Those producing the 1955 drama can easily get bogged down by the gravitas of the material, forgetting the play’s all-too-human inhabitants. That humanity isn’t overlooked in the production at Writers Theatre, but director Kimberly Senior ultimately misses the mark, giving us a happy family in place of the diary’s complicated individuals....

It feels a little odd walking out of the May weather and into the macabre Halloween-season atmosphere of Exit 63 Productions’ debut show. But why should the sinister be confined to a single time of year? That’s certainly not the way things work in real life. Steve Yockey’s 2012 Very Still and Hard to See is a cycle of short plays dealing with the uncanny. In the first vignette, a big-time architect named Buck Mason (Scott Olson) falls into a sinkhole near his latest commission, a hotel on which construction has just begun....

“The charges announced are serious and the Chicago Police Department will have zero tolerance for proven misconduct,” CPD news affairs said in a statement. “CPD is fully cooperating with the US Attorney’s Office.” “The government is very selective about when it indicts,” says Taylor, explaining that Proano’s indictment means that the U.S. attorney’s office must believe it has a very strong case. “I’ve seen similar situations in the past for almost five decades now, and I’ve seen the powers that be in this city put up a good show that they’re doing fundamental changes when in fact they’re not,” he says....

Nicknames are good for tavern regulars and old-time gangsters. For anyone and anything else they can be downright cringeworthy. Alas, Chicago is an eminently nickname-able city. Maybe it’s because the world associates Chicago with taverns and old-time gangsters, or maybe it’s just our lousy luck that city nicknames accumulate like dibs chairs in January. Sure, they add color to the landscape of our midwestern vernacular, but for every cool Chicago epithet there are at least two or three awkward ones: for every Scarface, a Willie Potatoes....

Curious Theatre Branch presents the world premiere of Matt Rieger’s overloaded whodunit about underworld struggles with a lot of hand-wringing over morality. When a neighborhood kid is mugged while running an errand for a mysterious figure named Hart (Rieger), it sets off a series of killings and reprisals that upends the power dynamic of the town. Told in four acts through a breathlessly listed series of dozens of scenes—none much longer than five minutes—this is an intermittently amusing but often baffling stew of snark and philosophizing masquerading as a mystery....

New York-based Alexandra Drewchin, also known as Eartheater, creates mellow music that terrifies and/or terrifying music that you can sink back and relax to. On her most recent album, last year’s IRISIRI (Pan), she mixes elements of acoustic folk and electronica; the music pulses and flows like a heavy mist that dissipates only to show glimpses of waving heather and witches’ claws. But Drewchin never settles on one mood or mode, even within a single song....

As an artist, teacher, and musician, Rodney James Baker shaped countless lives, but he did it under the radar: throughout his career he remained fiercely independent, pursuing an idiosyncratic aesthetic that ensured he’d never reach a position of mainstream influence. He recorded his own tracks under the name Rodney Bakerr, but his most widely heard works were probably the house-music rhythm patterns he wrote in 1987 for the Roland Corporation, whose drum machines and synthesizers formed the bedrock of the Chicago sound at the time....

Next week local trio Basement Family welcome their first proper release (that is, their first that isn’t a demo tape). Their self-titled 12-inch EP comes out via the Maximum Pelt label, and today the Reader premieres an exclusive stream of it. Basement Family came together in 2014, after the demise of Bigcolour, the dreamy garage band of singer-guitarist Alex Auby and drummer Jeremy Lindemulder. They’ve since added bassist Joel Schafer and turned up the volume, blasting through a hybrid of stoner pop and garage rock as a blown-out, distortion-drenched power trio....