On “Epiphany,” one of the singles from Futuristic’s December album Blessings, the rapper describes his 2016 album As Seen on the Internet as a “garbage” project filled with repetitive hooks and even a Family Guy impression. The 26-year-old Arizona native had gotten trapped in the nerd-rap gimmick he utilized well in a 2015 series of videos for which he donned oversize frames and challenged people on the street to rap battles....
Gossip Wolf is sad to report that Laura “Lulu” Callier—who performs as local synth jammer Gel Set and half of duos Simulation and God Vol. 1—is leaving town for Los Angeles at the end of the month. Bummer! She’ll play a characteristically idiosyncratic final Chicago show at Near North space Savage Smyth (920 N. Franklin) at noon on Thursday, June 23; opening are noise dudes Andy Ortmann, Jeremiah Fisher (Oakeater), Anthony Janas, and Peter Speer....
Sometimes the most effective songwriting doesn’t attempt any artifice grander than capturing half a day in somebody’s mental process. On this month’s I Need to Start a Garden (Mama Bird), promising Portland singer-songwriter Haley Heynderickx sometimes sounds like she’s simply thinking out loud. The strummy “Oom Sha La La” accelerates and decelerates in fits and starts, summoning the loose, squirrelly vibe of early Modern Lovers, and Heynderickx keeps repeating “The milk is sour,” as though she’s been holed up at home for too long and she’s going stir-crazy....
Over the years, music scholar Christopher C. King has displayed his erudition, curiosity, and passion on countless projects that uncover fascinating and forgotten corners of history—not just in the U.S. but increasingly also in Eastern Europe, usually digging back between 50 and 100 years. He’s produced crucial multidisc sets focusing on bedrock American sounds, including the entire surviving output of blues legend Charley Patton and the recordings of the so-called Bristol sessions, which created a new paradigm for country music....
By all appearances, Sol Café is a product of gentrification, a prime example of the businesses that arrive in neighborhoods to accommodate newer, wealthier residents. It definitely stands out from its neighbors on Howard Street, which include long-standing family-owned restaurants, payday lending services, a minimart, and a pair of shoe stores. Inside the sunlit storefront, baristas sling specialty lattes amidst dried flowers, plants for sale, and a golden disco ball, which floats just above the register....
Earlier this week, extraordinary Chicago soul singer Jamila Woods released her debut solo full-length, Heavn, through local hip-hop label Closed Sessions. On the sedate “Lonely Lonely,” the 26-year-old (who’s also a poet, teacher, and artist) takes pride in fighting through darkness and despair: “I put a sun in my lamp / I put a Post-it Note on my mirror / So I might love myself / So I might be enough today....
Michael Gebert Crayfish boil I arrived late at Dolo Restaurant and Bar, located a little southwest of the primary Chinese restaurant area that spans Archer and Cermak in Chinatown, and my friends had already been through the menu and decided on some things to order. One of those things was a big platter of crayfish and crab; we were interested to see what the Chinese interpretation would be. It arrived a few minutes later, and to our surprise it proved to be nothing more nor less than a seafood boil like you might find in some place in Maine called Ye Old Fish Shanty or in Shreveport or anywhere else they catch up stuff like this: red crawfish mixed with crab legs, half ears of corn, boiled potatoes ....
Red Theater has achieved its admirable goal to “ask dangerous questions theatrically” in the past. But this time playwright Walt McGough’s schematic 2018 Gamergate-inspired drama provides only answers—and likely ones the young storefront audience this company courts already know. Ambitious Katja, a 22-year-old coder, is passionate about designing a noncompetitive online game that involves creating trees, attaching stories to them, and watching multiple players’ stories interconnect. Trent, a hard-core gamer and Katja’s bosom college friend, now at a dead end and living with his parents, can’t understand a game where no one wins....
With nearly 40 actors, eight directors, and an overall roster of artists spanning five countries, Trap Door Theatre‘s sprawling, eight-episode streaming production of playwright Matei Vişniec’s Decomposed Theatre offers a deep dive into the drama, absurdity, tragedy, and undeniably relevant work of the contemporary Romanian-French dramatist. Weirdness and wonder abound, starting with the first episode, The Runner & Illusionist, which takes viewers on a virtual run while we also see—via split screen—a cruise ship magician who sometimes levitates between water and sky....
Lifetime Will Ferrell is (mostly) dead serious in A Deadly Adoption. A week before the Will Ferrell/Kristen Wiig-helmed Lifetime movie A Deadly Adoption aired, the network premiered another original movie called I Killed My BFF. (Not to be confused with the Lifetime series I Killed My BFF. So many BFFs are being killed always.) Two women, a young single mom named Heather and a slightly older married one named Shane, meet in a maternity ward after their respective labors and forge a strong and immediate bond....
Categorizing art is a significant part of aesthetic experience. To be a fan of science fiction, for example, is to declare a passion not for one work of art, or even for art in general, but for a somewhat nebulous set of tropes and canons. Aesthetics is as much about context as it is about text. Genres and styles help explain what art matters, and what art means. Max Sansing’s work doesn’t obliterate or struggle against the wood background—rather, it uses the grain as an ironic wink....
In a recent survey published in the Singapore-based paper the Straits Times, “artist” was labeled the top nonessential job during the pandemic. Folks flocked to social media to push back and criticize the results—and rightfully so. Just because museums have been largely closed and art openings have been put on pause doesn’t mean art is absent from our everyday experience. The Hyde Park Art Center is commemorating the anniversary of the original “Artists Run Chicago” show in 2009....
Hours after students across Chicago and the nation held a walkout to protest gun violence, officials at Northwestern University in Evanston advised students to stay away from campus after a report of a person with a gun. At William J. Bogan High School on the southwest side, students held signs and chanted, “Who keeps us safe? We keep us safe.” Students faced the road screaming, “We are not animals,” while holding up signs that read, “Honk if you’re against gun violence....
Now celebrating its 16th year, the sex-positive film festival CineKink brings to town comedy, drama, documentary, and experimental films ranging from mildly kinky to explicitly sexual and focusing on a wide variety of sexualities and identities. Founded in 2003, with roots in New York City, the annual festival tours to Oakland, Toronto, Portland, and Chicago. Lisa Vandever, one of the cofounders—and a former Rogers Park resident—says she “stumbled into the whole thing” after moving to NYC and becoming involved in the BDSM community....
That’s what he told me anyway, a few months ago when we talked about his second and presumably last cookbook Cooking for Good Times, which hits the market Tuesday in all its full-color glory. “We’re not trying to show you how great of cooks we are,” he says. The book’s fundamental truth, however, comes straight out of a restaurant kitchen: Kahan tells me he’s been cooking a lot of Japanese food up at the cabin, just because there’s not a lot of it around there....
Garth Greenwell, an American poet, critic, and fiction writer, first came to prominence in 2011 with his novella Mitko. The book, a mix of fiction and memoir, is an account of the sexual and romantic relationship between two men: the eponymous Bulgarian male hustler, and the narrator, ostensibly based on the author, who works as a teacher at the American College in Sofia, where Greenwell taught for four years. In his debut novel, What Belongs to You, Greenwell expands Mitko into a 190-page meditation on sex, desire, identity, rejection, humiliation, and what it’s like to navigate these complex subjects in Bulgaria during the early 2010s....
Stevie Wonder’s personal archives are reputedly filled with decades of homemade demos and jam sessions that have never been released. If I had to guess what they sound like, I’d say some of them probably have a lot in common with the new album from Georgia Anne Muldrow. The Los Angeles singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist is a true original, operating across genre boundaries in soul, rap, jazz, R&B, and elsewhere, and Vweto III recalls Wonder’s early-70s experiments with Moogs and other analog synths....
Kara Thorstenson had a dream of filling her Lincoln Square home with original art, though she thought she could never afford it on her school librarian’s salary. But the 33-year-old found a workaround, acquiring works from friends and repurposing found art. The charming decor has turned what was once a no-frills apartment into a sought-after Airbnb rental. When Thorstenson temporarily relocated to Hyde Park last summer for a six-week teaching gig, she needed to cover two rents; Airbnb seemed the obvious solution....
Chicago is home to lots of technically savvy rock weirdos obsessed with unconventional song structures, odd time signatures, and controlled chaos. I’ve wondered often why London four-piece Black Midi has gotten so much international hype for their (perfectly fine) debut album, given that I can walk into Subterranean’s downstairs venue on a Tuesday and see three local bands with just as much or more face-melting proficiency. I hope at least some of the folks getting turned on to askew rock via Black Midi end up finding these Chicago acts—and Imelda Marcos would be a great place to start....
Jennifer Kim’s mom keeps a bottle under her kitchen sink containing knobby, gnarly roots and a continually replenished volume of clear, high-proof spirit. “I’m extremely upset,” she says. “We’re taking time to mourn and grieve but we’re also taking time to celebrate because there’s been this great untethering.” Kim is a onetime pharmacy student who switched tracks and came up in the kitchens of a handful of One Off Hospitality restaurants—Nico Osteria, Avec, Blackbird—before making her name at the short-lived cured seafood-focused microdeli Snaggletooth....
