The Jesus Lizard are back . . . again. Chicago’s great 90s noise-rock agitators made their first return to the stage in 2009, ten years after splitting up. Their original label, Touch and Go, accompanied that reunion with Inch—a Record Store Day exclusive that repackaged remastered versions of all nine Jesus Lizard seven-inches it had released. Later that year Touch and Go reissued its Jesus Lizard albums: Down, Liar, Goat, Head, and the EP Pure....
In his 2004 New York Times essay “The Rap Against Rockism,” Kelefa Sanneh argued, “A rockist is someone who reduces rock ‘n’ roll to a caricature, then uses that caricature as a weapon. Rockism means idolizing the authentic old legend (or underground hero) while mocking the latest pop star; lionizing punk while barely tolerating disco; loving the live show and hating the music video.” In the wake of the threats to the Hideout with the Lincoln Yards TIF deal, Eason’s show, directed here by Northlight artistic director BJ Jones, should still carry contemporary weight....
Sue Kwong This winter, the Reader has set a humble goal for itself: to determine the Greatest Chicago Book Ever Written. We chose 16 books that reflected the wide range of books that have come out of Chicago and the wide range of people who live here and assembled them into an NCAA-style bracket. Then we recruited a crack team of writers, editors, booksellers, and scholars as well as a few Reader staffers to judge each bout....
Decades of playing together have given percussionists Hamid Drake and Adam Rudolph an almost clairvoyant rapport. They met as teens at a Chicago drum shop, and in the 70s they formed the Mandingo Griot Society with Gambian kora player Foday Musa Suso. Rudolph moved to New York in the 80s, but he and Drake have continued to collaborate, most notably in Moving Pictures. Last May, they recorded improvisations at NYC venue the Stone with saxophonist and flutist Dave Liebman, an NEA Jazz Master whose arid, biting timbres grace fusion-era Miles Davis classics such as On the Corner and Dark Magus (among hundreds of other albums)....
The streaming-video channel FilmStruck is currently featuring a small but potent package of crime films and thrillers focused on undercover cops. The fact that two are directed by Anthony Mann did not affect our decision to select this grouping for our list this week. Nope. Not one bit. T-Men This crisp 1948 thriller marked Anthony Mann’s emergence from B movie obscurity, setting him on the path that would lead to his great westerns of the 50s....
Once again, the Printers Row Lit Fest, the midwest’s largest literary festival, takes over Dearborn Street from Congress to Polk. There are books to buy, lectures to listen to, and autographs to obtain. If you haven’t bought your tickets yet, here are some of our suggestions for the weekend’s best bets. Welcome to the Neighborhood, Saturday 10:30 AM Five writers tell stories about their neighborhoods for Paul Dailing and Rachel Hyman’s continuing itinerant live-lit series....
Richard Gere in The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel I have no plans to see The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel anytime soon, though I’m sure I’ll end up watching it some night down the road when I’m trying to fall asleep. The movie features Richard Gere in a supporting role, which makes it grade-A insomniac viewing as far as I’m concerned. I find Gere to be a soothing presence in everything he’s done post-Dr....
In Thomas Nashe’s novel The Unfortunate Traveller, the young servant-soldier Jack Wilton swashbuckles his way through the Grand Tour about a century before such European travels became a standard part of a wellborn gentleman’s education. In Prop Thtr’s 2 Unfortunate 2 Travel, director Zach Weinberg and his excellent ensemble retell Jack’s story in the present day. But who is Jack, and why do we need to hear about his trip to Mexico?...
Of all the upsetting stories I heard while Aimee Levitt and I were investigating Profiles Theatre, the one that disturbed me the most came not from anyone who’d ever met or allegedly been harmed by artistic director Darrell W. Cox and his cohort. It wasn’t even a story about something specific he or his collaborators had allegedly done. Savage redacted the postscript and forwarded the message to another friend of mine, a local theater artist, and asked him if this sounded familiar....
Even by Serbian standards the komplet lepinja at Irving Park’s Astoria Café & Bakery is a breakfast of epic proportions. But is it a pizza? Is it a pastry? Is it a sandwich? This wasn’t her first turn at a bakery. When the family arrived in Michigan in 1999, via Germany, Suzi and Tanja both found work at a bakery owned by a Serbian woman. After the woman died Tanja would eventually purchase it....
Being catcalled on the street is annoying. It makes you feel exposed and unsafe. But the biggest problem with it is that, like so many forms of sexual harassment, it makes you feel powerless. You can’t stop it, you can’t confront it without escalating the harassment, and there’s no authority to defend you from it. In the past, I’ve been advised to ignore it, to cross the street, to avoid walking in certain areas without a male escort (including the block outside my apartment), and to laugh at the man in an otherwise empty subway car who decides to show me his penis....
In Ye Olde Tymes, some food historians speculate, pie was merely a vessel for food to get to the table. Everything that came inside was eaten and the actual pastry that contained it was rubbish. Arjun and Lilly Seigell had little sense of the mania said pies inspire in homesick expats when, after a visit to relatives in Sydney, they decided to open Chicago’s first Australian pie shop. On opening weekend last February Lakeview’s Barangaroos sold out of each of its nine varieties; not just the classics, but deliberately Yank-targeted ones like buffalo chicken, veggie pizza, and “Mexican” (steak fajitas, black bean, cheese, sour cream, pico de gallo)....
A screen shot of the “Melba’s Call” video On Friday London-based DJ, producer, and Night Slugs label cofounder Bok Bok comes to Primary. Night Slugs is one of the most prominent and consistent labels in underground electronic music—the music released on the label, often under such misnomers as “dubstep,” sounds more like Loose Ends or Control-era Janet Jackson instrumentals than Burial or Shackleton. The connection to late-80s and early-90s R&B has never been more prominent than in the music of the label’s most mainstream-ready artist, Kelela, whose trip-R&B singing is ideal for the production styles of Night Slugs’ roster (which includes Girl Unit, Kingdom, and Jam City)....
A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. Mica Levi, Delete Beach Mica Levi (Micachu & the Shapes) has written tension-filled film scores for Under the Skin and Jackie, and within that practice she shifts gears for this sci-fi anime by British experimental filmmaker Phil Collins. Her 29-minute soundtrack combines electronics, guitar noise, queasy washes of strings, and environmental elements (rain, a barking dog)....
Last week’s Supreme Court decision to strike down a Texas abortion law reverberated across the nation as a major victory for pro-choice activists. In Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, the court declared unconstitutional a Texas law that would have required doctors who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital, and abortion clinics to meet the safety standards of outpatient surgical centers. A majority of justices found in their ruling that neither of those requirements actually protect women’s health....
As hard as this is for me to admit, I’ve been turning to Republicans to help me get through the horrors of Trump. Like the one that depicts Trump as a doddering old man. Or the fellow-traveler one, spoken in Russian, linking Trump to Putin, Lenin, and Stalin. As they say on their website: “Our many policy differences with national Democrats remain. However, the priority for all patriotic Americans must be a shared fidelity to the Constitution and a commitment to defeat those candidates who have abandoned their constitutional oaths, regardless of party....
The history of improbably successful and long-lasting 70s prog band Nektar is a complicated one. The story starts in 1968, when four British lads—guitarist-singer Roye Albrighton, keyboardist-vocalist Allan Freeman, bassist-singer-Mellotron player Derek Moore, and drummer Ron Howden—met at the Star Club in Hamburg (where another group of British lads, the Beatles, famously cut their teeth). They’d been playing in different bands in Germany since 1965, and they bonded over their mutual love of the Fab Four and the new avant-garde directions rock music was taking....
When the Senate Select Intelligence Committee released its report last month detailing just how enhanced the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” got during the Bush administration’s war on terror, the least surprising response was probably Dick Cheney’s. The former vice president first said the report was “full of crap”; then, a few days later, he vehemently defended the interrogation and detention program as entirely justified and legal. In other words, I didn’t do it—and I’d do it again....
Michael Vallera has worked in a wide variety of Chicago bands including Cleared, Luggage, and Maar, exploring disparate facets of his musical interests, many of them aggressively loud. Over the last few years he’s pursued an interest in meditative ambient sounds. I was a bit surprised that on his 2016 solo debut, Vivid Flu, he’d removed most of the dissonance and bite that’s marked so much of his other music, instead revealing restrained and almost gothic atmospheres....
Courtesy the artist Platinum Boys HoZac’s Blackout weekend is underway, and helping get the notoriously debaucherous festival started tonight is Milwaukee’s Platinum Boys. Made up of stalwarts from Milwaukee’s arty experimental-music scene, these guys throw all subtlety and nuance to the wind and come out swinging with Miller Lite-soaked, unabashed party rock. On today’s 12 O’Clock Track, “Cruisin USA,” the loose-gang vocals sing of the need for weed and speed, and the simple, straightforward punk tune and shredding guitar solos perfectly showcase that these guys are just in this for a good time....
