Savage Love Live stormed into Revolution Hall in Portland, Oregon. Comedian Corina Lucas absolutely killed it before our sold-out crowd, singer-songwriter Elisabeth Pixley-Fink performed an amazing set, and two lovely couples competed in our first (and most likely last) Mama Bird Cupcake Eating Contest. I wasn’t able to get to all of the audience-submitted questions, so I’m going to power through as many as I can in this week’s column....
I was reading an article in the New York Times about the recent Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russian election interference when I spied the following sentence. But the Illinois State Board of Elections, hacked? I’ve been going around for the last few days asking people what they know about the story. And most folks didn’t know the state’s election board had been hacked, much less by Russian operatives. The only people who claimed they knew about it were reporters....
When Seratones released their 2016 debut album, Get Gone, it seemed they were on to something special: though they’re from Shreveport, Louisiana, their soulful punk sound came across like it had grown out of a musical road trip across the U.S., with stops in the deep south, Motor City, Memphis, Paisley Park, and assorted California beaches. The band’s new album, Power, tamps down the fuzzed-out atmospheres of their early material in favor of soul-pop sophistication without losing any of the music’s bustling eclecticism or the fire that blazes at its core....
Q: I’m a guy, 35, and a cheating piece of shit. I’m engaged to a woman I love, but earlier this year I cheated on her. I have no excuse. She discovered the dating app I used, and we worked through that. But she doesn’t know that shortly after her discovery, I went ahead and cheated. To my meager, meager credit, I did seek out only women who were looking for NSA hookups....
I was once a regular at Logan Square bar Golden Teardrops’s Thursday night karaoke, but singing in a crowded basement is the opposite of safe during an airborne pandemic. I was resigned to lingering in livestream comment sections until mid-April, when my friends Erin McAuliffe and Matt Munhall sent an invite to virtual karaoke. Virtual karaoke is just singing in your home, cueing up your own backing track on one device as you sing into the webcam of another....
Still, I’ve found it impossible to shake the feeling that I could attend the Dogs’ open tryouts and get called up to warm the bench if the whole team suddenly became stricken with food poisoning. This is part of their charm; it feels like anything can happen at a Dogs game. I’ve seen the Dogs commit more errors than in most MLB games I’ve witnessed, but also a lot more home runs and squeaky plays that left me on the edge of my seat too....
The upcoming Strange Foods Festival started with an Instagram account. A year and a half ago Keng Sisavath, a 36-year-old dental technician, launched @strangefoodschicago to “introduce the food of my motherland,” he says. Sisavath, who was born in a refugee camp on the border of Thailand and Laos, came to the U.S. as a toddler and was raised in Green Bay, Wisconsin, by Lao relatives. The problem with trying to photograph Lao food in the Chicago area according to Sisavath, is that there isn’t much: unlike Green Bay, Chicago doesn’t have a significant Lao population....
At around the same time that Alderman Ameya Pawar was blasting Governor Bruce Rauner last week, former alderman Will Burns was lighting into Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Well, not Burns directly, but Airbnb—the company he works for. In my mind, Pawar and Burns will always be linked as the smart guys Rahm turned to in the first years of his reign, when he needed a surrogate to offer a little progressive spin on his policies....
Cook County Clerk of the Circuit Court archives In the viewing room of the archives, visitors can peruse files of famous court cases, like the 1886 trial of the accused Haymarket bombers, the 1920 trial of the White Sox who were charged with throwing the previous year’s World Series, and the lawsuits against the builder and architect of the Iroquois Theatre, in which more than 600 died in a fire in 1903, shortly after it opened....
Boston is rarely celebrated for its contributions to hip-hop (Gang Starr started there, but most remember the legendary duo for their time in New York), yet last summer when Fader writer Eric Diep asked Boston rapper Stephen Goss, aka Cousin Stizz, whether he believed his hometown’s scene deserves more outside recognition, Stizz replied, “Yo, Boston is going to do whatever the fuck it do regardless if people want to give us recognition or not....
Some bands break up because of creative differences. Some break up because they can’t stand each other anymore. Some break up for financial reasons. But Chicago indie electro-pop group Celine Neon—aka Emily Nejad and Maggie Kubley, with Maggie’s brother Will producing—are splitting up because Nejad started making cakes. That friendship is of long standing: Nejad and Kubley met 15 years ago at Ball State, where they were both looking to form a band....
Rosario Zavala Chicagoans is a first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. This week’s Chicagoan is Jenni Prokopy, person living with chronic illnesses and founder of ChronicBabe.com. “I had a family member who recommended an out-of-state specialist, and that doctor gave me a bunch of treatments that made me much, much worse. She started me on three medications at the same time, and I had a horrible reaction....
Kuzu formed in 2017, when electric guitarist Tashi Dorji and drummer Tyler Damon invited saxophonist Dave Rempis to join their duo onstage at Elastic Arts. The set went so well that they recorded an album the next day. Anyone who knew what that record’s title, Hiljaisuus, means in Finnish probably just thought the trio were trolling—“silence” was the last thing you’d expect from three musicians so adept at managing high volume, and they’d delivered exactly the sort of blistering barrage you’d expect....
Queer history lives in its multitudes. While specific individuals like San Francisco politician Harvey Milk and Chicago businessman and photographer Chuck Renslow have historically dominated the spotlight, the real legacy of queerness is rooted in the untold stories of the historically forgotten and discarded, those refusing to passively accept their assumed fates. Every untold act of resistance echoes down to us today, whether we know it or not. As one web series of underreported trans narratives says: We’ve Been Around....
In the fall, Chicago nonprofit the Modern Dance Music Research and Archive Foundation kicked off a yearlong partnership with the Old Town School of Folk Music to celebrate the city’s house-music history. Tonight the Old Town School hosts an event born of that partnership, focusing on the labels, middlemen, and other behind-the-scenes operators who helped launch house from Chicago’s underground clubs onto pop charts around the world. The panel discussion, called the Business of House, is anchored by Kevin McFall, senior vice president of strategy and business development for the Johnson Publishing Company, and attorney Jay B....
Return with us now to the thrilling days of yesteryear,” went the intro toThe Lone Ranger radio and TV shows. Marriott Theatre’s revival of Oklahoma! might as well start with the same line. Interested in a realistic depiction of life in the Sooner State on the eve of its 1907 admission to the union? One that alludes to ugly truths about the way Native Americans were treated? One that so much as features a Native American?...
For years, Saint Jhn wrote for the likes of Usher, Joey Bada$$, and Jidenna, and even modeled on the side. But he grew tired of being another artist’s voice or a designer’s mannequin; with his debut album, Collection One (Godd Complexx/Hitco), Saint Jhn—who grew up in Guyana and Brooklyn—aims to tell his story for himself. In the vein of rappers/singers such as Tory Lanez, Bryson Tiller, and PnB Rock, he talks about getting with women, the temptations of alcohol, and reaching success, over standard contemporary R&B production: rumbling bass, stuttering hi-hat trap beats, and minimal melodies....
Governor Rauner made a royal ass of himself when he went on radio station WJPF in Carterville, “the voice of southern Illinois,” earlier this week. And no, I’m not talking about the part where Rauner vowed to keep the state out of education so the locals can control their schools. “I do not support legalizing recreational marijuana. I think it’s a big experiment on young people’s brains and development. We should study what’s going on in Colorado and California,” Rauner said....
At most any nightclub packed wall to wall, teeming with body heat, it’s not out of the ordinary for a few patrons to dance or lounge around shirtless—that is, if you’re a man. But there’s another important layer to Sullivan-Knoff’s suit, which she highlighted in an interview with the Reader last week. Sullivan-Knoff, a queer, transgender woman, points out that the ordinance also places transgender and gender non-conforming people in a precarious position—one that’s been reinforced by the relentless national debate about trans people using bathrooms, locker rooms, and other gendered public accommodations....
Update for June 5: Pivot Arts has made some changes to the schedule for this year’s festival. The livestream celebration and dance party originally scheduled for tonight’s opening night have been postponed to June 11. Instead, tonight will feature new works on video by Red Clay Dance Company (originally scheduled June 6) and the Era Footwork Crew (as scheduled). See the festival website for complete schedule. One of the “silver linings” of the reimagined Pivot Festival for Ehre is the ability to bring in artists from outside Chicago, including New York-based Obie Award-winning solo performer David Cale, who has been performing at the Goodman for decades....
