Posts

If you’re in the mood for some serious decolonizing after the Jeanine Cummins American Dirt backlash, Isaac Gomez has you covered. In The Leopard Play, or Sad Songs for Lost Boys, now in a blistering and poignant world premiere at Steep under Laura Alcalá Baker’s direction, Gomez returns to his own roots in El Paso—a border city that not only reflects the many cracks and divisions running through our national identity right now, but that is also internalized by the character identified as “Son....

“So . . . I think I may have seen that flying thing or whatever,” Jeff said sheepishly before taking an extra-long drag from his cigarette. So I admittedly wasn’t very alarmed when I read about the “record number of reports of flying humanoids” that Aimee Levitt blogged about for the Reader this summer. I browsed the website sourced in the piece, Lon Strickland’s Phantoms and Monsters, an unofficial archive of stories about the Chicago Mothman (or Chicago Phantom, or Lake Michigan Bat Creature, or whatever), and read of the alleged eyewitness accounts....

As the Museum of Contemporary Photography celebrates its 40th anniversary this week, the institution faces an existential question: Should a place devoted to photography worry that the fundamental definition of the medium has recently and radically changed? The explosion of amateur pocket photographers could seemingly wipe out the need for a brick-and-mortar monument to an aging art form. Inside the museum, images are stored in dark, refrigerated vaults, while everywhere else pictures are exchanged at the speed of light....

Q: First let me say that I think you give excellent advice, even if it is a bit pedestrian at times. I have a small problem: Last fall, my penis bent up and to the left at an almost 90-degree angle. I know from Google that this is not an unusual problem. And at 59, I am thankful that things are working as well as they are. But I fly gliders, and the relief system is a “Texas catheter” with a drain line to outside the glider....

The age of Zoom has created a split-screen metaphor for the changes in our private and public lives. We’re separated physically, but the world is invited into our personal spaces in a way that never happened in Cube Farmlandia. For theater pieces created at a distance and for online consumption, the dichotomy feels even more keen. It concludes with Marguerite Mariama, a longtime artist and activist who notes that her political organizing began as a student protesting the “Willis Wagons”—portable classrooms that maintained de facto segregation in Chicago schools....

While typically a time of year associated with relaxation and any number of festive activities, the holiday season in Chicago will look different this year due to COVID-19. “One of the main things we are considering is really trying to keep that Christkindlmarket family together [and] keep the feel of the market going,” she says. “And not sort of exclude those vendors that wouldn’t be able to come over, because they’re really something that is the heart of the market....

A Chicago Police Department document from 1989 that outlines (in absurd fashion) how to identify teens involved in ritualistic crime went viral on Twitter on Sunday. Not quite. The “satanic panic” was a very real case of mass hysteria that peaked in the 80s. Law enforcement played no small part in it. Hoooooooly crap guys. My sister is an art teacher in FLA, and she found this AMAZING document in her supply closet pic....

At 19, Chicago R&B singer and Zero Fatigue member Ravyn Lenae has proven herself a master at crafting odes to love. That’s partially because she’s open about the peculiar perplexities of being enamored with someone. On “Sticky,” the lead single from February’s Crush ­(Atlantic/Three Twenty Three), she sings about the cognitive dissonance brought on by loving an idealized version of a partner whose actions are out of sync with her expectations....

Last year, Chicago rapper Receo Gibson dropped a mixtape, a compilation of singles, and an EP, but he couldn’t shake the feeling he’d lost the thread. Now 26, he’d been rapping since age 18, and he’d built a promising career under the name Sage, the 64th Wonder. In 2016 local multimedia outlet 119 Productions put Sage’s “Purple Scope,” recorded with Pivot Gang cofounder MFn Melo, on Countdown 2 Midnight, a compilation that also features some of the biggest names in contemporary Chicago hip-hop—including Noname, Mick Jenkins, Saba, and King Louie....

CST Media Peter Lisagor Speaking personally, the Headline Club’s Lisagor Awards dinner has become a big deal in recent years because I get to stand in front of the crowd with my friend Len Aronson, say a few words, and make a presentation. Applause rings in our ears. Last Friday’s dinner marked the fourth time that we’ve given a Chicago journalist the Anne Keegan Award for Distinguished Journalism, which Len founded to honor his late wife, a former Tribune columnist....

Ghostemane is a white rapper from Florida who was reared on punk, metalcore, and other strains of aggressive music that had some modicum of accessibility and a fragment of crossover success. In a June interview with taste-making rap podcast No Jumper, he said, “The fans of my stuff now would have been fans of the Devil Wears Prada or Bring Me the Horizon—Myspace shit back in the day—it’s like the same audience....

Q: I’m an early 30s hetero woman in a monogamous relationship with my mid-30s hetero guy. We’ve been together ten years, married seven, no kids. We have a lot of fun—traveling, shared hobbies, mutual friends, etc. We have sex fairly regularly, and it’s not bad. However, his primary sexual fetish and main turn-on is furry porn—namely, cartoon images. He doesn’t self-identify as a furry; he doesn’t have a fur suit or fursona....

Gossip Wolf has loved local rockers Lifestyles (featuring members of Lil Tits, Touched by Ghoul, and Foul Tip) since they released a scorching demo in 2014—at the time, this very column described it as a “Babes in Toyland-style alt-rock apocalypse.” Last week the band dropped their debut full-length, Friends, via Bandcamp, and next week Chicago label Automatic Recordings releases the LP. The album has this wolf feeling “Sub Pop grunge in a sweaty-assed basement” vibes—it even closes with a song from the perspective of suicide cult Heaven’s Gate, who famously tried to catch a UFO ride off earth from San Diego in 1997....

Isaac Gomez’s exciting new thriller mixes bumps in the night with poignant social commentary, similar to Jordan Peele’s Get Out. In its world premiere, produced by Haven Theatre and directed by Jo Cattell, the one-act two-hander features charismatic performances by Karen Rodriguez and Rashaad Hall. They play Marisa and Lev, a young couple with a visibly strained relationship marred by the distance created by device addiction, mistrust, and some deep-seated hurt around the challenges of an interracial relationship....

Few documentary makers see their work bring results as substantial as those witnessed by producer Amy Ziering and writer-director Kirby Dick when The Invisible War, their exposé of sexual assault in the U.S. military, was screened for secretary of defense Leon Panetta in April 2012. One of the key problems identified in the movie was the policy requiring any military assault victim to report the incident directly to his or her commanding officer, who might be friends with the perpetrator or might even be the perpetrator himself....

Sometimes Marina Rosenfeld is a turntablist who layers the sounds of specially made, heavily used acetates into gritty sonic expanses. Other times she is a conceptual composer. Her performers’ histories, interests, and personalities become material influences on a composition; for example, her desire to work with people of a generation that had grown up having personal relationships with their electronics led to Teenage Lontano, which she devised for the 2008 Whitney Biennale....

After months of pushing by cycling advocates to bring dockless bike-share to Chicago, the technology finally debuted this morning in Beverly as 19th Ward alderman Matthew O’Shea cut the ribbon on a fleet of shiny new LimeBike cycles in the County Fair Foods parking lot. Meanwhile competing vendor Zagster is also rolling out bikes today, and dockless cycles from company Ofo and Jump will likely be popping up on south-side streets any time now....

O wen Daniel-McCarter is a longtime activist, lawyer, and Chicagoan. As one of the founders of the Transformative Justice Law Project of Illinois and the outgoing executive director of the Illinois Safe Schools Alliance, Daniel-McCarter has fought for the past decade to make this city and state a better place for trans people to live. He’s guided me and many other Chicagoans on legal matters related to trans identity, and he’s taught me how to build a community that works towards trans liberation....

Darrell W. Cox, coartistic director of the now-closed Profiles Theatre, has denied accusations of abuse leveled against him by former actors and crew members in last week’s Reader cover story. In addition, three more actors have come forward since the Reader‘s investigation was published to share their previously untold stories of onstage violence and lack of supervision at Profiles: Kevin Bigley and Emily Vajda, who were both part of Killer Joe, and Larry Neumann Jr....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Monday, November 13, 2017. A GOP state representative from the suburbs is running against Rauner from the right Republican state representative Jeanne Ives is trying to win conservative support for her primary challenge against unpopular incumbent governor Bruce Rauner. During an appearance in Arlington Heights Saturday, she criticized the governor for signing the sanctuary state bill, the school funding bill, and the reproductive rights bill HB 40, which allows state health insurance and Medicaid funding for abortion and eliminates a “trigger provision” that would have made abortion illegal if Roe v....