In the year and a half since Willis Earl Beal most recently appeared in the Reader, he’s settled in Portland, Oregon, and released two EPs: Through the Dark, which came out in March, and A Chaos Paradigm, which he dropped last week under the name Nobody. Beal has grappled with nothingness and the unknown in song for as long as I’ve known him, and he continues those explorations on A Chaos Paradigm....
Singer-songwriter Matthew McGarry caught my ear in 2012 with the charming, unruffled indie-rock tunes he released as Upholstery & Carpet Cleaning. By 2015 he’d dropped that name in favor of Bossa IV, and it’s been a pleasure to hear him refine his laid-back style of rock. But the whole project could’ve come to an end in April 2017, when McGarry went deaf in his left ear. As he wrote in a detailed blog post, an urgent-care doctor diagnosed him with sudden sensorineural hearing loss (SSNHL), and the ENT he saw next said he had only a 50 percent chance of recovering some of his hearing....
Earlier this year pianist and composer Vijay Iyer released Far From Over (ECM), a sextet recording whose sturdy but flexible originals reaffirm his jazz bona fides while Tyshawn Sorey’s explosive drumming fractures their swing. Iyer’s arrangements extract an orchestral splendor from the group he assembled for the album—Sorey, saxophonists Steve Lehman and Mark Shim, cornetist Graham Haynes, and bassist Stephan Crump—and his probing, corkscrewing melodies demonstrate the influence of his mentor Andrew Hill, albeit processed into his own language....
Lanford Wilson’s 1964 one-act The Madness of Lady Bright, a dynamic character study of an aging drag queen, is frequently cited as America’s first “gay play.” It premiered at Caffe Cino, an off-off-Broadway coffeehouse theater in New York’s Greenwich Village that also nurtured the work of emerging gay playwrights Robert Patrick, Tom Eyen, Jean-Claude van Itallie, and William M. Hoffman. Harvey Fierstein’s funny and moving Torch Song Trilogy opened on Broadway in 1982 after developmental productions off-off-Broadway in the late 1970s....
QI’m a straight male kinkster who used to do live performances as a rope bondage top, but I recently jumped out of the kink community. I just think I’ll have better luck finding a long-term relationship with a girl from the vanilla world. So long as she’s GGG, I can live with it. As much as I loved the sex/kink with people I met in “the scene,” I never found anything/anyone for the “long term....
If the 80s had been a perfect decade for music, we wouldn’t have the overproduced, radio-friendly power pop of Eddie Money or Bryan Adams still getting pumped over the airwaves—instead, we’d have the fun, catchy anthems of Julian Leal. The Romeoville native, who now lives in Plainfield, never reached the mainstream heights he deserved, probably because he never had management or a regular band and his singles were as DIY as they come....
The music community that lives together reunites together: In recent years, many of the northern-Virginia and D.C.-area screamo bands that warped punk back in the late 90s and early 2000s and went on to influence contemporary heavies (Touche Amore, anyone?) have reemerged. The group of bands in that scene—which includes City of Caterpillar and Malady, among others—would be incomplete without Majority Rule, whose three members teamed up again last year for the first time since they called it quits in 2004....
Marc Maron overshares. For almost seven years now, an ever-expanding audience has heard him talk about himself twice a week on his groundbreaking podcast, WTF With Marc Maron. These personal updates, which sometimes last up to half an hour, precede recorded interviews (or “conversations,” as he prefers) with comics, actors, musicians, and other creative types. In his stand-up shows he favors an improvisational, flying-by-the-seat-of-his-pants approach that relies heavily on mining material from his daily life....
Saxophonist Hafez Modirzadeh has spent the better part of 30 years forging connections among jazz, Persian artistic concepts, and free music. This has resulted in a clutch of albums that ping-pong between gutsy postbop and meditative duets, the latter of which come into focus on his new album, Facets (Pi). Modirzadeh has frequently worked with Chicago-bred trumpeter Amir ElSaffar, and here he taps pianists Kris Davis, Craig Taborn, and Tyshawn Sorey (better known as a drummer) to accompany him on an expertly and alternately tuned piano in his endeavors to deconstruct equal temperament....
You need something—make that everything—delivered, and before you’ve even finished typing A-m-, your browser has taken you to that magical behemoth in the sky (aka Seattle) that will make all of your free two-day shipping dreams come true. Not so fast, friend. Before you hit Add to Cart and add another dime to Jeff Bezos’s billions—with a B—consider supporting a local business instead, especially for things you’d usually stroll by and buy....
When people talk about “Trump’s America,” they mean two things at once. In general, the phrase is simply a term to describe where the country’s been at since the 2016 election. It’s also the preferred term of condescension among blue-staters for the great swaths of Americans who elected him president. Simply as an explanation for how Trump’s America got the way it is, and, by extension, how the country got the way it is, Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play is the most important work of art produced in the last five years....
The first thing you see is a large cement viaduct bisecting the Fulton Market neighborhood. But when you walk closer, it resolves into an explosion of brightly painted murals. One mural shows photo-realistic children while another shows an elephant riding a penny- farthing bicycle. Hoard, a Fulton Market resident, had spent years walking by the fading murals. Three years ago, he finally decided to look into the history of the neighborhood and discovered that in the 70s, it had been predominantly African-American....
Donald Trump is a bigot. Let’s just get that out of the way first. Dwyane Wade’s cousin was just shot and killed walking her baby in Chicago. Just what I have been saying. African-Americans will VOTE TRUMP! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 27, 2016 When Trump talks about Chicago’s problems he offers no real solutions. Rather, he uses our city as a prop for his platform. And not coincidentally, he mostly does so in front of predominantly white, suburban or rural audiences....
In the first runoff debate, Mayor Rahm Emanuel conceded that Chicago struggles with economic disparity. But he argued that “it is a false choice to pit one part of the city of Chicago against another.” But about 48 percent of what he has committed to spend in TIF funds over the last four years has gone to these same favored communities, an area stretching roughly from the Gold Coast on the north to McCormick Place on the south and from the United Center on the west to the lake....
It’s another case of parks versus parking lots. But here’s what really gets me: the parking lot expansion has been endorsed by none other than Friends of the Parks, the same group that helped tank George Lucas’s proposal to replace Soldier Field’s 1,500-space south lot with his Museum of Narrative Arts. That’s one reason the Active Transportation Alliance opposes the 31st Street Beach lot expansion. “Car parking and streets are a poor use of the city’s very limited park space....
Ben Lerner, the celebrated young poet and novelist in town for the Chicago Humanities Fest late last month, is said to have once apologized to an audience of poets for having even written a novel. Since then, Lerner—a 2015 MacArthur fellow for his poetry and fiction—has become something of a cult hero for the literary inclined, myself included. His three novels Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), 10:04 (2014), and now The Topeka School (2019), all written in the genre of “autofiction” (i....
In his poem “Chicago,” Carl Sandburg wrote of our great city’s mirthful denizens, “Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.” This particular line of Sandburg’s rapturous ode came to mind as I watched the three short documentaries that comprise “Chicago Memories,” a program screening Saturday at Chicago Filmmakers. My favorite of the three, Bleacher Bums: Rabid Fans Of Wrigley Field (1998), profiles storied Cubs fans....
Nearly 50 years ago, Chicago documentary makers Gordon Quinn and Gerald Temaner recruited a couple of Dominican nuns, Sister Marie Arné and Sister Mary Campion, for an experimental film in which they would approach random people on the street, ask them if they were happy, and try to determine why. Inquiring Nuns (1968), one of the earliest releases from the directors’ Kartemquin Films, screens outdoors Tuesday at Millennium Park as part of Kartemquin’s extended golden anniversary, with Quinn taking questions after the movie....
A sickness had descended upon my home. The walls echoed with wheezes, hacks, and croaks like a chorus of spitting coffee makers, while a malevolent fog of viral particulates hung in the air. I could feel it making a home in my lungs. What started as a wispy, scratchy tickle began to sound more like an open chest wound. Here that means his own version of tsukemen, the sauce based not on tonkotsu, but a chicken, vegetable, and pork broth emulsified with a blend of Ikehata’s red and white miso pastes....
“How do we define ‘professional?’” It was the warm-up question for a social justice workshop I am currently a part of. The answers ranged from clothing to conversation to language used in a workplace or to be eligible to enter a workplace. Most of us, people of color, talked about code-switching. Someone initiated a conversation about tattoos on Black men. I talked about needing to tame my hair when I was a child....
