Posts

Claude McKay Love recounts his life in two parts that many will be familiar with: before college and after college. At just five years old, Claude is abandoned by his mother and father who he’s been told have moved to Missouri from Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood, leaving Claude to be taken care of by his grandmother and her longtime best friend, Paul. Before they leave, the young Black boy sees his parents’ friends disappear, setting the stage for a series of moments of abandonment....

Shailene Woodley (right) with Gabourey Sidibe and Mark Indelicato in White Bird in a Blizzard In The Spectacular Now and The Fault in Our Stars, Shailene Woodley plays kind, idealistic, but hardly naive young women who find actualization through romantic love. One of the more compelling things about Gregg Araki’s White Bird in a Blizzard—which is now available to rent at Redbox stands after it failed to get a theatrical run here last fall—is how it plays with and against Woodley’s screen persona from those other films....

For Grizzly Bear’s first album in five years, Painted Ruins, the band broke from its independent roots to join forces with major label RCA. Produced by bassist Chris Taylor, the new music has a glossier surface finish than ever, and the band hasn’t simplified its intricate style. In fact, the tension between the world-weary lyrics of Ed Droste, Daniel Rossen, and (for the first time) Taylor and the churning grooves, ethereal harmonies, and sparkling melodies of the music does nothing to reduce life’s complexities into digestible bites....

This week’s gig poster was created by local illustrator Ryan Duggan, whose work has been featured here many times before. Duggan designed and printed this poster for the Hideout’s annual event A Day in the Country, a festival of honky-tonk, bluegrass, and Americana music. As usual it was curated by musician, DJ, and Hideout bartender Lawrence Peters, but this year it will happen entirely online, livestreaming via the Hideout’s Facebook page....

UK guitarist and composer Justin Broadrick is best known as a founding member of the industrial metal assault that is Godflesh. But capturing purely annihilatory noise in that pounding maelstrom is not his only musical interest. He formed Jesu in 2003 to focus on postpunk, goth, and the bleaker, lonelier shores of shoegaze, and characteristically, his latest album under that name, Terminus (Avalanche), is an exercise in nonmetal darkness that provides chiming soundscapes for a gray and empty existence....

Ten years ago, “Gee!” by Girls’ Generation became one of the first K-pop singles to break out of South Korea. The success of that track made the group stars in Japan and the U.S. years before Psy went viral with “Gangnam Style”—and even longer before the arrival of the omnipresent BTS. Thanks in part to Girls’ Generation’s efforts, K-pop is now a global phenomenon, but the group itself has been on hiatus since 2017 while several of its eight members, including California native Tiffany Young, pursue solo careers....

Who deserves more recognition in the story of rock ‘n’ roll: the black artists who created the sound or the white men who brought it to the masses? Memphis focuses on the latter, building a musical around a white DJ, Huey Calhoun (Liam Quealy), who fights the racism and segregation of his hometown by playing “race records” on the radio. Memphis, now playing at Porchlight, is driven by good intentions, but it fails to recognize the full scope of the issues....

As a teenager in Oak Park, Mia Joy Rocha visited the library to learn about music. “I didn’t have the Internet growing up, so I had to go to the library all the time to rent CDs to rip,” she says. Throughout the mid-2000s, Rocha would check out 20 CDs at a time, immersing herself in genres that had emerged long before she was born—Krautrock via Neu!, for example, and ambient in the works of Brian Eno....

It’s been great to see the extended second act in the career of veteran British pop master Nick Lowe, who’s been involved in making timeless music as a singer, a sideman, and a producer for more than four decades with nary a misstep or bad look. He’s aged with impressive grace, and at 67 he continues to produce strong work that feels neither geriatric nor desperate. (I was recently reminded how bad an idea it is for senior citizen rockers to try to act like they’re still in their 20s when I accidentally saw a bit of the latest Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, where Cheap Trick’s Robin Zander looked like a leathery-skinned retiree who’d spent too much time in the sun in Fort Lauderdale....

The performance department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago began as a place where disciplines met. Founded in the early 1970s by Thomas A. Jaremba, who taught dance and movement at the Goodman Theatre, performance as theorized and practiced at the SAIC was always understood to be a hybrid form. At SAIC, these modes of collaborating have been developed in parallel with the process of teaching. “In my classes, I’ve had students from China, Tel Aviv, Michigan, Tennessee, Seattle, Chicago,” says graduate coordinator and associate professor Mark Jeffery....

Two members of Chicago hardcore band Daybreaker, guitarist Alex Petrov and singer-guitarist Cameron Wentworth, are headed to Hollywood Spirits, at the intersection of Hollywood, Ridge, and Wayne in Edgewater. They need to talk to the owner about using his store’s stocked coolers and shelves of craft beer as a backdrop for their next video—and they’re expecting director Alex Zarek and the band’s other two members to meet them for the shoot in less than an hour....

Hip-hop has drawn from Bollywood and bhangra beats for years: Erik Sermon sampled Asha Bhosle back in 2002, and M.I.A. has spent much of her career finding different ways to make South Asian music and Western rap go together. In that context, Bloodline (Epic), the new EP by Indian-American songwriter and rapper Raja Kumari, sounds less like a merging of two disparate traditions than a natural extension of a conversation that’s already in progress....

Social media can be useful as a browseable depository of human knowledge and news. Other times it’s a swirling maelstrom of profound stupidity. Based on the outrage directed my way, I could have made broad statements about the average person who is a passionate supporter of Lady Gaga and concluded that the singer’s fans are disproportionately angry and unhinged people. Conceivably, I could’ve labeled them “Lady Gaga Loonies” and written a hasty think piece theorizing that there’s something inherent in the music of Lady Gaga that inspires a mob of millennials to harass people online....

Tasya Hardono thought hard about where to locate the midwest’s first and only Indonesian grocery store. Meanwhile, Hardono was bouncing back from an especially difficult year. She was born in Jakarta and for the better part of the last 25 years she’s worked in middle management at fast-casual chain restaurants in the northern suburbs, moving up from server to manager at Panda Express, and going on to oversee multiple KFC/Taco Bell locations....

What’s most impressive—and frightening—about Donald Trump is the size of his fan base. Trump could disappear, I commented in a recent post, but they won’t: “There are tens of millions of them now. They are a fundamental piece of American reality.” Trump didn’t create these multitudes, but thanks to him now we know they’re there. Even more importantly, now they know they’re there. And so we see, thanks to Trump, the conservative movement beginning to eat its own, its intellectuals turning against rabble they can no longer count on to swallow whatever medicine they’re spooned....

Al Podgorski/Sun-Times As he faces a runoff election, 46th Ward alderman James Cappleman has been mum about a proposed TIF-funded development near the Uptown lakefront. Last year around this time, a group of Uptown activists were busy protesting 46th Ward alderman James Cappleman’s support for a pair of high-rise residential towers along the lakefront—a project that would use $14 million in tax increment financing (TIF) dollars, though only 10 percent of the units will be set aside as “affordable....

There’s been a tsunami of theater news over the past couple of weeks. Steppenwolf named ensemble members Glenn Davis and Audrey Francis as co-artistic directors, replacing Anna Shapiro, who announced in May that she’d be leaving at the end of her six-year contract this summer. Ann Filmer announced that she’s leaving her post as artistic director at 16th Street Theater in Berwyn, which she founded 14 years ago. (Almost two years ago, Filmer faced charges of mismanagement and racial insensitivity from the creative team of Loy Webb‘s His Shadow....

c/o Toni Foulkes 15th Ward Alderman Toni Foulkes poses with her parents. Foulkes, who’s campaigning to be alderman of the 16th Ward, posted this photo to a friend’s Instagram account in an attempt to clear up what she says has been confusion around her ethnicity. While out knocking on doors recently in her campaign to be the new 16th Ward alderman, Toni Foulkes encountered an African-American woman who said Foulkes wouldn’t be getting her vote because she isn’t black....

Michael Schmidt/Sun-Times Media Stevie Wonder not pictured Having dutifully slogged through the editorial endorsements of Mayor Rahm by the Tribune and Sun-Times—yes, my beloved Bright One drank the Kool-Aid, too—I realize it’s fallen to me to offer an alternative point of view. Furthermore, Mayor Daley is endorsing Mayor Rahm—though Mayor Daley has for the moment refrained from blaming himself for all of Chicago’s ills. It’s also because he hasn’t been a very—oh, how to delicately phrase this?...

The members of Lucky Plush Productions jokingly call themselves the “keep it real dance company.” They abandon the pretentiousness that’s often associated with dance performance, instead balancing formal technical elements with a casual, relaxed perspective. This makes their productions feel spontaneous and improvised, even though the ensemble works within a tight framework. “The shows are very choreographed and scripted,” says Lucky Plush artistic director Julia Rhoads. “The performers are not actively creating the show in real time, but there’s the feeling because we try to have that practice of really listening to each other....