Posts

The two-drink minimum is a standard at old-school comedy clubs, a subtle reminder that making money is priority number one. A glance at the menu at the Rosemont Zanies makes the already unpleasant proposition even worse: a drink called the “Louis C.K.” is still prominently featured on a list of specialty cocktails. By the way, it’s a combination of coconut vodka, creme de cacao, and hazelnut liqueur that would surely give me a hangover that rivals the queasy feeling I get whenever I think about C....

In 1997, on the west side of Chicago, a group of Black boys from Manley High School made a decision that would forever shape their futures. Although they already risked their lives just walking to school, they took a different kind of risk as well: getting in a boat. The documentary A Most Beautiful Thing reunites the first all-Black high school rowing team in the nation, and the youth, now men pushing 40, who made history by being trailblazers and who now want another shot at competing....

Nance Klehm, the Ground Rules spontaneousvegetation.net/the-ground-rules During the last year and a half, ecological systems designer, landscaper, horticultural consultant, permacultural grower, and forager Nance Klehm has undertaken an ambitious composting and bioremediation project called the Ground Rules. Each week her group collects some 1,000 gallons’ worth of food waste from local businesses like Owen & Alchemy, Asado Coffee Roasters, Avec, and Cellar Door Provisions and transports it to soil centers in community gardens in Logan Square, Garfield Park, North Lawndale, and Bridgeport, where it’s composted in giant wooden bins....

Eater Chicago recently broke the news that, to quote the headline, “A Nelson Algren-Inspired Bar is Coming to Wicker Park from Bar Deville’s Team.” The story details how the new place, the Neon Wilderness, to be located near the Polish Triangle, the convergence of Division, Milwaukee and Ashland, will serve high-end cocktails such as the Polish Broadway, an old-fashioned with Żubrówka vodka. The mixologists behind the plan are award winners, and Eater Chicago’s Ashok Selvam seemed upbeat about this addition to the near northwest side’s high-end cocktail possibilities....

Aubrey Plaza and Liam Aiken in Ned Rifle Early on in Ned Rifle, which begins a weeklong run at Facets tonight, garbageman-turned-Nobel-Prize-winning-poet Simon Grim (James Urbaniak) surprises his nephew with the news that he’s given up poetry to run a video blog in which he performs a new stand-up routine each week. In a deadpan, single-breath delivery characteristic of writer-director Hal Hartley’s work, he explains: As Hartley looks for meaning in fidelity to form, his characters are always searching for some ideological system that will give order to their lives....

After taking a hiatus in 2018, Chicago Open Air is back for a third edition. The two-day festival celebrates the legacy of heavy metal, and each night’s headliner is one of the biggest bands in the genre—both of whom have kept fans eagerly waiting for new music for more than a decade. The first day of the fest wraps up with a set from Armenian-American circus-prog legends System of a Down....

I want to apologize at the outset. Here Chicago Shakespeare Theater just built an astonishing new performance space, the Yard, where nine huge “audience towers” can be slid around on cushions of air, allowing for all kinds of configurations. And here they inaugurated it with a four-night stand by the supremely gifted Swiss physical artist James Thiérrée, providing not only a gorgeous show but an encouraging sign that the Yard will be thoughtfully programmed....

Evan F. Moore is a culture/entertainment writer with the Chicago Sun-Times. Evan attended Donald Trump’s Chicago rally and lived to tell about it. And the bio for a dueling petition from the same website named “Do NOT remove Michael Vick as Pro Bowl Captain,” which has about 295,000 supporters, states: “The same people who will preach about forgiveness for injustices against human life will hold grudges in regards to animals. Forgiveness is forgiveness....

July is Minority Mental Health Awareness Month, and Herbert Wright III—better known as rapper G Herbo—has a lot on his mind. Herb is offering free 12-week therapy sessions to Black youth ages 18 through 25, partially funded by proceeds from a T-shirt collaboration with local designer Don C, owner of Chicago streetwear staple RSVP Gallery (applications will be accepted beginning in September at swervinthroughstress.com). Working with NAMI, Herb’s team has also created a hotline for anyone who needs to talk to a professional: right now it’s operating Monday through Friday from 9 AM till 5 PM CST at 844-457-PTSD (7873), and emergency help is available 24/7 by texting NAMI to 741741....

A few weeks ago guitarist John Scofield performed at the Chicago Jazz Festival with one of his greatest bands, his recently reconfigured quartet with the sublime saxophonist Joe Lovano. That project showcases his deep engagement with postbop, but over the last couple of decades the guitarist has repeatedly shown interests ranging far beyond that. He’s explored funk in collaborations with Medeski Martin & Wood, surveyed New Orleans-style R&B, and exploited his chops for the jam-band crowd, whether leading his own Uberjam project or working with Gov’t Mule....

Q: I’m a 38-year-old lesbian, very femme, very out. I have a coworker I can’t figure out. We’ve worked together for a year and gotten very close. I never want to put out the wrong signals to coworkers, and I err on the side of keeping a safe but friendly distance. This is different. We are each other’s confidants at work. We stare at each other across the office, we text until late at night, and we go for weekend dog walks....

In her acceptance speech Tuesday night, delivered after soundly defeating sitting Cook County state’s attorney Anita Alvarez, Kim Foxx didn’t mention the Laquan McDonald case or any other recent, high-profile criminal justice scandals. Just interviewed Latasha Watkins while her kids, Jadon and Jonathan, played around us. pic.twitter.com/HGSZazEJap — Micah Uetricht (@micahuetricht) March 16, 2016 “My five-year-old came home and asked, ‘Why did they shoot him 16 times?'” Latasha Watkins told me as her two sons, Jadon, five, and Jonathan, three, played with Kim Foxx yard signs near the back of the ballroom....

Traveling can be a disorienting experience. After many hours in transit, you find yourself in a strange city with a landscape and street names you don’t recognize and no friends except the ones you brought with you. But if you’re lucky, your hotel will be full of people to comfort and pamper you and see to your happiness. Among those agents of comfort is the lobby restaurant. We decided to order the most stereotypically midwestern food on the menu....

“The bands are being prerecorded at various sites in the city,” explains Rich. “A longtime partner with SummerDance is the Chicago Park District. In light of that, we’ve used Millennium Park as a backdrop for some of our productions, the rooftop of the field house in Ping Tom Memorial Park in Chinatown, and the lawn and the gymnasium at Calumet Park on the far south side. The parks are also available to people, so this has been an important partnership this year to encourage people to responsibly be outside and enjoy the spaces the city has to offer....

Since I’d already vetted all the judges up for retention during slower moments of the baseball playoffs, I brought my copy of All the King’s Men to the polls this morning to entertain me in case there was a long wait. There wasn’t, but I dipped into it during lunch anyway, because it’s been echoing in my head all election season, especially when I hear someone describing Hillary Clinton as corrupt or a liar....

At some point early one evening at Stephanie Izard’s new Duck Duck Goat, I looked up and wondered, “Who are all the dead Chinese?” That’s because the walls of that particular semi-isolated dining room (one of several) are covered with sepia-toned portraits of old-timey Asian people, like a gallery of ghosts, each one tagged with a circular red sticker. A server explained that these incongruous dots are meant to draw the eyes upward when the lights go down and the photos fade into the wallpaper, but they just looked like someone had forgotten to remove price tags after returning from the flea market....

Cauliflower ears and all, Mark Pracht turns in a remarkable performance as the declining “punchy” Mountain McClintock in this revival of the great Rod Serling’s boxing play from 1956 (also the basis for a TV show and film). After a swaying, wordless opening fight sequence that mimes the crush and tumult of a beatdown, McClintock receives doctor’s orders never to set foot in the ring again. Now that he can’t box, McClintock’s manager, Meysh Reznick (Patrick Thornton), guilts him into betraying his only asset—the knowledge that he never threw a fight—to brave the seamy underworld of celebrity wrestling where “everybody knows there’s a fix on....

In the late 80s and early 90s, I couldn’t get enough of a certain shambling strain of indie rock, marked by varying degrees of sloppiness and incompetence that were countered by a blend of aching sincerity, faux naivete, and catchiness. In the U.S. that aesthetic reached its apotheosis with Beat Happening, a trio from Olympia, Washington, that underlined its gee-whiz artlessness with punk-rock attitude. At the time many acts on K Records, run by Beat Happening capo Calvin Johnson, had a similar vibe....

A storm to end all storms, a battle scene to end all battle scenes—both achieved with barely more than some well-deployed tarpaulins. The Belarus Free Theater‘s King Lear is so visually inventive, so endlessly stunning that I started to doubt my own reactions. Was I being seduced by a bunch of cool but empty gestures? Or maybe by the political glamour of BFT’s backstory, rooted in resistance to Belarusan strongman Alexandr Lukashenko?...

Say what you will about 2020, but it was a year for people in Chicago to make their own agendas and to control their own destinies. Chicago organizers took action not just for themselves, but for young people growing up in the city, especially in Black and Brown neighborhoods. In the face of adversity, these folks who call the Windy City home got to work in times of crisis, and their work hasn’t gone unnoticed....