In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman wrote that the telegraph was the first technology to beat the challenges of distance and deliver information across the country faster than a train could carry. This was not necessarily a good thing. It meant that bits of news could travel immense distances yet mean essentially nothing to those receiving it or perhaps worse, risk being completely inaccurate. Today the Internet is like the telegraph on steroids....
The Story of a Satellite, which screens as part of the Chicago Underground Film Festival, is a lighthearted comedy about dark, heavy themes, and this friction between form and content keeps the film compelling despite its frequent preciousness. Spanish writer-directors Miriam and Sonia Albert-Sobrino, who credit themselves as “the Also Sisters,” address the subjects of death, freak accidents, and deadbeat parents while trading in deadpan visual humor and quirky characterizations. The latter elements are so prominent, in fact, that you may not realize how sad the movie is until after it ends, though the melancholy aspect of Satellite isn’t entirely hidden from view: critical scenes take place in a cemetery, and the main character lives in constant fear of death....
The plunging temperatures of the polar vortex and the unending winter have all of us looking for a silver lining, and I honestly thought I’d found it: Weather this cold must mean we’ll have fewer rats and mice this spring, right? Rats have evolved to take on winter “I would suspect that most of the mice in downtown Chicago are inside right now,” says David H. Wise, professor of ecology and evolution at UIC....
Michael Gebert Leigh Omilinsky of Cafe des Architectes with brie—which they don’t make any more The ambitious, possibly slightly insane charcuterie and cheese-making program that Cafe Des Architectes chef Greg Biggers started at the Sofitel Hotel—the first restaurant cheese-making program to be licensed by the state of Illinois—was the subject of this piece in the Reader‘s Food Issue last November. When I ran into Cafe des Architectes pastry chef Leigh Omilinsky (who’s in charge of the cheese part) at the voting for the Jean Banchet awards, she told me a little about how the program had changed even in the few months since she and Biggers had shown me around last fall....
It’s hard to believe it’s been 16 years since Madison stoner giants Bongzilla dropped a studio album—surely at least a few people rocking out to their brand-new Weedsconsin LP were in diapers back then. The band, formed as a four-piece in 1995, had a lengthy run as one of the midwest’s finest purveyors of slow, sludgy metal before going on hiatus in 2009. They reemerged as a trio in 2015 and have put out a few compilations and a self-titled box set of their previous albums—but Weedsconsin is their first new recording since then....
In 2017, celebrated Malian Wassalou singer and activist Oumou Sangaré released Mogoya, her first new album since 2009. During the intervening eight years, she’d largely stepped away from the spotlight to pursue a variety of business ventures, including establishing agricultural projects, opening a hotel, and launching a new car, the Oum Sang. For Sangaré each of them has offered the chance to support and empower the Malian people—proceeds from the Oum Sang, for example, benefit a scholarship fund....
Jillian Tamaki A panel from This One Summer Before she put the finishing touches on April’s sexually tinged techno-mystery comic Frontier #7, or garnered multiple awards and acclaim for 2014’s gorgeous graphic novel This One Summer, Canadian comics artist and writer Jillian Tamaki was making a home at Tumblr for a funny, mostly black-and-white comic called SuperMutant Magic Academy. For four years, Tamaki chronicled the ordinary experiences of rather extraordinary beings—a host of mutant high school students—as they endured the perpetual battles of adolescence....
This morning Pitchfork announced the lineup for its 15th annual music festival, headlined by mope masters the National, rap superduo Run the Jewels, and New York hipster-rock darlings the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Pitchfork the website originally built its reputation by covering the indie music world that gave birth to these headliners, and even though Pitchfork the festival has grown big enough to book them now that they’re stars, it hasn’t lost sight of that mission—which lends extra significance to its crystal anniversary....
Brooklyn singer-songwriter Mackenzie Scott, aka Torres, is a master of insular, languid indie pop. But after making it through lockdown and finding inspiration in her partner, visual artist Jenna Gribbon, Scott is in an expansive mood. Her new album, Thirstier (Merge), graced with a glam cock-rock cover painted by Gribbon, features a big, snarling, exuberant arena sound courtesy producer (and Garbage drummer) Butch Vig. Fans may miss the unhurried melancholy elegance of Scott’s powerful 2017 album Three Futures, but there’s no denying the Liz Phair-flavored crunch and cheerful guitar solo of album opener “Are You Sleepwalking?...
It’s no secret that Experimental Station (ES) is unique. The Woodlawn space has various tenants but it isn’t just art-focused. It’s a museum, it’s a coffee shop, it’s a farmer’s market. When explaining the space to folks who don’t live in the area, it can sound like a utopia of sorts, a place where people can create and work alongside one another, a central nervous center of community-focused people working within their neighborhood on projects they are passionate about....
In the the nearly two weeks since Chicago musician Alejandro Morales died at age 46 on Sunday, January 3, remembrances and testimonials have flooded social media. He was not only a pillar of the city’s underground rock scene (most famously, he drummed for noise punks Running and experimental duo Piss Piss Piss Moan Moan Moan) but also the kind of boundlessly generous sweetheart that absolutely no one has a bad word to say about....
Steppenwolf spills a lot of program ink trying to prepare an audience for 25-year-old poet Aziza Barnes’s first play, BLKS, which chronicles 24 hours in the clutching, haphazard lives of four unsettled twentysomething African-American women in New York. In addition to a full-page welcoming statement from artistic director Anna D. Shapiro, the program includes a three-page as-told-to-style feature in which Barnes muses over the play’s genesis, themes, and images in alternately playful and mystifying prose....
“It’s not for everyone,” Fat Rice chef and owner Abraham Conlon says of feni. The Indian spirit is made from cashew fruit, which resembles an apple; the cashew itself grows from the end of the pseudofruit, also called a cashew apple. Conlon compares feni’s aroma to gasoline; Julia Momose, head bartender at GreenRiver, thinks it smells a bit like acetone. But despite—and in some ways, because of—the spirit’s off-putting scent, both have put feni on their drink menus....
Chicago composer, arranger, and multi-instrumentalist Cam Be draws on his community to invigorate his already bold musical ideas. On his new second album, Summer in September (on his own Camovement label), Cam and an ensemble of friends create immediately gratifying fusions of soul, funk, hip-hop, and R&B. Feel-good jam “Fade Away” opens with 16 people clapping on the twos and fours, jump-starting its relaxed but implacable rhythm and amping up its summertime-barbecue vibe—which provides a simpatico framework for Joshua Griffin’s limber bass line, Sam Trump’s smoky trumpet, and Chris Paquette’s tender conga playing....
With my old pals aldermen Danny Solis and Nick Sposato calling for an investigation into Lori Lightfoot, it’s time for me to cut one of my famous deals. The mayor’s handling of the video showing Jason Van Dyke shooting Laquan McDonald. While we’re at it, let’s launch a City Council investigation into how $50 million in property tax dollars earmarked for a Marriott Hotel in the South Loop wound up being spent on Navy Pier....
On October 19, 2018, six days after producer Jerrilynn “Jlin” Patton performed at the 16th annual iteration of experimental-music festival Unsound in Krakow, Poland, she decided to cancel her appearance a week later at the Semibreve Festival in Portugal. “I’ve never had to cancel a show due to my health, but this time I have to,” she wrote in an Instagram post at the time. Patton had worked for years at a U....
It’s not restaurants, music, or even comedy that Kyle Kinane misses most: it’s the chatter of a crowded bar. “Eavesdropping is my entertainment,” the comedian says. “When I’d get off the road and be back in LA, I would go to whatever bar by myself just to eavesdrop and listen to somebody else tell a story to their friend. If somebody’s telling a funny story, they don’t care if someone is eavesdropping and laughing, that gives them more fuel to tell the story even more flamboyantly....
Europe was way ahead of the United States with Alice Merton: Her 2016 single “No Roots” made it to number two on the German charts in 2017 and charted all over the continent—including in France, Italy, Belgium, and Poland—before finally hitting the American market hard last year. If you’ve heard the song’s opening riff and percussive chorus, you know why the Germans call it an Ohrwurm: “I’ve got no roots / But my home was never on the ground....
Chicago trio Dehd are a meeting of the minds between two singer-songwriters: bassist and singer Emily Kempf, who performs as Vail and has been in Lala Lala, and guitarist and singer Jason Balla, who fronts Ne-Hi and Earring. (Eric McGrady plays stand-up drums.) Their most recent slab of wax, an LP that smashes two previously released tapes together on one disc, is hazy, confessional postpunk with a dreamy throb and beautiful vocal interplay....
Singer-guitarist Wyatt Grant launched Pool Holograph as a solo endeavor a decade ago, and around 2015 he brought in a few friends from Loyola University to turn it into a band: Zach Stuckmann on bass and brothers Jake and Paul Stolz of local indie rockers Discus on drums and guitar, respectively. Pool Holograph became a collaborative outfit, with everybody pitching in on songwriting, and they’ve remained active even though Grant left Chicago earlier this year for Asheville, North Carolina....
