Just inside the front door is a tiled bench in blue, green, and yellow hues that looks like it belongs in a plaza in southern Spain. Spanish-tiled floors, ornately wrought iron chandeliers, and an entire leg of jamon iberico (cured Iberian ham) that sits behind the bar, ready to be carved, all contribute to the illusion that you may have just wandered into a Seville bar for a bite to eat....
On August 2 at Freedom Square, a tent city raised across the street from the Chicago Police Department’s Homan Square facility as a protest against police brutality, Concerned Citizens of Riot Fest in Douglas Park held an alfresco strategy session. Local resident Sharaya Tindal outlined the group’s grievances against the festival, which debuted in the west-side green space in September 2015, for 16 or so people gathered on folding chairs under a canopy....
Songs don’t so much rise out of Yves Jarvis’s Sundry Rock Song Stock (Anti-) as they swim around, fray, and dissolve. In that sense, the most characteristic track on the Canadian producer and multi-instrumentalist’s new album, the woozily liquid “Ambrosia,” is one of the oddest. Anxiously percolating keyboard and an echoing, violinlike noise wander past each other for the first two-thirds of the song, at which point a distant, distorted bass beat creates an abstract, aspirational groove, as though a dance floor is trying to coalesce from a primordial but pristine pool....
Since the release of the Laquan McDonald video, the Black Lives Matter movement has demonstrated its ability to reform local government: the group’s public protests indisputably contributed to the firing of CPD superintendent Garry McCarthy and the defeat of Anita Alvarez in the state’s attorney race this spring. But those who attend “Our Duty to Fight,” a new exhibit at Gallery 400, may be surprised to learn just how far-reaching the influence of BLM has become....
Friends, I’m writing to you from Beloit, Wisconsin, just a few miles north of the Illinois border, where I have been invited to college up some of the youths of America for a few weeks. I have a class, and the students are great. Brilliant! Hilarious! But I always forget how eager young folks are to establish their place in the world, to assess an idea in terms of how much it conforms to their still-forming visions of the world, so as to differentiate themselves—from their classmates, their families....
Energy has seemed to be in stasis, the last throes of winter killing or wiping clean what no longer needs to exist. For us Northern Hemispherians, the change began in early February, the midway point between solstice and equinox, a time long recognized as the start of the agricultural calendar supported by old Western traditions and the Lunar New Year. Filled with life and human stories of human use, “vacant” lots—called such due to what’s not there—have a lot there....
For its fourth year, the culture convention of style, arts, and music outlet Complex has branched out into a second home in Chicago. ComplexCon is coming thousands of miles from its home in Long Beach, California, bringing national attention with it—and the members of Chicago’s groundbreaking creative community have been feeling the weight of that attention differently. Some of them are reluctant to celebrate, not least because they’ve been doing for decades what ComplexCon is attempting for a weekend in July: as the convention’s website puts it, it aims to bring together “pop culture, music, art, food, sports, innovation, activism, and education....
In late June, Pride Films and Plays faced a wave of allegations on social media about the behavior of founder and executive director David Zak, leading to Zak’s resignation and the appointment of Donterrio Johnson as artistic director. In early November, Johnson resigned, charging that Zak was still in a hands-on role with the company (which, under Johnson, did rebrand itself as PrideArts). According to Pride’s board president Cheri Tatar, Johnson was informed before he took the role of artistic director that Zak would still be involved behind the scenes....
Chicago Opera Theater Mary Ann Stewart and Ed Parks starting something they’ll regret in Thérèse Raquin It seemed like things were bleak enough in this Siberian deep freeze before Chicago Opera Theater brought composer Tobias Picker’s version of Thérèse Raquin to town. Given that, the cast does what it can. Tenor Matthew DiBattista, as Thérèse’s cuckolded husband, Camille, and baritone Ed Parks as his predatory friend, Laurent, deliver solid vocal performances; statuesque Mary Ann Stewart, in the title role, is more effective as actor than singer: her unremarkable soprano turns harsh on the high notes....
Few rappers sound as comfortable with introspection as Houston’s Emekwanem Ogugua Biosah Jr., aka Maxo Kream. Even the title of his recent second album, Brandon Banks (RCA/Big Persona/88 Classic), references his troubled past: his father, Emekwanem Ogugua Biosah Sr., ran scams under that name and spent much of Maxo’s childhood serving time on fraud charges. On “Bissonnet,” the 29-year-old rapper focuses on the effects this had on his adolescence, squeezing enough emotions to fill several chapters of a memoir into a couple of lucid, unflinching lines: “Police kickin’ in my door, threw my momma on the floor / HPD took my pops, I bought a heat, hit the block....
Much ink has been spilled about SoulCycle, the boutique indoor cycling chain with quasi-spiritual elements that enjoys a devout following at 60 studios in ten states. Founded on Manhattan’s Upper West Side in 2006, the company is best known for its 45-minute spin classes, which have a meditative but partylike atmosphere. Think candles and EDM. Despite being billed as a party, my first SoulCycle class was ridiculously difficult. The dim room, aglow with candles, felt less like a fitness studio and more like the set of Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” video....
On June 3, Chicago theater artists flooded my social media with #openyourlobby; a call for theaters around the nation to open their doors to #blacklivesmatter protesters. As the producing artistic director at UrbanTheater Company, a Black and Mexican Chicago native, and mother, this call exposed the truth about our theater community: the privilege of deciding to close our doors and separate ourselves from our neighbors is nonexistent. And yet we are constantly on the precipice of exclusion because of the coming and going of artists seeking to enhance their career, resulting in the gentrification of Chicago theater....
After Jeff Rosenstock was announced to play at Pitchfork last summer, a lot of folks seemed to be looking forward to a train-wreck collision between a scruffy DIY punk who’d spent most of his career giving away his music for free and a big-budget festival crowded with corporate sponsors. Rosenstock also recently signed to Polyvinyl Records, after a couple releases on SideOneDummy—another big change for an artist who insisted for years on giving away his own music and keeping anything remotely corporate at arm’s length....
Stranger than Paradise On Thursday Doc Films presents a screening of Jim Jarmusch’s Down by Law, part of the “Prison Break!: Great Escape Films of the 20th Century” series. A stylish chronicler of cultural malaise and Americanized existentialism, Jarmusch has been making films about “hipsters” long before the word became an amorphously defined marketing phrase. In the spirit of beat literature and John Cassavetes, Jarmusch’s films center on characters firmly situated on the margins of society, outcasts defined by their isolation—self-imposed or otherwise—and fruitless intellectual pursuits....
L ee Grantham, whose new show “Reverse Acrylic Paintings” is at Jean Albano Gallery through February 24, is a Milwaukee-based painter whose work can’t escape the Chicago Imagists’ long shadow. Grantham takes his imagery from instructional manuals, industrial illustrations, and, occasionally, from art history. His Van Gogh tribute, Worth Cutting Your Ear Off For (1991), presents an outline of the artist with bandaged ear, his face blank save for a cartoonish mouth, and pairs him with a similarly featureless bodice- and panty-clad blond....
With his speech last week at a Crain’s business luncheon, Mayor Emanuel made it clear that he’s adopted a new attitude toward Chicago’s public schools: he likes them. In particular, Emanuel is trumpeting gains made in standardized test scores—more on that in a moment—to win points in his fight with Governor Rauner, his old wine-drinking, money-making pal. OK, so Rahm never compared schools to prisons. But he roared into office intent on making his name as a charter-school-loving, teachers’-union-bashing Democrat who stood arm in arm with Republicans like Rauner....
For the better part of 30 years, Pittsburgh band Anti-Flag have made unapologetically confrontational political punk, cranking out fervent, hook-driven diatribes against facism, racism, animal cruelty, the surveillance state, and other social ills. They’ve also walked the walk, using their band as a platform to support a variety of causes (among them Amnesty International, the ACLU, Greenpeace, and Pittsburgh’s Center for Victims of Violence and Crime) and playing free shows at protests and demonstrations, including one outside the 2008 Republican convention....
J.L. Gross moved into the Lathrop Homes, a 925-unit Depression-era public housing complex on the north side, in 1988, two decades after coming back from the Vietnam war with a bullet permanently lodged in his back. He’s lived in six different apartments in the development since then. For years Lathrop was neglected and many buildings stood empty as the Chicago Housing Authority, developers, residents, and the surrounding community negotiated redevelopment plans....
In the parking lot of a grocery store in Beverly, I heard the most Chicago sentence ever spoken. Then came the immigrants, who adopted Inland North and added elements from their native tongues. Few languages other than English include the “th” sound. That’s how “Throop” became “T’roop,” and why “dese, dem, and dose guy” is a term for a salt-of-the-earth white ethnic Chicagoan, usually from the south side or an inner-ring suburb....
Jesus Alberto “Beto” Lopez Gutierrez, 24, was on his way home from a camping trip with friends when their car was pulled over by police in Iowa. Officers then transferred him to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody. Since May 2019, Gutierrez has been held in immigration detention. As told to Irene Romulo. I work in after-school programs teaching art. I was giving the class, I was talking, doing all the things, but at the same time I felt like I was not present....
