My metric for good TV has always been Breaking Bad. For years now, I’ve been telling anyone who will listen just how much I love the show. It has the groundbreaking antihero, it has unparalleled acting, it has unexpected action and slow burn drama. Breaking Bad has those moments that good TV has, where the viewer’s mind is completely shattered by what just happened. The end credits roll, and I say to myself, “Vince Gilligan, you son of a bitch....
Kyle Bruckmann teaches oboe and performance at four universities (the University of California campuses in Santa Cruz, Davis, and Berkeley plus the University of the Pacific), plays with five new-music ensembles (Quinteto Latino, sfSound, the Eco Ensemble, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, and Splinter Reeds), and subs with the San Francisco Symphony and several northern California regional orchestras. He also has an edgier side: he plays electroacoustic improvisations and compositions by the likes of Anthony Braxton and Michael Pisaro in the duo EKG, suspends densely layered poetry over twisting prog rock with Degradient, and performs solo concerts that seek to apply his free-jazz chops to nakedly beautiful music....
Two years ago, legendary avant-garde artist Lydia Lunch brought her all-star no-wave revival band Retrovirus to Chop Shop. The group laid down a charismatic, devastatingly tight set that wove together works from all phases of the singer’s storied career and even included crowd-pleasing Pere Ubu and Suicide covers. Her latest project is a very different type of act, despite containing two Retrovirus members: bassist, keyboardist, and sound artist Tim Dahl and drummer Weasel Walter (guitarist in Retrovirus), a former Chicagoan who leads the notorious (and recently reactivated) Flying Luttenbachers....
I’ve seen plenty of movies whose cast and crew should wish to remain anonymous, but never one this good in which they actually are. Manuscripts Don’t Burn is the latest drama from Iranian writer-director Mohammad Rasoulof, best known here for the political allegory Iron Island (2005), and the new movie—a tale of government censorship, repression, and murder—is so uncompromising that the only onscreen credit belongs to Rasoulof. After he and fellow filmmaker Jafar Panahi were arrested for shooting a movie about the disputed 2009 presidential election, Rasoulof fled to Hamburg, where he was living when Manuscripts Don’t Burn won a prize from the International Federation of Film Critics at the Cannes film festival....
When Chicago postrock band Tortoise began attracting international attention in the 90s, critics frequently discussed the band’s nifty adaptation of Steve Reich-style minimalism, particularly its use of hypnotic, interlocking tuned percussion. Tortoise’s “Ten-Day Interval,” from the brilliant 1998 album TNT, reconfigured his ideas for an indie-rock audience. At the time lots of underground artists took inspiration from Reich, and the following year Nonesuch Records released Reich Remixed, which featured electronic acts such as Howie B....
No Men are one of Chicago’s most idiosyncratic bands, mixing doom-metal walls of sound, punk velocity, and a pinch of hooky new wave—this wolf wouldn’t be surprised to find Missing Persons in the trio’s collection! No Men also have a thing for “killer” videos—in 2016 they collaborated with director Greg Reigh on a bloody Dario Argento-esque short for the rabid “Stay Dumb.” They’ve been working with Reigh again on a video for “Sucker,” which bassist DB describes as “a twisted-up western about abuse of power and environmental degradation, with some witchcraft and demon shit....
The following questions were crafted at a City Bureau event with the Reader to reflect the concerns of participants, who came from diverse neighborhoods in the city. Candidates Gery Chico, La Shawn Ford, John Kozlar, Neal Sales-Griffin, and Toni Preckwinkle were also invited to participate but did not respond. Full responses are listed in alphabetical order by last name. For the trimmed answers featured in print, click here [PDF]. Too many of us don’t feel safe, and too many of us tell ourselves there is nothing we can do, and that is wrong....
When local brick-and-mortar record store Permanent Records celebrated its five-year anniversary in 2011, the Reader‘s Miles Raymer laid out the forces that had been arrayed against cofounders Lance Barresi and Liz Tooley when they opened the Ukrainian Village shop in October 2006: not only were physical record stores dropping like flies, but Reckless Records seemed to have Chicago’s small market cornered. But Barresi and Tooley, who’d just moved here from Missouri, didn’t just persevere but thrived—and since then they’ve launched two more Permanent locations in Los Angeles, where they’ve lived since 2011....
I’ve been a huge fan of reedist Chris Speed for decades. He’s an improviser who’s adroitly experimented with various strains of jazz hybridization over his long career, whether transplanting rhythmic ideas from electronica into his avant-garde quartet Yeah No, toying with the music of Balkans in his fusion-heavy ensemble Pachora, or creating new chamber music in John Hollenbeck’s Claudia Quintet. Speed’s rigorous curiosity may take him in varied directions, but he filters all of his endeavors through a deep jazz foundation....
Remember High School Musical? Cool, cool, here’s what would happen if someone fused the squickiest parts of it onto a satire of Chicago theater. In the Cornservatory’s Storefront Theater Musical, originally produced in 2009, three different storefront companies all hold space at the imaginary Upstage Theater. There’s an improv troupe, a drag company, and the woo-woo Really Realistic Realism Theater. Big personalities abound, all of them self-absorbed, all of them toothless parodies of the folks who comprise the city’s storefront theater scene....
Courtesy Louder Than a Bomb The team finals of this year’s Louder Than a Bomb poetry slam competition were held Saturday evening in the Arie Crown Theater of McCormick Place. I hadn’t been inside the Arie Crown in close to 20 years, when I saw a ballet there. If then it was a fancy theatrical showcase, today it’s on the wrong side of the Metra tracks. The building’s vast and charmless, the carpet worn and patched, and screaming teenagers suit it perfectly....
Q: I’m a European heterosexual girl and reading your column from afar has been a good way for me to better know the sex world! I’m wondering if you have advice for me about a “faster” way to do blow jobs. Or rather, a way to make my boyfriend come faster from them. I like doing them but after some time my mouth begins to hurt and I’d like him to finish....
Either the residents of the 13th Ward are inordinately passionate about their current alderman, or they don’t much care if he sticks his signs in their yards. Last week I drove through the far southwest-side ward that covers much of Clearing and some of Garfield Ridge, hugs the south end of Midway Airport, and flares into West Lawn and West Elsdon like a jagged spur. As I crisscrossed its bungalow-lined streets, neat rows of signs sprang from tiny front yards, aligned with military precision as far as the eye could see....
As fate would have it, I sat down to write about inequity in Chicago a few hours after looters poured into the Gold Coast and Loop, busting windows, and, in some cases, clashing with police. Coincidentally, the looting occurred just a few days after Cook County clerk Karen Yarbrough released this year’s tax increment financing report, in which she revealed how much the city’s TIF program stands to collect in property taxes and where the city intends to spend most of the money....
Though the Bard wrote Hamlet sometime on the cusp of the 17th century, Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s minimal, grayscale revival has plenty to say about contemporary masculinity and race. With Black men as both King and Prince Hamlet, this particular production draws upon the concept of a legacy interrupted and destroyed by racialized violence. The show begins with a son singing at his father’s grave while his mother, a woman of color, gets intimate with a white man....
In 2006, the artist Alberto Aguilar decided to let go of his studio. “I don’t like things that throw off being free,” he says. “And not having a studio is, for me, being very free, to not have to make things in that designated space. To think of any of these spaces as a place to make things.” Aguilar grew up in Cicero, where his parents owned a small grocery store called La Grande....
Chicago hip-hop trio Hurt Everybody made experimental-leaning tracks that blurred the boundaries between rap and pop, but earlier this year they broke up. Fortunately I’ve found other young acts who seem to have learned from Hurt Everybody, including local four-piece Beach Jesus. They’ve been relatively quiet since releasing the EP This Time Last Year in February, but their members have kept busy—last week Beach Jesus producer Jaro dropped La Bleue, a wistful four-song EP featuring some of his bandmates....
In October leaders from the local Black Lives Matter movement talked with me about factors that affect travel options for African-Americans in Chicago, but that are sometimes overlooked by decision makers. These include subpar public transit service, unsafe walking conditions, and limited access to bike facilities, as well as expenses like train fares and traffic fines that can be significant for poor and working-class people. Worries about street crime and police abuse also influence their transportation choices....
Giving Tuesday is over, but if you’ve still got a few dollars to spend, you could do worse than donating them to the kids at Horace Mann Elementary School in the South Chicago neighborhood. They’re trying to raise money for more instruments and supplies for their school band, the Marching Mustangs. CPS band programs typically don’t start till high school, but Horace Mann students can join the Marching Mustangs as early as fourth grade....
At her best, young Chicago singer-guitarist Melody Angel comes on like a one-woman Black Rock Coalition. She updates ideas drawn from blues and old-school rock ‘n’ roll with a hard-rock ferocity that never crosses into overkill, while also incorporating generous helpings of R&B, hip-hop, and Tracy Chapmanesque balladry into her style. Melody Angel Sat 6/8, 11 AM, Crossroads Stage Melody Angel Band Sun 6/9, 9 PM, Rosa’s Lounge, 3420 W. Armitage, $15, 21+...
