As we all know, the real issue in this deal is which city is best positioned to bamboozle and bully its citizenry into forking over untold billions to one of the world’s richest companies. Docile We like to think we’re so big and bad, but push comes to shove and Chicago rolls over like a little puppy dog when the mayor barks his command. In the recent debate over giving $5....
It’s surprisingly difficult to photograph a bottle with a metallic label in the sun. I wrote about Chicago botanical brewers Forbidden Root in August 2013, when they made what I’m pretty sure was just their second festival appearance at the Oak Park Micro Brew & Food Review. About four months ago the brewery finally hit retail shelves, shipping 12-ounce four-packs of Sublime Ginger and Shady Character, and a little more than a month later Forbidden Root’s namesake beer joined them....
The curtain never rises on Clare Barron’s ferocious, Pulitzer-finalist play Dance Nation. The lights come on and they are simply there, so many of them: sailors, tapping their hearts out with militant glee, their eyes piercing the space like periscopes looking farther into a landscape than their age or experience would seem to allow and undaunted by whatever lies in the darkness ahead. The unison is heartstopping, almost terrifying. They have trained long for this moment, and whether they succeed or fail, their courage will be remembered....
One of the many small pleasures of our march into summer is the appearance of flyers for neighborhood yard sales. As the days grow longer and warmer, it seems like more and more of these notes promising unexpected treasures blossom on light posts. I’ve flipped through too many scratched-up CDs and worn VHS tapes to want to go out of my way to drop by a yard sale these days, but if you’re on the hunt for some new music and into flipping through LPs in the sun, head to East Room on Saturday afternoon for Do312’s Rock ‘N’ Roll Market....
“#992: Knowing to jangle your keys while walking through the nature preserve so the otters will come out.” That was my spoken contribution to Duncan Macmillan’s Every Brilliant Thing, a solo show about finding reasons to live now in its Chicago premiere at Windy City Playhouse, where the incandescent Rebecca Spence is our tour guide and narrator. Before the play begins, Spence greets us and gives us numbered slips of paper with a reason—when we hear the number, we chime in....
The Steins have been traumatized on an epic level. Until September 11, 2001, father Arthur was a senior vice president at a big Manhattan company with offices in the World Trade Center. Then his job “blew up,” as he phrases it in Deborah Zoe Laufer’s sweet, insufferable End Days. When the towers fell, 65 of his colleagues went with them. Now, two years later, unemployed Arthur occupies an apartment located someplace that’s not New York....
Robert Toren Scott Miller of Game Theory Last week marked the two-year anniversary of the passing of Scott Miller, one of pop music’s most intriguing, talented, and overlooked figures. Known best for fronting Game Theory (1982-1990) and Loud Family (1991-2006), the California singer, songwriter, and author was a true obsessive who had the ability to internalize and assimilate the most minute details of pop-rock history—remaking the past, embracing the present, and looking toward the future in hook-crammed songs....
The following is a list of limited liability companies affiliated with Pangea, the real estate company that files the most eviction cases in Chicago. The Reader compiled this list by examining property records and lawsuits against Pangea over the course of several months. This isn’t an exhaustive list, and not all of the LLCs are active and in good standing, but it represents a sample of the shell companies Pangea has used to purchase and transfer ownership of its buildings....
For the last several weeks, the 13 or so mayoral candidates have been promising to defend Chicago’s already overburdened taxpayers from future hikes to our ever-rising property taxes. All in the name of eradicating blight in low-income communities. We’re talking about hundreds of millions of property tax dollars a year—a number that will rise if Mayor Rahm gets the City Council to create the Cortland/Chicago River and Roosevelt/Clark TIF districts. Together, those two TIFs would siphon off another $1....
Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, July 20, 2016. UIC alum, Mets star gives back to the community with youth program Blue Island native and New York Mets player Curtis Granderson may be a rival of the Chicago Cubs, but he’s made giving back to the city one of his top priorities. While in town Tuesday to play the Cubs, he held a baseball clinic for local children at his alma mater, the University of Illinois at Chicago....
Despite having one of the most radical and inspiring biographies of any theater artist, playwright-turned- prisoner-turned-Czech president Václav Havel hasn’t seen much time on Chicago stages over the years. The last time I recall watching a translation of one of his works was in 2012 at Trap Door, a company that has maintained a reputation for masterfully interpreting esoteric and deeply political plays, many of them of Slavic origin, for 25 years....
As a sign of my commitment to a new Chicago, I went to Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s inauguration at the DePaul basketball arena, thus breaking my old pledge to never, ever set foot in that place. That funding was approved in the summer of 2013 on a City Council voice vote, hastily gaveled through by the mayor, as though he wanted to sneak it by the council without public debate. Before all was said and done, Rahm spent that $55 million in TIF money, originally intended for the arena, on a project at Navy Pier....
The show begins before you enter the theater lobby on the 14th floor of the Cambria Hotel, before the costumed attendants greet you just past the revolving door at the northeast corner of Randolph and Dearborn and usher you into the elevator, before you step off or out of your preferred mode of transport and into the entropic eddies that are the awkward traffic of humans and cars learning to move en masse again, where some shop and some shout and some gawp agape across the street from—yes—street performers on trumpets outside the Macy’s....
In 1994, a live broadcast of O.J. Simpson’s white Bronco racing down the LA freeway crashed televisions across the country; it was the start of a very complex story about the criminal justice system, race, abuse, and celebrity. Let’s not forget, the LA riots took place just two years earlier; many saw O.J.’s prosecution as yet another incident in which the LAPD prejudicially sought to convict black men. And then there’s the notion that celebrities can get away with anything (while Simpson raced down the highway, fans lined the road cheering him on, “Run, O....
Rebecca Gilman’s portrait of five young women in a small Wisconsin town (and one annoying interloper from Winnetka) is a minor-key chamber piece, with a few wince-worthy dramaturgical air horns thrown in. Set in the bar of a bowling alley, it follows the women’s lives over two years, from the farewell party for soon-to-be-incarcerated Jaycee (the dynamic Heather Chrisler), caught helping her father sell prescription meds, to a celebration for Sam (Becca Savoy), whose bowling scholarship to Ohio State promises a way out....
Q: How does one get into the gay BDSM bottoming and leather scene? —Seeking Answers Concerning Kink “Recon.com is a great option for gay men,” said Metal from the gay male bondage website MetalbondNYC.com. “It’s a site where you can create a profile, window-shop for a play buddy, and ‘check his references.’ Even better, if you can, go to a public event like IML, MAL, or CLAW, or to a play party like the New York Bondage Club, where you can participate in a monitored space with other people around, or just watch the action....
These interviews have been edited and condensed for clarity. After our first positive test, several nurses had symptoms who were there on that day, who were not wearing the right equipment. We didn’t test them. I haven’t been tested. If you don’t have a fever and you’re not a high-risk person, then you’re not getting tested. You would never feel good about sending a person like this home with no intervention....
Our Reader event card is full this fall, with three big public engagements. First we have our first Mobilize political event at Sidetrack bar on Thursday, October 10. Reader reporters Ben Joravsky and Maya Dukmasova will be live from 5:30 to 6:30 PM, and then we’ll watch the Human Rights Campaign presidential town hall live on CNN. It’s a free event, 21+, with food from D.S. Fajita Factory. Presidential candidate Marianne Williamson is in Chicago that night, and her team says she’s planning to attend....
In Brian Coleman’s liner notes for the 2010 Get On Down reissue of Common’s Resurrection, producer No I.D. (aka Dion Wilson) talked about his early collaborator, the Twilite Tone, who was also Common’s DJ. Specifically he credited Tone, born Anthony Khan, for helping catalyze the growth of Chicago’s hip-hop community in the late 80s and early 90s: “Tone was a house DJ, too, and he took what he got from the house scene and started his own hip-hop scene,” No I....
Commercial theater has never been the lifeblood of Chicago the way it is in New York with Broadway, but that doesn’t mean losing for-profit producers because of you-know-what doesn’t leave a mark. Mercury Theater, the nifty 300-seat (plus intimate cabaret space) venue on the Southport corridor that started out as a nickelodeon in 1920, was originally renovated as a rental house for live theater by Michael Cullen in 1994, who also ran Cullen’s Bar and Grill next door....
