“Art helps to free people even while incarcerated,” Renaldo Hudson says in the new book Carving Out Rights from Inside the Prison Industrial Complex. Hudson should know. In September 2020, he was released from Danville Correctional Center, after spending 37 years behind bars. “There’s a tremendous amount of freedom when you can say what you want to say with your art, do what you want to do with it,” Hudson continues....
Jill Stein’s presidential run means nothing but trouble, according to most pundits and politicos. It’s a “fairy tale campaign,” goes the popular media narrative—an annoying speed bump in Hillary’s White House coronation, or perhaps a Ralph Nader-like spoiler that could spell President Trump. Getting slapped with an arrest warrant for tagging an oil company’s equipment is possibly the most punk-rock move for a presidential candidate since Eugene Debs campaigned from prison a century ago—though not likely one to win many votes....
When it comes to depressing music, Adam McIlwee is a jack of all trades. From 2005 to 2013 he was a founding member of influential emo-rock band Tigers Jaw, before moving on to explore equally downbeat rap, trap, and electronica in the loose collective GothBoiClique with collaborators who’ve included the late Lil Peep. Wicca Phase Springs Eternal, which McIlwee launched in 2010, is his one-man conglomeration of mope—an exercise in eclectic evocations of the same sad affect....
How to discuss this giddily inventive Argentinian feature without ruining its many surprises? The chief pleasure of Wild Tales is its sheer unpredictability; throughout the film, writer-director Damián Szifron flips the tone from farce to horror and back again, piles up absurd coincidences, and without warning throws his characters into life-or-death situations. The film presents six stories about revenge and chance, each beginning believably but getting progressively crazier as it goes along....
Melancholy shoots right out of the gate on Willie Nelson’s new full-length, First Rose of Spring. The album opens with its title track, a sweet but ultimately tragic love song by a trio of stalwart Nashville songwriters: Allen Shamblin (Bonnie Raitt), Marc Beeson (LeAnn Rimes, Blake Shelton), and Randy Houser (who hit number two on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart in 2009 performing his own “Boots On”). Nelson’s no-frills singing and plaintive solo on his trusty acoustic guitar, Trigger, make “First Rose of Spring” an anchor for the wistful, contemplative songs ahead....
“Put down the brownie batter hummus and slowly step away from the culture.” As an avid cultural appropriator herself, the Ariana Grande aesthetic proved an effective way into the issues of misrepresentation and erasure that MENA artists battle with about every project they sign on to. Ishak notes, “Ariana Grande is one of the white women most famous for appropriating Black and Latinx culture for profit and it just felt right to steal something back while making a critique about brownface....
“We like the sea and the lake,” says Özkan Yilmaz, the owner of Turkitch, a new café in Lakeview just a half-mile from the second largest body of water in the Americas. That’s why he reckons so many Turks choose to live in the neighborhood, and why, consequently, there are so many Turkish restaurants there, from Pera Turkish Kitchen to Cafe Orchid to ZiZi’s and more. Anyone who’s ever stood in line for doner (or al pastor, or shawarma) understands what a grave disappointment it is to approach a glistening, sizzling, spinning monument of meat, only to be served old scraps that had been previously set aside for expediency, maybe even only minutes before....
On Friday the 13th of February, a veritable holiday for horror fans, a lanky man whose face is plastered in black-and-white corpsepaint breezes through the downtown Hilton on Michigan Avenue wielding a chain saw. “Killer” Kyle Skogquist, the 33-year-old guitarist for long-running Twin Cities horror-metal band Impaler, is on the hunt for Gunnar Hansen, who played Leatherface, the psychopathic killer with a mask made of human skin, in the 1974 cult classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre....
Clocking in at 95 minutes, City Lit’s production of Voice of Good Hope (directed by Terry McCabe) isn’t long enough to capture the multitudes of its subject— the indomitable U.S. Representative Barbara Jordan, the first African American Congresswoman from the deep south. Jumping straight from her childhood as a wise dark-skinned Black child (a delightful MiKayla Boyd, alternating in the role with McKenzie Boyd) to her career as a savvy politician, playwright Kristine Thatcher employs only two key moments in Jordan’s professional life, casting her as a John McCain figure—occasionally willing to cross the aisle for unity, yet ultimately failing to act in a critical moment....
Cedille Records @CedilleRecords Founded in 1989 by James Ginsburg, Cedille Records is hardly a secret in the world of classical music, where it’s widely recognized as one of the most important independent imprints. Calling it the best classical label in Chicago, where it’s arguably the only established example, may feel like faint praise—but Cedille has blossomed over its history, and it’s as strong as it’s ever been these days, exercising an impressively catholic sensibility....
Zap Props and Antiques zapprops.com At first glance, Zap Props and Antiques might seem like nothing more than an enormous, highly disorganized pile of junk, but this three-story, 36,000-square-foot warehouse, tucked away in one of Bridgeport’s more nondescript enclaves, is a ramshackle museum of ephemera. Everything belongs to owner and proprietor Bill Rawski, who rents his wares to local film and theater productions. Most everything in his collection dates somewhere between the 1920s and the ’70s, and the website (much more orderly than the chaotic showroom) lists such varied categories as circus, kitchen and glassware, tiki and tribal, nautical, and taxidermy....
Eclipse Theatre Company presents Christopher Durang’s badly dated 1981 farce about a mismatched couple’s therapy-aided quest for love. When Prudence (Devi Reisenfeld) answers Bruce’s (Nick Freed) personals ad, they meet at a nondescript restaurant and have an awkward first date, highlighted by a volley of inappropriate comments back and forth. She storms out hoping never to see him again. But neither she, nor the audience, will be so lucky. Bruce’s amnesiac therapist, Charlotte (Lynne Baker), convinces him to place another ad....
After years of focusing its annual May celebration on Chicago and its suburbs, the Illinois Craft Brewer’s Guild now includes events across the state. Accordingly, it’s changed the name of the event to Illinois Craft Beer Week. Ultra Fresh All the beer served at this festival from the Hop Review (an online beer journal that focuses on Chicago and the midwest) will have been packaged within the past five days, making it—as the name would suggest—very fresh....
Chicago’s Malcolm London juggles more roles at once than some people can list on their entire resumés: he’s a poet, activist, rapper, and educator. How does he do it? “I’ve come to the conclusion that I have to be my whole self at all times,” he told the website DJ Booth in January. “When I’m onstage and I’m a rapper, I don’t forget that I’m an educator and that there’s young people watching me....
Adam Schubert, who plays guitar and sings in Chicago psych-rock unit Cafe Racer, took up music more than a decade ago. At age 14, he shattered his ulna (one of the bones in his forearm) in a skateboarding accident; since he couldn’t skate, he decided to pick up the guitar. By age 16, he’d gotten comfortable enough with the instrument to write and record his own material. He kept his solo work private up until a few years ago, when he started releasing lo-fi tracks as Ruins....
Four years ago, the City Council passed a historic reparations ordinance for survivors of torture perpetrated by former Chicago police commander Jon Burge and those working under his leadership. The ordinance was passed after years of organizing by survivors and advocates and included a package of measures to address the harm caused to the individuals who were tortured, to their communities, and to the city as a whole. The ordinance called for: $5....
Listening to a new Crippled Black Phoenix record is a bit like unwrapping a present. Even if you have an idea what’s under the intricate ribbons and shiny paper, you can still get surprised. That’s partially by design. Though the the songs of British multi-instrumentalist Justin Greaves provide the group with a common thread, Crippled Black Phoenix have routinely changed lineups—and their sound has changed with them, at various times adorning the band’s tapestry of cinematic prog and postrock with threads of British folk, spaghetti western scores, psychedelia, doom metal, and cabaret....
Gossip Wolf has been laying on the eyeliner and slouching around local clubs to the darkwave sounds of Chicago postpunk trio Staring Problem since they were wee goth babies from Carbondale—but it was 2011 when they last rewarded this wolfy loyalty with new material! Last week the band finally released a six-track album for free on Bandcamp, and they’ll put it out as a vinyl LP via BLVD Records this summer, with another seven-inch of new songs due on Modern Tapes in the fall....
In February 1999, Thomas Epach Jr., a top prosecutor in the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office, took on the daunting task of overseeing evidence presented to a grand jury that was reinvestigating the high-profile murder case against death row inmate Anthony Porter. Nearly 15 years later, he’d remain uncertain whether the right man ended up behind bars. Soon after, Epach, the office’s expert on the Porter case, found himself in the rather astonishing position of reinvestigating the case against an inmate who, days earlier, had been facing imminent execution....
I asked, and the answer is no: Shannon Cochran does not wear kothornoi in the extraordinary revival of Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes running now at Goodman Theatre. She sure looks as if she does, though. Kothornoi are the platform sandals ancient Greek actors wore (Aeschylus’s idea, allegedly) to look taller and more imposing onstage. Cochran enjoys a clear height advantage over most if not all of her fellow cast members....
