Q: My father left my mother abruptly when I was 14 years old, and he hasn’t contacted either of us since. It was a crushing blow for her, and she retreated from the world. She was never bitter about it, but it was devastating. She lost the love of her life for no apparent reason and was left completely alone, except for me. We have both done our best to forget about him....
Fire-Abla Brooks homes from Robert R Gigliotti on Vimeo. A drone caught dramatic video of a fire in the ABLA/Brooks Homes in University Village Wednesday. The footage shows playground equipment enveloped in flames in a courtyard in the middle of the public housing project, which is located off Loomis between 13th and 14th Streets. Thick smoke billowed into the air. Firefighters could be seen at the scene hosing down the fire as it destroyed the equipment....
Producer Quinn Cochran and singer Quinn Barlow, who make evanescent indie-pop songs as Iris Temple, met at Lincoln College Preparatory Academy in Kansas City, Missouri. They became friends in band class—Cochran played guitar, Barlow trombone—and after graduating in 2014, they came to Chicago for college. Barlow almost immediately returned to Kansas City, but in 2015 they began collaborating long-distance, with Barlow rapping over beats Cochran sent him. By August of that year, Iris Temple had grown legs, and Barlow moved back to Chicago....
Michael Gebert Whitney Morrow, mixologist at Drumbar “There’s lots of green on the menu,” says Whitney Morrow, a tall blonde who is dressed in the vaguely 19th century garb that’s become de rigueur for mixologists (a term which also dates back to the 19th century, though like the look, it spent a lot of time out of fashion before roaring back to prominence). The first two drinks we tried demonstrated that more isn’t always more....
The setup to Bill Cain’s revisionist Shakespearean fairy tale is the sort of juicy, rebellious, intrigue-filled “what if” fantasy that would make Quentin Tarantino proud: What if a villainous Lord Robert Cecil (Michael Dalberg) approached the Bard (Brendan Hutt) and his company to create a propaganda play that whitewashes the recently foiled Gunpowder Plot to bomb Parliament? And what if the King’s Men deviated from their forcibly “requested” commission to instead expose a conspiracy led by a corrupt king?...
Chicago has no shortage of young talented singers who can elevate a great rap track but who focus in their own careers on sounds outside or tangental to hip-hop. The recent EP from Eryn Allen Kane, this month’s Aviary: Act II, is steeped in soul, but the 26-year-old Detroit native has made a name for herself in part by working in Chicago’s hip-hop scene. I first heard her on Saba‘s excellent 2014 mixtape Comfort Zone, where she appears on two tracks, “Burnout” and “For Y’all,” which also features the incomparable MC Tree....
Of course there’s no such thing as magic. Not in the supernatural sense, anyway. Not in the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” sense, where Mickey Mouse dons his master’s glowing cap and casts a spell on a broom, making it tote buckets of water for him. What we choose to call magic comes down to a strategic partnership between physics, psychology, dexterity, and hope. But soon enough his show is invaded by an apparition: the memory of a competitive diver—called, yes, the Diver—who became the Magician’s lover after the two met cute over a card trick....
Open up any horror auteur’s toolbox, and you’ll likely see some recurring devices: tracking shots, audience immersion, startles, simmering dread—elements that are notably difficult to achieve onstage. So Wildclaw Theatre’s mission of bringing the world of horror to the theater is an ambitious one, and one I’ve seen yield truly creative results from this innovative company. Couple that challenge, though, with the addition of another stage-averse genre—spaghetti westerns—and the outcome is a little more strained....
Johnny Guitar In his review of Michael Curtiz’s Mildred Pierce, screening this weekend at the Music Box as part of the “Weepie Noir: The Dark Side of Women’s Pictures” series, Dave Kehr calls the film “the archetypal Joan Crawford film,” which it very well could be—I actually haven’t seen it, and I’m also not that sure what constitutes an “archetypal Joan Crawford film.” Crawford’s 45-year career is among the most varied and storied of any Hollywood actress—it transcends multiple eras, stylistic shifts, and industry overhauls....
Mon 11/13 The Reader‘s Peter Margasak writes of pianist and composer Vijay Iyer, playing Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s MusicNow series at the Harris Theater (205 E. Randolph): “Iyer and trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith will give the local debut of their stunning duo, performing A Cosmic Rhythm With Each Stroke, the centerpiece of their 2016 album of the same name. This shape-shifting seven-movement suite responds to an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Indian artist Nasreen Mohamedi, who often blends abstraction and architectural precision in line-based drawings....
The world didn’t shift on its axis when Riot Fest announced its lineup in May, even though it’d landed arguably the biggest prize of the 2019 festival season: reunited riot-grrrl pioneers Bikini Kill. Riot Fest has made something of a specialty out of booking (or even bringing about) unbelievable reunions that fans never expected to see in this time line: the Replacements in 2013, the Original Misfits in 2016, Jawbreaker in 2017....
Q: Can I still be considered sex positive if I personally do not have sex? I’ve never had sex or masturbated—all my life, any type of sexual stimulation has been very painful and I’ve been unable to experience orgasm. I simply get a migraine and feel mildly nauseated instead. I am not looking for a possible solution, as I long ago accepted my fate and consequently avoid sex, such as by maintaining only sexless relationships....
Australian multi-instrumentalist Tash Sultana is an expressive performer, and that quality comes through strong in the viral YouTube videos that have helped her transform her from a street busker into a rising pop-rock darling. In her 2016 breakthrough video for “Jungle”—a blustery, woeful ballad filled with spindly riffs, a smooth reggae melody, and sparse hip-hop percussion—Sultana animatedly bobs back and forth while strumming her guitar, reacts to her finger triggering a beat on an MPC like she’s playing drums with her whole body, and contorts her face while singing, even clenching her eyes tight during the most intense vocal lines....
As 2020 comes to a close, it brings with it the gift of hindsight, which I have decided to use to play cinematic matchmaker—instead of recommending merely ten movies, here are 20. Pairing some of the best releases of the year together via a list of double-features allows us to reflect on how 2020 left its mark on the medium. It’s admittedly heavy on the horror—that’s fitting, though, in a year that saw its own share of scares, but also saw the genre strive as streaming replaced a trip to the theaters....
Over the past decade, saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock has increasingly used composition to provoke and organize adventurous improvisation. She made a major leap on the knotty 2016 album Serpentines (Intakt). The musical personalities she’s assembled, and the unusual timbres they contribute, represent compositional decisions just as profound as anything she’s put down on the page. The band combines her own grainy, jagged tenor and soprano saxophones, the rubbery low end of tuba player Dan Peck, the skittering intervals of pianist Craig Taborn, the glistening harplike fragments of koto player Miya Masaoka, the fractured throb of drummer Tyshawn Sorey, the cleanly articulated smears and tart curlicues of trumpeter Peter Evans (a guest on the album), and the splintery, refracted signal processing of laptop improviser Sam Pluta....
Now that Mayor Lightfoot has named her school board appointees, the time has come for me to evaluate the previous mayor’s appointees. I’ve known del Valle for decades. I happened to be there the night in 1986 when del Valle, then a community organizer, upset state senator Edward Nedza, a key cog in former alderman Tom Keane’s legendary 31st Ward Democratic machine. So that’s all good, except . . ....
Q: I need your advice. My partner of 27 years has been sleeping with my best friend. This has been going on for a year and a half. As far as I knew, we had a monogamous relationship, even if things had gotten stale between us in recent years. And my best friend is everything to me. I confide in him for a lot, including advice on my relationship. We spoke recently about how my partner wasn’t interested in sex....
Among the contenders for the title “Best pizza” this year, you might have been surprised to see the name of Reader staff writer Leor Galil. How does a music writer become a pizza, you ask? Like many major happenings these days, the story starts with Twitter: While promoting Best of Chicago 2016, Leor tweeted that voters could write in any candidates they pleased—for example, they could nominate him for best pizza....
Robert Slechter is used to catching—and firing—bullet passes as a wide receiver and backup quarterback for the Chicago Police Enforcers football team. Of course, real bullets are fired and violent hits are thrown whether or not the Enforcers are playing on Morton Grove High School’s field. ‘There is no justice here’ “I never was raised to hate, but to be honest with you, I hate that officer. I hate him with a passion for taking my son away from me....
Born in Michigan and raised on the road, the Goddamn Gallows had a four-year gap between The Maker and last year’s The Trial. The somewhat nomadic existence of this raw and boisterous band might account for that—they’ve moved from Michigan to Portland to California, and their members are currently scattered in cities all over the country (including Chicago) like empty bottles. But whatever the reason for the delay, The Trial was worth the wait....
