Posts

One of cinema’s great visual stylists, filmmaker Jacques Demy (1931-1990) was part of the other French New Wave—the Paris Left-Bank group of directors that included Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, and Demy’s wife, Agnès Varda. As a complement to Varda’s recent Oscar nomination and surge in celebrity, this week we’re spotlighting five Demy films currently showing on Filmstruck. Varda’s 1995 documentary The World of Jacques Demy is also showing in the Demy collection on the streaming channel....

The world premiere of Kari Bentley-Quinn’s one-act marks Halcyon Theatre’s last production under Tony Adams’s artistic direction and presents a fitting representation of the theater’s commitment to diversity and inclusion in storytelling. Simply, it’s a story about mommy issues, but the suspenseful script and all-female cast work together to create a portrait of three complicated, sometimes awful, sometimes sympathetic women. Nina, played by Susaan Jamshidi with guts and authenticity, is stuck in a pit of despair after the birth of her son....

Zak Kiernan, 37, moved to Chicago in 2012 and has worked for eight years as a video editor and sound designer at Leo Burnett. He makes ambient black metal as Adrasteia, which has a split with Celestial Sword coming later this year on Greek label His Wounds. His dungeon-synth project, Alkilith, will release The Shores of Evermeet this week on Chicago label Wrought Records, and will appear in April on the second volume of the Dungeon Synth Magazine cassette compilation series by Italian imprint Heimat der Katastrophe....

Since the Pitchfork Music Festival’s launch in 2006, its organizers have ensured that approximately a quarter of the lineup consists of artists from outside the U.S. This year is no exception, with nine international acts out of 41, including four of the top-billed performers: Robyn, Charli XCX, Belle & Sebastian, and Stereolab. (London singer-songwriter Tirzah canceled at the last minute.) Along with headliners from abroad, the fest is packed with lesser-known bands from around the world who are just as worthy of fans’ attention and time....

Seven-member South Korean boy band BTS were already fairly successful when they nonchalantly rapped about having an uncountable amount of trophies in the 2017 Steve Aoki remix of “Mic Drop.” Two years later, that boast feels quaint. Their success is no longer measured in mere award-show wins; they’re shattering records with nearly every move. Their single “Boy With Luv” racked up 76 million views in 24 hours, and just ten hours later became the video to most quickly reach 100 million....

At an administrative hearing Monday morning, a Cook County official doubled down on a controversial position that the Reader first reported on last week: she explained to attorneys for two Chicago venues that live performances of rock, country, rap, and electronic music do not constitute “music” or “culture” by the county’s standards. County code stipulates that venues with a capacity of 750 or fewer are not subject to the tax as long as any cover charges or admission fees are for “in person, live theatrical, live musical or other live cultural performances....

Gina DeLuca is a 32-year-old Chicago-based writer and live lit performer who specializes in wry, personal essays. She has performed readings of her work at CIC Theatre, iO, and Steppenwolf Theatre. She also cocurates and cohosts a monthly open-mike live lit event with writer Sarah Ashley at the Duke of Perth (2913 N. Clark), called Tartle at the Duke, the first Sunday of every month. So what is the Tartle at the Duke?...

A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. Perfume Genius I was introduced to the music of Perfume Genius in 2014, when I heard the big drums, airy defiance, and luxurious synthesizers of the song “Queen.” Perfume Genius make daring, radical love music, and when I recently saw them perform 2017’s No Shape (opening for Florence & the Machine) I was transformed....

Q: A male friend—not my best friend but a close one—told me his wife was really attracted to me and asked if I was attracted to her. His wife is an incredibly hot woman and I thought it was a trick question. I read your column and listen to the Savage Lovecast, Dan, so I know there are guys out there who want other men to sleep with their wives, of course, but I didn’t want to risk offending this friend by saying “FUCK YEAH” too quickly....

Hoo-boy. Good intentions pave a path off the deep end in Collaboraction’s ensemble-derived season finale, which reenacts pivotal moments in Chicago’s history of violence inflicted by whites upon people of color. A ten-person ensemble presents a living 4-D exhibit at the fictional Chicago Racism Museum, teaching and role-playing its way through a litany of flash points and milestones in the city’s civil rights history, ranging from the 1919 race riots to Harold Washington’s mayoral election to the uncovering of Chicago Police Department abuses at Homan Square....

Rappel says that he wanted to “subtly subvert” some of Altgeld’s inward-facing nature with the new building’s exuberance. But perhaps the most important factor determining Altgeld’s defensive posture is less rooted in the social dynamics of the place and more in the material conditions of the economy. Boxed out of expanding suburbs by racist lending practices and redlining during a historically tight housing market, Altgeld offered Black families subsidized housing in a tidy suburban atmosphere....

Welcome to the Reader‘s weekday news briefing. Have a great weekend! State senate to hold hearings on Quincy Veterans Home deaths Illinois senator Tom Cullerton is planning to hold public hearings after the New Year on the 13 Legionnaires’ disease deaths since 2015 at the Illinois Veterans Home in Quincy. “We’re going to bring all of the veterans’ affairs department in front of us,” Cullerton, who is also the chairman of the senate’s Veterans’ Affairs Committee, told Politico....

When it comes to conversations about the best guitar players of all time, rock fans typically mention the likes of Jimmy Page and Jimi Hendrix long before the thought of little old Adrian Belew crosses their minds. That’s a shame, because the unassuming shredder has one of the most mind-bending discographies in music history. Belew shared the stage and studio with icons such as Frank Zappa, David Bowie, and the Talking Heads, frying minds with his next-level alien dexterity—and that was all before joining up with Robert Fripp in 1980 to front newly re-formed progressive-rock pioneers King Crimson....

On Sunday Lupe Fiasco tweeted the video for an unreleased track called “Harold’s” he composed as a birthday gift for a friend, and, yes, it’s all about the beloved fried chicken joint. The lithe soul number barely crosses the two-minute mark, but that’s more than enough time for Lupe to unload delectable descriptions of the restaurant’s fried fowl, a “southern delight, supper color the white.” Happy Birthday To My Real Brothers Harold “Huggy Bear” Perkins…this one dedicated to you big bro!...

If you were looking for compelling source material for an album of 21st-century Americana, you might not start with poems written in England at the tail end of the 18th century. But the 2012 debut album by Martha Redbone Roots Project, The Garden of Love—Songs of William Blake, sets the words of the English writer, artist, and visionary to arrangements that blend elements of Appalachian folk, gospel, soul, blues, and Native American music....

The myth of 17-year-old pop star Billie Eilish is that she blew up overnight at age 13, after she uploaded the dreamy, trap-inflected “Ocean Eyes” to Soundcloud and it went viral. That was in November 2015, and by the following summer she’d signed a joint deal with Darkroom and Interscope. But that narrative omits the influence of her actor parents, who homeschooled Eilish and her older brother, 21-year-old Finneas O’Connell—in 1997, the year O’Connell was born, one of the top hits was “MMMBop,” written by three homeschooled Oklahoma brothers, and Eilish’s parents figured that a similar education might help their kids develop their artistic sides....

Cassette tapes and the avant-garde are what I call “play cousins.” They’re not necessarily related, but they work well together and have a lot in common. I use “avant-garde” here as a catch-all for experimental music, contemporary classical, odd films, and forward-thinking literature. I’m thinking of the new and unusual, a testing ground for ideas that might shift our perspective and understanding of the human experience if broadcast widely. At first glance, though, this stuff isn’t for everyone—I consider myself adventurous, and even I have moments when the voice of a skeptical geezer from the old neighborhood pops into my brain and says, “What the hell is this shit?...

In the world of Chicago goth dance trio Pixel Grip, “the arena” is more than a literal venue where spectators gather to delight in competition—it refers to any context our society envisions as a zero-sum game, where no one can win without someone else losing. The band’s sophomore album, Arena, proposes the club as a sanctuary. The “Demon Chaser” video, directed by Todd Diederich Chasing the forbidden is the premise of “Demon Chaser....

Sandra Treviño, 48, has run Latin-music site Enchúfate since founding it in 2005. She also contributes to Vocalo and two Lumpen Radio programs and DJs as part of Latinx arts collective Future Rootz. When we saw the lack of coverage for the rock en español community—nobody was reporting about it, we weren’t getting written up—the band’s singer and myself decided to do something about it. He studied cinematography at Columbia College and he’s like, “I know how to do video....

Before Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 was released in theaters a little more than a month ago, Hollywood insiders speculated that the movie could be a rarity: an intellectually rigorous blockbuster that could connect with mainstream audiences and Academy voters. Once 2049 underperformed at the box office it was treated as a misfire, proof that audiences don’t like to be challenged, or that the marketing campaign didn’t try hard enough to appeal to millennials or women, or that the distributor’s overzealous attempt to police spoilers wound up constricting the conversation around the film....