Qin Shi Huangdi likely qualifies as the most ambitious 13-year-old who ever lived. In 247 BCE, when he ascended the throne of Qin, one of the many warring states that competed for territory in what is now modern China, he set for himself two goals: to conquer all the rival states and to create a magnificent tomb that would contain a replica of his kingdom. This is the first time some of the figures have ever left China....
All day long at the Petro truck stop in Gary, Indiana, drivers pull in, dismount from their cabs, and saunter lazily across the long blacktop toward a grassy patch next to the parking lot entrance. Muttering into Bluetooth earpieces, they approach the steps of a raised semitrailer painted bright yellow, announcing itself to the parking lot with the words “Balkan Grill Restaurant.” Inside, a stark cargo area contains a few high-top tables, a drink cooler filled with bottled water and the Slovenian soft drink Cockta, and a window that separates customers from the kitchen, the register, and Momocilo “Momo” Bogdanovich....
Welcome to the Reader‘s weekday news brief How local “Dreamers” are planning ahead while Congress decides their fate Local undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children and were allowed to get work permits under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program are in limbo as Congress and the White House decide their future. There are more than 35,600 DACA recipients in Illinois, according to the Tribune. “I try to be optimistic and hopeful, but part of me is like, I don’t know....
Under the name Cut Worms, Max Clarke conjures deeply nostalgic, comforting sounds and bygone eras, evoking the sweet close-harmony singing of the Everly Brothers and the irresistible Merseybeat hooks of early Beatles. While the surface of his tunes on the recent Hollow Ground (Jagjaguwar) appear ripe for joyful sing-alongs, the words that fall out of his mouth in catchy, hypertuneful bunches convey a darkness at odds with the warmth of his vintage pop touch....
The 11th annual Hyde Park Jazz Festival kicks off tomorrow with a typically packed schedule of diverse sounds, focusing on some of the city’s most important and creative forces while making room for a selective smattering of national and international attractions. In this week’s paper I highlighted a couple of duo performances by Nick Mazzarella & Tomeka Reid and Andrew Cyrille & Bill McHenry, but naturally there’s much more that’s worth your time....
The Organizers of local R&B dance party Bump & Grindcore want each and every one of their monthly ragers to be “a safe space for people of all shapes, colors, orientations, and gender expressions to get nasty all up on each other.” Gossip Wolf has attended their R. Kelly tribute and one or two totally mental Pitchfork afterparties, and they definitely aren’t just blowing smoke. Do you know how hard it is to get purple lipstick out of fur?...
Improvising drone trio Good Willsmith—aka Natalie Chami of TALsounds and Hausu Mountain cofounders Max Allison and Doug Kaplan—dropped their previous release, a collaboration with avant-pop duo Dustin Wong & Takako Minekawa called Exit Future Heart, in 2018. Somehow that seems like decades ago, but if any local band can bend the laws of spacetime, it’s Good Willsmith. Two weeks ago Hausu Mountain finally released a new Good Willsmith album: the live tape HausLive 2, recorded from the audience by band pal Joel Berk during an April 2019 set at Sleeping Village....
In between acts at his comedy variety show, Caleb Says Things with Friends, Caleb Hearon takes a seat. “Y’know, this is my show. I could just sit here and talk about me for the next hour,” he says. “I won’t though . . . unless?” He takes a pause, raising his eyebrows and theatrically looking around the room, as if hoping someone will let him do it. “Haha, yeah, that’d be crazy,” he continues, “....
It’s time once again for the Printers Row Lit Fest, which combines three of the greatest pleasures in life: walking, talking about books, and the serendipitous discovery of new books (sometimes at incredible prices). The fest goes on all weekend in the south Loop near the intersection of Dearborn and Polk with events inside Jones College Prep (700 S. State). Arlene Stein and Rebecca Makkai, noon Stein is a sociologist and professor and the author of Unbound: Transgender Men and the Remaking of Identity, which follows four strangers who meet in Florida while awaiting top surgery....
Thaddis “Kuk” Harrell is one of the music industry’s preeminent vocal producers, in charge of coaxing unforgettable studio performances out of top-tier stars. He compares his process to a therapy session—to capture distinctive, compelling performances, he has to connect with musicians and dig into their emotional cores. Harrell has a gift for doing this, to judge by his resumé—it reads like a who’s who of the Top 40. He’s worked with Beyoncé, Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, Mary J....
Alexander Dodge concocts a crafty set design for Chicago Shakespeare’s decidedly uncrafty Othello. A sterile, brutalist facade of identical institutional windows, looking for all the world like a maximum security DMV, represents Venice. Its impersonal menace deftly conveys the unreflexive militarism that permeates Shakespeare’s world, a place where the mercenary known as Othello the Moor, who boasts he’s known nothing but soldiering since the age of eight, achieves near mythic status as a war hero....
This story was originally published by City Bureau on September 2, 2020. The citywide primary turnout was 38 percent, according to the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners, a bit higher than the final turnout during the 2018 March primary at 32 percent. To prepare for an expected high turnout in November, election officials are now taking steps to secure safe voting locations with more space, promote mail-in voting, and push for the early recruitment of younger election judges to avoid another shortage....
On February 14, 2018, Katrina Jabbi and her husband Buba needed a distraction. Buba had a meeting with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, the next day. A few months earlier Buba received notice that ICE had bumped his appointment date up by six months, from June 2018 to December 2017. He had to work on the new date, so he contacted the agency to reschedule. They moved his appointment to February 2018....
Nothing about this past year has been normal. (You’re welcome for that insightful news flash!) But for theater in Chicago, one of the constants every January is the Young Playwrights Festival with Pegasus Theatre Chicago, which opens the first week of the year and highlights three one-act plays crafted by students in Chicago-area high schools. The symmetry for the festival (headed up by Pegasus’s executive producing director, Ilesa Duncan) has always been pleasing to me at least: new year, new voices....
In 2010, when the young actor Corbin Bleu took over the lead role of Usnavi in In the Heights, Lin-Manuel Miranda, who’d written the show’s score and also originated the role, hailed him in rap: Chicago actor Tommy Rivera-Vega, who also auditioned for Porchlight’s production, makes an argument similar to Romano’s in a post in today’s Bleader: That authentic was held against her by everyone who believed the actual casting wasn’t—though Weiss tells me she was merely repeating a claim made by Porchlight—hence the quotes....
Setting Romeo and Juliet in a contemporary urban setting inevitably draws comparisons to West Side Story, even though Barbara Gaines’s current staging for Chicago Shakes (the first time she’s ever directed the play) resists that interpretation by casting the warring Montague and Capulet families across racial and ethnic lines. Mr. Capulet (James Newcomb) is a soused WASP, while Mrs. Capulet (Lia D. Mortensen) is in MILF mode, hooking up with Nate Burger’s Mercutio at the party where their Black daughter first sees the Latinx Romeo....
Months after droves of Moody Bible Institute students, parents, and alumni accused the religious college of grossly mishandling sexual violence claims, a group of survivors say the school’s administration has ignored their calls for change and shut them out of a third-party investigation. In an October 2020 petition on Change.org that’s garnered thousands of signatures, a group calling themselves MBI Survivors spoke out against what they and their supporters say is a culture of fear, misogyny, and unchecked sexual abuse at the school—with a majority of the accusations specifically naming Tim Arens, a now former vice president and dean of student life, and Rachel Puente, former Title IX coordinator, for sweeping assault claims under the rug....
Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place. Below had played in high school bands and in army ensembles, and he was trained in jazz. He struggled at first to adapt to blues rhythms, but he soon developed a swinging, sophisticated style that helped define the sound of urban blues and popularize the now ubiquitous shuffle beat....
AP photo / file Passengers wait for help after the Eastland capsized in the Chicago River on July 24, 1915. More than 800 others didn’t make it out alive. It happened in plain view—at 7:30 AM in the middle of a city—but the SS Eastland disaster has long been unfathomable. How did a 260-foot-long steamship simply tip over while docked in the Chicago River? I recently sat down with McCarthy, a former reporter and editor in Chicago for the Wall Street Journal, to talk about his fascinating new book, Ashes Under Water: The SS Eastland and the Shipwreck That Shook America (Lyons Press)....
The Grossman Ensemble could be thought of as a new-music incubator. The resident ensemble of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition (CCCC) at the University of Chicago, the 13-piece group—which comprises some of the best contemporary players in the city—rehearses extensively with composers over the course of several weeks. Some of their commissions emerge collaboratively from a nearly blank page, with composers drawing on the group’s input to flesh out their ideas....
