Posts

Can someone please give Meshell Ndegeocello a Grammy already? The ten-time nominee, also known as Meshell Suhalia Bashir-Shakur, has forged a distinctive and idiosyncratic path since her 1993 debut Plantation Lullabies. The singer and multi-instrumentalist has also become known for her social activism, and she’s contributed work to compilations, tributes, and anthologies including AIDS-research benefits from the Red Hot Organization, a compilation album devoted to empowering women and promoting peace in the Congo called Raise Hope for Congo, and an essay about her experience as a bisexual woman in Dan Savage’s anthology aimed at LGBTQ youth, It Gets Better: Coming Out, Overcoming Bullying, and Creating a Life Worth Living....

N at the Greenhouse Theater is based on a faulty premise: that a white actor would refuse to say the N-word in a play. Stage and screen are universally acknowledged as being “allowable” environments for this. However, this incident only serves as a MacGuffin for a clunky “both sides” thought experiment on liberal hypocrisy. Stacie Doublin plays Mrs. Page, an older Black Republican forced by her son to accept a caretaker....

Welcome to the Reader’s cannabis column To Be Blunt. We’re here to answer your canna questions with the help of budtenders, attorneys, medical practitioners, chefs, researchers, legislators, and patient care advocates. Send your cannabis queries to tobeblunt@chicagoreader.com. THC-COOH: an inactive metabolite of THC that stays in your fatty tissues for up to 30 days. “The chance of testing positive for cannabis on a company drug test depends on the type of CBD product you use, and how you consume it....

Whether you’re looking for a trick or a treat this weekend, there’s plenty to do. Be sure to check out Chicago’s best Halloween 2016 events and seven theater and comedy shows for the spooky season. And see more of what we recommend below. Sat 10/29: If you’ve been inspired by The Great British Baking Show‘s Chetna, Nadiya, and Tamal to use more south Asian flavors in your baking, you could do worse than learn from Malika Ameen, a past Top Chef: Just Desserts contestant and former pastry chef at Aigre Doux, who has just published her first book, Sweet Sugar, Sultry Spice....

Many years ago a college friend who was one of the lucky ones—right out of J-school she got a reporting job with the Chicago Tribune—led me up a public elevator to a little-known service elevator and out onto a terrace at the top of a hotel that’s now the InterContinental. It was a summer night. Stars lit the sky above and glittering Michigan Avenue below. And at our exalted level, almost near enough to touch, loomed the Tribune Tower’s mighty gothic crown....

The members of this Colombia-rooted, New York City-based quartet—vocalist and percussionist Carolina Oliveros, drummer Dilemastronauta, guitarist Niño Lento, and bassist-keyboardist Prince of Queens—have been pursuing what they call “tropical futurism” since 2015. Combo Chimbita’s magical, trippy rhythms are potent dance-inducing potions that build upon an extensive variety of beats from the global south, including Afro-Colombian cumbia and champeta, Caribbean calypso, and Haitian kompa. The group imbue their experimental jams with Afro-indigenous mysticism and spirituality as well as the fierce energy of punk and metal, and propel them into the 21st century with dub and electro....

Emma Yaaka snaps his fingers to make sure his audience is listening. He wears a chartreuse polo shirt and AirPods as he speaks into the camera. “Please, whenever you cough,” he says as he fake coughs into his fist, “cover your mouth.” He pauses for emphasis between each word and ruffles through some papers on his desk. He holds up a picture of himself, partially disguised in a baseball hat, with a tissue over his nose....

Welcome to the Reader’s morning briefing for Friday, September 9, 2016. Have a great weekend! City Council committee approves controversial water and sewer tax increases The City Council Finance Committee approved increases in the city’s water and sewer taxes Thursday. The proposal would increase water taxes by 30 percent in phases over the next five years. Mayor Rahm Emanuel hopes the revenue will raise hundreds of millions of dollars for city pension funds....

Instrumental five-piece Monobody have the tenacity and vision to add to Chicago’s storied postrock legacy, and they proved it with 2018’s Raytracing, which borrowed its frenzied energy from punk and metal. On their new third album, Comma (out on Sooper, the label co-owned by Monobody drummer Nnamdi Ogbonnaya), the group maintain the seat-of-the-pants spirit of their previous records while softening their touch and redirecting their energies toward a sound more reminiscent of jam-band music and jazz....

Could there possibly be a more overworked, banal question of the cultural moment than “What’s your passion?” It’s so ubiquitous, from job interviews to dating apps, that it has supplanted the equally risible “What’s your sign?”—as if anyone could instantly recognize real passion in a society as corporatized, monetized, and intimacy averse as ours. (As pervasive as social media is, sharing everything with everyone is the opposite of intimate, which means private and personal....

I was never a huge David Bowie fan. He was part of the musical background of my life, particularly the year I worked at a Barnes & Noble and the staff unanimously decided that Best of Bowie was the only one of the CDs chosen by corporate that we would work to; “The Jean Genie” had a particularly good rhythm for shelving. But I never really paid close attention to him until last fall when “David Bowie Is” opened at the MCA....

In August the Chicago chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (CDSA) launched the interactive database Find My Landlord. The website features a map of rental properties across the city. The owners, along with their properties, can be found via the search function. All data is available for download. In March, as the coronavirus pandemic thrust millions of Americans into economic uncertainty, CDSA began to focus more efforts around tenant organizing and joined the citywide coalition Chicago Tenants Movement....

“The sense of being lost is what we wanted to convey. That is what was missing before [in most earlier movies about the Holocaust]: one individual being lost.” —László Nemes to Andrea Gronvall, Movie City News I assume this storytelling strategy is what led the New York Times‘s Manohla Dargis to describe the film, in a report from Cannes, as “radically dehistoricized” and “intellectually repellent”—attributes that I’d be more inclined to assign to the period bloodbaths of Quentin Tarantino (including his latest, also showing at Music Box)....

Each school day the dabbawala delivered a fresh, hot, home-cooked lunch to Jasmine Sheth (and many others), each dish packed into a stack of three circular aluminum tins, or tiffins, with roti on the side, a salted lassi, and something sweet. The food itself was cooked every morning by her mother, and sent off via Mumbai’s sprawling lunchbox delivery system by bicycle and rail. The tins returned the same way each evening....

I recently finished reading the 2011 Will Hermes book Love Goes to Buildings on Fire (Faber & Faber), an entertaining and well-researched account of cutting-edge music in New York between 1973 and 1977. Hermes crafts a strictly chronological, diaristic collage, each entry addressing one of the various scenes—Latin music, free jazz, hip-hop, classical minimalism, protopunk—that were then colliding in a thrilling, freewheeling way. I thought of the book when I read violinist Sam Bardfeld’s liner notes to his new trio album, The Great Enthusiasms (BJU), where he briefly describes growing up in New York in the 70s and early 80s:...

My girlfriend has a Spotify playlist called “Emotional Bangers,” and it’s made up entirely of too-earnest, heart-on-the-sleeve hip-hop jams. Though it leans pretty heavily on Drake and the Weeknd, Chicago native Juice Wrld is a major presence as well. To hear him tell it, Juice Wrld has a lot of feelings; Juice Wrld also has lots of weed and pills. Though he’s only 20, he’s spent the past couple years redefining what’s possible in chart-busting hip-hop, evolving past not only its traditional hard-hitting beats and acrobatic wordplay but also the woozy trap of recent years....

Outside of the Chicago International Film Festival, the hottest movie ticket in town this week is likely Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, which is now playing at River East, the Arclight, and the Landmark Century. I consider Parasite to be Bong’s best film since Memories of Murder (2003); the South Korean writer-director mixes comedy, suspense, and social commentary so successfully that the combination comes to seem irreducible. Clearly I’m not alone in my admiration for the film—it won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, and it’s been selling out screens across the country since it opened in the U....

“I’m still getting used to the cold,” says Noah Frazier, 25, a masonry restoration worker who spent most of his life in India and Singapore. Despite loving the outdoors, the Bridgeport resident—who moved from Berlin five years ago—does his best to avoid feeling chilly. “My German grandfather had this saying, ‘There’s no such thing as bad weather, just pointless clothing,’” he says, first in German, then in English. “Even though it’s like 50 degrees today, I put on my thermals and my big coat because I figure you can always shed a layer....

Chicago has a rich paranormal history. If the tales are true, our city has ghosts in its nightclubs (the Limelight, Excalibur, and Castle Chicago, all in the old Chicago Historical Society building on Dearborn), in its hotels (the Congress Plaza Hotel reputedly throngs with spirits, including those of Al Capone and a murdered peg-legged hobo), and obviously in its graveyards (most famously, Resurrection Cemetery in southwest-suburban Justice is ground zero for sightings of a phantom hitchhiking woman nicknamed Resurrection Mary, who’s been appearing since the 1930s)....

There are few people in the world who have thought more deeply about the art of comics than Scott McCloud. In his trilogy Understanding Comics, Reinventing Comics, and Making Comics, he provided a thorough explanation—in graphic form—of the theory and practice of storytelling through sequential drawings in little boxes. But although McCloud, who is 54, had worked for DC and created his own series of black-and-white comic books, Zot!, he had never tried his hand at the graphic novel ....