Q: I have a quick question about bisexuality. What if one has a preference for dating straight individuals? As a straight woman, I am only interested in dating straight men. Is that some kind of phobia? Or is it OK for that to be a preference? I’ve always wanted to ask someone this but I’m afraid of being thought of as having a phobia. A: I would send my regrets along with a broken toaster and the wrong receipt....
The bartender: Jacyara de Oliveira of Sportsman’s Club The drink: Caipirinha The bar: La Sirena Clandestina During the year Oliveira spent living in Brazil during college, she often drank the country’s national cocktail, the caipirinha—a simple drink consisting of muddled limes, sugar, crushed ice, and cachaca, a liquor made from distilled sugarcane juice. Oliveira, whose family is Brazilian, also drank variations like the caipiroska (made with vodka) and caipirissima (made with rum)....
The emerging fifth-wave emo scene has given me a great excuse to stay glued to social media. I’m not shy about my enthusiasm for emo, and I got a little giddy last month watching a cross-section of Twitter music fanatics go wild for pop-minded Chicago emo songwriter Eric Reyes, who records as Snow Ellet. Hugo Reyes had included Snow Ellet’s music in a great Medium roundup of recent Chicagoland emo on April 19, and after interest snowballed on Twitter, on May 7 Pitchfork ran a review of Snow Ellet’s debut EP, the March release Suburban Indie Rock Star....
Q: I am a 40-year-old woman; I came out when I was 16. When I was 17, I met M and we dated for eight years. M was a horrible human being—emotionally and occasionally physically abusive. M still sends me the occasional (creepy) e-mail, wishing me a happy birthday or giving me updates on people I don’t really recall. I don’t respond. A few years back, I got an e-mail saying that M was now “Mike....
Jlin Its Chicago roots notwithstanding, footwork is a global phenomenon now, with vital communities popping up as far afield as Japan and Poland. So it was no leap at all for this adventurous, fast-paced dance music to reach Gary, Indiana, home to footwork producer Jlin, aka Jerilynn Patton. Her steel-mill job keeps her grounded in Gary, but the Chicago scene has gladly claimed her as its own: footwork progenitor RP Boo has gravitated toward her as a mentor, offering her words of encouragement and feedback, and she’s a member of Bosses of the Circle, a collective led by Low End producer DJ Roc....
“Lady Mocha has come to Bronzeville bearing the gift of fashion,” says William Salaam of his wife, Treva Johnson Salaam, aka Lady Mocha. The pair, both born and raised in Chicago, opened Bronzeville Boutique by Lady Mocha in October 2009 in the graystone where Gwendolyn Brooks once wrote the poem “Kitchenette Building” (a mural-size portrait of Brooks is next to the store’s display window). Johnson Salaam’s keen eye is apparent in the garments she picks for the store, purchased wholesale online and at apparel shows all over the country....
Just before Christmas 2019, “Katherine,” who asked her real name not be used for fear of retaliation from her alleged abuser, walked into an informal hearing held by the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) that would decide the fate of her and her five children. She had received a notice from the agency that it planned to terminate her Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher (HCV)—assistance that the 44-year-old had depended on for the past ten years to afford her East Garfield Park apartment....
Clayton Hauck Built to Spill at the 2009 Pitchork Music Festival Like Mission of Burma’s The Sound, the Speed, the Light, the Feelies’ Here Before, and a good many records by Neil Young (who might well have invented this particular subgenre), the recently released new Built to Spill album, Untethered Moon, is the sort of guitar-driven rock record that feels like catching up with an old friend. The solos are satisfying both technically and emotionally, despite not breaking any new ground....
Is life on Earth doomed? Beginning October 19, Steppenwolf for Young Adults is presenting Animal Farm as a radio play (a first for the program) as part of the 2020/21 season, adapted by Steve Pickering for radio from Althos Low‘s original stage adaptation and directed by Lili-Anne Brown. And on October 13, Northlight Theatre is taking part in a nationwide, simultaneous broadcast of Berkeley Rep’s radio play adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’s novel It Can’t Happen Here....
Courtesy of John Yingling Speak Chinese or Die Back in the summer of 2013, tireless former Chicago scene documentarian John Yingling—currently residing in Missoula, Montana—announced that he would be taking his operation global. He’d made a name for himself around town by running the website Gonzo Chicago, in which he filmed and photographed every underground show he came across for years before relocating to Montana, where he continued doing the same thing....
Yes, Underscore Theatre’s reworked 2016 “new folk musical” about the titular violent 1886 Chicago labor protest and its hopelessly corrupt aftermath features singing and dancing anarchists (who play musical instruments to boot). But both Nick Thornton’s no-frills choreography and Robert Ollis’s straight-ahead musical direction are fittingly—if unengagingly—workmanlike. The production’s general lack of razzle-dazzle may suit the subject matter, but it makes for a rather featureless two-plus hours. Part of the problem stems from the insular material....
Anna Gelman directs the world premiere of I Am Going to Die Alone and I Am Not Afraid, an ensemble-devised play about the Holocaust that feels hauntingly contemporary. A mostly bare stage decorated with lines full of white and beige clothing hanging near the rafters—left as if forgotten by a whole neighborhood suddenly vanished—hosts a versatile group of six actors, who tell, sing, and dance tales of resistance, bravery, and survival....
Julia Thiel Somrus, in the bottle and the glass Last fall Burr Ridge resident Pankaj Garg and his wife Swati released Somrus, an Indian cream liqueur—the first product in what they intend to be an entire line of Indian-inspired drink products. In Hindi, the name apparently means “nectar of gods,” which seems like a pretty high bar to set, but it does sound nice. Julia Thiel The Somarita (left) and Balancing Act I was hoping, though, that by some miracle the combinations of ingredients in the two cocktails would work....
If recreational marijuana finally becomes legal in Illinois, driving to a cannabis dispensary will be as commonplace as swinging by the liquor store. But are Illinois police officers ready to keep the streets safe from a potential influx of stoned drivers? And can police even tell when a driver is stoned? The screening process can also include a toxicology exam involving a blood or urine test. A urine test is problematic, because the screening doesn’t return definitive results saying whether the person tested was under the influence of a specific drug at the time the test was taken, experts said....
Since 1990, local percussionists Hamid Drake and Michael Zerang have held annual sunrise concerts on the morning of the winter solstice. Over time the series has expanded to include performances on adjacent mornings as well as evening concerts that bring in the duo’s past and present collaborators. This year the final evening show promises to be something quite special. It will honor an association of Drake’s that began even earlier than the solstice series....
Jason Bourne has daddy issues, and he’ll stop at nothing to work them out. The fifth installment in the popular spy-thriller franchise about an amnesiac CIA assassin, Jason Bourne supposedly deals with such topical issues as cybersecurity and civil unrest, but the characters’ motivations for inflicting damage to people and property seem entirely personal. As the film opens, our hero (Matt Damon) is off the grid somewhere in Greece, making his living as a bare-knuckle brawler....
Eddie Palmieri will turn 81 in December, but the pianist and bandleader hardly seems ready for retirement. As one of the most revolutionary and paradigm-shifting figures in the history of Latin music, he’s certainly earned the right to take it easy, and while he’s definitely quieted down on the recording front, this year’s Sabiduría/Wisdom (Ropeadope)—his first new studio album in a dozen years—makes it clear his work isn’t finished. Working with a fiery new band of virtuosos including jazz heavies such as bassist Luques Curtis and drummer Obed Calvaire, Palmieri dives into a batch of originals from some of the angles he’s utilized over decades of musical innovation, melding soul, funk, and jazz with heavy salsa forms....
Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez, newly elected alderman of the 33rd Ward, squeezed into the corner of a City Hall elevator, grinning and clutching a Starbucks cup. Others piled in only to disembark a few seconds later on the second floor, where dozens lined up to enter council chambers for the first meeting of Chicago’s legislature presided over by Mayor Lori Lightfoot. By 9:45 the aldermen streamed in. Byron Sigcho-Lopez, freshman alderman from the 25th Ward, explained to reelected 37th Ward alderman Emma Mitts how to pronounce “Sigcho....
No one in his right mind would accuse a filmmaker of having too much imagination, but French filmmaker Michel Gondry has so much that his flights of fancy can overwhelm his movies. When I think of Gondry, I often remember that dream sequence in The Science of Sleep (2006) in which Gael García Bernal gropes around with giant papier-mache hands—the director has an enormous hunger for ideas, but sometimes he can’t pick anything up....
When I heard that Mayor Lightfoot had teamed up with Samuel Skinner—former White House chief of staff under George H.W. Bush—to produce a study on how to eliminate inequities in Chicago, I raced to the report to find any references to TIFs. But, alas, there’s only one itty-bitty reference to the tax increment financing program possibly helping fund Black-owned businesses. It’s on page 44, if you want to see it yourself....
