If you are tired of swiping fatigue, profiles full of duck face selfies, snapchat filters, and people having a two-day conversation with you – but never actually meeting up with you for a date – then The Inner Circle has the solution. And the formula is — common sense and human intuition mixed with respect for quality over quantity. Does anyone really have the time to do it any other way?...
Last week, Music Ally published an interview with Spotify CEO Daniel Ek where he suggested that artists upset with paltry streaming royalties should produce more music. “Some artists that used to do well in the past may not do well in this future landscape,” Ek said. “Where you can’t record music once every three to four years and think that’s going to be enough.” I can’t speak to why people decide to pursue careers in music, but I’m pretty sure it’s not so they can have a boss who devises a business model so broken that the only way they can hope to survive is by doubling or tripling the amount of work they release....
Each glass-topped wooden box hanging along the corridors of the Silverado home seals the memory of a resident. Eighty-eight-year-old Frank’s* box holds a model of the first plane he flew during the Korean war and a sticker from his alma mater, the Boston University School of Law. This three-story private facility, which costs a resident $9,000 a month, is decorated as in old times: posters of the New Yorker from the 30s and 40s, Elvis Presley, and the film High Society hang in the corridors....
It’s Thanksgiving and, quite naturally, my thoughts have turned to Harold Washington. Not too many of his type are running for mayor, much less getting elected. The last thing anyone in Chicago’s power elite wants is Black people running around talking like Bernie Sanders. Hell, the powers that be have enough trouble putting up with the white Bernie Sanders. But I don’t want to get too melancholy. There’s another, Trump-related reason I’ve been thinking of Washington these days....
Artist Brendan Fernandes has been having conversations about ballet and mastery within his work for years. The call and response interaction focuses on the idea that ballet is tied to the process of perfection. It can be difficult for ballet dancers to let go and let loose. It’s endurance, labor, and an intense effort for the body to stretch, hold, and pose. The body is challenged to push through any sort of pain to gain a reward....
Jane M. Saks knows a lot of people. As a child, she knew Studs Terkel, who was a friend of her father’s. Now, as an adult, she’s the director of Project&, an arts organization that collaborates with artists to create new work with social impact. Two years ago, she was at a meeting to discuss income inequality, and she started thinking about Terkel’s great oral history Working, compiled almost exactly 40 years before....
Last June, Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced that the city had selected tech guru Elon Musk’s Jetsons-esque scheme to build and operate the O’Hare Express, an airport transit system employing high-speed electric pods as a faster, cushier alternative to the Blue Line. The inventor says his Boring Company will use proprietary digging technology to tunnel some 18 miles from Block 37 to O’Hare at a fraction of the cost and time of conventional methods....
2019 marks two anniversaries for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater: 60 years since the company was founded in New York, and 50 years of performing annually at the Auditorium Theatre in Chicago. This year the company brings three different programs to town featuring a variety of work, including its first two-act ballet. Lazarus, which premiered in December 2018, is inspired by the life of Alvin Ailey and is the third piece created by hip-hop choreographer Rennie Harris for AAADT....
At first, Book Expo America, the largest annual book-industry event/circus in North America, which opened at McCormick Place Wednesday, seemed like a wonderful dream. I walked into the exhibit hall and saw an enormous banner that read “Harry Potter: It’s Magic”; beneath it, nice people from Scholastic publishing were handing out short, bound excerpts of the new illustrated edition of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. I walked a little further into the Hachette booth where publicists stood by handing out free books like they were candy—they also handed out tote bags to hold the free books....
A couple of years ago the excellent, trance-inducing Chicago instrumental-rock band Cave quietly vanished. Drummer Rex McMurry moved to North Carolina in November 2015, while Cooper Crain and Rob Frye became increasingly busy with Bitchin Bajas, among other projects. That state of affairs felt like a shame to me, because Cave was on a serious roll; from a Columbia, Missouri, band bent on experimenting and jamming it had grown into an impressively lean and taut combo that mined a mix of Krautrock grooves and ultradry funk redolent of 70s Miles Davis and “Shaft”-era Isaac Hayes—especially on unstoppable rippers such as “Sweaty Fingers,” which opened its last studio album, Threace (Drag City)....
Hello, global visitors to the third Chicago Architecture Biennial. Welcome! One of the most disturbing is playing out in real time just three short blocks from the biennial’s main venue. To check it out, exit the Cultural Center on its north side and turn left, where a five-minute walk on Randolph Street will bring you face to face with what looks like an alien space transport vessel—a massive, squat, pink and bluish anomaly plopped down across from City Hall in the midst of Chicago’s towering skyscrapers....
You don’t have to get frosted tips or wear a flame-themed bowling shirt to venture out and enjoy new places, but sometimes it can still be hard to get out of the neighborhood (whether you’re headed to Flavortown or not). Here’s some ideas for local places to “dive” in to and some things to stay in for (in case you just can’t imagine leaving the house this weekend). Enjoy! Fri 4/23, 5-7 PM: DJ Phokiss hosts Farm, Food, Familias, & Fiesta, an online party with a purpose and fundraiser for the Farm, Food Familias mutual-aid meals project that delivers free meals to families in Little Village, Englewood, and South Chicago....
I was at a wedding last week when a rowdy, intoxicated record collector cornered me and exclaimed, “The Rolling Stones! Name another band that’s been going as long!” Usually I don’t play these sorts of games, especially at weddings, but this time I had to admit he’d stumped me—I don’t count reunion tours with only one or two original members (see: the Who). The only possible contender I could think of was ZZ Top, who still have all three founding members, but they started a full seven years after the Rolling Stones formed in 1962—so there’s no contest....
Pandemic life leaves a lot to be desired, but I’m especially unenthused about the extra time I spend on social media for work and . . . well, not pleasure, but to connect with people I care about but can’t physically be around. Doomscrolling creates an anxiety-provoking feedback loop: though I continue to click out of a desire to feel more engaged with my communities, I inevitably feel more isolated the more I partake in it....
Q: I’m a 36-year-old straight woman. I was sexually and physically abused as a kid, and raped in my early 20s. I have been seeing a great therapist for the last five years, and I am processing things and feeling better than I ever have. I started dating this past year, but I’m not really clicking with anyone. My problem is that I’d really love to get laid. The idea of casual sex and one-night stands sounds great—but in reality, moving that quickly with someone I don’t know or trust freaks me out, causes me to shut down, and prevents me from enjoying anything....
Gossip Wolf has loved local five-piece I Kong Kult for years—their funky fusion of new wave and prog sounds like a collaboration by the Waitresses, drummer Tony Allen, and Soft Machine! They’ve been quiet for a while, but drummer Areif Sless-Kitain (a onetime Reader staffer) says that I Kong Kult—whose lineup also includes his Eternals bandmate Wayne Montana—are ending a three-year hiatus by celebrating their debut album, Warnings, at the Burlington on Saturday, December 10....
One of the most annoying trends in fiction right now is the novel based on the life of a literary figure. What’s the point of trying to fictionalize Virginia Woolf or Zelda Fitzgerald when they’ve already told their own stories in their own distinct voices? In comparison, a lot of 21st-century literary ventriloquism just seems like a pale imitation. At times like these, Mazie can come off as pretentious, or maybe just the creation of a novelist, instead of the street-smart New Yorker she’s purported to be....
The music that Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi wrote during the middle of the 20th century predicted minimalism and spectralism, but its forms and sounds remain distinct from those later developments—and from most other European classical music. Born in 1905, he started composing music in the late 1920s and arrived at his mature style after experiencing a catastrophic emotional breakdown in the Iate 1940s. Unable to benefit from available psychiatric treatment, he recovered following lengthy episodes of playing single notes on the piano, which led him to shed 12-tone composition and other complex forms in order to engage directly with pure sound....
In 2014 black southern outsider artist Lonnie Holley told the New York Times Magazine, “We can make art where we have to. Dr. King, if you remember, wrote a sermon on a piece of toilet paper.” His one-bedroom Atlanta apartment was stuffed with objects he collected for his art: Times contributor Mark Binelli mentioned “DVD cases, egg cartons, torn bedsheets, yellow police ‘Do Not Cross’ tape.” Holley, now 66, didn’t begin making visual art till he was 29....
In a 2016 column in the British gay magazine Attitude, playwright Patrick Cash confessed to a dick move he committed early on in his dating life, when he was 23 years old. After meeting and hooking up with “one of the nicest people [he’d] ever met,” a 20-year-old man who disclosed his HIV-positive status before initiating consensual and protected sex, Cash gave in to fear and stigma the following morning. “His status was why I didn’t call up the boy again....
