A few days after Mayor-elect Lori Lightfoot raised the white flag on Mayor Rahm’s $2.4 billion TIF deals, I happened to see Knock Down the House, an uplifting documentary about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s upset triumph in last year’s Democratic House primary in New York City. Lightfoot argued that she didn’t have the City Council votes to stop the deals and so, having wrung concessions on minority hiring, signed on to them with a word of warning....
Melodic hardcore isn’t known for indulging pleasantries, and Boston-based five-piece Defeater dare you to enter a universe that’s as bleak as it is complex. Derek Archambault (vocals), Adam Crow (guitar), Jake Woodruff (guitar), Mike Poulin (bass), and Joe Longobardi (drums) write concept albums that tell the story of a Depression-era working-class family as they struggle with adultery, treachery, poverty, and death. Archambault refers to the characters he’s created as his own “Glass family” (a reference to recurring characters in the fiction of J....
We ask a lot of the diner, and all too often the diner disappoints. How can we expect the all-purpose concept—promising omnicompetence with regard to everything from French toast to Denver omelets to turkey wraps to chili—to execute any of it, beyond basics like eggs and toast, really well? I don’t know how Avondale’s Brother’s Restaurant does with any of that stuff, but I’ve heard good things about the turkey Reuben, the turkey-bacon club made with real turkey breast, and the ham-bacon-sausage Brother’s Skillet with crispy hash browns....
Courtesy the Raydios’ Facebook page The Raydios in late 2014. That’s Fink in the sunglasses. Twenty years ago I arrived at the conviction that the best punk band in the world came from Japan: Teengenerate broke up in 1996, just three years after their first seven-inch, but the one proper LP they released during that span, 1994’s Get Action!, still hasn’t been topped. I’m not referring to “punk” in the “bondage pants and great big pointy haircuts” sense, but rather to an in-the-red descendent of undomesticated 60s garage rock, rooted in the blues and fueled by the reckless energy of juvenile delinquents in hopped-up cars....
This story was originally published by ProPublica Illinois. ProPublica Illinois is an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism with moral force. Sign up for The ProPublica Illinois newsletter for weekly updates. Leer en Español. The Trump administration is sending immigrant children who are alone, afraid and sick with fever, chicken pox and even tuberculosis to shelters in Chicago, where they are further isolated to prevent the spread of disease, according to one of the nonprofit organizations caring for them....
My house smells like slow-cooked pot roast and marijuana. Around this time five years ago, in 2015, I gave up my studio apartment to travel in a musty 12-passenger van with the Second City National Touring Company as the newest member of BlueCo. I was listening to five adults make a bit out of every sentence, drinking my weight in Jameson from a flask I once used as a prop, and figuring out what my road to comedy success could look like....
A lot of Manson fans will tell you that Marilyn Manson’s ninth studio album, 2015’s The Pale Emperor, was a massive artistic sidestep for the shock rocker. Instead of his usual industrialized hard rock, the album dabbles in goth, blues rock, and spaghetti-western flourishes—eliciting both love and hate from longtime fans. On October’s Heaven Upside Down, Manson’s returned to form, conjuring up the crushing sounds and dark energies that made him an (antichrist) superstar in the 90s....
We’ll have to wait until sometime this summer to get the video stream Lyric Opera’s promising of last weekend’s performance of the garage opera, Twilight: Gods. Like a picnic version of a gourmet meal, that event was more about the environment than the opera, so it’ll be interesting to see how well it works onscreen. Also free and worth finding online: Chicago Fringe Opera‘s “A City of Works”—a series of “site-specific micro-operas,” all by different composers....
Pianist Matt Piet is a Palos Park native who jumped into the local improvised music scene in 2014 when he returned home after finishing his studies at Boston’s Berklee School of Music. Since then, he’s rapidly achieved an exalted status among a younger generation of musicians through his abiding sense of curiosity, drive to collaborate, and raw talent. Earlier this year Piet dropped Rummage Out (Clean Feed) and Throw Tomatoes (Astral Spirits), albums he made with two of the working combos he’s developed with players a generation older than he is—a sign of the respect he’s earned....
Berwyn’s Pulqueria Chicago has the sort of broad, comprehensive menu that usually makes my eyes glaze over. How good can a Mexican restaurant be that also serves Spanish tapas, fettuccine Alfredo, french fries, and chicken wings? On the other hand, among all that disparate stuff it also serves two things not frequently seen around these parts that prove to be pretty remarkable. At Pulqueria Chicago the borrego is sold by the pound and presented in a way somewhat at odds with the sports-bar-type ornamentation that festoons the walls....
In early December Ben Joravsky interviewed candidate Lori Lightfoot. The mayoral challenger is an experienced manager and reformer and has worked at several levels of city and state government. This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity. There clearly is a double standard in our criminal justice system. And having frankly defended a lot of people who have been wrongfully accused, they get on the conveyor belt and nobody stops to say, is this a righteous prosecution?...
Jenna Roxy and the Church of Modern Love (Sat 8/20, noon): One of the workshop productions, this tale of a cough syrup cult was represented by two songs that shared the same driving feel and dense, intense language; cast member Sophia Shrand put her solo—”Too Drunk to Be 15″—over nicely. Pen (Fri 8/26, 6 PM): Speaking of putting things over, Jenna Schoppe brought big comic energy to the bridezilla joke that is “Happy Fucking Day,” a song from Leo Schwartz and D....
Q: I’m a 19-year-old girl who was dumped a few months ago. My partner found out he didn’t like my body when we were having sex for the first time and he told me right after. We were actually still in bed naked when he told me. He kept cuddling me to make me feel a bit better but it still hurt to hear. Other than slight doubts about genitals and my face (I have Asian features and having my face and living in a Western country isn’t always easy), I didn’t go into that experience expecting to be rejected....
Julia Thiel Zoe Schor’s geoduck popcorn, created for her Key Ingredient challenge Now in its third year, the Key Ingredient Cook-Off—featuring 22 chefs from our James Beard award-winning series, Key Ingredient—lands at the Lacuna Artist Lofts on Friday. As with Key Ingredient, the cook-off will challenge each chef to cook with a specific ingredient; this year’s ingredients are cactus, coffee, sun-dried tomatoes, and chia seeds—plus one secret ingredient that we haven’t announced yet (all previously featured in Key Ingredient)....
Painted banners hang long and low from the rafters of the Pulaski Park Field House, and when the music begins with a noise like a siren, the dancers flicker in and out of view through them, as animals in a thicket or words obscured by censorship bars. They are jointed and joined, mechanical and organic, as they emerge and retreat from view, in groupings that create dependencies through the tensions of push and pull that pulse within and beyond the self....
Roosevelt Myles, an inmate at Illinois River Correctional Center who has been waiting 20 years for a wrongful conviction hearing that was granted by the appellate court in 2000, has now earned enough “good time” sentencing credit to leave prison in August. Under different circumstances, for a man who has already spent 27 years behind bars for a murder he says he did not commit, waiting just a few more months to get to live with his fiancée and begin a career as a paralegal might have been tolerable....
The Act to Prohibit the Importation of Slaves went into effect on January 1, 1808, effectively ending the transatlantic slave trade from Africa. It did not, however, end the demand for slaves in the United States. New Orleans was particularly rich in documentation: customs manifests, warrants to seize property subject to forfeiture, newspaper ads, and bills of sale, which, unique to Louisiana, were kept as public records. Greenwald also had access to testimonies of former slaves collected by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s....
According to resident Josh Dumas, the 6Odum building at 2116 W. Chicago will soon be no more. An under-the-radar countercultural hub for more than 20 years, it’s housed performance and practice spaces as well as the Semaphore recording studio; Pieholden Suite Sound, which moved in circa 2010, left on November 1 and will reopen shortly in Logan Square. The building recently changed hands, and it appears likely to be demolished—the new owner hasn’t found new tenants....
This review contains spoilers. The biologist’s willpower, or lack thereof, also figures into the hypnosis subplot. The psychologist, an older woman who commands the team, places her three companions under hypnosis to endure the rigorous crossing into Area X. But after the biologist, leaning too close to the funguslike script, accidentally inhales a shower of spores expelled from one of the flowers, she becomes impervious to the psychologist’s powers of suggestion and learns that she and her fellows are being programmed to enact a secret agenda on behalf of the Southern Reach, the organization that administers the exploration and study of Area X....
Men. You can’t live with ’em, and you’ll want to stay out of range of ’em, too. And then there’s Ron, the neighbor from hell—an angry ex-marine with a dog that won’t shut up, a mailbox full of gun-and-ammo catalogs, and a penchant for playing Call of Duty REAL LOUD. Izzie finds him so intimidating that she wants to sell the condo and move. Unwilling to take a loss, however, Taylor tries to minimize Ron’s baleful influence over their lives....
