Years ago, when I went to work for UPI in Saint Louis, my in-service training consisted of a demonstration of how to operate the teleprinter. Most of the time an operator would be available; but on Sundays, and also on Saturday and Monday nights, it was up to me to do everything myself. I know this about the AP because in recent weeks I’ve been speaking to AP staffers who went through the training and swear by it....
The 70s were about excess. Big hair, big stupid lapels, and even bigger piles of cocaine. (At least that’s what I’ve been told; I didn’t appear on planet earth until the early 80s.) I suppose it makes sense, then, that a French bread pizza would be excessively expensive at the Brass Monkey, a spendy West Loop spot that channels Me Decade cuisine, from classed-up versions of processed foods loved by kids to elevated French dishes popularized by Julia Child and her ilk....
Disobedience , the first English-language feature by Chilean director Sebastián Lelio (Gloria, A Fantastic Woman), considers the constrictive nature of traditional Jewish culture, particularly as it impacts the lives of women and homosexuals who grow up within it. The film tells the story of a woman named Ronit (Rachel Weisz), the estranged daughter of a prominent Orthodox rabbi, who returns to the close-knit Jewish community of her youth after her father dies....
Johalla Projects gallerist Anna Cerniglia, Hide singer Heather Gabel, and filmmaker Robert Stockwell bring the second annual Palace Film Festival to the Studebaker Theater (410 S. Michigan) on Friday and Saturday, January 22 and 23. It features a slew of unconventional filmmakers, plus several mostly local (and equally unconventional) musicians. This wolf is geared up for Asia Argento’s Misunderstood, scored by one-man electro army and Midwich label founder Jim Magas. It screens Friday, before drum warhorse Noah Leger collaborates with multimedia artist Mark Comiskey; Olivia Block closes the night pairing sound with 35-millimeter slides....
Spotlight, the Oscar-winning movie of two years ago, made me feel proud to be a journalist. The Post, which I finally saw over the weekend, reminded me how much fun the business is. Or at least was once upon a time. I’m pretty sure it still has its moments. The Post, like All the President’s Men, and like Spotlight, is about reaching a specific end—the publishing of a series of epochal news stories....
The premise of Lauren Gunderson’s two-hander is remarkably simple: a socially isolated, housebound high school girl receives an unexpected visit from an only-slightly-less introverted classmate she barely knows. He brings the unwelcome news that the two of them have been assigned to collaborate on a class project—due tomorrow, OMG!—about Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” a poem she has barely read and loathes. But from this Spartan setup, Gunderson spins a sweet, rich, nuanced story in which, over the course of 90 minutes, we watch two socially awkward adolescents open up and become a little less awkward....
Memphis musicians enjoy a well-deserved reputation for having more going on beneath the surface than they initially let on. Alex Chilton, Tav Falco, and Jim Dickinson are known for putting a trashy stamp on roots music in their songwriting, but they also incorporate outside influences at unpredictable times. Such is also the case with the Reigning Sound, led by singer-guitarist Greg Cartwright—a founding member of the Oblivians, a trio that deconstructs blues and punk until they sound nearly avant-garde....
It’s hard to think of an opera more timely for 2017 than The Consul, which was first performed in 1950. Composer and librettist Gian Carlo Menotti’s expressive meld of words and music—both lyrical and dissonant—tells the story of a family trapped by an unresponsive bureaucracy as they desperately try to escape a nameless “large European city” in a violent police state. Born in Italy, Menotti came to America at age 17 and stayed for 30 successful years before returning to Europe....
Mental illness as woman: It’s a trope that keeps on giving. From Blanche DuBois (A Streetcar Named Desire) to Bertha Mason (Jane Eyre) to Norma Desmond (Sunset Boulevard) and beyond, writers have used female characters to embody the myriad manifestations of mangled synapses and misfiring neurotransmitters. For Fotos, anxiety issues escalated after he graduated from Downers Grove North High School and was accepted at Boston’s ultracompetitive, highly prestigious Berklee College of Music....
Nebraska native Charlie Curtis-Beard, who moved here for school and still attends Columbia College, is one of Chicago’s most promising young MCs. His debut, Childish, was among the best overlooked local hip-hop releases of 2016, and on Friday he drops his second full-length, Existentialism on Lake Shore Drive. In its loose narrative, framed by dramatized phone messages, Curtis-Beard holes up at home while his friends have a wild night out. “I just wanted to tell the story of going out to pointless parties and staying locked in my room, from both sides,” he says....
Austrian guitarist Martin Siewert has always stood out to me for using his instrument like an arsenal of paintbrushes. In his many projects, including improvisational and experimental outfits Trapist and Efzeg, he thoughtfully applies his sound upon whatever canvas the group conjures. And since joining the Viennese trio Radian in 2011, he’s brought the group’s dry, instrumental strain of post-This Heat noise and rhythm closer to rock than it’s ever been—though any band that has a rhythm section of drummer Martin Brandlmayr and bassist John Norman will never sound like a normal rock band....
If the world makes any sense, Garrison Keillor has made this joke already. The one about what happens when you leave a man too long in the midwestern outdoors, armed with nothing but a heap of refuse and a barn full of tools. What he does is, he makes a sort of monument to . . . it’s not clear what, exactly. But the fruits of whatever passion inspires him grow in the region’s out-of-the-way passages, appearing roadside in Wisconsin and Michigan and elsewhere....
Last weekend, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, city officials, and the guy who greased the skids on a $98 million federal construction loan, former U.S. transportation secretary Ray LaHood, celebrated the completion of the third and so far final phase of the Chicago Riverwalk. Here’s the really great thing about the Riverwalk: You can stroll along the south side of the Chicago River from the lakefront to Wolf Point (at the confluence of the North and South branches of the river), without having to surface at street level....
Experimental musician Matthew Sage teaches a couple English classes as an adjunct at Wilbur Wright College, but because that apparently isn’t enough to keep him occupied he also runs Patient Sounds, one of Chicago’s best microlabels. Since he launched it in 2009 (when he still lived in Fort Collins, Colorado), he’s put out more than 80 full-lengths, EPs, and splits, mostly on cassette; under the name M. Sage, he appears on eight of them, including the ambient album Needleworks, which came out in July....
Pop quiz: Who uttered the following line—a Cook County official commenting on the legalities of a tax on small music venues booking rock, rap, and DJ shows, or Reverend Shaw from Footloose preaching about a ban on loud music and dancing? At least that’s what I gathered after reading the news the Reader broke about how the county is trying to strong-arm small music venues into ponying up hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes....
DryHop brewer Brant Dubovick and a glass of the Moritat collaboration High Plus Tight Since reviewing DryHop during its opening week in June 2013, I’ve drank many a memorable beer there—among them My Mirrors Are Black, a Cuban-style coffee stout with guava; Elektra, on Oktoberfest; Half Stepper, a rye IPA; the South Loop Brewing collaboration Milkstachio, a milk stout with pistachio and cacao nibs; Moustache & a Supernova, a biere de Noel; the Devil Jumped Up!...
It’s like an Onion headline come to life: With Nothing More to Accomplish, Billionaire Tech Mogul Who Just Shot a Car Into Space Starts Satirical Newspaper. Musk initially wanted to buy the Onion back in 2014 according to a report published on Tuesday by the Daily Beast, but the deal fell through—potentially because Musk wasn’t interested in the A.V. Club, the Onion’s pop-culture-obsessed sister site (disclosure: I was a regular freelancer for the A....
Q: I’ve been married for 30 years to the same man. I have dealt with his tantrums, his screaming, and his fits. He’s always had anger management issues. He strangled me once a few months after our son was born and never did it again. I would have left otherwise. He’s had relationships with other women but always swore it was just online. Then, a few years back, I got into a relationship with someone online....
Engineer and philosopher R. Buckminster Fuller is remembered for his prescient understanding that mankind could run through the world’s resources, and for the many unconventional notions he proposed to help humans develop more harmonious relationships with one another and the rest of the planet. He’s an apt subject for filmmaker Sam Green, who has specialized in examining better-future initiatives in his documentaries The Weather Underground, Utopia in Four Movements, and The Universal Language (a movie about Esperanto)....
The idea to return to oyatsu first came in September, when the weather was still gentle, fall just beginning to work itself into a fantasia of crimson, gold, and auburn. Because I’ve lived in Chicago for nearly 15 years now, I knew that winter, with its flat white sky and toothy chill, was not far off. Every year I suffered through it alongside everyone else, slipping on iced-over sidewalks and complaining bitterly that spring never arrived in a timely fashion....
