Posts

Led by singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Luis Vasquez, Oakland’s the Soft Moon create a visceral mix of darkwave, industrial, and postpunk music that recalls the heyday of 80s counterculture. Nearly a year after releasing their fourth LP, Criminal (Sacred Bones), the group are on the road with a reworking of that album, November’s Criminal Remixed, in their back pocket. If Criminal is the tortured sound of Vasquez coping with guilt from the abuse he suffered as a child and his subsequent abusive behavior, then Criminal Remixed is the sound of that guilt fueling a drug-induced dance-party nightmare....

In February 2021, dance-music site Selector republished a list of 100 important house records taken from a 1992 issue of a short-lived Chicago zine called Crossfade. “Chicago’s House: A Checklist” originally ran in November of that year as part of a story package about house history, sandwiched between a brief but trenchant essay by copublisher and editor Terry Martin on the birth and evolution of Chicago’s underground dance culture and a six-page interview Martin had conducted with the godfather of house, Frankie Knuckles....

I visited Royal Oak, Michigan, for Savage Love Live at the Royal Oak Music Theatre. I didn’t get to all of the questions submitted by the large and tipsy crowd—a crowd that skipped the Stormy Daniels interview on 60 Minutes to spend the evening with me (so honored, you guys!)—so I’m going to race through as many of the unanswered questions as I can in this week’s column. Here we go ....

If you’ve never heard of Githa Sowerby, don’t feel bad. When she died at 93 in 1970, Sowerby was mostly forgotten, even though her 1912 play Rutherford and Son was a smash hit in London and won the writer comparisons to Henrik Ibsen. (Arthur Bingham Walkley, the drama critic for The Times of London, wrote that it was “a play not easily forgotten, and full of promise for the future.”)...

Quiote, the Logan Square Mexican restaurant from former Salsa Truck owner Dan Salls, has had a mezcal bar in its basement since it opened early last year. Last fall, though, the bar got its own name along with a new beverage director when Jay Schroeder (formerly of Mezcaleria Las Flores) came on board. Now known as Todos Santos, the space looks the same as before—wood everywhere, including the floor, ceiling, walls, stools, tables, and bar—but has an entirely new cocktail menu....

In Sam Chanse’s 2017 one-act, romantic partners and ardent social critics Mel and Arjun attempt to escape the world—at least for one night—in Joshua Tree National Park. Arjun, a professor of ethnic studies, fears an ill-advised tweet about campus racism may end his career at USC. Mel, already n midcareer meltdown, has retreated from her abuse-filled stint as a lightning-rod “hot shit blogger” to write an experimental novel no one’s likely to read....

It transpired more than 1,000 miles away, but the mass shooting that killed 17 people at a high school in Parkland, Florida, on February 14 hit close to home for Jaden Gray. The 18-year-old Lincoln Park High School senior thought of Cesar—the friend from dance class who was lost in a fatal shooting outside Curie Metro High School in June. There are 2,545 different walkouts planned around the country, according to Empower’s website, including a bunch at schools in the city of Chicago....

If you ever use Twitter to express your fandom of a famous rapper and have the “good” fortune of said rapper retweeting you, you’ll likely experience the bad fortune of receiving replies meant for the superstar from aspiring MCs thirsty for any inkling of attention. Rap spam is as common and easy to ignore as the ads that eat up space on your favorite website, so it takes a little something special to find your audience by plastering your work in online spaces where it’s generally seen as unwelcome—and 24-year-old Berkley MC Caleb Parker, aka Caleborate, has “it....

Gene Siskel Film Center This probably sounds like a backhanded compliment, given that Film Center presents some of the most substantial and adventurous first-run programming in town. Yet over the past couple years, as the movie exhibition business has contracted, Film Center has carved out a new niche for itself by bringing back to Chicago art-house releases that couldn’t gain a commercial foothold in their first runs at Landmark or Music Box or River East 21....

“I anticipated giving an entirely different lecture today,” Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood, told a standing-room-only crowd at the University of Chicago Law School yesterday. “I was hoping to tell you that America was entering a new era of reproductive rights defined by possibility and progress. But the rug was pulled out from underneath us. The future of reproductive rights is more fragile than at any moment in my lifetime....

Cheap marijuana seeds sound great in theory, but you must be careful where you get them from. Some stores selling cheap weed seeds will be shipping low-quality product that is hard to grow with unimpressive yields. We want cheap seeds, not bad weed. Still, there are many cannabis seed banks online that sell cheap cannabis seeds at very reasonable prices without sacrificing plant quality. Here we discuss the best marijuana seeds to buy in terms of seed type and the most trusted brands....

The Sex Pistols rewired lots of young minds in 1976, when they began their scorched-earth climb to infamy in London—and within little more than a year, their music had also changed the life of a 24-year-old in Chicago named Terry Fox. On a Sunday night in August 1977, Fox and a couple friends were walking north on Halsted Street in Lincoln Park when someone opened the front door of a squat A-frame nearby and a burst of noise rushed out....

It’s tulip time. Between now and Mother’s Day, masses of these heralds of spring will burst into bloom at the Chicago Botanic Garden, which counts 750,000 bulbs among the treasures on its Glencoe campus. To see them in fields of dazzling color is to begin to understand the mania that seized Holland in the 17th century, driving the price of a single bulb to many times the annual earnings of ordinary Dutchmen....

Ever since Mayor Rahm kicked off his reelection campaign, I’ve been reminded of this otherwise forgettable 1960s flick called A Guide for the Married Man. “What?” says Charlie. “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” In the end, we won’t make him dinner. But we’ll reelect him, leaving him free to go back to his old ways. And then, a few months ago, his campaign overseers apparently broke him the news that the Chicago electorate is not, by and large, made up of New York pundits and Wall Street types....

Sun Ra may have told everyone he was from Saturn, but the Afrofuturistic avant-gardist spent the 1950s in Chicago. While he was here, he recorded “El Is a Sound of Joy,” jazz’s greatest tribute to the city’s public transport system. No one in improvising trio Icepick—bassist Ingebrigt Håker Flaten, trumpeter Nate Wooley, and drummer Chris Corsano—now lives in Chicago (Håker Flaten spent a few years here in the aughts), but in 2018 the group came to town to play a benefit for Experimental Sound Studio’s Option Series, a weekly concert and salon launched in 2015 that served as a beacon for improvisers around the world until COVID-19 closed everything down....

Q: I’m a 36-year-old straight guy, happily married for more than ten years, and a longtime reader. My wife and I are monogamous. We’re good communicators, well matched in terms of libido, and slightly kinky (light bondage, Dom/sub play in the bedroom). For the last few months, I’ve been thinking about trying prostate play, and I have a couple of questions. A lot of bloggers and other writers in the sex-advice complex tout the health benefits of regular prostate massage, but I haven’t found any academic research to back up some of the lofty claims that are being made....

Syleena Johnson became a force in mainstream R&B in the early 2000s, landing several chart hits and working alongside such figures as Busta Rhymes, Kanye West, and R. Kelly. But in many ways the singer, daughter of Chicago soul/R&B/blues legend Syl Johnson, has always sounded like a roots woman: her voice is supple and resonant, yet toughened with grainy texture, and it highlights her deep-soul inheritance. Her songs are distinguished by a courageous willingness to express vulnerability—emotional and otherwise—in a genre where postmodernist ironic detachment and blunt aggression often seem to dominate....

If you have a dog or cat, you must meet Sophie Phillips, owner of Hyde Park’s Sprocket & Stone, a boutique specializing in natural pet foods, healthy treats, and unique accessories and toys. She loves her customers — both the people and the animals — and is an indispensable resource for new pet owners, able to match them up with just the right vet, trainer, or special food for any dietary needs....

I have trouble following complicated plots. I find that it’s especially difficult with narratives about wars, imaginary lands, and wars in imaginary lands. For a little while I can keep track of the various battalions of characters and their movements, but then they start to intermingle and I forget who’s allied with whom, where they’ve stashed the sacred whatsit, and why so much depends on one brave orphan. And if there’s a twist of any kind, forget about it....

In 1983, Harold Washington became Chicago’s first black mayor. Washington’s emergence as a political leader was no fluke, but rather, a direct result of the city’s racial tensions and the black community’s struggle for political power and representation. Washington’s roots were deep in the south side, where he grew up and later lived after serving in the U.S. Army and in the Illinois and U.S. House of Representatives. He won the ‘83 Democratic mayoral primary with more than 80 percent of the city’s black vote....