Posts

Kyle Froman Ian Spencer Bell performing Wallkill Solo, from his Elsewhere (2014) Last month I got to see the rock and cultural critic Greil Marcus, whose Lipstick Traces—recently described jokingly but aptly as “that book about how Johnny Rotten started the French Revolution”—was one of my undergraduate bibles. In honor of Marcus’s latest, The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in Ten Songs, the Poetry Foundation and the Old Town School of Music teamed up to present him with real, live former punks Jon Langford and Sally Timms of the Mekons, who sang and played and bantered at his side....

Dick Klein knew there would be blood. Before the Chicago Bulls played a single game, the team’s founder seemed acutely aware that if there was to be any glory in the organization’s future, there would also be heartache, clashing egos, bad behavior, run-ins with the law, sweat, tears, and, yes, actual blood. Father Bull, as Klein became affectionately known, didn’t want to see the struggle sanitized. His team would embrace the savage competition of pro sports, and make it part of the brand....

Nancy Pelosi is having her moment. From her literal clapback at President Trump to her dogged and confident management of the impeachment process, she has solidified her position in history as a groundbreaking political leader and feminist. The Adult in the Room, a Broadway Factor NYC world premiere penned by Bill McMahon and directed by Heather Arnson and Conor Bagley, fails to do such a storied career and complex personality justice....

In a way, Irvine Welsh is responsible for Bill Hillmann’s new memoir, Mozos: A Decade of Running With the Bulls of Spain. The two met outside a White Sox game a decade ago. At the time Hillmann was 23, a former Golden Gloves boxer, a current coke dealer, an aspiring novelist, and a self-described complete mess; Welsh was twice his age and already famous as a chronicler of Edinburgh’s low life in novels and screenplays, most notably Trainspotting....

Two love stories that started on the pages of the Reader How do you cut the cord when you’re surrounded by couples tying the knot? Four places where relationships sunk How do you mend a broken heart? Twitter has some answers. A Valentine’s Day bar guide based on relationship status Single people can celebrate February 14, too! A journalist turns her breakup into art and politics with a breakup zine....

Steven Spielberg’s empty sci-fi epic Ready Player One takes place in a 2045 so dystopian that people spend all their time under headsets, inhabiting a virtual reality known as OASIS. The hero, 18-year-old Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), lives in Columbus, Ohio, in a slum made of stacked-up trailers, so you can’t blame him for focusing on his virtual life, where he commands an avatar named Parzival and tries to win an Easter egg hunt embedded in OASIS by its mysterious creator, James Halliday (Mark Rylance), that will grant the winner half a trillion dollars and full ownership of the invented world....

This story was updated after the August 26 CPS board meeting. These divided votes are rare in a body handpicked by Chicago’s mayor and have broken down along gendered lines. Board president Miguel del Valle, vice president Sendhil Revuluri, Lucino Sotelo, and Dwayne Truss have maintained their support for the SRO program. This despite public protests that included CPS students and recent graduates being assaulted by police and student arrests this week in front of board headquarters, and despite research linking cops in schools to poorer learning outcomes....

America’s Best Outcast Toy, by Larry Todd Cousineau (book and lyrics) and Cindy O’Connor (music), starts off as a send-up of various reality TV shows—America’s Got Talent, Survivor, Dancing with the Stars—and ends up being about a lot more. The premise is that some citizens from the Island of Misfit Toys, made famous by a beloved television special about an ostracized reindeer—including a spotted elephant, a bird that acts like a fish, a cowboy who rides an ostrich, a basic doll with low self-esteem—are competing for the previously mentioned title....

Chicago drummer Ben Baker Billington has some of the busiest sticks in town. He always has his fingers in a whole icebox of musical pies—he plays in Ono and free-jazz trio Tiger Hatchery, for instance, and used to be in dearly departed Doors-y three-piece Moonrises. Last week his synth project Quicksails dropped a new EP called The Bright via Italian label Gang of Ducks that’s full of bloopy electroacoustic weirdness, as well as remixes by Brett Naucke and Khaki Blazer (aka Pat Modugno of Moth Cock)....

A couple years ago, Chicago art-rock group Woongi dropped an album intended as an unofficial soundtrack for a 1993 kids’ film featuring a magical flying skateboard voiced by Dom DeLuise. You can try to find spots where the synth-focused songs on Rip’s Cuts might fit into the movie, titled The Skateboard Kid, but their cheeky playfulness speaks for itself. Woongi’s new self-released follow-up, Fruits of the Midi, is a touch subtler but still delightfully silly....

Bass clarinetist Jason Stein spent a good chunk of last year and most of 2016 playing large theaters and basketball arenas with his scrappy trio Locksmith Isidore as the opening act for his half-sister, comedian and actor Amy Schumer. Since then he’s gone back to playing more modest stages, but his latest music is bigger than ever. In September, he dropped one of the strongest albums of his career, Lucille! (Delmark), a spry quartet recording built around his interplay with reedist Keefe Jackson....

Born in Arkansas in 1918, John H. Johnson relocated to Chicago with his mother, Gertrude, to further his education after his father, Leroy, was killed in a sawmill accident when Johnson was just six years old. After graduating from DuSable High School and the University of Chicago in 1942, Johnson took out a $500 loan using his mother’s furniture as collateral to open the doors of Johnson Publishing Company. Launched in 1945, Ebony revolutionized the way black journalists and advertisers engaged with black readers....

For her hour-long Saturday-morning set at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s 50th-anniversary celebration, MCA Hearts Chicago, Lakshmi Ramgopal has put together the biggest ensemble of her musical career. Though she’s played in bands (most notably synth-pop duo Love and Radiation, with ensemble member Adele Nicholas) and enlisted the occasional musician to support her solo project, Lykanthea (which debuted in 2014 with the EP Migration), she’s never attempted anything as ambitious as the nine-piece group she’ll debut this weekend....

What differentiates Koogler’s play from other suburbia-as-existential-limbo stories is a wary, perhaps misanthropic suggestion that a bohemian fidelity to youth and adventure is equally as doomed and futile a course of action as giving in to the man. When we meet Suzan (Natalie West)—a housing-insecure aging folk singer with a broken car and breaking back—she’s suffering the indignity of a warehouse-mandated, stopwatch-timed walking test around a course of safety cones as part of an interview for a seasonal gig....

“It’s not like we’re saying sex doesn’t happen—when you get adults in a hotel somewhere, stuff’s going to happen,” says Matt Berger, media relations lead for Midwest FurFest. “But sex is definitely not something that’s predominant, especially in public spaces.” He’s shrugging off a persistent misconception that all furries are sexual fetishists who enjoy cavorting about in animal costumes. While a vast majority of individuals consume anthropomorphic-related content at some point in their lives (think: Mickey Mouse, Zootopia, Guardians of the Galaxy‘s Rocket Raccoon), furries exhibit a focused, lifelong interest in this world....

Remarkable German trombonist Johannes Bauer died today at 61. (No other details have yet been made public.) The younger brother of fellow trombonist Conny Bauer, he was a longtime fixture in European improvised music, an imaginative and talented player who privileged an ensemble-oriented approach over individual grandstanding. In fact, in his vast discography, which stretches back to 1979, I can’t find a single recording where name sits alone on an album’s cover—he always worked as sideman or a participant in collective endeavors....

Even if you don’t know their names, you may already have heard Bill MacKay and Nathan Bowles. The former is a local guitarist whose versatility has enabled him to conjure late-night streetscapes with poet Dmitry Samarov, make like the Velvet Underground with Circuit des Yeux, and roll with the mercurial jams of folk-rocker Ryley Walker. The latter is a North Carolina-based banjo and percussion player who has put driving rock beats behind singer-songwriters Steve Gunn and Jake Xerxes Fussell, evoked the void with improvisational drone outfit Pelt, and kicked up the sawdust with old-time dance band the Black Twig Pickers....

A crowded festival weekend means a crowded cover! This year artist Jason Wyatt Frederick added the Silver Room Block Party and ComplexCon Chicago into the mix, which means that along with the who’s who of Pitchfork (Ryan Schreiber, Grapetooth, Robyn) we got to see the likes of Silver Room owner Eric Williams, Ayana Contreras, and Fat Tiger Workshop (an adorable favorite among Reader staffers). The key is below, and the numbers in the illustration above will tell you who’s who and what’s what:...

Green Day is blasting from the kitchen of Iliana Regan’s Elizabeth. It’s 4 PM on a Thursday, an hour and a half before the doors of the 20-seat Lincoln Square restaurant open, and the staff of about ten finishes prepping for a nearly sold-out service and sits down—or leans against a counter or stands over a sink—for the customary family meal. Staff meals typically allow the cooks, no matter their experience level, to flex some creative muscle in the kitchen....

In 2014, when famous improvisers TJ Jagodowski and Dave Pasquesi relinquished control of the Mission, the duo’s theater, Tribune critic Chris Jones all but announced sketch comedy outside of the walls of the Second City to be dead. Comedian (and artistic director of Stage 773) Brian Posen‘s brainchild, the Chicago Sketch Comedy Festival, disputes that notion. This year’s fest features more than 180 different sketch groups, its largest lineup yet....