Q: I am a guy in my 40s, handsome, more financially successful than most, and a classic sexual scoundrel. I cheated on my ex-wife and every girlfriend I’ve ever had. I’m currently dating a woman in her 20s. We are both each other’s ideal type. She has as scandalous a past as I do but has “accomplished” more in a shorter time. We met via a hookup app. Then another one....
“There are only three things happening in England,” Aretha Franklin was quoted as saying in 1968. “The Rolling Stones, the Beatles, and Terry Reid.” Few have had careers as simultaneously high-flying and underappreciated as Reid’s. One of rock’s greatest vocalists, he began singing as a teen with R&B bands, including Peter Jay & the Jaywalkers, who supported the Stones in 1966, leading Graham Nash to score them a record deal with Columbia....
Seeking: old-school butch dykes and trans-masculine queers Occupation: art director What do you do when you’re not working? Her friend says (in poem form): Her heart is as kind as Neko, her pit. She’s a smart, sexy femme (and funny as shit). A designer by trade, For her style, she’s paid. If you’re butch and you feel her, perhaps you’re a fit! Hanging out with friends or family, dancing with the queers, figuring things out, getting ready, cooking, admiring good design, Netflixing, texting too much, and planning my next vacation....
A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. Summer ’16 Promo by Jesus Piece Switched on Pop podcast Switched on Pop is great to put on in the car when I’m tired of actual pop radio. Musicologist Nate Sloan and composer Charlie Harding dissect songs in terms you can understand without knowing music theory, occasionally tracing their roots all the way back to medieval music (or just to Michael Jackson)....
Tatsu Aoki left his native Tokyo in 1977 to study experimental film and settled in Chicago two years later. In addition to making films, he improvises, composes, and conducts music, playing bass, shamisen, and taiko drums, and by the early 1990s he’d connected with the local jazz scene, developing a particular affinity with past and present members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. In 2000 the tireless polymath founded the Miyumi Project, named after his third child, to express his sense of himself as an Asian American artist....
You could call Patrick Wilkins’s solo exhibition at Extase a sausage party—but his punny ceramic wieners are just a taste of this show’s irreverent joy. “Indiscriminate Sincerity” includes 16 hot dog sculptures divided into two sets of eight that flank both sides of a converted closet in the Humboldt Park apartment gallery. Each is painted brick red (save for two that are unpredictably gold) and features a unique face with an exaggerated expression: one threatening the viewer with kisses from elastic lips, for example; another with eyes bulging like a cartoon wolf and an open mouth revealing two tiny rows of teeth....
The seed of this year’s Bar Issue was a deceptively simple question: Who the hell is Danny, anyway? All sorts of improbable tales have been uttered by booze-loosened lips about the unseen namesake of Danny’s Tavern, that unlikely drinking destination nestled in a two-flat on a largely residential Bucktown street. Perhaps the most enduring story of the bunch I heard was the one about how, back in the 80s, a notorious party animal named Danny hosted so many liquor-soaked bashes at his shabby residence that the city eventually threw up its hands and granted him a tavern license, if only to allow inspectors (and police) to more easily keep tabs on the place....
“I found a new job,” I told my boyfriend at the beginning of last summer. “As an online girlfriend. Part cam-girl, part therapist.” I signed on to MyGirlFund, a “social networking” site that advertises the chance to meet “sexy, interesting girls you won’t find anywhere else.” Its tagline: “The girl next door is now online. Connect with a virtual girlfriend.” I set up a profile that looked much like a MySpace page from the early 2000s, if MySpace were covered in pink and hearts....
Have you ever wanted to see a police car set on fire? You may soon have the chance to, albeit the car in question is made of pulped paper. Artist Adela Goldbard’s “The Last Judgment/El Juicio Final,” on view through October 10 at Gallery 400, features papier-mache set pieces mirroring iconic symbols of the Little Village neighborhood—both good and bad. The exhibition combines the history of Mexican effigy-burning traditions with the complexity of carnival to delve into the challenges facing the neighborhood of Little Village today, complete with a flame-filled finale....
In the Chinese drama Angels Wear White, screening this week at Gene Siskel Film Center, writer-director Vivian Qu addresses the issue of corruption in contemporary Chinese society. The subject may be familiar to anyone who’s kept up with Chinese cinema over the past two decades, but Qu’s approach is somewhat novel in that she considers the issue from a female perspective. Angels follows the police investigation of a government official suspected of having sexually assaulted two 12-year-old girls at a seaside motel in the western city of Binhai; rather than focus on the official, Liu (who barely appears), Qu looks at the assault victims as well as the female employees at the motel, who become witnesses in the investigation....
Many prolific musicians call Chicago home, but multi-instrumentalist Ben Baker Billington is a veritable Energizer Bunny. He’s been contributing otherworldly experimental sounds to the scene since his mid-aughts stint in noise project Druids of Huge, and his musical resumé is too long to reproduce in full here. Any outre artist looking for an open-minded collaborator with a refined ear and exacting technique would be well advised to call on Billington, and many have: he’s played drums for free-jazz misfits Tiger Hatchery, industrial-gospel legends Ono, and twisted psych-improv outfit ADT, as well as in the backing bands of Ryley Walker and Circuit des Yeux....
Just when I thought I could take no more depressing news about COVID-19, or Trump, or our impending economic collapse, along comes the city with a little happy news to lift me from my funk . . . Tax increment financing is a program in which the city slaps an undisclosed surcharge on your property taxes and diverts the money into a slush fund the mayor is pretty much free to spend as she wants....
The COVID-19 pandemic has left indoor dining in a constant state of flux in Chicago. As bars and restaurants throughout the city are scrambling to make outdoor dining as comfortable as possible for guests, rigged tarps and igloos aren’t exactly ideal conditions to sip craft cocktails as temps continue to drop. Luckily, curating a bar cart at home is a simple alternative to catch a buzz without freezing your ass off....
Abu Hani opened his first restaurant in 2000, when he was an ambitious 17-year-old student at Theodore Roosevelt High School. His first kitchen was his mother’s. Growing up in Mayfair, he used to help her cook elaborate feasts to break the Ramadan fast. After marrying, he and his wife would take annual months-long trips back to Yemen, where he learned at his grandmother’s side in the city of Aden, just west of the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, which divides the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden....
Thomas Comerford is a devoted student of rock music who takes his own contributions to the form as seriously as its rich history. He operates with meticulous detail and patience, which might explain why it’s been four years since his last release, the 2014 album II. Since then, he’s expanded his pool of collaborators, and through extensive studio sessions and live performances leading up to his new Blood Moon, he’s developed more sophisticated arrangements than ever....
Courtesy the artist Derek Sheen The most important thing a comedian can be is honest. When a comic exudes anything less than the real McCoy, discerning audiences are quick to detect bullshit. Luckily, Seattle native Derrick Sheen doesn’t have that problem—if anything, he has the opposite problem. On his debut album Holy Drivel (Rooftop Comedy Productions), Sheen overshares on some truly private subjects, and you can feel the audience sort of hold its breath whenever he starts a new bit, anticipating another highly personal confession or emotionally transparent diatribe....
Black metal has long been contaminated with bands that embrace fascist politics, but the genre has a left-wing tradition as well, which includes the antiwar themes of 2001’s The Haunted House by South Korea’s Pyha, the pro-union slant of Panopticon’s bluegrass-laced 2012 album Kentucky, and the radical environmentalism of Botanist. To that list you can add anarchist, anti-fascist UK trio Dawn Ray’d. On their 2017 album, The Unlawful Assembly (Prosthetic), the band imagine revolution in the first track, “Fire Sermon,” and spit bile at those who seek control through scapegoating and fearmongering (which implicitly includes Trump and Brexit proponents) in the wonderfully named “A Litany to Cowards....
Daylight savings time steals an hour from us on Sunday, which can only mean one thing—Lollapalooza is right around the corner! (Also, set your clocks forward, dingbats.) Lolla expands to four days to celebrate its 25th anniversary, and tickets go on sale Tuesday, March 22. Judging from past years, the lineup will be announced in the next couple weeks, and this wolf has some predictions about who will appear. Expect to see James Murphy taking a break from his Williamsburg wine bar to front the reunited LCD Soundsystem....
As we all know by now, 2020 was miserable. Worst year ever—at least in my lifetime. I won’t bother with this year’s lowlights. You lived through it—you know the score. Basically, it was Trump, death, Trump, death, Trump . . . Watching all the big games (Super Bowl, NBA playoffs, World Series) on the big TV screen at the house of Cap, my dear friend who I hardly saw these last few months....
Two weeks ago, Saturday Night Live alum and west-side native Nora Dunn was in rehearsals at Steppenwolf for the title role in The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington, by James Ijames. Directed by Whitney White and featuring Nikki Crawford as Ann, Celeste M. Cooper as Doll, Sydney Charles as Priscilla, Carl Clemons-Hopkins as Davy, Victor Musoni as William, and Travis Turner as Sucky Boy, the show had all the makings of a feverishly watchable slice of history....
