During the loneliest stretches of pandemic isolation, when I spent ages eternal locked in my studio apartment eating canned chili and descending into my most feral state, I missed a lot of things. Thrift stores. Dinner parties. Riding the el. But the thing I missed with the most startling acuity, as if a vital organ had been ripped from my body: small talk. I’m talkin’ tiny talk. Miniscule dialogues with Uber drivers or baristas or nail techs....
Last week I saw a new video featuring two young retro-leaning Brazilian rock bands covering the classic Milton Nascimento song “Saidas e Banderas No. 1.” In the past both Boogarins and O Terno have demonstrated a love for vintage jams from their homeland, particularly the wiggy psychedelia of tropicalismo faves Os Mutantes. The 1972 album Clube da Esquina, where that Nascimento track originally appeared, is much more chill and elegant than anything Os Mutantes ever released, but its mix of psychedelic folk and jazz harmony definitely gets expansive and trippy....
About four years ago, the Gage Gallery at Roosevelt University mounted an exhibition of photographs from the Reader’s black-and-white era, which ended in 2004. The gallery is small, maybe three rooms, and on opening night, it was packed with old Reader people, many of whom had flown back to Chicago from wherever they’d moved to in order to be there. Afterward, there was a party at the Hideout that spilled out onto the lawn....
More than 120 features screen at the 31st edition of the Chicago Latino Film Festival, which continues this week at multiple venues around the city and suburbs and concludes on Thursday, April 23, with Chus Gutierrez’s musical comedy Ciudad Delirio at River East 21. Following are selected films screening in the festival’s second week; here are reviews of films screened during week one. —J.R. Jones The Incident Like Philip K. Dick’s Time Out of Joint and certain episodes of The Twilight Zone, this Mexican SF parable (2014) has two concurrent story lines....
When members of the Second City first met with staffers of the online magazine Slate last fall to plan a collaborative political revue, they never imagined that the 2016 presidential election would transpire in the way it has so far. “There was pretty much unanimous belief by us and by the Slate staff that Trump would fall away as a nominee,” Second City director Matt Hovde says. “But as he built momentum and became the nominee, the comedian side of us was like, ‘Oh wow, this just made this show a lot more fun....
Q: My question is on managing “gray area” intimacies during the pandemic. I have a lover/friend that I’ve been hanging out with—fucking, drinking tea, going on hikes, eating ice cream, watching movies, and other activities—for about nine months. He’s 36 and was married for ten years and due to that experience he’s been a bit emotionally “boundaried” but he’s still really sweet and a good communicator. I’m in grad school doing a double masters, so the small amount of time we’ve been spending together has worked well for me....
Singer-songwriter Kevin Patrick, who makes charming, unvarnished acoustic bedroom songs under the name Field Medic, had an subconscious penchant for folk music long before he ever discovered Dylan and his 60s allies. In his early high school days Patrick gravitated toward the stripped-down material he’d come across on a now-defunct social network: “Every emo MySpace band had one acoustic track on their album,” Patrick tells me. Now 26, Patrick cycled through a handful of other projects before he figured out how to do what he does so well in Field Medic....
A video survey of Side Street Studio Arts’ 2015 season starts with two women in the backseat of a car, making fart noises into their arms and laughing. You think, Uh-oh. But what follows is a pretty impressive collection of images showing performances, concerts, gallery shows, and crowds. The Elgin-based SSSA brings its combination of arts and brrraappps to Wicker Park this weekend, partnering with Core Project Chicago on the Going Dutch Festival....
In Greek mythology Tiresias was a blind seer who was turned into a woman for seven years as punishment for hitting some sacred snakes. That doesn’t happen in Jaime Mire’s “kinda-sorta adaptation” of Antigone—receiving its world premiere at the Organic Theater Company—but many, many other portentous events do. This is a play with a lot on its mind and not quite enough time or lung capacity to tell it all....
The Reader‘s archive is vast and varied, going back to 1971. Every day in Archive Dive, we’ll dig through and bring up some finds. Sergeant and Edginton spoke to several people who had been involved in the case, including U.S. attorney general Ramsey Clark and Ray himself. Their story was filled with details like this: The authorities certainly couldn’t be accused of a lack of vigilance regarding King’s visit to Memphis....
Named after the devilish sprite in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and established in New York in 1876 by Austrian immigrant Joseph Keppler, Puck was a German-language satirical magazine (with an English edition following in 1877) that skewered powerful people and high society for the next 40 years. “With a Wink and a Nod—Cartoonists of the Gilded Age,” now open at the Driehaus Museum, displays 74 original drawings and some 20 magazines from this pioneering publication, providing invaluable insight into how the visual and written press interpreted, elucidated, and took the piss out of events in American history in the years between the Civil War and World War I....
Making something like a pot joke on 4/20 Three years ago Cook County state’s attorney Anita Alvarez described marijuana as a dangerous “gateway drug” while prosecuting thousands of cases involving the possession of dime bags. But as calls for reform grow louder—and she prepares for a potentially difficult reelection campaign next year—Alvarez has changed her approach. People caught with as much as an ounce of marijuana will now have their cases dropped; if it happens three or more times, they’ll be directed to education programs....
Fresh from winning the 2017 BroadwayWorld New York Cabaret Award in the category “Best Show, Celebrity Male,” Charles Busch returns to Chicago with his latest cabaret act, My Kinda 60s. The witty Busch is best known as the author and original star of the 1980s camp comedies Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, Psycho Beach Party, and Die, Mommie, Die!—gender-bending spoofs of the genre films (biblical epics, beach-blanket comedies, horror films) that Busch grew up watching in the 1960s....
Is there a mass audience for Chappaquiddick? John Curran’s new drama about the 1969 scandal involving Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy opened April 6 on 1,560 screens across the U.S. but so far has grossed only $11.8 million and appears to be fading at the box office. Actor Jason Clarke, who plays Kennedy in the movie, has publicly lamented its shutout from such liberal TV programs as The Rachel Maddow Show and Real Time With Bill Maher....
On Tuesday at 7 PM Doc Films kicks off a nine-week, 13-film series devoted to Japanese director Seijun Suzuki (who passed away last year at 93) with Tokyo Drifter (1966). It’s the only film in the series with any sort of reputation in the west—the other 12 rarely screen outside of Japan. As programmer Will Carroll explains in his notes for the series, the Suzuki films that have been distributed in the west represent only a fraction of his work, which consists of more than 60 theatrical and television films....
AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Cook County Commissioner Jesus “Chuy” Garcia before the first runoff debate begins Monday night. “Chicago is one of America’s most segregated cities,” Anastasia Kaiser began. Kaiser, a University of Chicago senior, was framing a question for Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Cook County commissioner Jesus “Chuy” Garcia during Monday’s debate at the NBC Tower, the first of three in the mayoral runoff. (A few questions were taken from the audience....
Anyone who ever suggested that D.C. punk had a definitive sound likely never listened to Dischord Records’ complete catalog, let alone the Make-Up. Prior to launching the group in 1995, front man Ian Svenonius, drummer Steve Gamboa, and guitarist and organist James Canty were citizens of the Nation of Ulysses, a hurricane of a postpunk band whose members dressed like they were going to church and spouted cheeky, radical leftist ideology....
John Prine remains one of the greatest songwriters the U.S. has ever produced, but he’s not a poet—the marriage of melody and words is integral to his art. That also help explain why he takes occasional detours to make albums of songs by other people. For Better, or Worse (Oh Boy), released in September, is a kind of sequel to his wonderful 1999 record In Spite of Ourselves—both consist of duets with a slew of strong female singers....
In 1980, toward the end of a press conference on the state of the census count, Dianne Feinstein, then the mayor of San Francisco, turned toward Census Bureau director Vincent Barabba with a harsh warning: if he didn’t recognize her requests, she said, “We may see you in court.” In the years leading up to the 1980 Census, the bureau conducted an apology tour of sorts. “We didn’t do as good a job counting black people as we should have,” Barabba conceded to the New York Times in 1974....
Peter Gannushkin/downtownmusic.net Mivos Quartet Because I’ve presented a couple of concerts by them in Chicago over the last year (including one this past Sunday at Constellation), I haven’t really had the chance to proclaim my adoration for the remarkable New York string ensemble Mivos Quartet, a fearless, precise, and forward-looking new-music group dedicated to some of the toughest material being written today. But I’m pleased as hell to watch them play, strictly as a listener, tonight when they perform an intimate concert at Experimental Sound Studio, the local premiere of the third string quartet by composer Patrick Higgins....
