A figure in black caresses a length of paper mounted on the wall with both hands. Two hands take sticks of charcoal to apply smoky curls, then lines that outline and defines first the frame of the page, then a life-size human figure. As he continues, his body seems to multiply: shadows on the wall echo the motions of the curves on the page. He adds translucent strokes of black paint, then tosses on opaque splatters in white....
Rhinofest turns 29 this year and remains one of the only fringe festivals in the US that actively curates its acts instead of selecting them through a lottery. This year artistic directors Jenny Magnus and Beau O’Reilly have chosen 41 different plays, cabarets, dance performances, workshops, and other things that defy classification. Of course Reader critics have opinions what’s worth seeing. The festival runs through February 25 at the Prop Thtr (3502-04 N....
Now in its 31st year, the Chosen Few Picnic & Festival has been one of the largest house-music events in the world for more than a decade, but it started as an informal Fourth of July barbecue. In the late 1980s, brothers Tony and Andre Hatchett would join their family at a holiday picnic behind the Museum of Science and Industry. Tony and Andre have belonged to pivotal house-music DJ collective the Chosen Few since 1978 and 1981, respectively, and in 1990, they invited the rest of their crew—at the time Wayne Williams, Jesse Saunders, and Alan King—to spin at the Hatchett family picnic....
Darryl Holliday and Erik Rodriguez’s “How to survive a shooting” was published in the Reader in 2013. We live in a world where you can run but you can’t hide. A colleague says a perplexing letter just came in the mail to her husband. As he’s someone “who basically scoffs at the Internet,” she told me in an e-mail, “I am wondering what list they got his name and address from....
On Friday, March 16, Vic Mensa takes over Lincoln Hall to launch his charitable foundation, Save Money Save Life. Mensa is no stranger to activism, having joined street demonstrations after the release of the Laquan McDonald dashcam video in 2015, traveled to Standing Rock to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016, and written a Time op-ed in January connecting American racism to the oppression of Palestinians. His new foundation aims to combat systemic injustice by funding three programs: one will train first responders for underserved Chicago neighborhoods, another will send therapists to public schools to help students who lack access to mental health care, and the third will support artistically inclined youth on Native American reservations....
When Yuta Katsuyama landed at the Illinois Institute of Technology four semesters ago, in the very real food desert of Bronzeville, he couldn’t find anything to eat. For overworked professionals such as Katsuyama, who was a management consultant in the food tech industry, their absence would be unthinkable. “Onigiri is really handy,” he says. “You can eat with just one hand. You can eat while working.” Besides that, they’re tightly knit into the emotional fabric of the nation....
Chicagoans is a first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. This week’s Chicagoan is Adewole Abioye, West Englewood Branch Library teen-services rep. “One thing that sometimes makes this work difficult is the lack of parental participation. Kids need support, and a lot of them are sort of dumped here at the library. When I was a kid, I went to the library with my parents, and we would sit there and read together as a family....
Julia Thiel The Amora Amaro (left) and Road to Manhattan cocktails Angostura bitters is a cocktail staple, ubiquitous at even the most poorly stocked bars. The recipe, allegedly known to only five people in the world, is a closely guarded secret; the only ingredient listed on the bottle besides alcohol, water, sugar, and “natural flavorings” is gentian (a bittering agent). There are supposedly a total of 47 ingredients in the bitters, mostly herbs and spices—but which ones is anyone’s guess....
The PSA represents a growing trend of court systems around the country using computerized risk-assessment to inform bond-setting and, in some places, even sentencing decisions. Some experts are welcoming the PSA as a tool for potentially counteracting racial and class bias in judges’ bond-setting—a bias that’s seen as contributing to the disproportionate pre-trial incarceration of poor, African-American men in the Cook County jail. But critics are concerned that bias persists even in the PSA’s supposedly neutral algorithm....
Many bands associated with famous DIY punk label SST Records have been enshrined for posterity, but SoCal rippers Saccharine Trust, who combined gloomy punk, wiggly free jazz, and other weirdness during SST’s 80s heyday, haven’t gotten their due. In 2000, local filmmaker Jim Sikora released My Char-Broiled Burger With Brewer, which he describes as a “portrait of an old and enduring friendship between two musicians—one who is very successful (Mike Watt of the Minutemen and the Stooges) and the other (Jack Brewer of Saccharine Trust) who is sliding into obscurity....
“I didn’t relate to being a rock star at all” is a strange sentiment from someone who played Monterey Pop, but Michael Bloomfield was no ordinary guitarist. Growing up in the northern suburbs of Chicago in the 1950s, Bloomfield learned to play by mimicking the blues artists he heard on his transistor radio, tuning in AM frequencies from Chicago’s south side and as far away as Texas. In the early 60s he was a fixture on Chicago’s music scene, playing and producing shows that melded rock, blues, pop, and jazz for rapt audiences....
When Raquel Monroe thinks of democracy, she envisions a certain freedom. “I was interested in pictures . . . the way that the bodies are seated or the way that the bodies are still, they feel as if they are about to step up out of the camera,” she says. “They’re about to move.” Sharon Bloyd-Peshkin, an associate professor of journalism, curated a collection about photojournalism and the role of free press in democracy, both in history and today....
David Bowie A New Career in a New Town (1977-1982) (Parlophone) $106.99, $206.82 for vinyl David Bowie’s personas were often inseparable from the records he made. You might even say that he had only one—a persona of constant artistic reinvention—and that his music changed along with it. He displayed this mastery of self-transformation most dramatically during his so-called Berlin period, which began in 1977. Collaborating with producer Brian Eno, he radically revamped his sound and methodology, adopting Eno’s approach to the studio as an instrument unto itself....
True-crime storytelling began in Victorian America. Newspapers eager to captivate their audiences relied on the same tools TV shows and podcasts still use today: sex, suggestion, and fright. By the 1920s, true-crime narratives had begun to incorporate gay panic as well. James Polchin’s new book Indecent Advances: A Hidden History of True Crime and Prejudice Before Stonewall (Counterpoint Press) explores some of these early writings and the paranoia they inspired—which continues today....
This spring, the Reader got an advance copy of NOFX: The Hepatitis Bathtub and Other Stories, written by the band with Jeff Alulis (aka late-period Dead Kennedys singer Jeff Penalty). It wound up in my hands, so of course I read the whole thing. The book is a memoir a la Motley Crue’s The Dirt, and it details every up and down the popular California band has gone through since its inception in (holy shit) 1983....
Since long before any of us heard of COVID-19 (and before most of us heard of Anthony Fauci or Emily Landon), Chicago’s been home to a widely recognized infectious disease expert. He’s Gary Slutkin, the former University of Illinois epidemiologist best known for taking a look at the rampant killing on our streets and recognizing it, literally, as a plague. Gary Slutkin: The public messaging about this particular epidemic has been disastrous beyond the fact that there are different messages coming from the administration and the scientific community....
Seventeen months ago, Laura “Lulu” Callier—aka solo electronic musician Gel Set—packed up her things and moved from Chicago to Los Angeles with her steadfast canine companion, Dixie. As Callier rode out that loneliness, she began noticing doppelgängers everywhere she went: on sidewalks, at gas stations, at supermarkets, and at shows, she saw people who looked almost but not exactly like the friends and acquaintances she’d left behind. She calls them “body copies”—and they’re also why she titled the new Gel Set record Body Copy....
Many an artist claims to have psychedelic or surf influences, whether you can hear them or not. But in the case of Los Mirlos those flavors are immediately obvious. The septet, formed in Lima, Peru, in 1971, play cumbia amazónica, a tropical subgenre of Peruvian cumbia that reflects the life and customs of the region. They’re all excellent musicians, but their secret weapon is lead guitarist Danny López, who plays with a slight tremolo that calls to mind instrumental-rock greats such as Dick Dale, Duane Eddy, and the Ventures....
It was only a matter of seconds before Chicago stole the show. Having been introduced as a visionary and a master of lurid cinema, Michael Mann took the stage at the BAM Harvey Theater in Brooklyn earlier this month for the keynote of the career retrospective Heat and Vice, which launched on the Humboldt Park native’s 73rd birthday. (The series wrapped last week.) Asked off the top by moderator Bilge Ebiri why he became a filmmaker, Mann looked homeward....
I like Charly Bliss way more than I should. The NYC foursome—really a pop act disguised as a punk band—ticks countless boxes on the list of things that immediately annoy me or make me roll my eyes: goofy, quirky lyrics; cute and zany music videos; pristine production values; and an unabashed Weezer influence (more the bad era than the good). But I let my guard down for 2017’s Guppy (Barsuk), and I’ve been completely hooked ever since....
