Posts

If there’s anything that perfectly captures the transformation of public housing from physical buildings and lived experience into a cultural commodity, it’s a small plexiglass box mounted on the wall of the National Public Housing Museum’s latest exhibit, “Housing As a Human Right: Social Construction,” on display at Archeworks through January 8. Inside the box there’s a pile of mint-green paint chips, blotched with brown stains and cracked like a dehydrated lake bed....

Jennifer Connelly (left) in Aloft Though it’s in English and stars internationally celebrated actors Jennifer Connelly, Cillian Murphy, and Mélanie Laurent, Claudia Llosa’s Aloft—which plays at the River East 21 for another two nights—feels remarkably similar to the writer-director’s previous features, Madeinusa (2006) and The Milk of Sorrow (2009), which were made in Peru with nonprofessional casts. In Aloft, a single mother (Connelly) seeks out a nomadic faith healer in hopes of curing her terminally ill son and, in the process, discovers she possesses magic healing powers herself....

“The species in which peace and mutual support are the rule, prosper, while the unsociable species decay.” So wrote Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin, advocating for the concept of mutual aid, when communities care for their members rather than forcing them to eat each other to survive. It’s a concept that has sustained a sizeable portion of the Chicago restaurant industry during the pandemic, while at the same time supporting farmers, vendors, bakers, and thousands of hungry Chicagoans....

“TAKE IT ALL” reads the caption on Chris Rudd’s Instagram story, overlaying a video of looters emptying a Gucci retail store and a Walgreens in downtown Chicago. The incident followed an explosive face-off between police and demonstrators after cops shot a young man in the predominantly Black, south-side neighborhood of Englewood. There are rewards, of course, to win in a society that is rigged in every way to make one fail....

If there’s one thing we’ve learned in this title town of ours, with 12 major championships since the Bears last won the Super Bowl 30 years ago, it’s that, in hindsight, victory always seem inevitable. Of course Scottie Pippen is going to lead a bunch of scrubs to start a comeback from a 15-point deficit in the fourth quarter; of course Michael Jordan is going to push off, just a smidge, and hit a game-winning basket at the buzzer; of course A....

The federal prosecution of Jeffrey Epstein for running a sex-trafficking operation involving vulnerable young girls ended last month when Epstein was found dead in his cell. The official story is that he committed suicide. But many people, led by the victims of Epstein and his coconspirators, suspect foul play. Second, Acosta has given conflicting statements about the highly unusual and illegal deal he cut with Epstein’s lawyers in 2008. In private conversations with Trump transition team members, who wanted to know if the Epstein deal was going to cause problems for Acosta—then a Labor secretary nominee—at confirmation hearings, Acosta explained that he’d cut the nonprosecution deal with Epstein’s attorneys because he had “been told” to back off, that Epstein was above his pay grade: “I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone....

Neeson tells his daughter (Kim Mills) how much he cares in Taken 3. Near the start of Taken 3, Liam Neeson’s perpetually unlucky ex-CIA operative Bryan Mills tries to show his college-aged daughter how “unpredictable” her old man can be by showing up at her apartment a few days before her birthday to present her with her gift. It is a giant stuffed panda. Even the filmmakers acknowledge how stupid this is—in fact, they can’t seem to acknowledge it enough, milking this awkward display of affection for maybe a half-dozen unfunny one-liners....

At a bar in Chicago nearly 30 years ago, Billy Bragg slugged down Joe Hill‘s ashes with a bottle of union beer. Now 103 years dead, Hill remains one of the most iconic faces of the Industrial Workers of the World, informally called the Wobblies, a radical international union that is itself an enduring symbol of militant working-class power. After Bragg played a concert in Chicago, a couple of Wobblies brought him a packet of Hill’s ashes—one of the last remaining traces of this particular relic, which had been divvied up into 600 envelopes and distributed to IWW branches and their allies worldwide....

Last Wednesday, February 21, two days before he released his major-label debut, WWW., Chicago rapper Towkio was in Minnesota, where he put on a space helmet and a yellow high-altitude flight suit and strapped himself into a tiny capsule suspended beneath a helium balloon. The suit was equipped with an oxygen hose and emblazoned with the album’s logo—a stylized globe bisected by a sawtooth waveform (WWW. stands for World Wide ....

Tricky is justifiably feeling reflective these days. In his 2019 autobiography, Hell Is Round the Corner, he wrote about the severe adversity he faced from an early age; his mother committed suicide when he was four years old, and his troubled adolescence in Bristol, England, culminated in a short prison stint when he was 17. It might’ve been enough to shut down another person’s dreams, but Tricky, born Adrian Thaws, found his path when he turned to music as a means to cope....

KStarke Records, the Ukrainian Village shop run by veteran DJ Kevin Starke, closed for good last month. But on Friday, December 22, the storefront at 1109 N. Western will reopen as a new record and clothing shop called Wild Prairie Vinyl & Vintage (co-owner Natasha Rac took the name from the lyrics to “Onion Rings,” a song on the 2001 Molemen compilation Chicago City Limits Vol. 1). Starke sold the business to Rac and Wild Prairie’s other owner, Alex Gonzales, a local DJ who’d worked at KStarke for five years....

This weekend, your faithful listings coordinator turns 21, doubled, plus a presidential term (that’s four years, folks—I know it seems like longer) and she’s already on Guy Fieri mode*. You may or may not have Monday off, and even those of you who do might not feel like anything is a weekend anymore. Perhaps it’s a good time to remember what Labor Day is all about. Here’s a list of films that Ben Sachs told us about in 2019 that should help you learn about the power of a union....

Like many drag queens, Chicago’s Tori Sass has been through it this year. It started with some bang-up success: When the South Michigan Avenue drag palace Lips Chicago made its grand opening in August 2019, Sass landed a coveted showgirl gig at the venue, whose opulent interior is a cross between upscale Victorian bordello and Mad Men-era steakhouse. In addition to Chicago, Lips owner Mark Zschiesche installed Lips in New York City, San Diego, Fort Lauderdale, and Atlanta....

Under the tutelage of the late, great hip-hop svengali Asap Yams, New York collective Asap Mob (whose members all have “Asap” in their stage names, though they prefer to use a dollar sign rather than an s) learned the benefits of blending the best regional rap sounds, including Memphis’s humid, syrupy aesthetic and Atlanta’s psychedelic flamboyance. With Asap Rocky in the lead, the group have ascended to the national stage over the last several years, and it seems they, like every other popular rap act around, want to help in the kitchen and toss in some of their own sauce....

Big Freedia is both a practitioner and a champion of bounce music. On the first episode of her 2013 reality show, Big Freedia: Queen of Bounce, she defined the New Orleans hip-hop style as “uptempo, heavy-bass, ass-shaking club music.” Bounce music emerged in the mid-80s, after Queens duo the Showboys released the 1986 single “Drag Rap (Triggaman).” By the early 90s the sound had been adopted by New Orleans, where its mash of hip-hop and house with call-and-response lyrics reflects the eclectic nature of the city’s party spirit....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Friday, November 10, 2017. Have a great weekend, and Happy Veterans Day! Despite plea from Chance the Rapper, City Council approves $95 million police training academy The City Council voted in favor of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s plan for a $95 million police and fire training academy in West Garfield Park Wednesday despite a highly publicized plea from Chance the Rapper to consider other ways of spending the money, such as mental health clinics....

Ultima II Massage Do Division weekend kicks off this afternoon, and along with the street fest comes a bunch of great aftershows happening at Empty Bottle and Subterranean. Tonight, Tobacco will be headlining a sold-out show at the Bottle, and today’s 12 O’Clock Track is “Video Warning Attempts,” off of his 2014 release Ultima II Massage. Perhaps best known as the front man of Pittsburgh-based experimental-rock collective Black Moth Super Rainbow, Tobacco (born Thomas Fec) has carved out a supercool solo career over the past handful of years, creating twisted electronic psych....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Thursday, November 30, 2017. Chicago takes another step in the O’Hare express-train journey Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s dream of an express train from downtown to O’Hare International Airport is one step closer. Emanuel is issuing a request for qualifications “for respondents to offer their credentials to design, build, finance, operate and maintain an express service through a public-private partnership with Chicago,” according to the Tribune....

After what some say was an unprecedented pattern of violence against people experiencing homelessness in Chicago last year, activists are calling on the city to better investigate these crimes and to do more for the victims. In July 2020, fires occurred nearly simultaneously at encampments at Belmont and Kedzie, Belmont and Kimball, and Diversey and California, according to police reports. Another Belmont-Kedzie encampment burned in October, and police reports from the July and October fires say encampment residents, many of whom lost all of their belongings, believed the fires were an act of arson....

It’s a slightly rainy late November evening and the lights are all on at Pilsen Community Books. I’ve come here to attend a live recording of Eye 94, a weekly program on Lumpen Radio 105.5 FM that dives deep into the culture of publishing, authors, and books. It’s the only terrestrial radio show currently airing in the midwest that is completely devoted to books and writers, and possibly the first Chicago radio show to do so since Milt Rosenberg’s Extension 720 on WGN AM ended in 2012....