Posts

Not only is 2020 the Year of Chicago Music, it’s also the 35th year for the nonprofit Arts & Business Council of Chicago (A&BC), which provides business expertise and training to creatives and their organizations citywide. To celebrate, the A&BC has launched the #ChiMusic35 campaign at ChiMusic35.com, which includes a public poll to determine the consensus 35 greatest moments in Chicago music history as well as a raffle to benefit the A&BC’s work supporting creative communities struggling with the impact of COVID-19 in the city’s disinvested neighborhoods....

Would you have bet that this year would end with a massive expansion of legalized gambling in Illinois—a whole new crop of casinos, racinos (combination racetrack-casinos), slots, and even online sports betting—all justified as the way to get legislative approval for a long-sought Chicago casino, but there would still be no Chicago casino in the works? It looked like a done deal at the end of June, when Governor J.B. Pritzker signed an 800-page omnibus bill that—among other things—authorized six new casinos, 5,000 sports betting kiosks, and nearly doubled the number of gambling positions in the state, to just under 80,000....

This has been a helluva week for Second City news. On Wednesday, Financial Times first published reports of an imminent sale of the comedy behemoth to private equity firm ZMC, owned by Strauss Zelnick. Zelnick is the CEO of Take-Two Interactive Software, home of the Grand Theft Auto game franchise. On Thursday, those rumors were confirmed by ZMC; they declined to name the purchase price, but FT said that “the company was expected to fetch about $50 [million]....

When Chicago MC Probcause teamed up with local hip-hop duo the Palmer Squares to release an EP as Junkyard Samurai last year, it seemed like a perfect fit. As the Palmer Squares, rappers Acumental and Terminal Knowledge have dropped track after track stuffed with voluble, flamboyant lines delivered with a playful bounce. Probcause can also make his words ricochet like rubber, and his whimsical sensibilities, combined with hard-as-nails rapping, have helped him cross over into EDM—he’s delivered steely performances on overdriven productions by the likes of Griz and Gramatik....

The Soft Pink Truth’s new album, Shall We Go On Sinning So That Grace May Increase? (Thrill Jockey), is a soundtrack for contemplation, discovery, and the seeking of truth. The solo project of Baltimore musician Drew Daniel, best known for his work in experimental duo Matmos, the Soft Pink Truth started in response to a challenge. After Matmos released 2001’s A Chance to Cut Is a Chance to Cure, which featured glitchy electronic sounds built from samples of medical procedures, British house producer and musician Matthew Herbert dared Daniel to apply his inventive style to house music....

78/52, which dissects and decodes the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), has received mostly glowing reviews from critics—which makes sense, given that it both validates cineastes’ obsessions and constitutes a fine piece of film criticism itself. Named for the 78 camera setups and 52 splices that Hitchcock employed for a sequence running about three minutes, the documentary feels like an Intro to Cinema Studies class taught by an engaging professor, both wonky and accessible....

You’ve got to give Governor Bruce Rauner this: some parts of his job are complicated. Like negotiating a budget in a political war zone. Or, if he wanted to have a go at it on his own, Rauner could have selected any regular faculty member at any of Illinois’s colleges and universities. Thousands of them would have qualified. So, last October, the council sent Rauner two possible candidates—both experienced members of the FAC—and waited for a response....

Molly Raskin Inside the new Shuga Records The stretch of Milwaukee Avenue between Ashland and Wolcott in Wicker Park is set to welcome two record stores this year. The Reckless Records at 1532 N. Milwaukee is moving south to a larger space at 1379 N. Milwaukee; the new location’s official opening date is still being determined. The other store setting up in the neighborhood, Shuga Records, is opening its shop at at 1272 N....

Trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith has made recordings over the past decade that celebrate uplifting movements, such as the Occupy protests and the civil rights struggle, and great jazz musicians, including Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis. At first glance Sun Beans of Shimmering Light, a six-year-old concert recording of a group that played just a handful of times between 2012 and 2015, appears more modest. But in fact, it synthesizes and embodies those two themes....

The locally shot drama Rogers Park, which opens today at the Gene Siskel Film Center for a weeklong run, achieves a commendable sense of intimacy in its portrait of two middle-aged couples facing personal crises. It also conveys what it’s like to live in the title neighborhood, celebrating the diversity of Rogers Park and the variety of careers that are available to people there. The principal characters are a failed novelist working as a librarian (Jonny Mars); his longtime girlfriend (Christine Horn), who works in an alderman’s office; the novelist’s sister (Sara Sevigny), who runs a preschool; and the sister’s husband (Antoine McKay), a former musician who now sells real estate....

You guys hear about this Black Panther movie? In Rise of the Black Panther, whose third issue hit shelves Wednesday, T’Challa’s story is getting a reboot. Much like Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One, Rise of the Black Panther retells the story of T’Challa’s ascension to Wakanda’s king and protector in a modern age. This time around we see a new king excited to offer up the powers and technology of Wakanda to the world, shunning the secrecy of his ancestors and peers and inviting outsiders in—which ends up welcoming skeptics and threats....

Almost as if preordained, the first installment of my property tax bill arrived a few days before Mayor Lightfoot announced her TIF reform plan. For the record, my annual tax bill is approaching $13,000. If the upward trend continues, I’ll be priced out of my house just like people in Woodlawn, Humboldt Park, Wicker Park, Lincoln Park, Lakeview, etc. There’s transparency—they’re part of a shadow budget, shrouded in secrecy. The city’s supposed to apply a rigorous “but for” test to any application, as in, but for this TIF handout the project wouldn’t happen....

Chicago rapper Chris Crack recently dropped a collaborative full-length with Vic Spencer, Who the Fuck Is Chris Spencer?, but that’s hardly all he’s been working on. Earlier this week Crack released the video for “Armani Silverware,” one of many one-off cuts that have crowded his Soundcloud account over the past year. The “Armani Silverware” clip has the same cartoonish flair Crack displayed in the two-minute video for “Duct Tape on the Machete,” from last year’s Public Domain 4 mixtape....

For a couple years now I’ve been trying to propagate “divorce rock” as a term for a very specific strain of soft, folky 70s pop that would probably fit under the larger banner of “adult contemporary” without qualifying as “yacht rock” (which is overused anyway). Divorce rock songs are not about the average puppy-love breakup; these world-weary tunes often ruminate about how time is a cruel mistress, how people change and grow apart, or how you can truly gave your all to a relationship and still see it fail....

UPDATE Friday, March 13: this event has been canceled. Refunds available at point of purchase. The idea of a day of absence remains vibrant. Women in Mexico are currently organizing one to highlight the government’s indifference to violence against women, and it was an annual event for many years at Evergreen State College in Washington, where students of color stayed off campus to discuss issues of equity and inclusion. The tradition came to an end in 2017 when it finally succeeded in its purpose of making white people uncomfortable: the nonwhite organizers announced that to observe the day that year, whites would be excluded from campus....

Chicago has always been a good town when it comes to producing homegrown metal bands—the south side rocked heavy in the 80s with the likes of Trouble, Cianide, and Macabre—but it didn’t develop the international reputation it deserved until the 90s, when north-side postrock collaborators drew hipster attention. From there a new generation of freaks exploded forth. When Yakuza formed at the end of the decade, their grindcore base and free-jazz eruptions sounded like no one else, to the extent that some people refuse to consider them metal at all....

What do you think of when you hear the word skateboarding? He details the costs skateboarding has exacted on his marriage and his body, but also manages to tie in literature and philosophy. He cites David Foster Wallace on tennis and the hard-to-quantify-or-define concept of fun. For that is one of Beachy’s goals, to articulate and give gravity to a thing that few take seriously. His twin passions of writing and skateboarding sometimes meld, other times chafe on one another throughout....

It’s hard to think of another band that defined turn-of-the-century indie-rock hipness quite like Interpol. Taking the stage dressed in crisp three-piece suits and hammering out emotionless, crystalline postpunk with a strong nod to Joy Division, they’d set the blueprint for how young New York bands should look and feel by the time of the breakout success of their debut full-length, 2002’s Turn on the Bright Lights. In retrospect, it’s strange to think about what direction indie rock would have taken in those days if they hadn’t made such an indelible mark....

If it were released in any other year, L.A. Witch’s new Play With Fire would be the perfect album to blast through the car stereo with the wind in your hair while indulging in an adventure with your best pals. Unfortunately, summer 2020 has proved to be far from carefree, but while the trio’s nostalgia-tinged mix of indie rock, garage, punk, and country can twinge the heartstrings over what we’ve lost, a feel-good record like this can also remind us that it’s still possible to feel good....

Though it takes place in Tallahassee, Florida, the independent drama Life & Nothing More might be described as a foreign film. Antonio Méndez Esparza, who wrote and directed it, is a Spanish émigré who’s lived in the U.S. for a number of years, and he brings to the drama an outsider’s perspective that often suggests that of an ethnographer. He likes to keep his camera at a slight remove from the action, resulting in visual compositions that balance one’s sense of characterization with a sense of social milieu....