Ah, Saint Patrick’s Day—Chicago’s annual excuse to dye the river from a sick shade of sewage olive to a sick shade of kelly green. The March 17 holiday falls on a Thursday this year, but most of the big happenings, like the parades and the aforementioned river staining, go down this weekend. Here’s some of what we recommend to pair with your daytime drinking. Gaelic Storm The Celtic-rock giants play a pair of shows....
Pauline Etienne and Félix de Givry as Louise and Paul in Eden Mia Hansen-Løve’s Eden, which opens today at the Music Box, is easily one of the best movies to premiere in Chicago this year. At once intimate and epic, the film mines universal observations about aging and the loss of innocence from a seemingly arcane subject—the two-decade rise and fall of a subgenre of French electronic music known as garage....
I first found out about the Skate Kitchen collective in 2018 from a series of events at the House of Vans encouraging women to pick up skateboarding. The women of the Skate Kitchen exude a near-impossible balance of extreme confidence and radical encouragement—just watching them in their element will make you want to pick up a board and give it a try Betty’s strongest assets are its characters. Every member of the eclectic crew is fully developed in a way that could not have happened in the 90-minute film, and not one member feels more important than another....
Cam’s lyrics cut to the core of interpersonal relationships like a breakthrough in a therapy session, perhaps because the California singer-songwriter studied psychology and worked as a researcher before pursuing her country-pop dreams. On her 2017 single “Diane,” she gives a voice to the auburn-haired strumpet of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene,” responding to the original tune’s anguished wife: “I promise I didn’t know he was your man / Diane, I would have noticed a gold wedding band....
Chicago sound wizard Mark Solotroff has been wielding his powerful electronic grimoire since the mid-80s as the leader of Intrinsic Action, Bloodyminded, and Anatomy of Habit. He’s also collaborated with a who’s who of industrial and metal artists, including the Atlas Moth, Indian, Locrian, Plague Bringer, Wrekmeister Harmonies, Brutal Truth, and the Body. Then there are his side projects: in the past couple years, he’s remastered the extensive body of lo-fi synth music he released under the name Super Eight Loop, put out an album with dark-synth trio Nightmares, and revived his Milan-Chicago postindustrial collective Ensemble Sacrés Garçons, who put out their first album in 25 years....
Chicago producer Steve Poindexter helped mold the raw underground sound known as ghetto house during its formation in the late 80s. His irreplaceable 1989 Work That Mutha Fucker 12-inch is a standard-bearer in ghetto house—the title track propels forward atop dirty, interlocking drum patterns, brittle hi-hats, and a sample of the words “work that mutha fucker” sporadically played on a loop. Poindexter crafted an arsenal of tracks he’d play live, but not all of them saw a physical release....
Nisian Hughes Wendy Whelan in motion Last fall, at 47 years old, Wendy Whelan retired from the New York City Ballet after 31 years, 22 of those as its principal dancer. Whelan’s career began in 1986 when she became a member of the New York City Ballet corps de ballet. Being promoted to principal dancer in 1991 led to numerous iconic performances and achievements, among them originating more than a dozen feature roles in Christopher Wheeldon ballets and being honored with a Bessie Award....
Fifty Shades of Grey, the movie adaptation of E.L. James’s best-selling porn novel, screened for the press last week at Showplace ICON, in a room jammed with feverish women. But I wanted to see it again in IMAX, on a seven-story screen, because I was curious whether the movie could be blown up any bigger than it already has been. Every opinion writer in America has something to say about Fifty Shades—Newsweek has even published a special issue, “Fifty Shades Phenomenon: Exploring the Sexual Revolution,” which promises to take readers inside the secret world of BDSM....
If you didn’t know Kate Berlant was a professional comedian, you might think she’s just an eccentric audience member who wandered into the comedy club to spout her thoughts on cosmetic theft. “I believe 100 percent that women have the right to steal cosmetics, because women upon birth are forced into an economy where you have to pay for your own subjectivity constantly,” Berlant says in a typical bit. “So if you don’t have certain creams or lotions, the state won’t recognize you....
On Friday, March 20, music site Bandcamp waived its revenue share for all sales through its website. When Bandcamp announced that it would take this step, COVID-19 had only begun to upend the music industry’s fragile economic ecosystem—the first wave of Chicago concert cancellations, for instance, had arrived in mid-March. Bandcamp’s gesture was hardly enough to make everyone solvent, but it did help many independent artists and labels who use its services—not least because the surrounding surge of publicity encouraged fans to target that Friday with their purchases....
Who hasn’t had a weekend of drunken debauchery in Edinburgh? For those who haven’t, Midsummer (A Play With Songs) by David Greig, directed by Randy White and produced here by Greenhouse Theater Center and Proxy Theatre, is a fast-paced, funny look at love, life, and the ache of aging. It is the story of Helena and Bob, how they met, got drunk, and the crazy weekend that followed—basically Before Sunrise meets Once....
Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place. In the early 70s, Bishop began gigging as a singer-songwriter (though he’s no fan of the term) in Urbana-Champaign, including at the folk festivals the Red Herring presented each fall and spring. The artists who participated could get their songs included on the aforementioned LPs, and Bishop contributed “White Lines and Road Signs” and “Kissed You Again” to the two volumes of Folk and Music From the Red Herring compiled in fall 1971....
In 2014 the Onion ran a headline that describes watching Orange Is the New Black all too well: “Woman Takes Short Half-Hour Break From Being Feminist To Enjoy TV Show.” With its vivid discussions of race, gender, and sexuality, Orange Is the New Black might not seem like it requires this kind of cognitive dissonance from feminists, but the fourth season had me in a pickle. This kind of TV should be hard to watch, but the outlandish pacing of season four seems to value trauma for the sake of drama and comes at the experiences of abused women from a gossipy, sensationalistic angle....
In a sense, New Orleans brass band music is much like acappella doo-wop. The better practitioners of either style can make you forget you’re listening to a wordless art form where the music does the talking. On the Louisiana home turf of the Rebirth Brass Band, that legacy is something to be taken seriously. You might ham it up for the partiers and tourists, but you can’t sleepwalk through the standards—and the competition is fierce to keep the style evolving....
For most, the holidays mean food, family, festivities, and fits of reckless acquisition. But for ballet dancers, Thanksgiving is the last supper before the marathon of merrymaking that is The Nutcracker, which first flopped in 1892 Russia only to become a seasonal sensation in 1950s America. More than two dozen productions of the annual phenomenon exist in the Chicago area alone, ranging from extravagant and spectacular to DIY and Dance Along, ensuring that the magic of Christmas is broadly allied with the ritual of dance....
In 1931, chewing gum entrepreneur William Wrigley Jr. gave an industrial building at 509 N. Union to the Salvation Army, which started collecting donated goods there in addition to housing Depression-era guys down on their luck. Ever since, it’s been the go-to place downtown for great deals on used furniture, clothing, and just about anything else, including stuff you don’t need but can’t resist. In the years before the Internet “disrupted” the resale business it was possible—as I once did—to pluck a Ceil Chapman or Mainbocher gown from a rack there for, say, $15....
The attack on Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue last October that killed 11 people shined a light on the ugly truth that anti-Semitism in the U.S. and Europe has been sharply increasing in recent years. According to a survey published October 23 by the American Jewish Committee, nearly one in three American Jews avoid wearing or carrying objects that will identify them as Jewish, and the same percentage said that Jewish institutions with which they are affiliated had been the targets of anti-Semitic attacks and threats....
While tobacco use may be well-ingrained in our society, not every tradition has its roots in health-conscious habits. Tobacco use, over the years, has been found to be incredibly harmful to the body. It’s linked to dozens of cancers, diseases, and disorders, and in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s a greater concern than ever. The shift away from tobacco in recent decades has been truly remarkable. As of last year, only about 13% of the population of the United States still used tobacco, but tobacco use itself has been linked to a higher risk of contracting COVID-19 and increasing the chances that the victim will develop serious health complications because of it....
QLast summer I reconnected with a high school teacher I hadn’t seen for a year. We first met when I was 15, and I had nothing but respect for him and his intelligence. I also had a crush on him for the next four years. Fast-forward a year. He is sexting me and sending dick pics and wants to hook up. He has told me he loves me. I feel violated and tricked, like he was supposed to be someone I could trust and he didn’t respect that....
It’s a balmy May morning and the streets of downtown Springfield are quiet save for a stretch of Adams Street near the Old State Capitol. For more than a block, the sounds of Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin” can be heard blaring from speakers perched against the screen windows on the second floor of Springfield Furniture and Recycled Records. “When I turned 70 last November, I decided I wanted to relax a bit,” Mark says as he leans his elbows against a glass counter filled with old cassette tapes....
