Chicago is nothing if not a food city, and nothing encapsulates the city’s diverse culinary scene like Chicago Restaurant Week. Over the course of two weeks (1/22-2/4), more than 350 restaurants offer a series of multicourse prix fixe menus at $22 for lunch and $33 or $44 for dinner. That’s a lot of choices to, um, digest, so here are nine of our favorites to help you narrow it down....
When I wrote about prolific Chicago three-piece Dark Fog last winter, the trippy psych voyagers were releasing three albums within a three-month span. It’s nice to know that, even in these uncertain times, some things you can still rely on: Dark Fog dropped the EP Escape Into This on April 6 and followed it up with Escape Into This 2 on April 20 (as if there were ever a chance they’d let that date go by)....
It took nearly 20 years for composer Jake Heggie and librettist Terrence McNally’s powerhouse of an opera, Dead Man Walking, to make it to Lyric Opera of Chicago. In the interim, it’s been Chicago Opera Theater that gave us a chance to see any of Heggie’s work, including last spring’s Moby-Dick and 2010’s Three Decembers. So, it’s about time, Lyric. And this gut-punching production, directed by Leonard Foglia (and almost as old as the opera), is not to be missed....
Whimsical, brutal, and evocative of The Secret of NIMH, First Love is the Revolution is a modern fable and one of the more interesting plays I’ve seen. It’s the story of Rdeca, a young fox who allows herself to be tamed by a human teenager, Basti, and the consequences of that choice. In the dramaturg’s notes, we learn that playwright Rita Kalnejais was inspired by an unspecified international dispute. Fortunately, Kalnejais did not write a direct allegory, which saves this from becoming a morality play....
Tony Quartaro has an impeccable pasta pedigree going all the way back to all-day suppers at his Grandma Joyce’s house in upstate New York, where he learned to shape gnocchi for the Sunday gravy. Quartaro stepped up at the Bristol as Pandel stepped away to open Balena, which became its own pasta powerhouse, and where he moved over a year later to work under Joe Frillman, now of Daisies (another juggernaut)....
In his 40 years of making music, Jon Langford has earned a reputation for not doing things by the book. That applies most notably to the Mekons, a band the Welsh native cofounded in Leeds in the late 70s, whose sound has evolved over the decades from rudimentary punk to a dark, strange melange of rock, folk, country, and even reggae. In 1984 they played a series of benefits for striking coal miners, whose communities were being starved by Margaret Thatcher’s decision to close many UK mines—a burst of activity that produced their early masterpiece Fear and Whiskey....
From Oliveira’s A Talking Picture (2003) It seems a little silly to mourn someone who lived to be 106 and remained an active artist up until his death, and fittingly, the obituaries for Portuguese filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira that have appeared in the last week feel less mournful than celebratory. In fact, the obituaries feel a little redundant. For some time it had been a critical cliche to begin reviews of Oliveira films—of which there were dozens in the past few decades—by mentioning his age and summarizing his biography: Oliveira made his first movie during the silent era, then remained sporadic in his filmic output until the end of Portugal’s fascist period, becoming a prolific director only in his 70s....
In the back of the parking lot of the Hobnob, a wonderful 62-year–old supper club in Racine, Wisconsin, a sign warns drivers not to plunge their cars into Lake Michigan. There’s something about the preserved-in-amber 50s-retro swank at this charming old chestnut—the off-angle arrowhead neon sign, the jumbo martini glass sloshing on the facade, the smooth stylings of house pianist Lillian Gildenstern—that makes almost everything that happens inside magic. Even the food, which under less enchanting circumstances would be considered thoroughly conventional—white-bread middle-American surf, turf, and potatoes—is likable at the Hobnob....
There I was in nothingness. Or at least in the 21st-century urban version of nothing: patches of forest thick enough to get lost in, tall prairie grass grazing my thighs, dirt paths without a destination. But on the horizon, a short distance north of where I stood, was the jarring juxtaposition of gleaming downtown Chicago—skyscrapers and condos and commuters. These were, of course, all facts I learned after my chance first journey to Rezkoville....
Q: I’m a 24-year-old nonbinary person living in Florida. I have two wonderful girlfriends. One I have been with for four years (we live together). The other I have been with for a year and a half. They’re both brilliant, interesting, and kind. Both relationships have their issues, but they’re minor. They know each other but aren’t close. Neither is interested in people besides me right now, although my longer-term girlfriend identifies as poly....
Like all die-hard music geeks, I live for the moment when I first hear a song so spellbinding it stops me in my tracks. One of the most memorable in my life arrived thanks to The Day the Earth Met the Rocket From the Tombs (Smog Veil), a 2002 collection of demos and live recordings by Cleveland protopunk legends Rocket From the Tombs. RFTT existed for just over a year in the mid-70s and imploded before formally releasing any music, but its members cofounded weirdo art-rock outfit Pere Ubu and the best midwest punk band of the day, the Dead Boys—both of which incorporated a handful of RFTT songs into their sets....
The Right Brain Project presents Nicky Silver’s sprawling 1995 tragicomedy about twin siblings trying to make peace with their past and with each other. Sebastian (Joel Collins) and Bernadette (Hannah Williams) meet at the cemetery after their mother’s untimely and bizarre death. They have been out of touch and are virtual strangers, but each is burdened by a host of unresolved traumas and resentments. For starters, he’s emotionally crippled after his lover’s death from AIDS 11 years prior, while she’s trapped in an unfulfilling marriage and has no discernible purpose in life....
Q: I am a twentysomething, straight, cis-female expat. How long do I have to wait to ask my German lover, who is übersensitive about the Holocaust, to indulge me in my greatest—and, until now, unrealized—fantasy: Nazi role-play? He is very delicate around me because I am a secular Jew and the descendant of Holocaust survivors. (Even though I’ve instructed him to watch The Believer, starring Ryan Gosling as a Jewish neo-Nazi, to get a better grasp on my relationship with Judaism....
If you learn anything from reading romance novels, it’s that true love happens unexpectedly. For Sonali Dev, it happened about ten years ago, when she was sick in bed with a 102-degree fever and nothing to read. She asked her husband, Manoj Thatte, to pick something up for her when he took their kids to the library. He came back with a cheap paperback with the title stamped on the cover in gold foil....
For much of its length, Stony Island Avenue is basically an expressway with stoplights. Located on the southeast side between 56th and 130th, it generally has eight travel lanes, the same number as Lake Shore Drive, although it carries half as many vehicles per day—35,000 versus 70,000. Due to this excess lane capacity, speeding is rampant. The complex intersection of Stony Island, 79th, and South Chicago, a diagonal street, is particularly problematic....
Avengers: Age of Ultron is on my mind today—partially because I just took in the joyless spectacle last night, partially because it’s especially indicative of the diminishing returns of superhero movies of the past few years. Like Ben Sachs, I’ve found the Marvel movies of late to be, well, lacking, but I inevitably wind up at the theater out of a sense of obligation: to participate in a cultural phenomenon that the younger me—the one who amassed a dresser drawer full of Marvel comics—could only imagine making it to the big screen....
There’s something about the walking tacos at Lincoln Square’s Taco in a Bag that invites comparison to Patton Oswalt’s “failure pile in a sadness bowl” rant about KFC. Owned and operated by champion gurgitators Pat “Deep Dish” Bertoletti and Tim “Gravy” Brown, aka Glutton Force Five, Taco in a Bag traffics in an undeniably alluring sort of drunk/stoner fuel that can result in a different kind of crapulence. It may soften your hangover, but the shame might make you feel worse....
When the Awakening formed in the early 1970s, they combined veterans of Chicago’s R&B sessions and jazz players affiliated with the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. The sextet drew on these diverse sources for its 1972 debut album, Hear, Sense and Feel, which is being reissued domestically this month as part of Real Gone Music’s new pressings of the California-based Black Jazz catalog (which also includes influential 70s LPs from multi-instrumentalist Doug Carn and pianist Walter Bishop Jr....
Wong Ping’s Vimeo page features a box containing key information about the artist, including this short—and, for those expecting something befitting a moving-image maker, perplexing—bio: “A comedian based in Hong Kong.” This isn’t meant facetiously: the 37-year-old animator views himself not as a serious artist whose audacious, excessively colorful renderings represent grotesque truths about society, but rather as something of a stand-up comedian, whose irreverent jokes, rendered via said vulgarities, accomplish that task just as well....
The Chicago Feminist Film Festival began with an enthusiastic Yes!-the exclamation Susan Kerns gave Michelle Yates, her fellow assistant professor at Columbia College, when the latter reached out with her idea. Now in its fourth year, the fest, which is free and open to the public, aims to expand and explore gender equity in filmmaking, pulling from a variety of styles and narratives to forge connections between underrepresented artists and audiences....
