I began hosting events like Salonathon many years ago in my unfinished basement in Seattle,” Jane Beachy wrote recently, in a curatorial statement explaining the origins of her Monday-night performance series. And that’s where a special five-year anniversary edition convenes Monday, starting at 8 PM (with a dance party after). 7/18: Mon 8 PM, Beauty Bar, 1444 W. Chicago, salonathon.org, free, 21+
Writer and spoken word artist Nikki Patin has long been an advocate for survivors of sexual assault, harassment, and harm in creative spaces. In 2005, she left a position as a teaching artist when the institution she was working for (which she prefers not to name) seemed uninterested in protecting students from sexual harassment and assault, and she started working at Rape Victims Advocates—now Resilience—as a sexual assault prevention educator. She remained involved in Chicago’s spoken word scene and continued to see pleas for protection from survivors ignored....
Imaginative and often beautiful visual projections by designer Tony Churchill transform Strawdog Theatre’s intimate, low-ceilinged performing area into an otherworldly environment for Take Me, by playwright (and Reader contributor) Mark Guarino and songwriter Jon Langford, a quirky world premiere directed by Anderson Lawfer. It’s the story of Shelley (the engaging Nicole Bloomsmith), a service representative for a wireless telephone carrier, who one day is contacted by aliens—or so she believes. As the action unfolds, shifting confusingly between reality and fantasy, we come to understand that this outer-space connection is all in Shelley’s mind....
Two middle-aged men sat in a red Hyundai Sonata with the license plate “RUF,” idling in a back alley parking lot along Farwell Avenue in Rogers Park. When I pulled in and parked, the white man behind the wheel nodded at me. I went to my friends’ first-floor apartment to pick up some belongings and when I came out a few minutes later the men were standing, maskless, in the gangway in front of the back staircase of one of the neighboring buildings that shares the alley....
Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Tuesday, March 1, 2016. Walter Payton College Prep is still extremely hard to get into Getting a highly coveted spot at any of Chicago’s selective-enrollment public high schools is no small feat, but a seat at Walter Payton College Prep is the hardest to come by, according to data released by CPS. Acceptance is based on a mix of grades, standardized test scores, and a high school admissions test, but there are tiered spots available based on socioeconomic need....
Leigh Whannell’s low-budget horror feature Upgrade, now playing in general release, reminds me of the goofy genre mash-ups made by Brian De Palma in the 1960s and ’70s (Hi, Mom!, Phantom of the Paradise) and Takashi Miike in the 1990s and the aughts (Fudoh: The New Generation, The Happiness of the Katakuris). Whannell steals from so many different movies—and does it so cheerfully—that Upgrade stops feeling derivative and starts looking like a collage, with the recycled elements forming a new sensibility....
In 2009 Martha Bayne was bartending at the Hideout and had been working with the community meal and hunger-relief fundraiser Soup & Bread over the winter. Bayne, Sheila Sachs, and Ben Helphand began brainstorming ways to keep the momentum of Soup & Bread going well into the summer. “I suggested salad and bread,” says Helphand, executive director of NeighborSpace, which is a nonprofit that preserves and supports gardens in the city....
Thinkstock A local woman who rents out her Ukrainian Village condo on Airbnb says she has nothing but great things to say about doing so. Using the service has introduced her to cool strangers and changed her perspective on people for the better—and it often makes her as much as two times more money in a month than she would make with a standard tenant. But she’d rather not be named because of a lingering fear of being caught in a gray area that had become familiar territory to people participating in the sharing or peer economy....
Environmental consciousness barely registered at the recent Democratic presidential debates, and climate-change deniers still seem comfortable ignoring science and evidence. But sustainability issues increasingly have come to bear on music festivals. The Pitchfork Music Festival generates about 20 tons of waste in total each year, Reed says, and the percentage of it that gets recycled averages in the mid-40s. While this is vastly better than Chicago as a whole has ever managed, it’s not extraordinary for a festival....
The Reader‘s archive is vast and varied, going back to 1971. Every day in Archive Dive, we’ll dig through and bring up some finds. The culinary influence on the cultures Portugal dominated for nearly 600 years isn’t as celebrated as, say, the shotgun marriage between French and Vietnamese food. By some reports it’s been difficult to even find places serving the old mingling of Chinese and Portuguese food born on the tiny island of Macao ever since the island’s handover to the casinos, gamblers, and the People’s Republic of China in 1999....
Does McDonald’s brand-new “fancy” restaurant stack up with the best of its neighbors on Randolph Street’s Restaurant Row? The actual food? It takes you right back to nearly every other fast-food joint on earth. The menu is chock-full of woefully standard burgers, fries, shakes, and salads with some pastries and other coffee shop-ish items thrown in. Yes, this mothership McDonald’s brags about its one-of-a-kind international menu that includes a Brazilian McFlurry, with strawberry sauce and chocolate-covered coconut candies as mix-ins, and a “French” pasta salad....
Since 2010, Chicago aldermen have been using participatory budgeting to give ward residents a say in how some of the money in their ward will be spent. First implemented in the 49th ward by former alderman Joe Moore, participatory budgeting allows ward residents to propose and vote on capital improvement projects to be funded by the $1.32 million dollars of aldermanic “menu money” allocated to each ward by the city of Chicago each year....
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. Older strips are archived here.
Deborah Slabeck Baker uses simple tools to make oblique art. A show of her recent work at Firecat Projects, “6B,” consists of 11 graphite drawings on light brown paper and three embroideries done in black thread on linen. Each piece contains a word or phrase, such as tightrope or union or loop, surrounded by seemingly trivial images, like dancers or statues or a doghouse; each is finished off with an ornamental border reminiscent of raised stage curtains....
Johnny Sampson does not draw superheroes, but he does have an origin. His origin story, self-published in a beautifully designed, humorous, autobiographical mini-comic, tells the tale of how he became a cartoonist—and came to paint the MAD magazine Fold-In. Stunned, the illustrator writes back and the friendly legend keeps his promise. Visiting New York, he meets with MAD‘s art director, Sam Viviano, who assures him that the spry Jaffee is not near retirement, but he is invited to submit cartoons....
Chicagoans is a first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. This week’s Chicagoan is Afri Atiba, 51, AirBnb host. Before Uber and Lyft, I had a big problem, because cabs never came into my neighborhood. And if my guests took a cab to come here, by the time they got here, the cabdriver would have scared them half to death. They would come in the house and say, “The cabdriver told me I shouldn’t be staying on this side of town....
Chicago saxophonist Greg Ward is one of the most versatile jazz musicians of his generation, with a deep-seated curiosity that drives him to push himself into new territory. Through decades of study, the 34-year-old Peoria native has immersed himself in the jazz canon, particularly music that arose in the wake of his first great hero, bebop pioneer Charlie Parker. So it’s odd that it wasn’t till last year that Ward first heard the classic 1963 Charles Mingus album The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady—the inspiration for his new album, Touch My Beloved’s Thought (Greenleaf)....
“I am interested in not just creating dance, but an art experience,” says Shen Wei. The Chinese-born American choreographer and visual artist is one of the world’s foremost names in modern dance, and this weekend he brings his company, Shen Wei Dance Arts, to Chicago for the first time for two performances at the Auditorium Theatre. Shen’s vision goes far beyond the choreography, and whether blossoming like seeds in spring soil or contorting into ever-shifting geometric shapes, his dancers are elevated by the visual design around them....
Every year since 1981, FitzGerald’s American Music Festival has celebrated the Fourth of July with a great lineup of roots music, and the 38th edition is no exception: it has plenty of highlights on its four days on three stages (the club, the smaller SideBar, and a tent outside). Chicagoan Robbie Fulks rolls in with country guitar wizard Redd Volkaert (July 3, 6:30 PM, tent), who joined Merle Haggard’s band in 1997 as a successor to the great Roy Nichols....
At the intersection of 29th and Dearborn, down by [Daniel Hale] Williams Park in the Douglas community area, stood the Provident Hospital and Training School Association. There, pioneering African-American physician Daniel Hale Williams both established the first integrated hospital and performed the first successful open-heart surgery. Some credit Catalonian physician Francisco Romero with the beginning of cardiac surgery in 1801; others grant the honor to French military surgeon Dominique-Jean Larrey during the Napoleonic Wars in 1810....
