I’m not a homesick Brit, but I’ve read enough English novels, both historical and contemporary, to feel like I could be one. There’s probably a German word to explain the feeling of nostalgia for things you’ve only read about but never experienced in real life, and I felt a wave of this the first time I went to Spencer’s Jolly Posh, when the cafe was still in its original location on Irving Park Road....
Community members are sounding the alarm at Weiss Memorial Hospital’s plans to sell a surface parking lot, which they say could signal a plan to shutter the Uptown hospital that boasts a novel surgery center for transgender patients. “I am thankful that the committee voted to delay the vote, which allowed us two weeks to gather feedback on the building’s design and send that to the developer,” she says. “It also allows more time for each of the members of the zoning and development committee to be able to outreach the neighbors that they each represent to see what their feedback is about this proposal....
Correction: This story has been updated to correctly reflect the games for which Gordon McGladdery hired John Robert Matz to compose. No one had ever commissioned Babbitt to write music, and he’d never collaborated with people who didn’t make music themselves. “I had no idea what I was getting into,” he says. “It was like, ‘Why wouldn’t I want to write a couple pieces of music for this thing and get paid a bit of money?...
Jillian Tamaki A panel from This One Summer Before she put the finishing touches on April’s sexually tinged techno-mystery comic Frontier #7, or garnered multiple awards and acclaim for 2014’s gorgeous graphic novel This One Summer, Canadian comics artist and writer Jillian Tamaki was making a home at Tumblr for a funny, mostly black-and-white comic called SuperMutant Magic Academy. For four years, Tamaki chronicled the ordinary experiences of rather extraordinary beings—a host of mutant high school students—as they endured the perpetual battles of adolescence....
This morning Pitchfork announced the lineup for its 15th annual music festival, headlined by mope masters the National, rap superduo Run the Jewels, and New York hipster-rock darlings the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Pitchfork the website originally built its reputation by covering the indie music world that gave birth to these headliners, and even though Pitchfork the festival has grown big enough to book them now that they’re stars, it hasn’t lost sight of that mission—which lends extra significance to its crystal anniversary....
Brooklyn singer-songwriter Mackenzie Scott, aka Torres, is a master of insular, languid indie pop. But after making it through lockdown and finding inspiration in her partner, visual artist Jenna Gribbon, Scott is in an expansive mood. Her new album, Thirstier (Merge), graced with a glam cock-rock cover painted by Gribbon, features a big, snarling, exuberant arena sound courtesy producer (and Garbage drummer) Butch Vig. Fans may miss the unhurried melancholy elegance of Scott’s powerful 2017 album Three Futures, but there’s no denying the Liz Phair-flavored crunch and cheerful guitar solo of album opener “Are You Sleepwalking?...
It’s no secret that Experimental Station (ES) is unique. The Woodlawn space has various tenants but it isn’t just art-focused. It’s a museum, it’s a coffee shop, it’s a farmer’s market. When explaining the space to folks who don’t live in the area, it can sound like a utopia of sorts, a place where people can create and work alongside one another, a central nervous center of community-focused people working within their neighborhood on projects they are passionate about....
Update on Fri 5/24 at 3 PM: Due to potential inclement weather, WHPK’s Summer Breeze festival has been moved indoors, to the First Unitarian Church at 5650 S. Woodlawn. Prune City by Sharkula x Mukqs Got a tip? Tweet @Gossip_Wolf or e-mail gossipwolf@chicagoreader.com.
On its first compilation, Buds Volume 1, Chicago label Rosebud Allday showcases the talent of its roster and its friends from the local scene. Founded in 2018 by Bill Ocean and producer Jayson “Jsun” Rose, Rosebud Allday specializes in the overlap of pop, hip-hop, and R&B; its sunny sounds recall Chicago neosoul groups such as the Social Experiment and the O’My’s or the early work of Los Angeles collective Odd Future (minus the menace)....
There are plenty of events happening this weekend—comedy, dance, and video games. Here’s some of what we recommend: Sat 2/24: RuPaul’s Drag Race season six winner Bianca Del Rio (aka Roy Haylock) stood out for her impeccable sewing skills and biting witticism (she’s also behind the iconic line, “Not today, Satan, not today”). For one night only, she’s bringing her theatrics and sharp tongue to her Blame It on Bianca standup show at The Vic (3145 N....
Nature documentaries may be plentiful on cable TV, but they rarely connect at the box office—March of the Penguins (2005), the biggest nature film of all time, grossed only $127 million worldwide (compared to $2 billion for the most recent Star Wars sequel). By this modest standard, French filmmakers Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud have been phenomenally successful. Their first two features are firmly lodged among the genre’s top ten: Winged Migration (2001), a stirring account of migratory birds, earned $32 million for Sony Classics, and Oceans (2009), a study of marine life, grossed $82 million for Disney....
Q: I’m a 30-year-old bi male. I’ve been with my wife for five years, married nine months. A month into our relationship, I let her know that watching partners with other men has always been something I wanted and that sharing this had caused all my previous relationships to collapse. Her reaction was the opposite of what I was used to. She said she respected my kink, and we both agreed we wanted to solidify our relationship before venturing down the cuckold road....
Welcome to the Reader‘s weekday news briefing. ComEd: Atlanta airport-like power outage unlikely at O’Hare or Midway An event similar to the power outage at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta Sunday, which threw off the plans of thousands of travelers, is unlikely to happen at Midway or O’Hare International airports, according to ComEd senior vice president for distribution/operations Tim McGuire. A single fire is unlikely to shut down the airports’ entire power system because, unlike Hartsfield-Jackson, O’Hare and Midway have “robust” systems: “They are not all bundled together, where one event at a single location could take them all out,” McGuire said....
Soprano and tenor saxophonist Urs Leimgruber has covered a lot of ground since he first recorded in 1974. On his earliest recordings, with Swiss jazz-rock group Om (which predates by decades the heavy American band of the same name), he played muscular solos over surging rhythms. Since the 90s he’s used several groups—including Quartet Noir and MMM, which both feature French bassist Joëlle Léandre, and a long-running trio with French pianist Jacques Demierre and American bassist Barre Phillips—to combine free improvisation with classical gestures, particularly Léandre’s operatic singing....
My mother always told me, “When you get older, you’ll begin to see the world in shades of gray.” Generally speaking, she was right (as usual), but I often find that idiom falling short of my personal experience. Listening to the prismatic 12 Comp (ZIM) 2017, I finally understood why: I’d much rather see the world in spectral wheels, the way Anthony Braxton does. Throughout the 11 hours of 12 Comp, the experimental composer and reedist—an icon of the hugely influential Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians—investigates the ceaseless shifting of hues....
ARTIST: Mister Kanos SHOW: The Rewrites, When We Was Kids, and Midnight Ruckus at Moe’s Tavern on Sat 2/13 MORE INFO: misterkanosindustries.tumblr.com
The recording career of Lee Fields extends at least as far back as 1969, but he was considered little more than a footnote in R&B history until the late 1990s and early 2000s, when he emerged as a latter-day roots-soul celebrity. Cast initially as a James Brown-style funk artist, Fields landed his sole chart hit, “Stop Watch,” in 1986, and though he enjoyed moderate success on the 90s southern soul-blues circuit, he was scuffling in semi-anonymity a few years later when the retro-soul crowd caught up with him....
Mary Zimmerman returns to Leonard Bernstein with Wonderful Town at the Goodman September 10-October 16 Rarely performed plays by Amiri Baraka, Sam Shepard, and more Catching the latest work from Chicago’s notable playwrights should keep you busy this fall. Seems like each of them has something new to show us, including The Happiest Place on Earth (Sideshow Theatre Company, 9/17-10/23; reviewed here), an autobiographical solo show written and performed by Philip Dawkins; Skooby Don’t (Hell in a Handbag Productions, 9/29-11/4; reviewed here), David Cerda’s spoof of the animated mystery solvers; Andrew Hinderaker’s The Magic Play (Goodman Theatre, 10/21-11/20), about an illusionist in crisis; and Calamity West’s Give It All Back (Sideshow again, 11/20-12/18), about an artist holed up in a French hotel room....
Remember how it was?” a voice-over narrator asks periodically in Leo Hurwitz’s bold essay film Strange Victory (1948). For the first 20 minutes, Hurwitz revisits the World War II years, when Americans of all stripes pulled together to defeat the racial tyranny of the Axis powers. War Department footage shows the fury of the air war against Germany and the suffering of its people as U.S. soldiers chase through Berlin in hope of capturing the Führer....
Aki Kaurismäki’s The Other Side of Hope, which is playing this week at the Music Box, is the only recent film I know that merits comparison with the work of Charlie Chaplin. Like Chaplin, Kaurismäki (The Match Factory Girl, The Man Without a Past) blends humor and pathos in his look at a down-and-out individual by using the character’s misadventures to illuminate the plight of many others like him. Chaplin’s Little Tramp was remarkably versatile, taking in the form of numerous oppressed people: immigrants, the unemployed, Jews in Hitler’s Germany....
