After last week’s column about the looming Chicago teachers’ strike, I heard from teachers with horror stories to tell about overcrowded classrooms—among other things. I’m sure you can imagine what that’s like. Not enough desks for the students. Barely enough space in the room. Not enough books. More papers to grade. Harder to keep everyone’s attention. More challenging to meet the needs of the slower-learning kids without losing the attention of the faster-learning kids....
Q: I’m a 33-year-old woman in a relationship with a 43-year-old man. My boyfriend’s fantasy is to have a threesome with another man. He enjoys watching me have sex with other men and then intermittently fucking me. But he mostly likes to watch me get fucked. For a long time, my boyfriend would send nudes or videos of him fucking me to men we met on dating apps. We would talk dirty about it during sex....
Not everyone has found the social restrictions of shutdown unwelcome amid the pandemic. Some have prepared materially with survival gear compiled for months or even years. Others are easing into a much-needed break from a compulsory social calendar, giving themselves permission to turn inward toward their own quiet reserves for emotional refueling. Some have thrived in their newfound isolation, including those who have been through harsher times in more challenging environments, such as a war or a major loss, and have savored this time to embrace solitude without stigma....
Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1902 thriller is one of those classics most people are more familiar with from their often tarted-up screen adaptations than the original. In this intimate City Lit Theater staging, director-adapter Terry McCabe returns to the source, following both the spirit and the letter of Doyle’s novel. McCabe employs the chamber theater format, in which a literary work is brought to the stage with minimal physical action and design and maximum fidelity to the text....
As you scroll through Clee McCracken’s TikTok account, the @clockluvr username is immediately accurate. When and why did you get interested in clocks? Right now, how many clocks or clock items are in your collection? It’s weird now because the clocks don’t synch, necessarily. It’s kind of like a wave of ticks. The rhythm changes night to night because the mechanisms are all synched differently. It’s like a wash of ticking....
As did the ensemble before them in 2011, the current playwrights ensemble blasted the theater on social media for excluding them from the process of deciding new leadership and ignoring the artistic community it purported to serve. At the time he was hired, Yew was one of the few artistic directors of color in the country heading up a theater that isn’t geared toward race- or ethnic-specific work. Those numbers have increased in recent years, with high-profile theaters such as Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Long Wharf Theatre in in New Haven, Woolly Mammoth in Washington, D....
Key Ingredient was a multimedia cooking series produced by then-Reader staffer Julia Thiel and food writer/filmmaker Michael Gebert from 2010-2018 in which Chicago’s baddest chefs challenged their colleagues to redeem unusual, underappreciated, or often abhorrent ingredients by showcasing them in beautiful plated dishes that might or might not have been edible. The ingredient: pickled eggs Meanwhile, he had plenty to keep him busy. Virtue discontinued its curbside pickup and delivery business in late April and pivoted to preparing hot meals for nighttime medical residents at the University of Chicago Medical Center....
Samuel Beckett sets his seminal 1953 absurdist tragicomedy aside a country road, where nothing grows but a single tree—which may be dead. Vladimir and Estragon, the Chaplinesque tramps who’ve waited here for days, or maybe years, for the ever-deferred arrival of the unknowable savior Mr. Godot, have never encountered anyone, save the buffoonish windbag Pozzo, who allegedly owns the land, and his mostly silent servant Lucky. There’s nothing to do but wait, and nothing to eat but a few stray root vegetables Estragon digs out of his pockets....
In early 2014, at the beginning of a pivotal year in his reelection bid, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s schedule was packed with meetings and events. But many of them were closely guarded secrets. Even Mayor Emanuel needs to sleep, but the next morning—February 12—he started with a “non-city breakfast” at another of his favorite haunts, 312 Chicago on North LaSalle. In 2011 we reported that the mayor’s schedule was full of meetings with corporate CEOs, hedge fund managers, investment bankers, right-wing donors, and other millionaires....
Over the past decade, saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock has increasingly used composition to provoke and organize adventurous improvisation. She made a major leap on the knotty 2016 album Serpentines (Intakt). The musical personalities she’s assembled, and the unusual timbres they contribute, represent compositional decisions just as profound as anything she’s put down on the page. The band combines her own grainy, jagged tenor and soprano saxophones, the rubbery low end of tuba player Dan Peck, the skittering intervals of pianist Craig Taborn, the glistening harplike fragments of koto player Miya Masaoka, the fractured throb of drummer Tyshawn Sorey, the cleanly articulated smears and tart curlicues of trumpeter Peter Evans (a guest on the album), and the splintery, refracted signal processing of laptop improviser Sam Pluta....
Now that Mayor Lightfoot has named her school board appointees, the time has come for me to evaluate the previous mayor’s appointees. I’ve known del Valle for decades. I happened to be there the night in 1986 when del Valle, then a community organizer, upset state senator Edward Nedza, a key cog in former alderman Tom Keane’s legendary 31st Ward Democratic machine. So that’s all good, except . . ....
Q: I need your advice. My partner of 27 years has been sleeping with my best friend. This has been going on for a year and a half. As far as I knew, we had a monogamous relationship, even if things had gotten stale between us in recent years. And my best friend is everything to me. I confide in him for a lot, including advice on my relationship. We spoke recently about how my partner wasn’t interested in sex....
Among the contenders for the title “Best pizza” this year, you might have been surprised to see the name of Reader staff writer Leor Galil. How does a music writer become a pizza, you ask? Like many major happenings these days, the story starts with Twitter: While promoting Best of Chicago 2016, Leor tweeted that voters could write in any candidates they pleased—for example, they could nominate him for best pizza....
Robert Slechter is used to catching—and firing—bullet passes as a wide receiver and backup quarterback for the Chicago Police Enforcers football team. Of course, real bullets are fired and violent hits are thrown whether or not the Enforcers are playing on Morton Grove High School’s field. ‘There is no justice here’ “I never was raised to hate, but to be honest with you, I hate that officer. I hate him with a passion for taking my son away from me....
Born in Michigan and raised on the road, the Goddamn Gallows had a four-year gap between The Maker and last year’s The Trial. The somewhat nomadic existence of this raw and boisterous band might account for that—they’ve moved from Michigan to Portland to California, and their members are currently scattered in cities all over the country (including Chicago) like empty bottles. But whatever the reason for the delay, The Trial was worth the wait....
Shakespeare’s Macbeth was the ultimate doomed weaver—relentlessly twisting reality’s threads until he found himself snug in a shroud. His final undoing came when the English, disguised as a forest, overtook his castle at Dunsinane, toppling the corrupt king and mounting his head on a stick. It’s a play with blood and humor to spare. And director Silbert submerges us in both. Through 3/22: Tue and Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Wed 1 and 7:30 PM, Sat 8 PM, Sun 2 PM Chicago Shakespeare Theater 800 E....
I recently decided to listen to “Common Cold,” one of the singles off Tiny Moving Parts‘ recent Celebrate, partly because I’ve come down with a summertime cold. I don’t like to read too literally into song titles, but I wanted to see if the Minnesota emo band had replicated the frustration and exhaustion of battling a head full of mucus. The music of “Common Cold” feels strangely appropriate: it oscillates between fierce, soaring riffs and gentle, hushed melodies, which don’t take much of a stretch to map onto “frustration” and “exhaustion....
Shortly after west-side hip-hop heavyweights Twista and Do or Die dropped “Aquafina,” the first single off their collaborative EP, Withdrawal, I told a friend the track sounded like the 90s. The tune glides on a dainty keyboard melody, gentle finger snapping, and subtle synth squelches, all of which effectively evoke bold velour sheets and candlelit soft-focus lighting ripped from a mid-90s R&B video. With the exception of a few moments that take me out of the song’s mood—a Lady Gaga reference, the line “ate her like a Combo”—Twista and Do or Die sound like they’re in their element....
In 2017, several Chicago musician friends—Joe Carsello and Zaid Maxwell from Lasers and Fast and Shit, Steve Reidell from Air Credits and the Hood Internet, and Johnny Caluya, Rob Goerke, and TJ Tambellini from Verma—founded Volutus Records as a “common place for side projects and audio experiments” devoted to “forever searching for the vibe.” The label has apparently had a busy quarantine, and its recent releases include the exquisite ambience of Fruit Collection, which Maxwell made as Oscillator Bug; the drone-heavy sound art of Program One, by Goerke’s project Quiet Eye; and the chilly industrial tracks of the debut EP by Surgery Boys, aka the trio of Carsello, Caluya, and Reidell....
Since 1976, Chicago nonprofit Connections for Abused Women and Their Children (CAWC) has provided a wide range of assistance for victims of domestic abuse, including a 24-hour hotline, professional counseling, and emergency shelter. According to CAWC, hundreds of women and children are turned away from the organization’s Greenhouse Shelter each month due to a shortage of facilities. On Sunday, May 22, the Chicago chapter of Women in Music hosts a benefit for CAWC at the Empty Bottle that includes a raffle and performances from incorrigibly tuneful garage rockers Varsity, winsome power-pop band Bloom, shoegazy grunge outfit Colossal Woman, and singer-songwriter Quinn Tsan....
