The Block Beat multimedia series is a collaboration with The TRiiBE that roots Chicago musicians and performers in places that matter to them. “Being here today after being on Drag Race is, like, full circle,” the Vixen says. It’s a sunny April morning, and the 27-year-old drag queen is sitting pretty with a curly pink wig and beat face inside the Jeffery Pub, where she first performed professionally. Located at 7041 S....
The Bears’ 2017-2018 season isn’t a raging Dumpster fire so much as it’s a barrel designated “hot coals only” that someone has tossed paper napkins, plastic plates, and assorted food scraps into, so that the whole pile smolders and smells to high heaven. And I write from experience, having spent a Sunday morning on week 11 of the National Football League season trolling the parking lots south of Soldier Field for tailgating fans willing to talk about what brought them out in 30-degree weather to grill meat, drink beer, and mingle with like-minded nutcases a week after the Bears had lost at home to their arch-rival Green Bay Packers—in spite of the Pack’s lack of star QB Aaron Rodgers, out with an injury, which made the defeat even more disgraceful....
Chicago rapper Vic Spencer couldn’t let the year pass without dropping at least a couple albums. August’s Spencer for Higher 3 (Old Fart Luggage) is his third solo outing of 2020, and that’s not even all he’s put out. After February’s Psychological Cheat Sheet and April’s No Shawn Skemps, he released June’s Your Birthday’s Cancelled as part of Iron Wigs, an underground supergroup that also features Chicago rapper Verbal Kent and UK rapper-producer Sonny Sathi, better known as SonnyJim....
Michael Gebert Muffaletta at J.P. Graziano & Sons I had to be in the West Loop for an interview for an upcoming piece, so I thought the logical thing to do for lunch was to go to Nonna’s to try this thing that Mike Sula wrote about Monday. But that was before I saw the Twitter exchange between Jim Graziano, of the much-loved J.P. Graziano, and Jim Behymer, cofounder of the admirable Sandwich Tribunal blog, discussing Graziano’s special of the month: a muffaletta....
As if Chicago doesn’t already have enough of a chip on its shoulder, now we are, along with Texas, one of the only two states unable to access the museum-selfie app that’s gone viral this week. #tfw you downloaded the google arts & culture app but don’t have access to the selfie/art look alike feature pic.twitter.com/HYN1RMEIKL — 🌶 Tovarisch (@nwbtcw) January 13, 2018 But don’t fret, Chicago. Tomorrow is Museum Selfie Day....
Canadian producer Jamison Isaak, who began releasing music as Teen Daze in 2010, emerged as part of a loosely defined scene specializing in hushed, woozy, and intimate electronic songs, which felt like bedroom recordings even when their creators used more robust studios. The ironic poet laureate of late-aughties indie culture, Hipster Runoff founder Carles, dubbed this style “chillwave.” The trend crashed a year or two later, and Isaak is one of a handful of chillwave veterans who’s continued to explore the boundaries of the aesthetic....
You wouldn’t be alone if your first response to a Squirrel Nut Zippers concert listing was to wonder, “Are they still around?” Ardent fans excepted, listeners mostly lost track of the Zippers after their late-90s heyday—but the show ain’t over yet. The Squirrel Nut Zippers formed in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in 1993 (taking their name from a brand of old-time candy) with six members, including James “Jimbo” Mathus and his wife at the time, Katharine Whalen....
Percussionist Tyshawn Sorey has never concerned himself much with doing what a “jazz” drummer is supposed to do. Though his talent in that area is beyond doubt, it’s only a part of his full diapason. He’s a world-class composer who’s dramatically focused his vision in recent years. He’s a powerhouse player, yet on his brilliant 2014 trio album, Alloy (Pi), he’s a faint presence on the music’s surface, playing with exquisite subtlety and allowing remarkable pianist Cory Smythe to dominate the performances of Sorey’s compositions—which owe more to Morton Feldman than to Mark Feldman....
Not only is 2020 the Year of Chicago Music, it’s also the 35th year for the nonprofit Arts & Business Council of Chicago (A&BC), which provides business expertise and training to creatives and their organizations citywide. To celebrate, the A&BC has launched the #ChiMusic35 campaign at ChiMusic35.com, which includes a public poll to determine the consensus 35 greatest moments in Chicago music history as well as a raffle to benefit the A&BC’s work supporting creative communities struggling with the impact of COVID-19 in the city’s disinvested neighborhoods....
The best comics are deadpan. They don’t telegraph that they are going to be funny, they just are. In the same way, the best thrillers don’t let us in too early on the fact that we’re watching a thriller. Steven Dietz’s 2015 play about a mother trying to steal her daughter away from a cult begins with a rather flat, naturalistic conversation between a woman and a man who we slowly realize must be a cult deprogrammer....
As severe storms struck Chicago on Sunday night, Ella Williams was coming home from a music-video shoot. Walking to her apartment, she felt a strange yet familiar sensation. “There was a time where every little headache I got would spark anxiety and depression,” she says. “After I would get one, I would think, ‘Yeah, my life is over. I have brain damage.’ I don’t have brain damage. I’m fine, but I was overcoming the fear of my body not working....
If Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Seymour “Sy” Hersh is the closest thing that print journalism has to a superhero, then his origin story can be found in the first few pages of his new memoir, the aptly titled Reporter. During another late shift, he overheard two cops discussing a robbery suspect who’d just been shot and killed, reportedly while trying to avoid arrest. One police officer, Hersh recalls, said something like, “So the guy tried to run on you?...
The members of the Devil Makes Three grew up in New England but formed their trio in California in 2002. They’ve since moved their home base to Burlington, Vermont, and their crisscrossing migrations seem fitting for a group that draws on rootsy styles and sounds from across the continental U.S., including folk, bluegrass, country, blues, and ragtime, with traces of punk and rock attitude. For most of their career the Devil Makes Three have stuck to bare-bones, folky tunes played on acoustic instruments (Pete Bernhard on guitar and lead vocals, Lucia Turino on upright bass, and Cooper McBean on banjo and guitar), and their 2016 full-length, Redemption & Ruin, topped Billboard’s bluegrass chart....
One of the best bargains in the Chicago scene, this well-established festival—currently co-organized by Plastic Crimewave, aka Steve Krakow (a Reader contributor), and artist Matt Ginsberg (Dark Fog, Underground Symposium)—celebrates its ninth installment. Named after a 1968 song by Marc Benno and Leon Russell, Icicle Star Tree has a killer lineup that showcases the diversity of what psychedelic music can be. Friday includes a collaboration between TALsounds (Natalie Chami) and Matchess (Whitney Johnson), two mesmerizing electronic artists....
ARTIST: Joe SchorglSHOW: Music Frozen Dancing at the Empty Bottle with Perfect Pussy, Protomartyr, Oozing Wound, and Ne-Hi on Sat 2/28MORE INFO: jcsuperstarcomics.tumblr.com
Sue Kwong This winter, the Reader has set a humble goal for itself: to determine the Greatest Chicago Book Ever Written. We chose 16 books that reflected the wide range of books that have come out of Chicago and the wide range of people who live here and assembled them into an NCAA-style bracket. Then we recruited a crack team of writers, editors, booksellers, and scholars as well as a few Reader staffers to judge each bout....
Now onstage at Black Ensemble Theater: a hard-charging, gotta-dance, groovilitastic celebration of the genre of superfreaks and pile-driving downbeats. If you’ve ever sung about (or in fact are) the kind of girl “you don’t take home to mother,” this show is yours. As in all BET shows, there are a lot of expositional breaks between songs—in this case, mostly delivered by Neal as he offers bullet points for the artists on display....
Even if you don’t recognize the name Zia Anger, you’re probably familiar with her work. Over the last few years, Anger has pushed and played with the limits of conceptual visual storytelling as the creative force behind some of the most notable music videos in indie music over the last decade, including Mitski‘s “Geyser” and “Your Best American Girl,” Angel Olsen‘s “Hi-Five,” Maggie Rogers’s “Fallingwater,” and a slew of projects for Jenny Hval....
One day in April 2019, DL Mullen was wandering around Halsted and Grand. Right before then, she had just left another project that she was trying to get off the ground, Athenaeum Librarium, which was supposed to be like a Soho House for book lovers. From construction delays to the building flooding, things kept going wrong, and Mullen knew that she’d have to put it on hold. Her dream of founding a luxurious membership club, library, and coworking space would have to wait, even after partnering with tech giants like Google....
The debate was first sparked in Chicago by the death of Marlon Horton, a 28-year-old man fatally shot by off-duty officer Kenneth Walker outside a west-side Chicago Housing Authority building in September 2013. Walker worked as a security guard at the site; Horton had been unarmed. The lawsuit is still pending, but Granich says that both Moore and Walker have testified that they had first aid training. In addition, Dean Angelo Sr....
