Al Capone lived as a schoolyard bully, died in a simper with a brain et by syphilis, and lives on through eternity as a cigarillo mascot and gimme film role for dark-haired white actors who want a chance to really chew some scenery. In the 1920s, Illinois’s Republican Party was divided between two factions. You were either with Chicago mayor “Big Bill” Thompson or U.S. senator Charles Deneen, each GOP primary a proxy fight between the two....
The glass on the doors leading to Second City’s Mainstage theater lists the names of cast members from its past revues. The company employees who gathered today outside the Old Town comedy mecca won’t see their names displayed prominently anywhere. They’re ticket takers, servers, bartenders, and they stood in the cold, on the afternoon of the first snowy day of the season, explaining why the union they’ve organized deserves a seat at the bargaining table with the management....
Last week, supreme Chicago boogie label Star Creature Universal Vibrations dropped its first three records of 2020. They bring some serious heat: there’s a seven-inch by NYC talk-box maestro Temu (the tenth release by the label’s Tugboat Editions imprint); the disco-inflected debut album by Munir (of Indonesian boogie collective Midnight Runners), titled Eastern Sun; and the Paradise’s Love Remix 12-inch EP by American disco combo Bordeaux, a collaboration with London soul-reissue label Fantasy Love that packages a remastered version of the funky, fiery 1982 original with two slick remixes....
I know there are concerns in the community that it could be a bad summer, but I’m optimistic,” Perry Gunn says. Englewood will rely mainly on more traditional methods for interrupting violence—youth programs and summer jobs. “If we keep kids engaged, we can have a positive summer,” Gunn says. The success of the Jackie Robinson West Little League team in 2014 raised interest in baseball in Englewood, Gunn says. (Jackie Robinson West won the Little League World Series that year, but its title was stripped because the team violated residency rules....
For Mujeres Latinas en Accón (Latina Women in Action), empowering women isn’t just about offering counseling, survivor support, and other services out of their three offices—it’s about being an active and visible presence in the community. Whether it’s the Women’s March downtown, meetings with legislators in Springfield, or family festivals in Pilsen, the regal purple T-shirts make Mujeres an instantly recognizable force to be reckoned with. “Mujeres has always been very rooted in advocacy,” says Fanny Cano, development and communications manager....
Michael Gebert Garlic scapes overlooking Stock, the cafe at Local Foods Ryan Kimura, another partner, points me to a small section of petite carrots with tops that have clearly been battered by the constant rains this spring. “These are the first baby carrots from City Farm,” he says. Michael Gebert Baker Miller flour, which is sold to Hewn to make bread, which is sold to Local Foods
It took eight years after she first began having hallucinations for Esmé Weijun Wang to receive her diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder. Her diagnosis, while laden with its own orbit of stigma and baggage, is a source of comfort. “I like to know that I’m not pioneering an inexplicable condition,” she writes in the first essay of her new book, The Collected Schizophrenias. I think of TCS as having an audience among whoever is interested in reading it, really—people with mental health diagnoses, people who love people with such diagnoses, clinicians, researchers—anyone who’s curious about the topic....
No one in Baskets gets to have what he wants. Take Chip Baskets (Zach Galifianakis), who just wants to be a clown. Back home in Bakersfield, California, after flunking out of clown school in France, Chip gets a gig with a rodeo, but it does little to fulfill his artistic ambitions. Nevertheless, he prepares to be knocked around by the bulls as if he’s about to take the stage at Carnegie Hall....
A Hedda Gabler An empty wicker birdcage hangs portentously from the rafters in A Hedda Gabler, a new adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s 1891 drama from Red Tape Theatre and local playwright Nigel O’Hearn. The cage is meant to be symbolic of Hedda’s entrapment, her “caged” subservience to men, the “imprisoning” role society demands she play as a woman. More than once, men stare into the cage, lit from above by a hot spotlight, and deliver lines as if Hedda were inside....
Courtesy of Saba’s Facebook Saba There are more shows on Friday nights in Chicago than anybody could possibly get to. For fans of Chicago hip-hop, this particular Friday is either one to celebrate or one that will cause folks to pull out their hair trying to choose what to see. I count three shows I’m eager to check out, and until I’m able to be in three places at once I’ll have a hard time deciding how to start my weekend....
Gary Middendorf/Sun-Times Media The six opponents of Tenth Ward alderman John Pope (left) say he’s too cozy with Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Last week Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Tenth Ward alderman John Pope announced that the city wasn’t going to wait any longer to clean up an environmental hazard on the southeast side of Chicago. They issued a statement declaring that the city was rejecting a request from KCBX Terminals Company to take more time before enclosing its heavy-polluting piles of petcoke....
On its third album, Mambo Cósmico (Glitterbeat), Mexico City juggernaut Sonido Gallo Negro expands well beyond its cumbia roots and further extends its psychedelic treatment of vintage Latin American dance forms. The group balances kitsch with earnest adoration, injecting twangy surf-guitar licks and wheezing Farfisa organ riffs into galloping polyrhythms. Its largely instrumental music (excepting a few simple vocal chants) summons the spirit of the Peruvian chicha craze of the 60s and applies it to an assortment of tropical dances, including mambo, danzon, and porro—the last on a strutting cover of “Tolu,” a 50s gem by Colombian cumbia star Lucho Bermúdez....
The audience sits along two walls in Studio 1 at Dovetail Studios for The Quiet Hours. The windows are covered with a cloth, but the mirror is bared. This is the psychological situation of a dance studio—everything beyond its enclosure muted, everything within magnified, everyone within invited to consider the experience of the body in parallel with its surface. The expressivity of each dancer comes through most clearly in the solo work, often in the simplest movements of a foot or a hand claiming space through emphasis....
Indie-rock stalwarts Pinback have spent considerable time on the road in recent years, but they’ve been quiet on the studio front since the release of Information Retrieved (Temporary Residence) in 2012. Now, 20 years removed from Pinback’s self-titled debut, prolific multi-instrumentalists and singer-songwriters Rob Crow and Armistead Burwell “Zach” Smith are back with a new single—and they’ve hit the road again with their most famous band, one whose melodic progressions, distinctive guitar and bass tones, and oft-delicate vocal delivery were influential in late-1990s and early-2000s underground circles....
Veteran LA noise maven John Wiese has dramatically slowed his release schedule in recent years, but he’s made up for that relative scarcity by increasing the rigor in each project. Last month he dropped Continuous Hole (Gilgongo), a stunning collaboration with Drew Daniel of Matmos that redirects his penchant for sonic violence. The pair spent a decade developing the album’s 11 terse, fat-free tracks, arranging impossibly dense packets of visceral noise into ferocious rhythmic patterns borrowed from club music....
This year the 2021 Sundance Film Festival was virtual, and its offerings trimmed down from previous years. It included 73 feature films, 50 short films, four Indie Series, 23 talks and events, and 14 New Frontier multimedia projects. We watched 38 of the 73 films, including most of the award winners. Here are some sneak peaks of our favorites to look for in the year to come. Eight for Silver In a foggy 19th-century village, a wild animal is ripping people apart....
Ashlee Rezin/Sun-Times Media Incoming 35th Ward alderman Carlos Ramirez-Rosa has vowed not to become a mayoral rubber stamp. Carlos Ramirez-Rosa says it’s clear why he and more than a dozen other newcomers have been elected to the Chicago City Council, and why Mayor Rahm Emanuel had to fight so hard for his own reelection. But as he well knows, these aren’t exactly promises till death do us part. In 2007, SEIU and other labor groups vowed to stir things up....
Adapted by Marilyn Abrams and Bruce Jordan from the original play Scherenschnitt, (scissors cut), by German playwright Paul Pörtner, Shear Madness is not so much a fully realized work of comic theater as a kind of silly party game writ large. The premise is reminiscent of interactive murder mysteries: setting—a beauty salon; characters—a brace of stereotypes (gay hair dresser, ditsy beautician, bulldog homicide detective); McGuffin—the murder of an upstairs neighbor. But the real mystery is why we should care about the death of a character we never meet....
Contains less than 1 percent Buddha juice by volume Every so often in Beer and Metal, I review something that’s clearly not a craft beer, either because I’m having a snit about an evasive press release from a macrobrewer or because I’m hoping to stumble across a bargain in an unlikely place. (The less said about the Super Brew 15 fiasco, the better.) I’ve accomplished little in the effort, but it has produced some ridiculous columns....
At 5 PM Saturday, March 21, Governor J.B. Pritzker’s COVID-19 Executive Order No. 8, aka the Stay at Home order, took effect. Here’s a daily-ish journal of how Reader staff, our friends, family—and our pets—are spending our time. Cookie and Cream, a pair of senior donkeys Ruby, a 40-pound pig Kelly Kapowski, a young Dutch mix rabbit What online livestream events we’re looking forward to: v
