W hen Jane Beachy first started the weekly performance series Salonathon in July 2011, she didn’t imagine it would run for more than two months. The show was founded with a DIY spirit, intended as an inclusive space for emerging artists to test the boundaries of performance. Soon one year came and went, then five. And now, six and a half years after that first night at Beauty Bar, the series is finally coming to a close....
Last June, when Rolling Stone contributor Andrew Matson asked Shabazz Palaces’ Ishmael Butler about the negative critiques of social media he’d gleaned from the songs on the Seattle duo’s 2017 albums, Quazarz vs. the Jealous Machines and Quazarz: Born on a Gangster Star, Butler deflected him, responding, “No, it’s not mostly negative. I just feel like [social media is] too much. It’s too widely accepting without being considered. That’s all.” The interaction reminds me of how critics too often read Shabazz Palaces’ most far-out qualities in comparison to what’s hot at the moment—the music is “delightfully experimental” (the Quietus), filled with “discordant sounds and bizarro abstract lyrics” (Pitchfork), and, uh, whatever mind-numbing hyperbolic drivel A....
“I want to kill everybody who listens to me as I stumble around this world,” says the character Anthony Bourdain in one scene of a short three-act sketch called “Parts Unknown.” “So what happens if I want to eat up a big freaking octopus?” Bourdain asks later. “What do you think of food and water?” Though the lines may seem like inscrutable nonsense, they’re actually based on the most common phrases the celebrity chef uses on his CNN show....
With a combined 40+ years of experience in restaurants, the trio understands the intricacies of the niche wine industry and are on a mission to demystify the conversation surrounding the industry. Clients can range from the novice wine drinker who wants to host a virtual blind tasting for friends or a business happy hour to wine and beverage programs and cellars in need of consulting. Cultivated in August 2020, during the height of the pandemic, Slik’s business plan is focused on sustainability, with safety protocols baked in from marketing aspects to hosting events....
Re-Animator Stuart Gordon isn’t among the most well-known or revered horror filmmakers around; in some circles, he’s downright reviled. The Chicago native has drawn ire his whole career, even here in the pages of the Reader. None other than Dave Kehr, a measured and thoughtful critic even at his most vitriolic, called Gordon’s breakthrough Re-Animator “ludicrous and inept,” describing it as the “kind of flat-footed stuff that gives garbage a bad name....
The heyday of vaudeville is over and done with 15 minutes into this delightful new musical from Underscore Theatre Company, with book and lyrics by Brian Huther, Ben Auxier, and Seth Macchi and music by Huther and Auxier. Its heroes are two relics of the old school with a duo act to beat the band and nowhere to perform it, what with music halls shuttering and Hollywood’s first flowering guzzling the entertainment market share....
Every week our film critics tackle the movies they’re most excited to see. Some more than exceed our expectations, and some, well, some don’t (this week we’re looking at you, Desperados). Before you settle in to stream this weekend, check out what we have to say. More new releases, revivals, and currently streaming films can be found every week at Movies of Note, and you can dive deep into the Reader‘s film review archive here....
Hell is a blast. Beats living. You get to garden, the drugs are free, and if the Harrowing’s planned for anytime soon, no one’s informed Judas Iscariot or Pontius Pilate, the double-quadruple-damned linchpins to Houston playwright Brendan Bourque-Sheil’s show, which makes its Chicago debut here with Death and Pretzels under director Madison Smith. Minus an understandable touch of guilt at having brought about the death of Christ, this Judas (Jake Baker) and this Pilate (Nick Strauss) are set....
Julia Thiel View from outside the festival The hallmark of a successful beer festival may just be that the critics don’t have much to say about it. Chicago Ale Fest, which was initially scheduled for last September and then canceled due to “anticipated inclement weather and financial concerns,” went off without a hitch this past Friday evening and Saturday afternoon—at least as far as I can tell. I was only there for the second half of the Saturday session, but if there’s one thing people like to do it’s complain, and if there had been issues I’m pretty sure they would have been tweeted, Facebooked, and blogged about....
Last week the Sea and Cake released its 11th album, Any Day. The record embodies a simmering cool, which is demonstrated in the elegantly crystalline guitar lattice sketched out by Archer Prewitt and singer Sam Prekop—whose vocal lines have never sounded more sweetly aspirated—and also serves as an impressive assertion of commitment. A year after the band released its previous album, 2012’s Runner, longtime bassist Eric Claridge had to step back from touring due to carpal tunnel syndrome, and he left the group permanently soon after....
Last week, Payton Leutner, the victim in the Wisconsin “Slender Man” attack in which two of her schoolmates stabbed her multiple times as tribute to a fictional ghoul (one they believed to be real), spoke out for the first time since the horrific event. That’s serendipitous timing for Underscore Theatre Company’s new musical by composer Alexander Sage Oyen and book writer Austin Rega. In Proxy, Vanessa (Carisa Gonzalez) is 15 years out from the time her best friend, Veronica, or Ronnie (Tessa Dettman), plunged a knife into her torso a dozen times....
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. Last week, the traveling mainstream punk festival slash outlet mall known as the Vans Warped Tour announced the lineup for its final cross-country tour, which begins June 21 and comes to the Chicago area July 21. This is Warped Tour’s 24th year, and the bill is the same as it ever was: bands that played the gathering during its halcyon days in the early and mid 2000s....
Earlier this month, in the wake of her own attention-grabbing press conference, Wheaton College professor Larycia Hawkins was worrying about something besides the fact that the school is trying to dump her. Since then, students and faculty at Wheaton and other schools have been protesting on her behalf; 67,000 supporters have signed a petition seeking her reinstatement, and the school has attained a certain notoriety. That’s what was foremost on Hawkins’s mind....
Update: Second City is not the only legendary Chicago comedy theater on the market. On Friday, October 9, Charna Halpern of iO, which ceased operations in June, announced that both the business and the Kingsbury Street building that has housed the company (including two main theaters and two cabaret spaces in addition to classrooms and a bar) since 2014 were for sale. A press release from iO said “After 40 years of success, Charna decided to put the business and property up for sale....
A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. Cleric, Retrocausal When this Philly four-piece released its previous full-length, 2010’s Regressions, I was so confounded by its collage of elastic noise and hypercube math-metal that I wrote 1,200 words trying to explain it. Retrocausal came out in December, and I’ve had fun watching newer writers grapple with Cleric’s mix of bestial fury, jazzy sass, creepy ambience, and eight-dimensional convolution, which is so divorced from conventional structures that parsing it is like trying to memorize Finnegans Wake....
Update 4/5: This story has been updated to remove references to Marsha P. Johnson as the first Stonewall brick thrower and to add responses and information from Lurie Children’s Hospital and Pride in the Park. This year, Chicago is taking the anniversary of Stonewall to a new level: Pride in the Park boasts a “killer lineup” featuring Iggy Azalea and Steve Aoki. The Grant Park event on June 29 will cost attendees $50-$100 for access to the show of non-LGBTQ stars....
Sun-Times Media Columnist Phil Rosenthal circa ’96 Phil Rosenthal, a Tribune business columnist, is about a month into something new. He’s launched a column he calls Margin Call; it’s a string of snappy observations on the news, most of them tweet length. For instance, this from February 11: “The Pentagon, according to reports, spent $504,816 on Viagra last year. This lends new meaning to the phrase, ‘Straighten up and fly right....
When you were in high school, did you ever sneak into a girl’s house after school? And did her dad happen to come home, after being fired from work, in the midst of the action? So you hid in the bathroom, only for him to come in there and poop while you’re hiding behind the shower curtain? Well, Korporate has. “#BlackChicagoBeLike is meant to show life in Chicago on the other side of Michigan Avenue,” he says....
The dedication in Samantha Irby’s latest book, Wow, No Thank You., is made out to Wellbutrin. Fitting, then, that the pages that follow are an antidepressant in their own right. And it came just in time—the book dropped on March 31, 2020, right around the time we first lost all hope of ever leaving our homes. But who needs to go outside when inside is a list of more than 100 “sure, sex is fun, but have you ever ....
Today Billy Corgan’s Smashing Pumpkins announced that three-fourths of their original lineup would reunite for a summer tour, a moment that Corgan, drummer Jimmy Chamberlin, and guitarist James Iha have been moving toward for a couple years. Corgan resuscitated the Pumpkins brand in 2007, after roughly seven years of dormancy, and since then he and a revolving-door crew of musicians (including Chamberlin on occasion) have released four albums of new material and toured extensively....
