In a sign of our distraction, the feds indicted not one but two aldermen last Friday and hardly anyone around here batted an eye. Thompson says he’s innocent of all charges. But I can’t wait to hear him explain the interest-deduction thing. That is, Muñoz allegedly stole thousands from the accounts of the City Council’s Progressive Caucus—which he then chaired—and used the cash to buy, among other things, items from Lover’s Lane....
Santina Croniser Canadian whiskies, awaiting tasting Canada has a reputation for producing light, smooth whiskies without much whisky flavor—which makes them popular among people who don’t particularly like whisky, and anathema to those who do. (Unlike the U.S., Canada, Scotland, and Japan spell “whisky” without the e.) That reputation isn’t entirely undeserved; for many years, the Canadian whiskies that were being exported to the U.S. were mostly along the lines of Seagram’s Seven, Canadian Club, and Canadian Mist—which are generally pretty tasteless—earning Canadian whisky the nickname “brown vodka....
Working a traditional office job doesn’t deter Mandy Sears from making a bold fashion statement. Sporting an outfit she described as “punk rock meets business casual,” the 23-year-old appraisal coordinator managed to look both polished and rebellious by pairing classic pieces with edgier ones: a houndstooth duster coat with a black pair of Dr. Martens boots. Another way Sears stands out from the nine-to-five crowd is by not shying away from bright colors, which are amplified by her fiery red strands....
One of Chicago’s most accessibly bizarre musical collaborations of 2019 began at a Burger King in Evanston. A couple years ago Maxwell Allison, who makes experimental music as Mukqs and helps run the eclectic Hausu Mountain label, was walking past the fast-food joint when he spotted rapper Brian Wharton, better known as Sharkula, sitting inside. Wharton has stayed underground for decades, and though he might like to be more popular, he’s definitely not willing to change his scattered, unconventional, sometimes off-the-beat flow, his anachronistic love for a grimy boom-bap sound redolent of 90s hip-hop, or his fascination with lyrics about bodily functions....
The crowd started gathering around Wrigley Field midafternoon on Sunday, approximately four hours before the Cubs were scheduled to face off against the Dodgers in game two of the National League Championship Series. And on the corner of Addison and Sheffield, amid the stream of fans, vendors, drinkers, gawkers, and wanderers all clad in blue, stood one lone stout, white-haired figure in red with a hands-free microphone over his ear and Bible in his back pocket....
This week’s gig poster brings us back to the world of online concerts. The staff at West Edgewater’s Experimental Sound Studio (ESS) have been working hard to bring a full calendar of collaborative programming from all over the world to our Internet “airwaves” since March. Saturday’s free concert was coordinated by online publication Tone Glow (edited by Reader contributor Joshua Minsoo Kim) and delivers experimental, noise, and improvised music from Sunik Kim, Wendy Eisenberg (both based in New York), Philadelphia’s Lucy Liyou, and Glasgow/South London collective Still House Plants....
T he story of Chicago’s street murals isn’t exactly untold. Much of it has been documented in the Reader, as a matter of fact, primarily through articles by the estimable Jeff Huebner. But it’s seldom if ever been mined as a subject for theatrical exploration. The nearest attempt, as far as I know, was This Is Modern Art by Kevin Coval and Idris Goodwin, which is about tagging-a genre that’s been known to serve as the apprenticeship program for mural making as well as its outlaw wing, but isn’t the thing itself....
By now, thanks to the movie Kinsey (2004) and Showtime’s Masters of Sex, most people are well versed in the story of Alfred Kinsey, the Indiana University professor who collected Americans’ individual accounts of their sexual histories in the late 1930s and early ’40s. Within three years of beginning the project he had collected more than 2,000 personal sexual histories, and by 1947 he had founded the Institute for Sex Research....
It took me nine years to get out to the House Theatre’s annual nonballetic staging of The Nutcracker, but after finally seeing it last year, I was eager to make a return trip. Created by Jake Minton, Phillip Klapperich, Kevin O’Donnell, and Tommy Rapley, the House version imagines a family broken apart by grief and finding their way back to a different kind of normal. The twist this year is that the family is headed by two dads—Benjamin Sprunger’s Marty and Nicholas Bailey’s David....
Most band reunions don’t live up to the hype, but most bands aren’t Sleep. In the early 90s, the Northern California trio—bassist and vocalist Al Cisneros, guitarist Matt Pike, and drummer Chris Hakius—laid down a guttural strain of Sabbath-worshipping blues metal, filtered through a crusty psychedelic lens. They broke up in 1998 following a years-long struggle surrounding their third full-length, Dopesmoker—their label balked at releasing a single hour-long song centered on a bong-toting desert caravan, and the band refused to compromise their vision....
Puppetry is an art form that goes back millennia. Puppets are referenced in the ancient sacred Sanskrit epic the Mahabharata and shadow theater is still performed throughout India and southeast Asia, while its influence can be seen in the works of silhouette animators from Lotte Reiniger (The Adventures of Prince Achmed, 1926) to Michel Ocelot (Princes and Princesses, 2000). Japanese bunraku puppets have been around since the 17th century, about as long as kabuki theater, and are equally suited for the delicate conveyance of complex emotions....
The 2016 presidential election may have transformed Walter Benn Michaels from pariah to prophet of doom. In 2006, the University of Illinois at Chicago English professor published the polemic The Trouble With Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality, which makes the unpopular argument that liberalism’s single-minded obsession with diversity is a tool used by elites to distract from the greater evils of worker exploitation and economic inequality....
The pandemic has kept many of us from leaving the house, but honestly, why would you want to? There is too much TV to watch to go outside. Outside doesn’t have Hulu or Netflix or HBO Max. To encourage you to stay home and stay safe, comedian/writer Rima Parikh and myself (two people who watched just as much TV in the before times) will be diving deep into the shows we’re loving or lovingly hate-watching, social-distance-style, over Google chat....
We had a book launch celebration online on July 16. Watch (or re-watch) the video here. Editors: Philip Montoro, Jamie Ludwig, and Taryn Allen Cover design: Jackie Weinberg Book design: Kirk Williamson
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. As the front man for the band Pedro the Lion, David Bazan was Christian indie rock’s first big crossover star. His lyrics, Jessica Hopper wrote, “have a through-a-glass-darkly quality, acknowledging the imperfection of human understanding rather than insisting on the obviousness of an absolute truth.” But then something happened: Bazan lost his own faith....
Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process,” E.B. White once wrote. His words apply to The Room, an inept drama from writer-director-producer-star Tommy Wiseau that found instant cult status upon its release in 2003, earning the coveted word-of-mouth review “It’s so bad it’s good.” Ten years later, Wiseau’s costar, Greg Sestero, published a behind-the-scenes book called The Disaster Artist that chronicles his friendship with Wiseau and the clumsy production of The Room....
Video by Morgan Elise Johnson It began with an unsolicited e-mail—the kind of Hail Mary that artists send to radio DJs hoping for feedback or, God willing, a little airplay. In 2012 an 18-year-old south-side MC rhyming as Dreezy attached her new Mikey Dollaz collab, “Break a Band,” to a message addressed to Power 92 on-air personality DJ Nehpets. Nehpets couldn’t deny the track’s catchy hook or Dreezy’s microphone prowess—she crushes Dollaz with tireless speed and bravado....
Jake Ewald, best known as a guitarist and singer for Philly fourth-wave-emo heartthrobs Modern Baseball, launched this solo project under inauspicious circumstances a couple years ago—he’d hit a wall with the personal, almost diaristic songs he was writing for his main band. So he uprooted his imagination from the soil of his own day-to-day and instead populated a fictional town called Slaughter Beach, bringing it to life in euphoric, slightly rambunctious rock songs that make a beeline for the heart as surely as any Modern Baseball tune....
The fourth Run the Jewels full-length, RTJ4, is the hardcore rap duo’s first since Donald Trump’s inauguration. Not at all by coincidence, it’s also the most sociopolitically outspoken album they’ve released to date. On their third, released at the end of 2016, rapper-activist Killer Mike and rapper-producer El-P let poignant, sober lyrics about war, religion, love, and redemption shine through the cracks in their armor of car-bombing braggadocio. Their fuck-the-power attitude and rap-battle instincts also inform RTJ4, which features plenty of the group’s characteristic mix of John Carpenter-esque synth sounds, boom-bap beats, and trap rhythms....
John Snyder lays downs gnarly, surging, needling analog synthesizer tones alongside multihorn player Joe McPhee on The Willisau Concert, a 1975 concert recording originally released by Hat Hut and recently reissued by Chicago’s Corbett vs. Dempsey. The album, which also features the explosive drumming of South African Makaya Ntshoko, is a typically quizzical affair for McPhee, who’s built a career moving in and out of jazz orthodoxy while letting his curiosity and experimental impulses guide him....
