Hi there 🤖 👋

One day last month, I took a noontime drive to Archer Heights to see who I should vote for in the Democratic primary for the 22nd legislative district: Michael Madigan or Jason Gonzales. I’m sort of torn on this one. I mean, on one hand, I could write a book about the dastardly deeds of Mr. Madigan, chairman of the state Democratic Party—his strong-arm election tactics, his law firm’s efforts to win property tax breaks for the rich (including, by the way, the owners of the building that houses Rauner’s old firm), his helping the state run up massive debt, and so forth....

Louder Than a Bomb and Young Chicago Authors alum Jamila Woods returns to the LTAB Festival to perform during halftime of the slam poetry finals on Saturday, March 21 at the Cadillac Palace Theatre. This year marks the fest’s 20th year of supporting young spoken word artists—Chance the Rapper is another successful alum—and the anniversary events are inspired by Muhammad Ali’s 1975 poem “Me. We.” “Each year we set a mantra that carries us into the fest and lives on to become a prompt for many of the poems,” says Young Chicago Authors Operations Manager Nicole Humphrey....

6/5: Hairspray Mon 7/9, 11 AM: The Iron Giant 7/31: WALL-E and Crash

Michael Gebert Nando’s Peri-Peri, 953 W. Randolph They were lining up on West Randolph street for the last day of previews at Nando’s Peri-Peri, the first Chicago location for a South Africa-based chain. Most of the people lining up when I got there at 1:30 PM on Tuesday were African-American. Was there a hitherto unknown fan base for the spicy peri peri chicken in Chicago’s black community? Maybe they were folks who knew it from D....

As drummer and musical director of Africa 70, Tony Allen was the rhythmic architect of Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat style. Last year the Nigerian drummer reinforced the malleability of his instantly recognizable approach with The Source, his first album for legendary jazz imprint Blue Note. Earlier in the year he dropped a digital EP on the label that featured interpretations of tunes by hard-bop outfit Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers, but for his full-length he fashioned a new project highlighting a dynamic blend of his stuttery, snare-driven attack with an agile, horn-rich nonet....

Mike Sula Paul Fehribach’s gumbo z’herbes Continuing our series of recipes from local cookbooks, today we address Paul Fehribach’s outstanding Big Jones Cookbook. Since the book’s publication, Fehribach’s talked quite a bit about its origin, and his role as researcher and keeper of Southern foodways. Broken into chapters by region—low country, south Louisiana, the Appalachian highlands, Kentuckiana, and the delta and deep south—with additional chapters on bread, cocktails, pantry staples, and charcuterie, it’s packed with unusual and tempting recipes and the stories behind them (salty sorghum pie, five-pepper jelly, benne oyster stew, reezy peezy, Antebellum rice waffles)....

Composer and pianist Vijay Iyer has taken advantage of his heightened visibility as a Harvard professor, MacArthur fellow, and ECM Records artist to pursue multiple projects, a puzzle of disparate interests that form an intriguing mosaic of his creative mind-set. While Far From Over (ECM), the debut from his agile sextet, certainly shares ideas he’s explored in his trio and in an old quartet with saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa (especially the ongoing influence of his piano mentor, Andrew Hill), it carves out its own driving, rhythmically limber space....

Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place. Older strips are archived here.

One of the art world’s most bizarre cases has been quietly playing out this month in district court judge Gary Feinerman’s courtroom, located in the Dirksen Federal Building in the Loop. According to expert testimony heard in court last week, if Doig owned up to this one, it would go for $6 to $8 million. Bartlow agreed that the painting did look like the work of Peter Doig (mostly because of some similar shapes), and Fletcher thought pictures he saw of the famous artist resembled the Doige he’d known....

Rage, a new thriller playing at this year’s Polish Film Festival in America, feels like a throwback to the cinema of moral anxiety, a movement of the late 1970s and early ’80s that used interpersonal stories to examine social codes and political forces inside Communist Poland. The film centers on an amoral journalist for an ultraconservative cable news network who suffers an attack of conscience over various personal and professional concerns, and Michał Węgrzyn, directing a script he wrote with Marcin Roykiewicz, shows how the journalist’s treatment of people at home and at work mirrors his engagement with the public....

Last month Moaning front man Sean Solomon told the record club Vinyl Me, Please, “I think we take a lot of influence from Abe Vigoda and No Age, but I don’t think it’s something people will necessarily notice.” He’s right in the sense that the LA postpunk trio sound like they could have emerged from any contemporary underground rock scene; their style befits any guitar-based genre that’s vaguely sad, or sharply employs effects pedals, or is something that people with little frame of reference for music might incorrectly describe as “goth” or “emo....

It may be a while before the sort of all-out raging rock show that’s so hot and packed you leave smelling like other people’s sweat is once again part of human existence, but Newcastle Upon Tyne five-piece Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs (or, more concisely, Pigs x 7) won’t let that feeling fade into memory without a fight. Formed in 2013, they mix heavy rock, metallic riffs, and a little spacey psych with ample amounts of weirdness and fun—they’re the sort of band you wish were a regular presence on your local circuit, whether you ordinarily listen to their style of music or not....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Monday, August 8, 2016. Chicago Public Schools layoffs include nearly 500 teachers Nearly 1,000 Chicago Public Schools employees, including almost 500 teachers, got pink slips Friday. The good news is that laid-off staff members can apply for the approximately 1,000 open jobs at other schools in the district. About 60 percent of laid-off teachers have gotten another job with CPS in the past, according to CPS....

What’s a resilient auteur to do when their movie flops? After her 1966 film Les Créatures—now finally available for home viewing in a new Criterion Collection box set—failed to engage critics and audiences alike, Agnès Varda took the proverbial lemons and made lemonade: she later used 35mm release prints of the film to create an installation called Ma Cabane de L’Echec (My Shack of Failure), a rough-hewn hut with translucent walls made out of the salvaged film strips....

We no longer have a mayor at my local coffeehouse. There used to be a guy—a genial Hal Holbrook type—who filled that unofficial position. But I hear he left in a huff when management changed the seating plan while redecorating. I don’t know who might become mayor next. Maybe the retired translator who chats up college students. Or the doughnut-eating Bernie supporter. Or the lean, fastidious man who reads poetry while breakfasting on zucchini bread swimming in honey, sprinkling wheat germ from the Ziploc bag he carries with him....

Daniel Ash is associate vice president for Community Impact at the Chicago Community Trust; Lolly Bowean is program officer for Media and Storytelling at the Field Foundation; Kathy Im is the director of Journalism and Media at the MacArthur Foundation; Channing Lenert is a program officer at the Polk Bros. Foundation; Andres Torres is Democracy Program officer at the McCormick Foundation. In fact, as the devastation of COVID-19 falls most heavily on lower-income communities of color, according to Pew Research, people of color rely on local news more than their white counterparts and turn to it more than any other source for coronavirus news....

Al Podgorski/Sun-Times Media It’s Madigan or nothing these days. We were having a grand old time of it talking politics at the Hideout—and everyone was almost civil, if not sober—when, of all people, our friend professor Paul Green felt compelled to have the following outburst: Our onstage guests this week—Mary Ann Ahern and Charles Thomas—had already offered their view of things when Green couldn’t resist jumping into the fray....

John Carpenter is a master of thrills. The legendary filmmaker and composer unnerves and titillates by fusing sight and sound—how the light catches a blade or outlines a breast, for instance, and the way heartbeat rhythms drive his bare synths. Because Carpenter’s horror and sci-fi movies establish a visual and emotional vocabulary for his music, the albums in his Lost Themes series similarly build up dangerous tension followed by resolution. That’s what makes his latest release, Lost Themes III: Alive After Death, surprising....

Louisiana-based guitarist and harpist Leslie Johnson got the nickname “Lazy Lester” in 1957, ostensibly because Excello Records producer Jay Miller thought it suited Johnson’s relaxed style, influenced by Chicagoan Jimmy Reed. But as primitive (or “lazy”) as that style might’ve seemed to opportunistic whites such as Miller (who also released virulently racist music on his Reb Rebel label), it proved commercially viable and artistically significant. In the hands of Lester and his contemporaries (including Slim Harpo, Lightnin’ Slim, and Lonesome Sundown), it evolved into the regional subgenre eventually dubbed “swamp blues....

By many accounts one of the smartest comedy acts to have emerged in Chicago in recent years comes from a man who first came to prominence by calling out then-candidate Trump’s anti-Muslim bigotry—at a Trump rally. That Arish Singh turned out to have not only correctly identified a key aspect of the presidential agenda early on, but to have maintained a sense of humor despite it, is rare. On Monday, March 4, he welcomes musician and videographer Basim Usmani to his variety show, Monkey Wrench, at the Hideout....