“Hard Times” isn’t just a 19th century Charles Dickens novel (or a 1995 album by one of my fave bands, Laughing Hyenas). The unfortunate events of the past few years have put a definite strain on resources for certain people, and with a long winter ahead, Chicagoans are finding themselves turning to each other for support. Cozy listens and reads for the weekend:
This week we were supposed to run a review of My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, a graphic novel by Chicagoan Emil Ferris about a precocious ten-year-old who becomes embroiled in the political turbulence of late 1960s Chicago as she tries to investigate the murder of her Holocaust-survivor upstairs neighbor. The reason we are not is because Fantagraphics, Ferris’s publisher, informed us last week that the entire print run of the book, 10,000 copies, is stranded on a cargo ship that has been seized at the Panama Canal....
My Friend Dahmer (which is now playing at Webster Place) takes place in 1978, and the movie evokes a certain type of filmmaking that flourished in the U.S. around that time—an improbable mixture of art house sensibilities and exploitation-movie content. Dahmer draws viewers in with a provocative title, which promises to reveal intimate secrets about serial murderer Jeffrey Dahmer, then refuses to deliver any details about his crimes. Rather, it’s a portrait of the killer as a young man—the movie depicts Dahmer’s senior year of high school and the events leading up to his first murder....
Q: I am at a loss. I am devastated. I just found out my husband has been sexting with another woman. As if that wasn’t bad enough, this woman is his first cousin! And this has been going on for years! I was on my husband’s iPad when I found their explicit chats along with requests for “visuals.” I went to my husband and asked if they had ever gotten together physically....
For the many of us who are still paying our fair share while corporations and the 1 percent stand around gawking gleefully (“How droll,” they chuckle as the rest of us squabble over minimum wage), we might need help understanding how much we owe. If you haven’t started getting your stuff together from last year’s wages, you better get to the IRS site and file for an extension posthaste. The official IRS website still has an open and fairly easy-to-use slate of tax information available....
The fourth and final part of this year’s countdown begins below. You can read about picks 40 through 31 here, 30 through 21 here, and 20 through 11 here. Marc-André Hamelin, Morton Feldman: For Bunita Marcus (Hyperion) Arek Gulbenkoglu, Three Days Afterwards (Penultimate Press) György Kurtág, Complete Works for Ensemble and Choir (ECM) Bellows, Strand (Shelter Press) Arca, Arca (XL)
During the women’s liberation movement in the 1970s and 1980s, lesbian activists played an integral role within both the feminist movement and the gay movement—but that legacy has largely been forgotten in mainstream teachings. A new exhibition at Gerber/Hart Library and Archives aims to change that. The initial concept for the exhibition was lesbian feminism in Chicago, but as time went on, the curators became more interested in the relationship between lesbians and feminism....
Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Tuesday, February 23, 2016. Antigun activist Father Pfleger gets the New Yorker profile he deserves Father Michael Pfleger has spent 40 years working at Saint Sabina, the city’s largest African-American Catholic parish, located in the Auburn-Gresham neighborhood on Chicago’s south side. The New Yorker takes a deep dive into the extraordinary antiviolence work Pfleger has done, and throws in some interesting facts about his relationship with Mayor Rahm Emanuel....
If you’re vaxxed and eager to return to movie theaters, I can’t imagine a better film to see this summer than In the Heights. Years before Lin-Manuel Miranda found earth-shattering success in Hamilton, he wrote and starred in In the Heights, the Tony Award-winning musical portraying New York City’s Washington Heights neighborhood and the people who call it home. On June 11, director Jon M. Chu (Crazy Rich Asians) brings the simultaneously grand and intimate story to the big screen....
When I graduated from Brookline High School in Massachusetts in 1989, my art teacher, Osna Sens, gave me an oversize monograph of Ivan Albright paintings as a present. I was a depressed, lonely kid whose only true outlet was painting and drawing. Perhaps Ms. Sens thought Albright’s ghoulish pictures might strike a chord. I didn’t know then that I would make Chicago my home, but Albright’s lurid, often nightmarish portraits were an early introduction to one of the more unusual artists our city has produced....
Earlier this month Moog Music announced that it would recreate three of the sophisticated modular-synth systems that made the company famous in the 70s. System 55, System 35, and Model 15, as they’re rather prosaically known, are straight-up battleships compared to most modern synths—enormous and heavy, with intimidatingly cryptic interfaces and solid walnut cabinets. Caldara: A Moog Mass was released by the Kama Sutra label in 1970, and many people on the Internet now assume it to be the work of a group named Caldera, in part because some editions of the LP misspell the composer’s name that way....
This year’s edition of “Noir City: Chicago”—the Music Box Theatre’s annual weeklong festival of classic and obscure film noir titles—started with a bang this past Friday night with a 35-millimeter revival of In a Lonely Place (1950), one of director Nicholas Ray’s greatest achievements. (If you missed the show, the film is available on DVD from the Criterion Collection.) Eddie Muller of Turner Classic Movies introduced the screening, shining light on how the film was a personal project not only for Ray, but for star Humphrey Bogart....
Q: Over the years, I have consumed what I believe to be an average amount of porn for a 44-year-old hetero guy. I have never paid for it, and I am now facing a troubled conscience for that fact. I could obviously just subscribe to some site or other now, but that would benefit only one company and/or set of performers. Is there a Dan Savage–approved charity relating to the adult film industry to which I could donate?...
When punk musician Neil Berthier sat down for a Better Yet Podcast interview at the beginning of 2019, he was halfway through a yearlong stint in Chicago; he’d moved here after a short stay in Nashville following the 2017 dissolution of his rambunctious, stylistically slippery New Orleans indie-punk band Donovan Wolfington. Berthier was still coming to terms with his band’s breakup when he talked to Better Yet host (and Reader contributor) Tim Crisp, even though he already had an established solo project, originally called Neil O’Neil....
By comparison to their 2014 All Our Tragic, the Hypocrites’ Aristophanesathon is a wee little thing: running just over four hours where its predecessor lasted 12, featuring six performers as opposed to 14, and, most significantly, pulling together a mere 11 extant plays by a single ancient Greek—way down from AOT‘s 32 by three. For all that, Praxagora turns out to be a poor peg to hang an epic on, in large part because Kate Carson-Groner never manages to establish her as a force to be reckoned with....
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. Arnold soon returned to Chicago, but when Prohibition ended in late 1933, bootlegging went with it. He became a full-time bluesman, and luckily, fellow musician Kansas Joe McCoy heard him and introduced him to producer J....
Our gig poster this week celebrates the second-ever Indigenous Peoples’ Day Concert in Chicago, presented by local promoters Sky People Entertainment and the Old Town School of Folk Music. Graphic designer and community activist Mereya Lachel Goetzinger-Blanco designed this poster incorporating an original artwork by Native American artist Frederick McDonald. Not everybody can make a gig poster, of course, but it’s simple and free to take action through the website of the National Independent Venue Association....
