First it was Jorge Soler. Back when he played right field for the Cubs, he really liked the churrasco plate at Cuba 312. Soler told Javier Baez and Willson Contreras and Pedro Strop, and before long all sorts of Latin American players and coaches started hanging out at Billy and Jamie Alvarez’s Roscoe Village restaurant. Then they discovered the couple’s first restaurant, Taste of Cuba, in Lincolnwood, which served a more traditional, homier menu....
It’s time to plan the week. Here’s some of what we recommend: Wed 3/30: The Dad’s Basement DJs, Ryan Duggan and the Reader‘s own Luca Cimarusti, skip the punk, indie, and experimental to play solely classic dad rock at this dance party at the Slippery Slope (2357 N. Milwaukee). 9 PMThu 3/31: Author Katherine Don reads from her latest biography, Real Courage: The Story of Harper Lee at Women and Children First (5233 N....
Q: I’m a 31-year-old cis bisexual woman. I’m hetero-romantic and in a monogamish relationship with a man. We play with other people together. I’ve never liked giving blowjobs because I was taught that girls who give blowjobs are “sluts.” Phrases that are meant to be insulting like “You suck,” “Suck it,” “Go suck a dick,” etc. created a strong association in my mind between blowjobs and men degrading women. (Men take what they want, and women get used and called sluts....
This week the Gene Siskel Film Center is presenting new digital restorations of La Chinoise (1967) and Le Gai Savoir (1969), two films from a critical period in the trailblazing career of Jean-Luc Godard. Both are informed by the revolutionary fervor that had energized the French left in the late 1960s—this spirit is so central to the films, in fact, that today they feel like time capsules of a particular moment in political history....
Mon 11/13 The Reader‘s Peter Margasak writes of pianist and composer Vijay Iyer, playing Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s MusicNow series at the Harris Theater (205 E. Randolph): “Iyer and trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith will give the local debut of their stunning duo, performing A Cosmic Rhythm With Each Stroke, the centerpiece of their 2016 album of the same name. This shape-shifting seven-movement suite responds to an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Indian artist Nasreen Mohamedi, who often blends abstraction and architectural precision in line-based drawings....
Sun-Times Media Lyric Opera’s Kenneth G. Pigott pictured with his wife Jane in 2004 Lyric Opera announced today that free public tickets are being released for its star-studded concert honoring Lyric president and CEO Kenneth G. Pigott, who died last month. Pigott had been a member of the Lyric board since 1998, and had been president since 2011.
Kyle Froman Ian Spencer Bell performing Wallkill Solo, from his Elsewhere (2014) Last month I got to see the rock and cultural critic Greil Marcus, whose Lipstick Traces—recently described jokingly but aptly as “that book about how Johnny Rotten started the French Revolution”—was one of my undergraduate bibles. In honor of Marcus’s latest, The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in Ten Songs, the Poetry Foundation and the Old Town School of Music teamed up to present him with real, live former punks Jon Langford and Sally Timms of the Mekons, who sang and played and bantered at his side....
In 2014, when famous improvisers TJ Jagodowski and Dave Pasquesi relinquished control of the Mission, the duo’s theater, Tribune critic Chris Jones all but announced sketch comedy outside of the walls of the Second City to be dead. Comedian (and artistic director of Stage 773) Brian Posen‘s brainchild, the Chicago Sketch Comedy Festival, disputes that notion. This year’s fest features more than 180 different sketch groups, its largest lineup yet....
In Endgame, life is more than a “tale told by an idiot . . . signifying nothing,” as Macbeth puts it when he’s feeling blue. It’s also a tale told to idiots—and no one is listening. I couldn’t tell you what Kays hoped to accomplish by having Beckett’s existential clowns perform at a birthday party, unless it’s meant to be a kind of memento mori—the fly on the cake reminding us that all fun and games come to the same end....
Aimee Levitt Spoils of Hot “G” Dog (left to right): duck sausage, thuringer, Chicago dog, and fries Approximately two and a half weeks after DNAinfo broke the secret about Hot “G” Dog, word had spread sufficiently that the place was half full at four o’clock on a Friday afternoon. I feel like an ungrateful wretch for complaining about this, by the way, especially since, until I read the DNAinfo article a few weeks ago, I was in mourning for the juicy, garlicky Hot Doug’s thuringer, sure that I would never taste its like again....
It took me a couple of listens before I realized that Louisville singer Joan Shelley was tackling Nick Drake’s singular ballad “Time Has Told Me” on her new six-track covers EP, Rivers and Vessels (released as a benefit for the antipollution advocacy organization Kentucky Waterways Alliance). Shelley’s honeyed, weightless voice can express both pain and empathy; it’s so distinctive that her interpretations of songs have a tendency to utterly remake the source material....
Cheryl Mann April Daly, Dylan Gutierrez in Liturgy When the Cubs are more exciting than the ballet, it’s not a good thing for the ballet. And beautiful. That’s a high bar, but high bars should be a cinch for the Joffrey.
Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Thursday, September 28, 2017.
Waithe begins by introducing the ensemble’s disparate story lines. There’s the career-driven twentysomething who returns from the north side to his home turf to find everything amiss, the lazy stoner who shirks adult responsibilities, the middle-school student who auditions for the school’s musical just to impress a girl. All of them are contentedly following their routines. Brandon (Jason Mitchell), the aforementioned workaholic, is an aspiring chef angling for a promotion at a north-side seafood joint....
After Chicago pizza-rock garage ragers Party Bat called it quits, bassist and singer Chris Clark and guitarist Aaron Turney recruited drummer Michael Petrucelly to form Problem People in 2014. Shedding the zany antics of Clark and Turney’s previous project, Problem People swing straight for the gut with heartfelt punk that channels the melodic sensibility and rough-around-the-edges attitude of midwestern greats past and present, including Hüsker Dü, the Replacements, and the Honor System....
Michael Taus is back. Not that he was ever gone for long. But the veteran chef—who got his start at Charlie Trotter’s the year after it opened before embarking on a nearly 20-year run at Zealous—became a bit of a ronin when he closed that restaurant’s second incarnation two years ago. Oh, he’d opened Duchamp before that, but he was long gone by the time it closed the same year. Since then there have been a few low-profile consulting gigs (Da Lobsta and the ill-fated Coppervine), but Taus, by his own account, has spent much of his time traveling....
This past weekend saw the release of Captain Marvel, but Brie Larson isn’t the only superwoman of American cinema you can see on Chicago screens this week. Tomorrow at 7:30 PM at Northeastern Illinois University the Chicago Film Society will screen the 1932 drama Christopher Strong, which was directed by Dorothy Arzner, one of the few women to direct Hollywood movies between the 1920s and the 1970s. And at Chicago Filmmakers at 7 PM on Saturday, local filmmaker and educator Shayna Connelly will present an introduction to pioneering women filmmakers, incorporating clips by such key U....
The neighborhood clubs of Chicago’s south and west sides aren’t the incubators of blues talent that they used to be, but some artists on that circuit still have the potential to break out and establish themselves among a more general audience. One is vocalist Mzz Reese, a sultry alto who cites Denise LaSalle as her primary inspiration. Reese’s “Cookies,” a sexual throwdown in the LaSalle mode (“If you don’t treat my cookies right / I’ll be dippin’ someone else’s milk”), shares its title with her self-released 2015 debut album, and it’s already become her signature song....
One of the most distinctive characteristics of the west side’s Douglas Park is the rows of Chicago-style two-flats lining the perimeter of its 218 acres. Like many of the beautiful green spaces around the city, the park was created for the neighborhood that surrounds it—in this case North Lawndale, a predominantly black, blue-collar enclave. On any warm day, the concrete porches of these homes fill with families gossiping, laughing, and enjoying the sunshine while their little ones play in the big park across the street....
International record club Vinyl Me, Please has been surprising its subscribers with a different LP every month since 2013, and in 2015 it launched a parallel seven-inch series with a new gimmick: the records, which contain previously unreleased material, come with generic white sleeves and center labels that don’t identify the artist or the songs. Roughly 3,000 of the club’s more than 20,000 members (chosen at random) receive each one, and they gather on the Vinyl Me, Please online forum to try to figure out whose music they’re listening to each month....
