UPDATE Friday, March 13: this event has been canceled. Refunds available at point of purchase. Throughout, the actors move purposefully through the audience, demanding prolonged eye contact, puzzling over these creatures who “like to watch.” Grif: “They have a name?” Isa: “America.” Through 4/5: Wed-Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 4 and 8 PM, Sun 2 PM; also Wed 3/11, 2 PM; no performance Fri 3/13; TimeLine Theatre, 615 W....
Lookingglass Theatre’s Thaddeus and Slocum: A Vaudeville Adventure certainly gets the vaudeville aspects right. When Lawrence E. Distasi—in a handlebar mustache and some turn-of-the-century spandex—did a handstand on the railing of the balcony, the audience let out a gasp, then cheered and applauded madly. Our collective amazement made it feel like we were all back in 1908, easily dazzled and filled with hope that the defending champion Chicago Cubs would win the World Series....
The multifarious outlets of Chicago experimental musician Maxwell Allison include the solo project Mukqs and the improvisational ambient trio Good Willsmith, whose Twitter account he uses to opine about music. His incisive comments on the granular details of his daily listening make it clear he’s had the experience of loving a song while hating how it’s marketed—which means he knew exactly what he was doing when he named his new solo full-length My Most Personal Album to Date....
The beauty of Ike Holter’s 2017 play about a young Latino seeking justice after being beaten up by a cop is how deftly Holter avoids the temptation of simple didacticism and instead turns a sensational incident into the catalyst for a complex morality tale. Over 90 taut minutes Holter presents us with a story full of flawed, deep characters. No one in the play is completely honest, and everyone’s motives are tainted....
Obama Community Benefits Agreement (CBA) | July 2020 from SoapBox PO on Vimeo. Five years ago, the Obama Presidential Center (OPC) declared its home on the south side of Chicago; it was presented as an opportunity to “revitalize” the area. Since then, we’ve been engaged in fierce community discussions about the economic impact of the center. For many essential workers who are unable to work from home, wages are often too low to afford rising rents in their neighborhoods....
Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Friday, October 7, 2016. Have a great weekend! Federal authorities arrest 17 people in human trafficking ring with Chicago ties The U.S. Department of Justice has arrested five Americans and 12 Thai nationals for allegedly bringing hundreds of women from Thailand to Chicago, Los Angeles, and other major U.S. cities, promising them a better life in the U.S. “Once in the United States, victims were allegedly placed in houses of prostitution, where they were forced to work long hours—often all day, every day,” the DOJ said in a statement....
In an October 2015 interview with hip-hop site WatchLoud, local rapper Jayaire Woods, who grew up in suburban Bellwood, talked about landing a gig he’d long wanted: “This was my dream job, too, being a mailman. This is a career I wanted, but music was the dream dream.” Less than two months later, Woods announced that he’d signed to Quality Control, an Atlanta indie founded in 2013 by Pierre “Pee” Thomas and Kevin “Coach K” Lee—the latter had previously managed southern rap heroes Young Jeezy and Gucci Mane....
That’s right, age 104. The premise of the film is that a boy is inexplicably born with a condition that causes him to age four years every hour; in other words, he’ll die within a day. A nurse, Jess, skillfully acted by Yale MFA grad Baize Buzan, kidnaps the child to ensure he gets the chance to experience the world outside of a hospital ward. From there Tom of Your Life is part road-trip movie, a leisurely drive through rural Wisconsin (farms!...
It was a dark and stormy night last Wednesday when the Evanston Library board met to discuss the fate of its long-standing used-book sale. You wouldn’t have guessed from the meager turnout that the cancellation of the quarterly event, and of the book-donation program that fueled it, has evoked some real passion in the community, especially among the volunteers who ran and staffed the sale, and worked year-round sorting a mountain of donations....
ARTIST: Jordan Reyes SHOW: Radiant Devices, Saajtak, and Jordan Reyes at Cafe Mustache on Wed 9/4 MORE INFO: instagram.com/jordan__reyes/
Jennifer “Nuky” Phạm, 37, helps run the Celebrate Argyle campaign and books musicians and artists at pop-up events for Haibayô, whose cross-cultural creative collaborations aim to energize the Asia on Argyle district. Phạm is a Chicago-born Vietnamese American and co-owns her family’s business, Mini Thương Xá Pharmacy. She also serves on the board of directors for the Uptown Chamber of Commerce and on the associate board for the Chinese Mutual Aid Association....
A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. Electric Wizard, Wizard Bloody Wizard Only time will tell if the new Electric Wizard LP will join Dopethrone and Come My Fanatics . . . in the doom-metal canon—as much as I like the bass playing on this one, I’d prefer less blues-rock and more evil down-tuned slop. But I’m just happy they’re still out there, trolling the pious hypocrites who have to believe in covens of satanic baby killers in order to maintain their self-serving persecution fantasies....
Gossip Wolf has long enjoyed the illuminating writing of Reader contributor, festival programmer, gallery owner, and record producer John Corbett. Every bookshelf should have copies of A Listener’s Guide to Free Improvisation and his crackerjack essay collections Microgroove and Extended Play. Last month, the University of Chicago Press published Pick Up the Pieces: Excursions in Seventies Music, in whose 78 chapters Corbett takes a characteristically kaleidoscopic view of the polyester-and-punk decade....
Though it came out in mid-December, too late to make most “best of 2020” lists, Megalophobe’s Music for Resistance Fantasies (Nefarious Industries) deserves to be remembered as one of the most iconic and painfully lovely summations of the year. Megalophobe is the New York-based solo project of Benjamin Levitt, and he recorded the album to accompany a dance performance choreographed by Marion Storm for the 2019 Brooklyn Exponential Festival. But released on its own more than a year later—without the dancers’ bodies to watch, and with many more bodies buried—Music for Resistance Fantasies feels like an overwhelming, droning eulogy....
When the present is a slog at best and the future seems aimed off the edge of a cliff, a pair of rose-colored glasses turned toward the past can be irresistible—at any rate, that’s how Brooklyn trio Nation of Language approached their debut album, Introduction, Presence. Powered by chockablock synths, hypnotic bass grooves, and the shadowy croon of bandleader Ian Devaney (imagine Frank Sinatra at golden-era Neo), the record exhumes all the 80s new-wave hallmarks worth reviving....
John Waters aptly expressed both his and my feelings about Pedro Almodóvar‘s latest film, Pain and Glory—among my favorites of the year and one of the Spanish iconoclast’s best works—when, in his annual top ten list for Artforum, the filth maestro himself declared it the “first Almodóvar movie to shock me.” Anyone familiar with Almodóvar’s work who’s not yet seen the film, now awash in award season buzz, can only wonder what Waters means....
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.
This lifestyle of always looking forward isn’t meant to be dramatic or radical. It’s a grounding practice rooted in Kaba’s identity and is why her passion for collaboration and growth flows so easily from one cup to the next. And yet, her newest book looks backward to the abolitionist’s decades-long fight for justice to meet the present moment. “[Kaba] is one of the most brilliant, incisive visionary leaders of my generation, of this moment, and also one of the funniest, most practical and kind, even though she likes to hide it,” Ritchie says with a laugh....
Singer-songwriter Johari Noelle lives in a South Shore apartment that’s filled with art. Colorful paintings—slices of nature, simple human figures, abstract symbols—cover the wall between her kitchen and living room, most of them her own work. They’re complemented on the adjoining wall by an array of black-and-white photos and several photography backdrops, courtesy of her boyfriend and manager, James McCarter. Noelle’s resumé includes acting, musical theater, and reality TV, but for the past 18 months, the 23-year-old Chicago native has focused less on bringing other people’s visions to life and more on creating a musical statement of her own....
In a darkened room, four overhead projectors snap on. A picture of a street in Bronzeville slides onto a movie screen. Behind one of the projectors, Jyreika Guest and Eunice Woods drop two paper cutouts onto the glass surface and move them back and forth. Onscreen, the silhouettes of two well-to-do white women circa 1950 stroll down the street. “Is this it?” they coo. “Is this where the Negro poetess lives?...
