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.
Excess wealth has always been a rich topic for comedy because the power to act on any material whim tends to expose and even foreground people’s foibles. Rollo Treadway, the lonely millionaire played by Buster Keaton in The Navigator (1924), is so spoiled he gets his chauffeur to ferry him to a house across the street. In the Depression-era fantasy If I Had a Million (1932), W.C. Fields and Alison Skipworth, whose treasured automobile has been totaled by a road hog, use a sudden financial windfall to buy a fleet of cars and purposely smash them into the autos of inconsiderate drivers....
Michael Gebert Iliana Regan with ramen noodles If you wanted to do something cool in the food scene at the moment, you could have a tasting menu, make doughnuts, hold a pop-up, or offer ramen. But the only person it occurred to to do all of those at once is Iliana Regan, whose Elizabeth will continue with its new chef de cuisine (as reported yesterday) while she prepares her “microbakery” Bunny for a spring opening in Lakeview—and she’ll use Bunny’s space after hours for a pop-up space called Wunder POP, which will host a variety of different concepts and formats over time....
Julia Thiel Welles Park Craft Beer Fest When the weather is nice, an outdoor beer festival is a magical place to be. When a steady, cold drizzle falls continually—as it did at Beer Under Glass, the May 14 kick-off event for Chicago Craft Beer Week—it’s a little less appealing. Fortunately, some of the beer was actually being served under glass this year, so it was possible to take shelter in the Garfield Park Conservatory and continue drinking (unlike last year, when ongoing repairs to the conservatory meant many breweries had to set up on the waterlogged lawn, earning the event the nickname “Beer in the Mud”)....
Late last month, a number of headlines carried news of Adolf Hitler’s genitalia: “Medical Records Reveal Nazi Leader Adolf Hitler Had Deformed Micropenis.” At this point, you might be saying, “Methinks the lady doth protest too much.” To which I’d reply, “I’m not a lady, I’m a dude, as evidenced by my unremarkably average penis.” My unremarkably average dick that is now irrevocably linked to Hitler—BUT OTHERWISE FINE, YOU GUYS.
The beginning of a new year is typically quiet as far as new music goes. Perhaps that should be expected after a holiday where the entire country is encouraged to stay up after their bedtime on a school night. Some folks in the local hip-hop scene haven’t gotten the memo, and since 2015 started genre-blurring Save Money duo Leather Corduroys released their debut full-length (Season) and ZMoney dropped another mixtape of mush-mouthed magnetism from behind bars (Green Dot)....
Last week local folk-rock outfit Minor Moon dropped their new album, An Opening, via the Midwest Action label. Singer-songwriter Sam Cantor weaves stately vocal harmonies and spacious arrangements around his ruminative, engaging melodies. Gossip Wolf is especially fond of the keyboard-saturated shuffle of “When You Notice (A Little Light),” which eventually bursts into a startlingly horn-heavy, almost jazzy outro. On Friday, February 15, Minor Moon will play a record-release show at Constellation with openers Niika and Storm Jameson....
June 25, 2012, was a terrible day for Jermaine Robinson. Overall, life was good—the 21-year-old Washington Park resident had been studying music management at Columbia College and was a few weeks into a job working as a janitor at a nearby Boys & Girls Club. But his 13-year-old neighbor had been killed by random gunfire the previous day, and Robinson spent the evening at an emotional memorial service. After the service ended around midnight, Robinson repaired to his girlfriend’s house on Rhodes Avenue to hang out with friends and to see his one-year-old daughter, he says....
Spend the long holiday weekend at one of Chicago’s goings-on about town. Here’s some of what we recommend: Sun 12/24: It’s Christmas Eve—time to get a jump on eating Chinese food and watching a movie (unless Christmas mass is your number-one plan). Our film department humbly suggests indie darling Star Wars: The Last Jedi. The Reader‘s Leah Pickett writes that this, the franchise’s eighth installment, ” . . . proves its worth with exhilarating action, well-developed characters, and moments of humor and emotion that director Rian Johnson balances better than any of his predecessors....
A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. You Won’t Get What You Want by Daughters The Temple of Murmur Defunct DIY venue the Temple of Murmur was the house in which my last holdout pastel choices in rebel radio were euthanized. It was also the house in which my first musical project, WHITEPHOSPHOROUS, was born. On a November evening in like-minded counsel, I played a set titled “First Horseman....
In Book Swap, a Reader staffer recommends two to five books and then asks a local wordsmith, literary enthusiast, or publishing-adjacent professional to do the same. In this installment, Reader digital managing editor Karen Hawkins swaps book suggestions with author, visual artist, and educator Xandria Phillips. Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity by C. Riley Snorton (University of Minnesota Press) is the book from 2018 that has continued to populate my headspace daily....
Recently, for more than a month, ex-Chicago Tribune editor Mark Jacob kept a vigil. Like many former, and even current, employees of the newspaper, he’d been among the harshest critics of the daily’s Rush Limbaugh-like conservative bloviator John Kass. As I had, they’d frequently called Kass out on Twitter for his cynical right-wing talking points and flat-earth arguments. After that, every few days Jacob tweeted at Kass, razzing him for failing to follow through....
This past weekend saw the release of John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum, the latest in Chad Stahelski’s immensely entertaining series about an unflappable (and endlessly pursued) assassin played by Keanu Reeves. These films are generally categorized as action movies, but for me their chief pleasure is their inventive and breathless fight choreography. (Indeed, in my capsule review of the latest John Wick, I compared the series favorably to Gene Kelly’s musicals....
Michael Schmidt/Sun-Times Jesus Garcia speaks outside the DuSable Museum before a recent debate. He pledges to hire a thousand more police officers if he’s elected mayor. A politician campaigns in poetry and governs in prose, Rahm Emanuel’s buddy David Axelrod likes to say. That maxim, coined by the late New York governor Mario Cuomo, is astute, but the “poetry” of a campaign is rarely the challenging type. It tends to be shallow and ingratiating—it’s designed to be music to the ears of voters....
Why would a successful jewelry designer—with a loyal clientele and her own line sold at more than 80 stores in the U.S.—sign up for the headaches of running a shop? “Love,” answers Sara McGuire, 45, the owner of Sailor, a boutique she opened in Ravenswood last fall. McGuire, who crafts her pieces in a nearby studio, became a jewelry designer almost 20 years ago while working as a graphic designer in New York City....
There are beignets for dessert at Gideon Sweet, Matthias Merges and Graham Elliot’s reunion of sorts in the Randolph Street space that once housed the latter chef’s Graham Elliot Bistro. And scene. Now he and Elliot have tapped chef Michael Shrader,* from the last spot (and Urban Union before that). Here he’s executing a menu that’s more Yusho-like than anything previously mentioned, featuring just more than a dozen small plates with a very slight Asian bias, fairly complementary to a beverage program developed by longtime Merges collaborator and Trotter’s vet Alex Bachman....
Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago. Street performer Joseph Taylor, of the one-man band Sax in the City, attributes his “neat, presentable” appearance largely to his wife, Annette. “I can’t walk out the door without my wife telling me what to put on. As she continuously tells me, I’m a reflection of her,” says the musician, also known as “Saxy Joe,” who usually performs on weekends near Willis Tower....
There was Mary-Arrchie Theatre, minding its own damn business, presenting works (including such recent hits as Greg Allen’s Ibsen’s Ghosts and Hans Fleischmann’s reimagined version of The Glass Menagerie, currently being revived by the Hypocrites) that pretty much epitomize the notion of storefront theater as practiced in Chicago, when all of a sudden artistic director Richard Cotovsky and his colleagues learn that the building they work in is going to be demolished to make way for a new development....
Your affection for Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty’s 1990 musical Once on This Island may well depend upon how much patience you have for narratives about young heroines who sacrifice all for the love of men who clearly don’t deserve them. (See also The Little Mermaid, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, etc., ad nauseam.) Based on Trinidad-born American writer Rosa Guy’s 1985 novel My Love, My Love: or, The Peasant Girl (which borrowed from Hans Christian Andersen’s fable), the great advantage of this show (book and lyrics by Ahrens, music by Flaherty) is its emphasis on communal storytelling....
