Posts

Update: Because Charles Joseph Smith has lost income due to the pandemic (the Fine Arts Building, where he teaches piano lessons and works as an accompanist, is closed), on April 11 he launched a GoFundMe campaign to help him afford to have food delivered. “Charles and I met through Chicago artist and oracle Angel Bat Dawid, who appears in the video,” says Moussavi. “Angel, myself, and our collaborators in Raw Music International have been working on a documentary together for the last year, and Dr....

When theaters closed their doors for COVID-19 in March, it looked like curtains for performing artists. With distancing guidelines in place for a virus with no cure in sight, an industry based on contact and physical presence was forced to retreat behind a screen—to video, video calls, and livestreams—where dimension and shared space is reduced at best to the illusion of shared time. In the absence of spaces verified by the lives of others, never has time seemed so fictional (“What is time?...

From Oliveira’s A Talking Picture (2003) It seems a little silly to mourn someone who lived to be 106 and remained an active artist up until his death, and fittingly, the obituaries for Portuguese filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira that have appeared in the last week feel less mournful than celebratory. In fact, the obituaries feel a little redundant. For some time it had been a critical cliche to begin reviews of Oliveira films—of which there were dozens in the past few decades—by mentioning his age and summarizing his biography: Oliveira made his first movie during the silent era, then remained sporadic in his filmic output until the end of Portugal’s fascist period, becoming a prolific director only in his 70s....

In the back of the parking lot of the Hobnob, a wonderful 62-year–old supper club in Racine, Wisconsin, a sign warns drivers not to plunge their cars into Lake Michigan. There’s something about the preserved-in-amber 50s-retro swank at this charming old chestnut—the off-angle arrowhead neon sign, the jumbo martini glass sloshing on the facade, the smooth stylings of house pianist Lillian Gildenstern—that makes almost everything that happens inside magic. Even the food, which under less enchanting circumstances would be considered thoroughly conventional—white-bread middle-American surf, turf, and potatoes—is likable at the Hobnob....

There I was in nothingness. Or at least in the 21st-century urban version of nothing: patches of forest thick enough to get lost in, tall prairie grass grazing my thighs, dirt paths without a destination. But on the horizon, a short distance north of where I stood, was the jarring juxtaposition of gleaming downtown Chicago—skyscrapers and condos and commuters. These were, of course, all facts I learned after my chance first journey to Rezkoville....

Q: I’m a 24-year-old nonbinary person living in Florida. I have two wonderful girlfriends. One I have been with for four years (we live together). The other I have been with for a year and a half. They’re both brilliant, interesting, and kind. Both relationships have their issues, but they’re minor. They know each other but aren’t close. Neither is interested in people besides me right now, although my longer-term girlfriend identifies as poly....

Like all die-hard music geeks, I live for the moment when I first hear a song so spellbinding it stops me in my tracks. One of the most memorable in my life arrived thanks to The Day the Earth Met the Rocket From the Tombs (Smog Veil), a 2002 collection of demos and live recordings by Cleveland protopunk legends Rocket From the Tombs. RFTT existed for just over a year in the mid-70s and imploded before formally releasing any music, but its members cofounded weirdo art-rock outfit Pere Ubu and the best midwest punk band of the day, the Dead Boys—both of which incorporated a handful of RFTT songs into their sets....

The Right Brain Project presents Nicky Silver’s sprawling 1995 tragicomedy about twin siblings trying to make peace with their past and with each other. Sebastian (Joel Collins) and Bernadette (Hannah Williams) meet at the cemetery after their mother’s untimely and bizarre death. They have been out of touch and are virtual strangers, but each is burdened by a host of unresolved traumas and resentments. For starters, he’s emotionally crippled after his lover’s death from AIDS 11 years prior, while she’s trapped in an unfulfilling marriage and has no discernible purpose in life....

Michael Gebert Matzoh ball soup at Frances’ Deli The state of deli food in Chicago—or, rather, the lack of deli food in Chicago—is a common topic of conversation among food enthusiasts. As recently as the 1960s and 1970s there were healthy deli scenes in Rogers Park and other parts of town, but when it comes to vintage places still going today—the local equivalents of Katz’s in New York or Schwartz’s in Montreal—the conversation tends to start and stop with Manny’s in the South Loop, in the area once known as “Jew Town,” which dates to circa 1949....

I’m in a great position going into indefinite isolation, because I get to read jokes, like this one from Malic White (@malicwhite), on Twitter all day, every day: “Any queer who makes it through quarantine without giving themself a weird haircut wins 9 lives.” While some people are avoiding social media altogether to keep themselves from having a panic attack, over the past handful of years I have surrounded myself with comedians on every platform....

Chloe Riley Juanita Irizarry, who’s running for alderman in the 26th Ward, stands outside her childhood home in Logan Square. The Logan Square Juanita Irizarry knew as a child is not the Logan of today. Growing up at the corner of California and McLean, she remembers the days when she regularly saw houses with fire damage—she says she’d later learn that banks had largely stopped lending in the area, and collecting insurance through arson was one way around that....

Los Angeles saxophonist and bandleader Kamasi Washington has achieved remarkable heights since dropping his triple CD debut, The Epic (Brainfeeder), in 2015. The lavish, often overstuffed album worked the early 70s spiritual jazz of Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders into ambitious, meticulously crafted new shapes, giving it a crossover appeal it hadn’t enjoyed in decades. Washington, who began paving his way by making cameo appearances on tracks by Flying Lotus and Kendrick Lamar, recorded the three-hour-long record as part of a month-long, group-funded communal session that according to a New York Times article from 2015 yielded seven albums among ten players....

Leonard C. Goodman is a Chicago criminal defense attorney and co-owner of the newly independent Reader. Contrast these images with Washington’s response to the cries of its major donors when, in March, the COVID-19 pandemic forced American businesses to shut down and workers to shelter in place. The leaders of both political parties quickly joined together to save the investor class by unanimously passing the CARES Act, whose 880 pages—clearly written by highly paid corporate lobbyists—bailed out big business (i....

I t’s fitting that writer Devlyn Camp chose to podcast the story of the Mattachine, the United States’ first successful gay emancipation movement. I spoke with Camp—yes, they know they have the best last name for this project—about the experiences and research behind this big, queer podcast. And this gay group was mostly white folks? When I read the arguments from genderqueer folks about having our own subculture separate from the outside [mainstream heterosexual] culture, I realized that was something I was fighting in myself....

ARTIST: Jake.PSD, aka Jake Reeder SHOW: Louis the Child presents Friendsgiving with Louis the Child, Cool Kids, Duckwrth, and John the Blind (on Fri 11/29) and Louis the Child, Kami, Duckwrth, and Ilo Ilo (on Sat 11/30), both at the Aragon Ballroom. MORE INFO: Jake.PSD

UPDATE Thursday, March 12: this event has been canceled. Refunds available at point of purchase. The Plano sisters’ updates about their lives, all delivered from Genevieve’s front porch, are stretched across space and time through smart staging and the telltale tones of their iPhones, the trill of FaceTime unmistakable (kudos to sound designer Eric Backus) as Anne and Genevieve check in with Isabel. She’s fled to Chicago to do the Lord’s work with women in need, while her two older sisters remain in Texas, worried about their husbands’ multiple personalities that haunt their homes and the streets of Plano....

The intersection of Michigan and Oak, at the north end of the Magnificent Mile, is a complex and intimidating junction. Here, Michigan is a massive seven-lane boulevard, while Oak is a broad, two-lane street with turn lanes, lined with pricey boutiques and luxury high-rises. To the north are on- and off-ramps for Lake Shore Drive as well as curving roadways leading to and from Inner Lake Shore Drive. At the northeast corner there’s an underpass leading to the Lakefront Trail and Oak Street Beach....

Paul Natkin Judas Priest, 1983 “Paul Natkin: Superstars,” the new exhibit at the Ed Paschke Art Center, marks the first retrospective of the Chicago native’s four-decade career in music photography. Featuring subjects as diverse as Miles Davis, Johnny Cash, Ice Cube, and Guns N’ Roses, each of the 21 photographs tells a story, some of music history, others of Natkin’s career milestones, and many of both. Another image, this one from 1982, shows Ozzy Osborne holding guitarist Randy Rhoads, then one of the most promising guitarists in the genre, above his head as the guitarist played....

There were supposed to be more of them. It was in the Plan. (You know which Plan.) But maybe it’s not so bad. Maybe we just need to do a better job of appreciating the diagonals we have. The paeans to Clark and Milwaukee and Archer are numerous. What about Talcott or Forest Preserve or Manor or McDowell or Vincennes or Exchange or Van Vissingen? For that matter, what about all the streets only masquerading as upstanding members of the Grid?...