As I write this story Monday, Chicago waits with bated breath to see if Mayor Rahm Emanuel will muster the fortitude to dip into his precious TIF piggy bank and extract the few hundred million or so of your property tax dollars to give public school teachers a nominal raise and avoid another strike. Barring any late-breaking agreements, teachers have been told to strike come Tuesday morning at 6 AM....
It’s generally considered high praise to say that musicians have developed their own languages, but Audrey Chen and Phil Minton make nonpareil music by bypassing language altogether. Though their voices make all the sounds on the 2013 album By the Stream (Sub Rosa), there’s rarely a word to be heard. Instead they work with everything else a voice can do, wielding gasps, wheezes, coughs, belches, growls, gargles, gulps, snorts, and hums in wildly dynamic improvisations....
Last summer Cheer-Accident dropped Putting Off Death, their first album in six years. And they’re definitely alive—last Friday the long-running local art-rock squad released another LP for fans to get weird to! Fades (Skin Graft) features guests such as Sleepytime Gorilla Museum veteran Carla Kihlstedt, bassoonist Katherine Young, and vocalist Sacha Mullin, who lend their eccentricities to the tunes. The proggy new wave of “Done” sparkles with brass—trumpet, trombone, and “mouthbone” (aka leader Thymme Jones making horn noises with his face)....
During the fading final notes of “Big Plans,” the cloudy closing track on Jayaire Woods’s August EP, Woodside Lane, a coterie of the rapper’s pals shouts the song’s succinct chorus a cappella. Woods is such a skilled songwriter his most potent verses beg to be shouted out loud even when you’re not listening to his music (thankfully I’m usually in the privacy of my own home when it happens to me)....
Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, November 23, 2016. Garbage, oily rags started the massive Old Main Post Office fire It was hard to miss the massive fire at the Old Main Post Office that shut down the Eisenhower Expressway Tuesday. More than 100 firefighters were sent to the scene for a fire that originally started with a pile of rubbish and oily rags, according to the Tribune....
PATRICIA DE MELO MOREIRA/AFP John Kass weighs in on the Charlie Hebdo massacre Catastrophes happen and journalists feel they must respond, but a sense of obligation by itself doesn’t make us profound. John Kass writes about the Charlie Hebdo massacre in the morning Tribune and I’m not sure what his point is, but I write about it too on the Bleader and I don’t have a lot of confidence in mine....
Boudoir photographer Samantha Eppel’s shoot this past October was an intimate affair: just her client, her client’s friend, and a dozen North Shore triathletes. Ez Powers, a queer photographer who specializes in boudoir for all bodies, races, and genders, has also taken to staging shoots outdoors near their home and studio in McHenry County, although they had to curb the practice when hunting season began this fall. While Hansen was ultimately able to secure a Paycheck Protection Program loan and has since reopened, she says she’s still only shooting one person per day to allow time for sanitizing and disinfecting....
What a difference a couple of days makes. On Tuesday, the League of Chicago Theatres issued a statement to “reassure our patrons that all of Chicago’s theatres remain open for business.” But two days later, after Governor Pritzker and Mayor Lightfoot urged the shutdown of all public and private events expected to attract 250 or more patrons, theaters and other venues around the Chicago area, large and small, announced that they were either canceling or postponing their planned performances and other public events, including fund-raising galas and panel discussions....
Welcome to the Reader‘s weekday news brief. Chris Kennedy leaves gubernatorial candidate forum after Jeanne Ives makes “ignorant” and “stupid” comments about gun violence Democratic gubernatorial candidate Chris Kennedy walked off the stage of a candidate forum Monday, “criticizing Republican candidate Jeanne Ives for what he called ‘ignorance and stupidity’ after she said Chicago’s gun violence could be solved if more fathers stayed in the home,” according to the Tribune....
Twenty-six years ago, four-man suburban DJ and production team 20 Fingers teamed up with local rapper, dancer, and singer Sandra Gillette on a record that made them all hometown heroes. As 20 Fingers, Carlos “Charlie Babie” Rosario, Manfred “Manny” Mohr, J.J. Flores, and Onofrio Lollino worked primarily with Brookfield’s SOS Records, run by Chicago house-music impresario Frank Rodrigo. In 1994, Mohr and Rosario wrote the single “Short Dick Man” and quickly found a singer in Gillette, an old friend of Flores who was working as a receptionist and living in Berwyn....
Q: I’m a bi, white, married man—35 years old and living in a big midwestern city. I’d like to know what’s going on in my psyche—from a sex-research perspective. I’ve been hung up on cuckold fantasies with my female partner for years now. But nine times out of ten, I’m spinning a yarn about her fucking other men, whether it’s a threesome, cuckolding with me watching, or her going out on dates and coming home a delicious mess....
Houses have been disappearing lately on my Logan Square street. Last fall, a pile of rubble appeared in the space where a home had stood just a few days before. Soon after that, the building a few doors north of mine was gone. They were frame houses, like most of the others on the street, which lies just north of an area in rapid transition. Since 2013, construction workers have been turning what was once an abandoned rail line nearby into the 2....
On a chilly Sunday morning in mid-May, packs of leather-clad bikers descend on a field at the outskirts of the municipal airport in Baldwin, Michigan. From the hum of distant engines becoming a thunderous roar to the skull-print face masks and black balaclavas the motorcyclists wear to block the unseasonable cold—all of it evokes some portentous scene from Mad Max: Fury Road. But instead of a future desert wasteland, the setting is a drab midwestern winterscape....
The Back Room Deal features radio personality and longtime Reader political writer Ben Joravsky arguing local Chicago politics with Reader staff writer Maya Dukmasova. With sharp wit and stinging analysis, Joravsky and Dukmasova cut through the smoky haze of the elections to offer you a glimpse of the current Chicago races—ward-level and, of course, mayoral. Will these historic elections be determined in back-room deals, like so many in Chicago’s past? Let Ben and Maya talk you through it....
Mainstream pop audiences were largely introduced to country singer Maren Morris through last year’s smash hit “The Middle,” her collaboration with Russia-born German producer Zedd and electronic duo Grey. The song—which showed off her powerhouse vocals—went platinum certified in several countries. About a dozen singers, including Demi Lovato and Bebe Rexha, had recorded demos of the track before Morris was selected for the final version—which serves as a testament to her singular chops....
In late summer 2014, Dayton lo-fi kings Guided by Voices called it quits, bringing a sudden end to their four-year, six-album reunion run. But as any faithful follower of GBV and their fearless leader, Robert Pollard, could tell you, it’s gonna take more than the demise of Pollard’s main creative outlet of more than 30 years to keep him down. He’s been putting out records nonstop ever since, not just under his own name but also with a variety of other projects, among them Teenage Guitar, Ricked Wicky, and Circus Devils—and they’ve all been good....
This past weekend saw the Chicago release of Sunset, László Nemes’s first feature since his widely debated debut, Son of Saul. Regardless of how one feels about these films (which have inspired strong reactions both pro and con), their prominence in film discourse confirms that Nemes is the most internationally visible Hungarian filmmaker since Béla Tarr—which is to say he’s one of the few internationally visible Hungarian filmmakers working today, period....
Nao is a British singer whose music nestles in the space between neosoul and the new generation of alternative arty R&B. Her light, dextrous vocals have some of the texture of Billie Holiday, while electronic soundscapes on tracks such as “Another Lifetime” from 2018’s Saturn (RCA) suggest a mellower FKA Twigs. At times, Nao’s contradictory impulses leave her mired neither here nor there; “”Love Supreme” weds a Coltrane title to a default midtempo beat and banal lyrics about “palm trees and breeze....
Azeez “Laka” Alaka and Brandon Holmes have a clear vision for their production company, No More Heroes, even if their headquarters is still under construction. In November 2020 the friends and business partners bought a vacant commercial building on 19th near Douglass Park, and on an overcast May afternoon they lead a tour of it, explaining over the sound of power tools how everything will eventually be laid out. They point out the eventual locations of recording studios, common spaces, a grassy backyard for cookouts, and sets being built to resemble jails, hospitals, and courtrooms—which, they joke, will get you far in the world of rap videos....
Election season in Illinois brings the usual accusations of corruption, copious paperwork, and byzantine bureaucratic processes to get on the ballot. Here’s how a seemingly simple, constitutionally sound, taxpayer-dollar-conscious, efficiency-oriented state law can seed doubts about election integrity. Once petition challenges are received, the State Board of Elections keeps one copy of the objection on file at the Thompson Center (a place whose glassy postmodern architecture deliciously reflects the spirit of the winding, tubular state election bureaucracy), and transmits the original and the other copy to the designated local election board that will examine the validity of the objections....
