Posts

Welcome to the Reader‘s weekday news briefing. Durbin bringing a local medical student “Dreamer” to the State of the Union address Senator Dick Durbin is bringing a Loyola University Chicago medical student who’s also a “Dreamer” to President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address. Cesar Montelongo Hernandez, a beneficiary of President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, will attend the speech with Durbin Monday evening. “This young person who is going to be my guest runs the risk of seeing an end to their medical education because of the end of DACA....

Soon after Michael Ferro took over the Sun-Times, the paper ran a full-page picture of his son, Trey, throwing out the first pitch at a Cubs game at Wrigley Field. A few pages away, the same edition carried a picture of the entire Ferro family hanging out with the owner of the Cubs behind the scoreboard. This e-mail is also worth quoting. It was sent to Ryan and to editor Davan Maharaj....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Monday, April 4, 2016. City of Chicago employees banned from visiting North Carolina for city business In the wake of North Carolina’s controversial new anti-LGBT law, Mayor Rahm Emanuel is banning city employees from traveling to the state on business. He’s also planning to try to lure North Carolina-based businesses upset about the law to Chicago. It’s not yet clear how common city travel to North Carolina is....

South- and west-siders are more likely to find news coverage of their neighborhoods lacking. North-siders, meanwhile, tend to think local news outlets are doing an OK job. That’s according to a recent survey that asked 900 Chicagoans about where they get their local news and about their attitudes toward the coverage. The study was conducted by the University of Texas at Austin’s Center for Media Engagement and funded by the Robert R....

Analogue | Logan Square Last summer Analogue, the craft cocktail bar that’s gotten as much love for its Cajun menu as its drinks, opened a 30-seat back patio that will be back in action as of May 31. Hanging planters and lights soften the stark concrete with metal tables a bit, and the seafoam-green chairs are a nice touch. 2523 N. Milwaukee, 773-904-8567, analoguechicago.com. Cindy’s | Loop The view of the lake from Cindy’s, the restaurant and bar on top of the Chicago Athletic Association Hotel, is hard to beat....

There’s plenty to do this weekend. Here’s some of what we recommend: Tue 12/13: Black Contemporary Art blogger Kimberly Drew and artist-scholar Rashayla Marie Brown discuss photography in the age of social media at the Museum of Contemporary Art (220 E. Chicago). 6 PM Thu 12/15: My Love is Your Love at the Whistler (2421 N. Milwaukee) is a special edition of Slo ‘Mo, the dance party featuring “slow jams for homos (and their fans),” marking the final time cofounder DJ Tess spins as Slo ‘Mo’s resident DJ....

On his 1976 album Mother Earth’s Plantasia, composer Mort Garson captures some of the most inventive sounds and most radical notions of the mid-70s. Specifically, he made his goofy and endearing compositions solely on the relatively new Moog synthesizer, and he intended that they be played for plants to help them grow. Inspired by his wife’s houseplants, the work of Robert Moog, and a controversial 1973 book about plant sentience, Garson created a wholesome mix of sounds, including playful arpeggios, dainty melodies, and warm textures....

When British novelist Evelyn Waugh caught the first London production of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, he described it as “an intolerable Irish-American play about a family being drunk and rude to one another in half-darkness.” Sounds like your typical Thanksgiving dinner to me. The home is open to the public nowadays. Last summer, as a matter of fact, I took the tour, following an incongruously cheerful guide as she rattled off her spiel about the building’s history as a habitat for addiction and limitless sadness....

“I knew I was bound to get a few pictures in today, so I had to bust a fit,” admits Jason Bell Jr., a 19-year-old fashion student and entrepreneur from Bloomington, Indiana. Dressed in a coat handed down by his grandfather, he considers his style “a work in progress”: “clean and comfortable, like a dapper grandpa. It’s the thin line between old fashion and this generation’s style,” Bell says. The apparel merchandising student at Indiana University was in Chicago to direct a photo shoot for Urban Genius, a lifestyle brand he created in high school with friends Drelen Williams and Derreke Johnson....

This award-winning 2008 musical by Brian Yorkey (book and lyrics) and Tom Kitt (music) began its life as a 10-minute rock musical, Feeling Electric, that was inspired by a Dateline NBC story about electroconvulsive therapy. (One of the most moving parts of the show remains the dramatization through music and dance of how it feels to experience ECT.) Despite all the Drama Desk Awards, Tonys, and the Pulitzer, the show has not transcended its roots as a kinda cool, kinda experimental rock musical based on a kinda weird premise: getting in the head of someone struggling with bipolar disorder who eventually receives ECT....

Back by popular demand: The Back Room Deal features radio personality and longtime Reader political writer Ben Joravsky arguing local Chicago politics with Reader senior writer Maya Dukmasova. With sharp wit and stinging analysis, Joravsky and Dukmasova cut through the smokey haze of the elections to offer you a glimpse of the 2020 Chicago-area Illinois primary races—local and Cook County-level and, of course, U.S. presidential. Will these historic elections be determined in back-room deals, like so many in Chicago’s past?...

As Peter Margasak pointed out in his recent feature on Third Coast Percussion, classical percussion ensembles are a relatively recent phenomenon. So when someone writes a strong new piece, percussionists are liable to talk. “Ghost Music was written during 2007 and 2008,” explains Sargent. “I was working on several pieces for solo percussion and percussion ensemble around that time for ringing metal instruments and became especially interested in the sonic signatures of small bells: by listening to them struck in different orders for long periods of time, details of their sonorities started to have a real familiarity and causality in the ear....

Patrick Houdek Rad Payoff One of the more solid local punk releases from 2014 was Rad Payoff’s The Good, the Rad & the Ugly, which dropped back in March via Let’s Pretend Records (I actually wrote about in preparation for last year’s Ian’s Party). The album not only sports a blend of supremely gruff, uppercut-punch punk in the vein of Andy Falkous-sponsored projects like Mclusky and Future of the Left, it also promotes a weird, beer-and-weed-fueled vibe—or whatever out-there, masked/caped antics are occurring in the brand-spanking-new video for “Sunglasses,” which the Reader is fortunate enough to premiere today....

Michael Gebert Antique cars have only one place to go for a dog, Superdawg. One hot dog in Chicago towered over all the others. Actually two hot dogs, both towering over Milwaukee Avenue near Devon: Superdawg, the Tarzan-dressed 12-foot-tall hot dog with glowing eyes, and his skirted female companion. They were nicknamed “Maurie and Flaurie,” which by an amazing coincidence happened to be the names of the couple who owned Superdawg....

Oui Ennui, aka Jonn Wallen, is one of this wolf’s favorite Chicago artists to emerge during the pandemic—he’s been recording under that name for years, but after fearing for his life during a harrowing bout with COVID-19 in April 2020, he shifted into hyperdrive. He challenged himself to put out a record every month, and since then he’s released 17 albums and EPs of beautiful and delirious synth-based music. His latest full-length, May’s Occupe​-​toi de Tes Oignons, is a trippy house jamboree bustling with uplifting vocal samples and insistent, driving beats—the joyful “Faim de Peau” could set off any party....

“I call my style ‘SlightFlex,’ which means doing the most and nothing at all simultaneously,” says Corey Henderson, 29, a rapper whose stage name is Almighty Xanno. The Austin resident was photographed at the Jefferson Park CTA station on the way to visiting his brother in Des Plaines. Henderson breaks down the concept he created, explaining that “Slight” is for the subtleness of his outfit, and “Flex” is the color coordination that makes a look really pop....

Gossip Wolf was immediately smitten with New Canyons, aka Adam Stilson and Andrew Marrah, when they released their excellent sophomore LP, Everyone Is Dark, on BLVD Records in 2013. The duo’s deft, genre-bending songs swirl together synth-pop hooks and industrial rhythms and coat everything with a syrupy glaze of shoegaze-style atmospherics. In the years since, New Canyons have been pretty quiet when it comes to new recordings—the most they’ve managed was a brief burst of activity in 2017, which resulted in a single (with three remixes) and a stand-alone cover of Nirvana’s “Drain You....

The release of a new Quentin Tarantino movie is usually accompanied by press that invariably addresses whatever the provocative premise or subject matter of the film is, whether it’s the writer-director’s casual use of racial epithets (Jackie Brown) or his flippant treatment of World War II (Inglourious Basterds) and slavery (Django Unchained). But with the release of The Hateful Eight—like Django, a political western—most of the hubbub isn’t about the film, it’s about Tarantino....