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.
Alex Wroblewski The “at least he’s not Rauner” candidate In 1986, Lyndon LaRouche candidates no one had heard of won the Democratic nominations for lieutenant governor and secretary of state of Illinois. “I will never run on a ticket with candidates who espouse the hate-filled folly of Lyndon LaRouche,” said Adlai Stevenson III, the Democrats’ nominee for governor, who formally abandoned his party, ran on a third-party ticket, and was clobbered....
Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago. Isa Giallorenzo
I don’t generally pay attention to ticket prices. I figure my job is to tell you what I saw at a given show, and how I took it, and leave you to decide whether it’s worth the gate. But Cascabel is a special case. This time around the main rate is $300. Which is to say, whoa. The fee may be justified on economic grounds, I don’t know. But on opening night it felt as if a psychological frontier had been crossed....
“One truism about contemporary life is that there are no more secrets,” a New York Times article declared in January. “In the age of selfies, sexting, Twitter, and Facebook, people are constantly spilling every intimate detail of their lives. Video cameras trace our every move; our cellphones know where we are at all times; Google tracks our innermost thoughts; the N.S.A. listens in when we dream.” Add to that a crop of new social networks—among them the much-hyped apps Whisper and Secret—upping the collective threshold of oversharing by encouraging users to anonymously and without discretion broadcast their most intimate, unfiltered thoughts to their friend groups....
Rosalie Schultz was just two years old when she began helping out with her family’s business, which printed and mailed industrial parts and price catalogs. Onlookers were awed as the collating wunderkind stuffed envelopes in a flash. The home business was a hike from Irving Park’s post office, so her father would hire neighborhood boys to haul mail in Radio Flyer wagons. When a large storefront in the ideal location—right next to the post office—was listed for sale, Schultz’s father jumped at the chance to make it the base for both his business and his family....
If there’s one place in town where it might be safe to choke on a chicken oyster it ought to be GreenRiver. That’s on the 18th floor of Northwestern Medicine’s Lavin Family Pavilion on the Gold Coast. And as you pass the hand sanitizer on your way to the elevator and up past the sterilized habitats of phlebotomists and electrocardiogram techs, radiologists, and ultrasound specialists, you’ll probably wonder what in the name of General Hospital was New York restaurateur Danny Meyer thinking by positioning his first midwestern upscale barstaurant—a collaboration with the fellows behind NYC’s celebrated cocktail bar Dead Rabbit—high up in a medical center....
In a little more than four years, Bric-a-Brac Records, which occupies a cozy storefront on the border between Logan Square and Avondale, has become a crucial part of the local creative community. Owners Nick Mayor and Jen Lemasters have accomplished this in part by hosting a bevy of all-ages shows featuring vital underground rock, punk, garage, and hip-hop acts from across the country and abroad. If for some reason you’ve yet to make it to one (and if you’ve missed Bric-a-Brac’s off-site shows too), the second-annual Scummer Slam is a great way to sample the types of sounds the store traffics in....
On Wednesday, I filed suit against the Chicago Police Department because of its refusal to release the police car dashboard camera video that shows an officer fatally shooting Laquan McDonald on the city’s southwest side last fall. The 17-year-old was shot 16 times, according to an autopsy conducted by the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office. The officer who pulled the trigger—his name hasn’t been released—has been assigned to paid desk duty....
Joe Martinez Jr. Oozing Wound Local thrashers Oozing Wound—whose second Thrill Jockey LP, Earth Suck, is due at the end of the month—have just unleashed a new music video for the album’s first track, “Going Through the Motions Til I Die.” Not only is the song a total monster, showcasing an even heavier, sludgier side of the band, but the video itself is hilarious, involving kidnapping, bloody murder, and bassist Kevin Cribbin reheating China Fast Wok on the the stove....
At a quarter to noon today, Riviera Theatre stagehands fired by Jam Productions earlier this fall inflated a giant rat outside the Old Town offices of one of the country’s last remaining big independent concert promoters. The workers hung a sign around its neck: “I was knifed by a ‘Jerry Mickelson’ slacker for being a union backer.” The stagehands say the 40 employees that Jam CEO Jerry Mickelson fired in September were let go illegally—they claim he was retaliating because they’d signed cards to authorize a union election....
Local band Stomatopod—named after the superpowered-punching mantis shrimp—will be celebrating the release of their debut LP, Air by the Ton, with a couple shows around town this weekend: tonight at the Hideout and Sunday, October 4, with a free in-store at Reckless Records’ Wicker Park location. Made up of Chicago punk staples, this trio, formed in 2013, features former Nerves drummer and soundman-about-town Elliot Dicks on drums, audio engineer Liz Bustamante on bass, and Pawner’s Society member John Huston on vocals and guitar, and together they hammer out an homage to the moody sounds of their 90s postpunk histories....
Vittoria Scognamigilio and Jacques Nolot in Porn Theatre One of the interesting things about Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake, opening at the Music Box this Friday, is that it’s not just a movie about gay cruising, but a movie that seems to take its structure from rituals associated with gay cruising. The film proceeds as a sensuous flow of events, where characters enter and exit the story with surprising casualness....
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With Donald Trump laying siege to America, Americans are scrambling to find creative ways to resist—in addition to marching in the streets, converging on airports, or thundering in rage till they turn blue in the face. Yes, abortion is currently legal. But if Roe v. Wade is ever reversed, Illinois is one of four states where it would immediately become illegal. State rep Sara Feigenholtz introduced a bill (HB 40) that eliminates the trigger language....
Woman, Demon, Human In a season of impressive retrospectives (of films by Alfred Hitchcock, Ernst Lubitsch, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Alain Resnais), the most eye-opening may be the series of Chinese opera films currently underway at the U. of C. Film Studies Center. Chinese opera remains relatively unknown to American audiences, the popularity of Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine and Tsui Hark’s Peking Opera Blues notwithstanding, making the series a worthy cultural lesson....
The first act of Lyric Opera’s new production of Siegfried is a triumph for director David Pountney, who’s put the four operas of Richard Wagner’s mythic, fairy-tale-like Ring Cycle into a self-consciously theatrical steampunk setting. There’s a big backstory. The Ring Cycle is a family drama, and its patriarch is Wotan, chief of the gods, sung (royally and on stilts) by bass-baritone Eric Owens. Years earlier, Wotan got it on with the earth goddess, Erda (mezzo-soprano Ronnita Miller); they had a child, the maiden-warrior Brünnhilde (she of the horned helmet and flying steed), who became his favorite daughter....
In press materials for his band’s new album, Whiteout Conditions (Collected Works), primary New Pornographers songwriter A.C. Newman refers to the cohesive sound of the record—for the first time since this Vancouver outfit formed in 1999, he’s responsible for all the material, not just most of it. Cofounder Dan Bejar typically contributes a few tunes to each release, his post-Bowie vocal style helping to vary the overall complexion, but when it came time to make Whiteout Conditions, he temporarily stepped down, preoccupied with recording a new album with his long-running project Destroyer....
In the Realm of the Senses Chris Marker’s Level Five (which screens again tomorrow at 6:30 PM at Columbia College) features a cameo by director Nagisa Oshima, who shows up to share his critical view of postwar Japan. Seen here in his 60s, Oshima comes off as an authoritative figure, delivering years of political thought in measured, lucid terms. This image of Oshima contrasts sharply with the one he projected in his 30s, when he was attacking the hypocrisy and conformism of Japanese society with one explosive film after another....
