Between Obama’s enthusiasm for drone strikes and the widespread fear that the NSA is forever looking for new ways to murder our freedom, drones have gotten a bad name. There’s an easy way to fix that. “We call them UASes now,” says local drone—ahem, unmanned aircraft system—enthusiast Ryan Twose. And, yeah, there’s also the fact that operating a drone is fun. “It’s not an esoteric hobby,” says Twose. “It’s very hands-on and maker-friendly....
Julia Thiel The bar at the Brixton The space that used to house In Fine Spirits has seemed slightly doomed since the neighborhood favorite closed two years ago (the lounge, that is; the liquor store next door is still going strong). It was replaced by Premise, a pricey fine-dining establishment that lasted just four months before abruptly shutting down in August 2012. Brasserie 54 by LM quickly took its place, but didn’t fare much better....
Few record labels have been as committed to preserving and championing the legacy of saxophonist and musical visionary Albert Ayler as the Swiss label Hatology (née Hat Hut). Since releasing a stunning live recording Lörrach/Paris 1966 back in 1982—a collection of live material cut in the title cities, when the saxophonist was leading a remarkable lineup featuring his brother Donald on trumpet, violinist Michael Sampson, drummer Beaver Harris, and bassist William Folwell—the imprint has repeatedly issued various live and radio recordings Ayler made during his few European tours....
Courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art “Unbound: Contemporary Art After Frida Kahlo” Looking for something to do today? Agenda‘s got you covered. For more on these events and others, check out the Reader‘s daily Agenda page.
You could be forgiven for mistaking Electric Jungle for a gardening shop at first glance. Potted plants fill the windows of the new Rogers Park record store at 1768 W. Greenleaf, which opened without fanfare during the last weekend of July. The storefront is largely unadorned, though there’s a small green sign on the front door with the shop’s name and business hours. It’s open just a fraction of the week: 2-7 PM on Tuesday and Thursday, and noon-7 PM on Friday and Saturday....
One small consolation at this week’s National League Championship games: Chicago Baseball publisher Matt Smerge and his team in the mustard-yellow shirts were back on the sidewalks adjacent to Wrigley Field, hawking their alternative Cubs program, as they have through a slog of dreary seasons that preceded this year’s delirium. “I’m known as a depressive winner,” Smerge’s attorney Mark Weinberg said Wednesday of the preliminary victory, “but this time, I was thrilled....
The Summer of Flying Fish The Summer of Flying Fish, which begins a weeklong run tomorrow at Facets Multimedia, isn’t the best new Chilean film to play here this year. (Sebastian Lelilo’s Gloria remains the front-runner for that title.) Still, it reflects the present good health of Chile’s national cinema, as well as the growing number of female auteurs all over South America, one of the more encouraging trends in movies today....
The full lineup for this year’s Pitchfork Music Festival came out this morning. Joining previously announced headliners LCD Soundsystem, A Tribe Called Quest, and Solange are alt-rock icon PJ Harvey, west-coast rap phenom Kamaiyah, Australian sample masters the Avalanches, and D.C. postpunks Priests, among dozens of others. A handful of the returning acts (Danny Brown, Angel Olsen, Dirty Projectors) might suggest that the festival’s taste in contemporary “indie” music ossified a few years ago, but that’d be reading too much into too little—Pitchfork also continues to step outside its comfort zone, making booking decisions that don’t slavishly toe the line about what’s supposedly hip on the summer festival circuit....
Monsieur Verdoux On Friday, the Silent Film Society hosted a screening of Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid, accompanied by the Greensboro Symphony Youth Orchestra of North Carolina, at the ill-fated Patio Theater. Chaplin, of course, was a stalwart of the American cinema and one of the preeminent purveyors of the form. When he began making short films he had a fascinating working style, often constructing stories and images on the spot, revamping and embellishing those that worked and discarding those that didn’t....
Screenwriters are the great unsung heroes of Hollywood. Without them there would be no story to tell, no movie to make, yet some of the most ardent film buffs would be hard-pressed to connect such masters as Frank S. Nugent, Ernest Lehman, I.A.L. Diamond, or Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett with beloved movies they wrote (respectively: The Searchers, North by Northwest, Some Like It Hot, and It’s a Wonderful Life). If I rattled off the writers who’ve contributed over the years to the Planet of the Apes franchise, you’d probably draw a blank on all of them except Rod Serling—who was, of course, a TV personality, introducing his own and others’ stories on The Twilight Zone....
General director Anthony Freud got a laugh at Friday night’s Stars of Lyric Opera performance at Millennium Park when he noted that, as usual, the Chicago weather was perfect. Chicago Shakespeare’s Barbara Gaines is directing Figaro, and it’s a new production; it should be interesting to see what she’ll do with it. Friday’s concert version of the second act definitely whetted appetites for the fleshed-out show to come. Bass-baritone Adam Plachetka, in another Lyric debut, promises to be highly entertaining in the title role, and we’ll get to see (and hear) Amanda Majeski in something totally different from her dark triumph as Marta in last season’s The Passenger....
Hollywood thanks Mayor Rahm Emanuel for enriching by one its stock of justifications for the hero taking matters into his own hands. We can’t call the police! They wouldn’t believe a word we said.
William Friedkin’s Sorcerer (1977) I found it odd that much of the anticipatory buzz surrounding the rollout of the new restoration of William Friedkin’s Sorcerer (which I discussed a few weeks back) emphasized that this would be the first time that many viewers would be able to see the film in its original aspect ratio. True, all home video releases of Sorcerer have presented it in the Academy ratio of 1....
Jodorowsky’s Dune Lord Thing, screening next Thursday at Gene Siskel Film Center as part of the Black Harvest Film Festival, is a 1970 documentary about the Chicago street gang the Conservative Vice Lords, whose late-60s campaign to reinvent themselves as a positive social force in the city’s blighted Lawndale neighborhood was derailed by the first Mayor Daley. Chicago Film Archives has recently restored Lord Thing, as well as Robert Ford’s The Corner (1963), another documentary about life on the city’s west side; they screen on the same bill, along with a panel discussion to include Lance Williams of Northeastern Illinois University, Cynthia Kobel of Second Chance Initiative, and Benneth Lee of the National Alliance for the Empowerment of the Formerly Incarcerated....
IMAGE BY LEIF PODHAJSKY/ORIGINAL BAND PHOTO BY DAVID BELISLE Shabazz Palaces Looking for something to do today? Agenda‘s got you covered. For more on these events and others, check out the Reader‘s daily Agenda page.
Smino won’t let the world forget he’s from Saint Louis. Sure, he’s lived in Chicago for a few years now, assembling the Zero Fatigue collective with singer Ravyn Lenae and producer Monte Booker. But he spelled out his loyalty to his old hometown in a September interview with hip-hop blog Passion of the Weiss: “I lived 85% of my life in St. Louis, so definitely, I got St. Louis on my back right now....
