Reaching into one of the Reader‘s bestickered yellow boxes this morning, you may have noticed something different about this week’s issue: the paper has been redesigned. Every few years, the Reader gets an itch to freshen up what we present every week to you, our dear readers. In 2004, the paper had its Wizard of Oz moment, transitioning to color after three decades in black and white. In 2007, the four-section broadsheet became a tabloid....
As fate would have it, Governor Bruce Rauner revealed his plan to fork over as much as $1.26 million a year in tax credits to ConAgra Foods at roughly the same time parents were packing a Board of Education hearing room to protest the latest CPS cuts in special education. This is the same Governor Rauner who says we have to obliterate unions in order to foster free, unfettered markets. I’m not sure how giving one corporation an edge over its competitors is fostering free markets....
Tron 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.
COURTESY ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO Stills from Zago Architecture’s XYT: Detroit Streets 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.
There are plenty of shows, films, and concerts happening this weekend. Here’s some of what we recommend. Fri 7/20-Sun 7/22: The Pitchfork Music Festival bolsters its usual smart bookings with a strengthened commitment to inclusiveness and community: this year’s lineup has more locals than ever, and more than half the acts include women. 11 AM, gates at noon, music at 1 PM, Union Park, 1501 W. Randolph, $75 per day, three-day pass $175, +Plus pass $375, all-ages...
A first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. “If we don’t keep it balanced, it goes off-balance, which means that the Ferris wheel itself balances itself out and corrects it, and it will shut down, and we have to reboot the system. It takes maybe about five, ten minutes. Usually people just think it’s a part of the ride, like, ‘Oh, it stopped so we can get a good view and take pictures....
Few configurations have produced music more starkly beautiful and quietly ruminative in recent years than Tyshawn Sorey‘s trio with pianist Cory Smythe and bassist Chris Tordini. Last month the group released its third album, Verisimilitude (Pi), and while superficially less grandiose than last year’s ravishing The Inner Spectrum of Variables, which added three string players to the fold, without reservation I would say it’s the trio’s greatest accomplishment. Two of the pieces were commissions premiered at the 2016 Newport Jazz Festival, so it’s not surprising that the aptly titled opening track “Cascade in Slow Motion” features Sorey’s elegant drumming, a dramatic, subtly surging presence that both lifts the simple, meditative figures elaborated by Smythe and offers a rich focal point on its own, mirroring the same sort tumble of sound voiced on piano....
The Bride Wore Black Today at 5:30 PM (and once more tomorrow at 6 PM), the Gene Siskel Film Center hosts a screening of Francois Truffaut’s The Story of Adele H. (It screens alongside Andrzej Zulawski’s horror classic Possession, part of a dual bill featuring films starring Isabelle Adjani.) Among a certain strand of hardcore cinephilia, Truffaut, a stalwart of the influential French New Wave, is very lowly regarded. True, he didn’t inspire the cult following of Godard or Rivette, or amass a filmography like Chabrol’s or Rohmer’s, but Truffaut played as crucial a role in the formation of contemporary film culture as any of his Cahiers du Cinema peers....
The Chicago International Movies & Music Festival, CIMMfest for short, returns for its sixth year this week. The festival’s hybrid schedule—which includes film screenings, concerts, panel discussions, and combination events such as live movie soundtracks and music-video showcases with live bands—has grown to a huge size, and this year’s tips the scales at more than 70 performances and at least as many films. On Sat 5/3 These New Puritans headline the Empty Bottle, while Indianapolis collective Joyful Noise hosts a concert at the Burlington featuring a solo set by guitarist Victor Villarreal of Owls and Cap’n Jazz....
Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Monday, April 17, 2017. More than 1,500 people call for end to gun violence during Englewood Peace Walk More than 1,500 people led by Cardinal Blase Cupich walked through Englewood Friday to call for peace on the streets. Joined by community leaders including the Reverend Jesse Jackson and Father Michael Pfleger, the group stopped periodically to read the names of Chicagoans lost to gun violence in 2017 and prayed....
Chicago rapper and New Deal Crew leader Chris Crack was fairly prolific, averaging three major releases per year, till last June—that month he put out Troll Till They Fold and then fell silent. He didn’t return to releasing music till last week, when he uploaded Nobody Cares (Thanksforlettingmebemyself) to Soundcloud. He’s formatted the mixtape as a single 36-minute track, with no information to identify any of the songs or indicate when they begin or end....
Michael Brosilow Caroline Neff and Zoe Perry 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.
A little more than two years ago I shared a track from the brilliant 1991 album Ask the Ages by guitarist Sonny Sharrock as a 12 O’Clock Track. It might seem excessive to post a different cut from that record today, but since the recording was reissued on November 13 (by M.O.D. Technologies, an imprint owned by bassist Bill Laswell, who produced the album and originally released it on his now-defunct Axiom label) I think there’s cause for doing so....
John Steinbeck intended East of Eden to be the book of his life. He planned to set down the story of his own personal origins for his two sons, and he meant that both literally and cosmically. Originally he called the book My Valley, and he intended it to unfold in alternating chapters that cut between his mother’s family, the Hamiltons, who arrived in California’s Salinas Valley from Ireland in the late 1800s, and their fictional neighbors, the Trasks, who embodied what he called “the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil....
Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago.
When Girlpool plays live, all Cleo has is Harmony and all Harmony has is Cleo. The Philadelphia-based duo (by way of LA) consists of just two players: Cleo Tucker on guitar and Harmony Tividad on bass. Both sing in harmony, and neither one sees any need for a drummer. No matter the size of the venue they play, Girlpool inevitably brings feel of intimacy to the space as they rattle through their growing catalog of folk-pop songs....
A composed plate featuring two rows of four perfectly aligned nachos shows up on the menu of Gemini, the second act for a long-running Lincoln Park neighborhood restaurant. Each of those well-behaved chips is piled with successively diminishing gobs of garnish, beginning with juicy duck confit, followed by a tiny, perfect square of melted chihuahua cheese, then a wee spread of avocado pico de gallo, a dribble of lime-infused crema, and a thin sliver of bright red chile....
Ryan Smith Over the past few weeks, in preparation for last weekend’s My Little Pony Fair, I watched a lot of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. It is, I discovered, a really good show. During that period, I also read a few extensive reports on rape at college campuses and the psychology of rapists, interviewed two rape victims/survivors, and saw on the news that a young white man had attended a prayer meeting in a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, and then shot and killed nine people he’d been praying with, including the pastor....
