Paul Boucher The future for the White Sox: Avisail Garcia and Jose Abreu, after Garcia homered in August against the Orioles Chicago baseball fans who wish they could say that at least their team’s better than the chumps on the other side of town will have to wait till next year. The Sox have one of the best hitters in the game in Jose Abreu, who should be a unanimous pick for Rookie of the Year....
Rafal Olkis I Like Bike 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.
Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago.
Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago.
An all-star cast—Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Ewan McGregor, Chris Cooper, Julianne Nicholson, Sam Shepard, Dermot Mulroney, Juliette Lewis, Benedict Cumberbatch—pile aboard Tracy Letts’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play about a resentful family reuniting in small-town Oklahoma. Streep chews the scenery as the vicious, pilled-up matriarch, and Roberts (whose early career as a pretty woman has given way to a great sourness) gives as good as she gets playing the angry eldest daughter. The cloistered farmhouse setting, the surfeit of familiar faces, and the furious emotional pitch all contribute to the stifling sense of claustrophobia that’s so key to Letts’s writing (and which William Friedkin exploited so well in his adaptation of Bug)....
A day after dropping her challenge to Illinois comptroller and fellow mayoral candidate Susana Mendoza’s petition signatures, Cook County board president and county Democratic Party chair Toni Preckwinkle pivoted to fund-raising. In an e-mail sent at 9:33 this morning, Preckwinkle asks supporters to give her money after decrying the injustice of the incarceration of Tennessee woman Cyntoia Brown. The ActBlue landing page to which the link leads proposes donations ranging from $5 to $500, with a write-in box where, one assumes, the requested $3 donations can be entered....
Night Moves 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.
Jay Lynch and Skip Williamson, “two seminal figures of the underground comics movement,” as the Sun-Times described them in its obit Monday, died recently, 11 days apart. Each was 72. The late 60s was “quite a vibrant era,” she remembers. “The comix community was tightly knit. There was a real bonhomie kind of feeling, with Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman—they would all crash at our apartment.” “No,” says Wald. “He wasn’t nuts....
“Trump is going to make punk rock great again,” Amanda Palmer declared, speaking at an Australian folk festival last month. The sentiment is callous and somewhat clueless—Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar and many others were already making excellent political art, and we didn’t need to elect Trump to inspire them. But Palmer is hardly alone in her nostalgia: the present threat of Trump’s fascism has a lot of folks thinking about the antifascist music of the past....
The tango exists in the popular imagination as a sleek, sexy, intimate dance. Hollywood has helped. Films like Easy Virtue, True Lies, and Scent of a Woman all feature spiced-up tango numbers, as of course do episodes of Dancing With the Stars and So You Think You Can Dance. Barack and Michelle Obama went viral after cutting a rug with two tango partners during a 2016 state dinner in Buenos Aires....
Several of the most charismatic and skilled members of the veteran Romani music group Taraf de Haidouks have died since its last studio album from 2007, Maškaradă (Crammed Discs). For many bands the loss of such figures would be irreparable—and to be sure, I’m certain this ebullient combo from the Romanian village of Clejani lacks some of the fiery, magnetic stage presence it possessed when Ion Manole, Nicolae Neacsu, and Ilie Iorga were still alive and kicking....
I always look forward to the Chicago Underground Film Festival, not because the offerings are uniformly great—truth be told, they’re a total crap shoot—but because they’re almost always original. There are no remakes, sequels, or adaptations of best-selling young-adult trilogies; no TV spinoffs or video-game dramatizations or major motion pictures inspired by Funny or Die clips. The people who make these movies labor over them in bedrooms and basements, fretting and fussing over each frame, secure in the knowledge that they can tinker with their masterpiece forever because no one really wants to see it anyway....
Summer Ramen-San
Joshua Black Wilkins Justin Townes Earle On his new album Single Mothers (Vagrant), Justin Townes Earle seems to have shed his tendency to move from style to style with each song he’s recorded, settling, more or less, on a study hybrid of 60s soul and country-rock. On his recordings for Bloodshot, I enjoyed the way he moved around the musical map so restlessly because he always sounded like himself, whether trying on honky-tonk, gospel, or rockabilly....
Mary Vallon Limp Wrist stole the show at Fed Up Fest. Last weekend, at the corner of 32nd and Morgan in Bridgeport, a crowd of pierced punks with brightly colored hair and dark clothes could be seen smoking cigarettes, talking, and eating outside of Co-Prosperity Sphere, where Fed Up Fest made its debut. “This song is for anyone who had to deal with violence against them for being who they are....
VALERY HACHEVALERY HACHE/Getty AFP/Getty Images Dr. John plays the Chicago Blues Festival 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.
LAUREN BILANKO Insect Ark 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.
Kevin Winter/Getty Images for Radio.com Riff Raff 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.
