Booker T. Jones, most famous for fronting iconic R&B/soul band Booker T. & the MGs, is a much more diverse musician than people give him credit for. A child prodigy who picked up an assortment of woodwinds and keys growing up, he became one of the most accomplished musicians in the Stax Records stable in the 60s, as likely to score a soundtrack as he was to introduce elements of jazz and classical music into Memphis soul....
On Wednesday, Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced a new initiative he says would help advance academic achievement in Chicago Public Schools: a requirement for all high school students to present an acceptance letter to a college, military, or trades program in order to graduate. Nowhere in the new initiate is there a plan to tackle this disparity, or to increase funding for crumbling schools—many of which are in such decrepit shape that principals complain about rat infestations while teachers are forced to buy basic supplies such as text books, pencils, and toilet paper....
On its surface, Tom Stoppard’s magisterial play is a jargon-heavy requiem for the Eastern bloc, oscillating scene by scene between the high-table gossip of a Cambridge Marxist academic named Max (H.B. Ward) and the tumultuous ordeal under communism of his hippie transfer student Jan (Julian Hester). Close to three decades in the saga of Czechoslovakia’s tug-of-war between the Kremlin and commercial capitalist hegemony play out at the grittiest level of detail: in Prague, Jan and his friends debate the viability of President Gustáv Husák’s normalization policies, while Max and others, in a dozen extremely dense English rows, weigh in on subjects ranging from physicalism versus innatism to Sappho’s papyri in the Ashmolean....
AP Photo/Mark Humphrey Glitches are only memorable when Russians are responsible. I’m not saying anyone made it sound like the biggest thing in the world, but when I google “Sochi opening ceremonies glitch,” Google promptly responds with more than 89 million results. “Sochi Opening Ceremony kicks off with Olympic ring glitch”—from Fox Sports
Fearing the final stages of dying from AIDS, a recording artist (Erik Pearson) gathers his closest musical colleagues to record an album inspired by his experience living with a terminal illness. Unbeknownst to everyone except his audio engineer (Benjamin Baylon), he intends for the performance to serve as his own artistic epitaph, a final love note to his friends and romantic partner, recorded the night before he plans to take his own life....
In the event that you’ve forgotten tenth-grade English, “the lunatic, the lover, and the poet” is a line from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a play by a certain William Shakespeare. Perhaps you’ve heard of him? It’s also the name of a new wine bar wedged into an increasingly restaurant-gunged Randolph Street. It’s a name so annoying I had to step away from the keyboard and command my dog to type it....
baseballhotcorner.com Wrigley Field: A great place to suffer for the past 100 years. I visited Wrigley Field for the first time on a Sunday afternoon in the spring of 1982. I was five and accompanied by my dad. He was a Detroit Tigers fan and I had no previous interest in baseball, but it was understood we would root for the Cubs because we were north-siders (well, northwest suburbanites), even though I secretly thought their opponents, the Pirates, had a better team name....
Celebrities gotta eat, so help feed them on The Taste If your idea of fun is listening to food writers tell stories embarrassing themselves, there’s a banner two days in a row coming up. Chicagoist editor Chuck Sudo will be among the lineup at That’s All She Wrote on Sunday, July 20, at the Savoy. And the very next night at Homestead, there will be a bevy of food people, including Fountainhead chef Cleetus Friedman, Molly Each, David Zivan, editor of CS magazine, Time Out Chicago and Sun-Times Splash contributor Samantha Lande, Kelly Aiglon of Red Tricycle, and ....
No longer do tourists make mere visits to Minneapolis to commune with Prince. Ever since the city’s iconic son overdosed in April 2016 at the age of 57, such trips have become veritable pilgrimages. The tourism bureaus of Minneapolis and Minnesota now prominently host itineraries on their respective websites, featuring points of interest such as First Avenue, the nightclub where Purple Rain was filmed; Prince’s childhood home on the city’s north side; and the downtown studio where he recorded his first demo....
It’s 50 years from now. Boston is an archipelago, Los Angeles is a bay, and New York is under the sea. But in Chicago, you don’t piss and moan about dibs on your street, rats in your backyard, or Cubs fans urinating on your porch. Those things are still aggravating, but you keep your trap shut because nobody calls us the Second City anymore. Compared to the rest of our continent’s erstwhile major metropolitan regions, we’re doing great, still high and dry above sea level....
Q: I am a straight, married, 38-year-old woman. My husband and I have two children. I have been with my husband for 12 years, married for six. Three years after we were married, we found out that he was HIV positive. We had both had multiple tests throughout our relationship because of physicals and the process we went through to get pregnant. Both of us were negative then, but only I am now....
Q: I’m a straight married man. My wife and I have a four-year-old and a three-month-old. We’ve just started having intercourse again. For Valentine’s Day, we spent the night in a B&B while grandma watched the kids. We had edibles, drank sparkling wine, and then fucked. It was amazing. After we came and while we were still stoned and drunk, my wife mentioned she was open to inviting others into our sex life....
You might be wondering why, in a year when so many high-profile bars have arrived—from Three Dots and a Dash in River North to the Dawson in River West, from Punch House in Pilsen to, oh, half of Logan Square—we chose to devote nearly half of our Bar Issue to the oral history of a centenarian dive in Uptown. To which we’d reply: Seriously? The Green Mill, as we all know, is as fashionable as ever—partly because of its pockmarked pedigree, partly because of its dodgy-but-gentrifying environs, and largely because so many new bars (we’re talking about you, Sportman’s Club) take their cues from joints like the one Dave Jemilo resuscitated 30 years ago....
This review contains spoilers. The convict and the lawyer are quite similar. Shigemori believes so deeply in the law that he’s sacrificed his life for it—early in the film Kore-eda reveals that the attorney’s wife divorced him and that his neglected 14-year-old daughter is becoming a delinquent. Shigemori realizes that he’s failed as a family man but makes little attempt to change his personal life; he’s too committed to the cause of justice....
When people think of prisoners, they often think of people who committed horrible crimes and deserve to rot away in jail. They’re less likely to think about the emotional, familial, and social consequences of long-term sentences, some as lengthy as 70 or 80 years. Other pieces in the exhibition include video interviews with inmates about the effects of long-term sentencing and another with a mother about raising a son who’s serving a life sentence....
Rapper Open Mike Eagle lives in Los Angeles now, but he grew up in Hyde Park and has family all over the south side. One of his aunts and several first cousins lived in the Robert Taylor Homes, which were demolished over the course of nine years beginning in 1998. Eagle’s most recent album, last September’s Brick Body Kids Still Daydream, is a touching, imaginative tribute to that housing project—after watching an hour-long PBS documentary about the Robert Taylor Homes called Crisis on Federal Street on a flight, he drew on archived government reports, YouTube videos, and his own memories to capture the feeling and meaning of life in Chicago’s public-housing high-rises....
On the Bowery 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.
Alto saxophonist Nick Mazzarella is one of the city’s most focused improvisers, a fervent student of jazz history and a staunch adherent of avant-garde tradition. He’s not a conceptualist. He likes form, function, and resolution, so at times he appears conventional within the context of Chicago’s shape-shifting jazz and improv scene. But with the release of Triangulum (Clean Feed) by his group Meridian Trio—a record beautifully recorded by Dave Zuchowski at the Whistler in January 2016—Mazzarella reasserts his versatility and presents a quiet brand of searching quite distinct from his past forays into the free jazz of Ornette Coleman and the sound sheets of John Coltrane....
ARTIST: Ryan Duggan SHOW: Leon Bridges and Khruangbin at the Aragon Ballroom on Monday, September 24 MORE INFO: ryanduggan.com
Back in 2008, when poets Shanny Jean Maney and Robbie Q. Telfer were spitballing about the creation of a live-lit show, they turned to an expansive source of inspiration: the encyclopedia. Starting with the topic “bears,” they assigned subtopics to writers, comedians, and musicians to build a live encyclopedia entry. After five years in Chicago, the Encyclopedia Show is down to its final two entries before the big book closes for good....
