Ryan Lowry Members of west-side rap group M.I.C: Lil Chris, Mikey Dollaz, Lil Kemo Biggs 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 About Face Theatre Michael Urie 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.
Nothing bellows “PLAY BALL!” like a spicy tuna roll. At least that’s the case at Stella’s Batting Cages in southwest-suburban Lyons, where for most of its 31-year history batters at one of the 12 indoor fast- and slow-pitch machines sustained themselves with industrial-grade fast food: dogs, corned beef, burgers, fries, nachos, pizza puffs, a Reuben if you were fancy. His menu for the snack bar adjacent to the circular configuration of automated ball spitters riffs on the regional nouveau-signature snack foods of various major league ballparks....
Gaston Pauls and Hector Alterio in Tango Glories (Fermin) Tango Glories (Fermin), which opens the Chicago Latino Film Festival this Thursday at 6 PM, belongs to a genre of Argentinean cinema to which I’m especially partial. Light entertainment based upon the integration of improbable or supernatural events into the flow of everyday life, the genre has roots in magic realism literature and the surrealist filmmaking of Luis Buñuel. The films are generally sweet and lightweight, at times suggesting adaptations of daydreams....
The Chicago International Film Festival is now in progress at River East 21 and other local venues. Check out our feature on Rebecca Parrish, whose feature documentary debut Radical Grace screens at this year’s fest, and our festival roundup, with capsule reviews of two dozen features through Thursday, October 29 (including Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Assassin, Jacques Audiard’s Dheepan, Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years, Thomas McCarthy’s Spotlight, and Michael Moore’s Where to Invade Next)....
I’m all done writing top five lists for the Reader. Last week was my final week on the job, and I’ve had a lot of fun concocting these posts for the last couple years. Hopefully one or two of you enjoyed reading them. If you’d like to go back and see the others, they’re archived here. 3. Targets (1968) A low-budget, down and dirty film, partly made up of leftover footage from Roger Corman’s Napoleonic-era thriller The Terror....
Kristen Radtke’s new book, Imagine Wanting Only This, is less a graphic memoir than a graphic essay, which is odd to think about. Comics are concrete, with their pictures and word bubbles, and essays deal in abstractions. But then again, many essays also rely on juxtapositions, the braiding together of two or more separate narratives or ideas, so why can’t an essayist juxtapose words and pictures to tell stories and explore ideas?...
At 10 AM on Thursday, July 6, Chris Widman, Henry Self, Luke Stokes, and Joshua P. Ferguson will settle into the studio for WLUW 88.7 FM at Loyola University’s School of Communications—they’ll have to get comfortable, because they’re planning to stick around till 6 AM the following day. The DJs regularly appear on WLUW as the hosts of Abstract Science, a program that’s focused on the breadth of electronic music rather than a specific genre beneath that large umbrella, but their block usually takes up the last two hours of Thursday night....
Lorenzo Tassone Josh Zagoren (Chad the Bird) and Paper Machete founder Christopher Piatt will keep August’s newbies in line. On a Saturday in late July, Christopher Piatt, a bald gentlemen in a plain white T-shirt and a pair of sparkly studs, took the stage at the Green Mill to hilariously lip sync Betty Hutton’s jazz standard “Murder, He Says.” Piatt is the ringleader of the weekly variety show the Paper Machete, and he’s a pro at perfectly setting the tone for the next two hours of anything-goes performances....
AP Photo/Charlie Riedel Before I moved back here to Chicago, I was a reporter in Saint Louis for five and a half years. I worked for the Riverfront Times, the city’s alt weekly. A few months before I left, I wrote a story about Ferguson. Well, it was about a group of record collectors who wanted to preserve their 50 tons of 78s; Ferguson was where they happened to live....
I used to think the notion of a “guilty pleasure” was a contradiction in terms until I encountered Thrillist Chicago—I genuinely enjoy reading their lowbrow listicles and ridiculous guides (like the best public bathrooms to poop in). And sometimes, their guides are extremely useful, particularly Reader regular Mike Gebert’s rundown of local barbecue and Titus Ruscitti’s list of the best options for every type of Mexican food in Chicago. These are examples of two experts providing helpful, quality overviews of foods that tend to be overlooked by the majority of the local press....
Gwynedd Stuart “Food” by Olive Garden Would it surprise you to learn that there was a 45-minute wait for a table for two at the goddamned Olive Garden last Tuesday night? Despite a rave review out of the Grand Forks area—and at the risk of sounding like a snob—Olive Garden is not a very good restaurant. Even the investment firm that owns the place doesn’t think so. So why is this place so packed?...
There’s plenty to do in Chicago this week. Here’s some of what we recommend: Tue 2/7: Emo pop group Lemuria plays Subterranean (2011 W. North) tonight. Leor Galil writes, “Lemuria’s narrative ambiguity is as strong as their grasp of pop dynamics, and their choices reverberate beyond their songs.” 8:30 PM Thu 2/9: Author Dave Hoekstra and photographer Paul Natkin stop by the Book Cellar (4726 N. Lincoln) to discuss their book Disco Demolition: The Night Disco Died....
If you know Chanté Moore only from TV One’s R&B Divas LA, you’re seriously doing yourself an injustice. This chanteuse’s syrupy pipes gave black women everywhere a reason to love up on their man with the 90s anthem “Chanté’s Got a Man.” As one of the defining voices in female R&B, Moore later joined forces with legend Ron Isley and the self-proclaimed pied piper of R&B, R. Kelly, to create the 2001 cheaters’ anthem “Contagious,” where instead of singing her beau’s praises, she played the role of a woman whose husband has caught her sleeping with another man in their home....
For Latin American drug kingpins, there are few fates as terrible as extradition to the United States. Former DEA director of operations Mike Braun says of the typical extradited drug trafficker: “Once he’s convicted [in the U.S.], he knows he is going to be spending the rest of his life in prison. He’s not going to have access to a cell phone. He’s not going to be able to run his organization from the direct lines of the federal penitentiary anywhere in the United States....
Chicago garage-pop wonders Twin Peaks formed in 2010 and debuted at Riot Fest in 2013, the first year it took place entirely in Humboldt Park. The fest was beginning its rapid expansion, and organizers booked plenty of well-established locals—as well as a few, including Twin Peaks, who were beginning their own rapid rise. At the time, the band’s original members were all 19. If Twin Peaks were aware of the sound problems, they kept it to themselves, playing straight through their hour-long set with professional precision leavened by playful goofiness....
The Cubs’ Kyle Schwarber is the sort of instantly identifiable and prodigiously talented phenom who just seems to demand a nickname. Sun-Times sports columnist Rick Morrissey recognized as much earlier this summer, when he called out for submissions from fans. Yet the dozens of suggestions he got from readers were, by my way of thinking, pedestrian, foremost among them: the Hulk, Smash, Schwar Machine (Morissey’s favorite), the Hoosier Hitman (which at least has a classic feel), and Bamm-Bamm, which is actually somewhat akin to what I’ve been calling the Cubs’ slugging catcher-outfielder for a while now....
Q My son is 19, but due to some physical and social disabilities (mostly unseen), his emotional maturity level is closer to 14, though he is quite intelligent. After a lifetime of therapists, specialized education, and other interventions, he is now a freshman in college far from home. His dad and I are paying for his tuition, room and board, and books. He was expected to use his summer job earnings for personal expenses....
Orson Welles has invaded Chicago movie screens. F for Fake played at Doc on Friday; The Lady from Shanghai is currently at the Gene Siskel Film Center, alongside Carol Reed’s The Third Man; the Music Box‘s weekend matinee is Welles’s adaptation of Kafka’s The Trial; and the Northbrook Public Library, which recently resumed its screening series after a prolonged break, is showing Martin Ritt’s The Long, Hot Summer, in which Welles plays “a ceegar-chomping southern paterfamilias,” according to Dave Kehr....
On the morning of July 15, 2016, the first day of last year’s Pitchfork Music Festival, Netflix debuted the horror/sci-fi drama Stranger Things. Within a couple weeks the eight-episode show had become an inescapable part of the pop-culture churn. Somebody even set up a website where you could create your own version of its title card—big, bold neon-red lettering (the font is “Benguiat”), bracketed with horizontal lines and overlaid on the midnight blacks and blues of a barely lit forest scene....
