A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. Jamie is curious what’s in the rotation of . . . Midwest Straight Edge by Inclination Bystander – Bystander by Safe Inside Records Breaking Through by Bitter Truth NO ONE IS SAFE by TREASON
Anthony Robert La Penna Zombie Pub Crawl 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.
In 2014 defunct music blog Stuff You Will Hate predicted young musicians would begin a new wave of music called “soft grunge” by breeding Puget Sound rock with midwestern emo. Though some bands unintentionally took the idea to heart in their own blends of sounds, soft grunge has become more of a parallel Web-based fashion trend than a definitive musical movement that could put pop in a vise grip. That said, I imagine San Francisco band Culture Abuse could change things....
When Meghen Fueston and Lindsay Betland first crossed paths, they bonded over a pair of similarites. One, each hails from Minnesota—they met at a local show in which a Minneapolis band was playing—and, two, both aspired to own a vintage store. After realizing they shared mutual passions for thrifting and biking, they decided to join forces. Since they didn’t have the financial backing to maintain a storefront, they did what any pair of normal entrepreneurs would do: they bought a school bus....
So far, details about how the new administration plans to do this have been scant. On Friday, Graham hosted a one-minute press conference at Lodge 7 and didn’t take any questions. Asked by the Reader what his new media strategy might entail, Graham responded in an e-mailed statement through vice president Martin Preib, also newly elected on the Blue Voice slate: But the Reader‘s investigation didn’t just point a finger at the FOP....
The Pitchfork Music Festival is in its ninth year—tenth if you count the 2005 Intonation Music Festival, curated by Pitchfork—and its increasingly diverse lineups have earned it a reputation for eclecticism. The 43 acts playing Union Park this weekend range from avant-garde R&B to ethereal shoegaze, from raunchy rap to aspirational black metal, and from confessional indie rock to whatever you’d call Grimes these days. Many major summer festivals in the States have disappointingly similar lineups, sharing acts the way unchaperoned teenagers swap spit, but Pitchfork stands out—where else can you see Circulatory System, Deafheaven, Pusha T, Neneh Cherry, and Giorgio Moroder?...
High Five In my posts about this year’s Chicago International Film Festival, I failed to mention the Uruguayan drug comedy High Five, which played two Fridays ago at 4:20 PM. It was one of the more memorable screenings I attended at the fest, and not just because the young man sitting behind me wiggled his bare feet on the armrest next to mine for most of the show. As I’ve noted elsewhere, contemporary Uruguayan cinema excels in depictions of simple pleasures and routine drudgery, so it seems inevitable that a Uruguayan movie about getting high would take place on a sunny workday afternoon....
Rich Hein/Sun-Times Media Private investors continue to collect millions of dollars a year from Chicago’s parking meter system. The private company that controls Chicago’s parking meter system had another banner year in 2013, raking in $135.6 million in revenues from the public, according to an annual audit posted Friday afternoon on the city’s website. The mayor was right in the short run, at least. The audit shows that total revenues for Chicago Parking Meters LLC dipped slightly from the $139....
Michael Courtney Stan Douglas 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 Word of Mouth Music, Inc Human Feel 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.
In Dime Stories, a collection of 86 essays from his freewheeling Newcity column, artist-poet-writer Tony Fitzpatrick discourses on a wide range of topics: politics, movies, books, nature, guns, crime, art, history, comics, his dog Chooch, you name it. By design and by nature, the essays are highly opinionated, and Fitzpatrick has some strong, heartfelt opinions, rendered in often lovely and always frank prose. You’d be well served to dwell on the intricate collages that accompany each essay....
Since September 2013, Chris Anderson, a former floor manager at the Green Mill, has been organizing a monthly series that invites local jazz musicians to assemble new groups in order to play a classic and/or overlooked album in its entirety. During its run, his Jazz Record Art Collective project has expanded its range: though the bulk of the albums celebrated have been hard bop at their core, other installments have explored free jazz or more fusion-oriented work....
What are you afraid of? The dark? Dogs? Not making rent? White supremacists? Your own potential? Sickness and death? The chef, Rey Villalobos, was summoned from Art Smith’s Blue Door Kitchen, the Gold Coast mothership, where he’s chef de cuisine. But here he’s offering three squares a day instead of two, with weekday breakfast including juice, coffee, fruit plates, oatmeal, pancakes, and something called a “brown line wrap.” There’s hummus, kale chips, and kale-and-artichoke dip that will surely appease whatever loving God you believe is supervising your existence....
Many of the memorable experiences created by Lookingglass over the years have been triumphs of imaginative and physical scale—more often than not, the augmented kind—like Amanda Dehnert’s Eastland or Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses. This enchanting world-premiere Christmas pantomime is a decidedly different sort, one that resembles a music box: fastidious and deceptively compact and, despite its weight and elegance, ultimately a machine masterfully crafted for play and wonder. Four powdered wig-clad chamber musicians provide string, piano, and woodwind accompaniment to Hans Christian Andersen’s fable about a one-legged tin soldier (Alex Stein) hopelessly in love with a toy ballerina (Kasey Foster)....
AP Photos U.S. officials haven’t convinced Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki to create a multiethnic state—but maybe they should show him Ivanhoe. The ending of the 1937 Jean Renoir movie Grand Illusion gently comments on the absurdity of war. The fleeing French prisoners cross the border into Switzerland and the pursuing Germans lower their guns out of respect for the rules of combat: it’s improper to shoot your enemies in a neutral country....
Chicago seems like it’s luxuriating in a golden age of pasta. From Monteverde’s Sarah Grueneberg to Daisies’ Joe Frillman to Cameron Grant at Osteria Langhe, the number of chefs operating at the peak of eccellenza is astonishing. And yet is it really that impressive when you consider that the Chinese were eating noodles long before anyone else—and that, in terms of the vast universe of Asian noodle dishes, Chicago is years behind cities like Los Angeles, Vancouver, or Toronto?...
A still from The Field Nearly two weeks ago popular video site World Star Hip Hop released a documentary called The Field: Chicago (A Profile of the City’s Hottest Artists, the Violence That Surrounds Them, and the Hope Music Brings to Their Lives). World Star has helped expose rappers such as Chief Keef and Riff Raff to a wider audience, but it’s also gained a lot of infamy for hosting raw, user-submitted footage of real-world violence—a clip posted in late November showing a teen girl from Texas beating up one of her peers has garnered more than 22 million views (I won’t link to it, but this New York Daily News piece on the viral video can explain more about it)....
The recently released self-titled album from Portland’s trippy doom quartet Witch Mountain was one of my most-anticipated albums this year. It’s their fifth album overall, and it’s their first with new singer Kayla Dixon and new bassist Justin Brown (his playing doesn’t change the band’s sound as dramatically). Former front woman Uta Plotkin helped to lift Witch Mountain far above the average heavy schist with her soaring and roaring vocals; when she amicably left the group in 2014, her place by the mic wasn’t going to be easy to fill....
Toy Masters UPDATE: According to Chicago Filmmakers program director Josh Mabe, Lay and Landis are no longer able to attend this screening. The Chicago Cinema Society has been quiet since April, when the programming organization presented the Chicago premiere of the Italian art house horror item Across the River. On Saturday at 8 PM the group returns to Chicago Filmmakers to screen a work-in-progress documentary called Toy Masters. The movie chronicles the rise and fall of the He-Man and the Masters of the Universe franchise, which included comic books, multiple animated TV series, one laughably bad live-action feature, and, of course, toys....
Michael Gebert Tremaine Atkinson with a still at CH Distillery It takes a certain temperament to find happiness in a field where things often age for years. Tremaine Atkinson apparently has the temperament for distilling—his first try at a brewing business was in his twenties, and another quarter century (or two batches of 12-year scotch) passed before he cofounded (with his friend Mark Lucas) CH Distillery, just a couple blocks west of the Loop on Randolph....
