Nick Murway Freddy the Beard last Good Friday at Chris’s Billiards in Portage Park Late last fall, a rumor began circulating through the pool world that Freddy “the Beard” Bentivegna, the great bank shooter and one of the last of the old hustlers, had passed away; or, rather, that he’d been killed in a terrible car accident on the south side en route to visit friends in the Cook County Jail....
A whole book could be written on what happened in the Chicago comedy scene in 2015. And it wouldn’t be a short book—it’d be, like, the seventh Harry Potter book. Alas, the Reader has only so many pages. Goodrich Gevaart The trio known as Gnar Gnar Shredtown—Zach Bartz, Kevin Gerrity, and musical director Dan Wilcop—have turned the rules of improv on their head. Forget the three-beat structure that informs Chicago long-form improv—these guys take a suggestion and run with it until they’ve squeezed it dry, then move on....
Random House !!! The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon is the new One Book, One Chicago for 2014-15, Brian Bannon, the Chicago Public Library commissioner, announced at the Harold Washington Library earlier this afternoon. There was applause and also a whoop, which OK, came from me. And I tried to feel guilty about it because it was the library, but I didn’t really, because Kavalier & Clay is one of the most joyous reading experiences I have ever had, and the more people who experience that joy, the better our city will be....
A first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. “By the time I was 16, I was trying to reestablish a relationship with my mom. I was like, ‘If she can put down the drugs, maybe I’ll give her another chance.’ But when I was 18, my mom passed away. She was murdered by her boyfriend.
Chicago rapper Vic Mensa opens his new EP, The Manuscript, by confronting his audience’s expectations: the ambling soul track “Almost There” begins with the lines “This for all my fans that say they want that old Vic / I’ve grown too much to ever be that old Vic.” Mensa has been a known name in Chicago hip-hop for nearly a decade, which is all the more impressive when you remember that he just turned 24 this Tuesday—Fake Shore Drive founder Andrew Barber talked with Mensa last week to preview his as-yet-untitled forthcoming album, fondly recalling a 15-year-old Mensa flaunting his freestyle skills to MCs twice his age....
Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Monday, March 13, 2017. Immigration officials are now detaining deportees in Kankakee County U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials in Chicago have been holding deportees at the Kankakee County Detention Center before they are sent to Mexico. Until March 3 immigrants being deported to Mexico were held in suburban Broadview, which is closer to Chicago than the facility in Kankakee County. The change will “make better use of ICE resources,” an ICE spokeswoman told WBEZ....
Mary Ellen Matthews Jack White 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.
Mutual Benefit | 1:00 Artists’ names are in the color of the stage they’re appearing on. See our previews of the bands playing on Friday and Saturday. Pitchfork main » Diiv | 1:45 On 2013’s Sunbather (Deathwish Inc.), San Francisco’s Deafheaven launch black metal out of dungeonlike clubs and gray arctic wastes and send it screaming across a cloudless summer sky. Spindly tremolo picking and chest-rattling blastbeats piggyback on soaring postrock riffs that rocket toward the sun, while George Clarke’s larynx-searing shrieks reach desperately after them....
But a portrait of loss—something similar to the Job-like suffering Bruce conveyed in Steppenwolf’s Head of Passes last year—isn’t exactly what Gardley is going for. After Emmanuel’s funeral, the play veers off in another direction. Mary is shaken from the private contemplation of her sorrow by an encounter on the CTA with the ghost of civil rights activist Ida B. Wells (Jacqueline Williams), who in real life died in 1931. She gives Mary a quick pep talk and, apparently needing no further encouragement, Mary promptly hits the social-justice circuit, speaking at political rallies and debating right-wingers on radio talk shows....
A patio in summer is a beautiful thing. Chicagoans are so desperate to be outside on the few days a year when the weather is perfect that we’ll wedge ourselves into the chairs that certain restaurants cram between the sidewalk and the street—and consider ourselves lucky to have the privilege. Then there are the real patios, set back from the street, with enough room to move around. Logan Square already has its fair share of good ones, but at 6,000 square feet, the patio at Park & Field—a “vintage sports club” that opened last winter on Fullerton between Kimball and Central Park—is one of the biggest in the city....
In October 2012, U.S. Border Patrol agent Lonnie Swartz shot and killed unarmed Mexican teenager José Antonio Elena Rodríguez through a border fence while responding to an incident in Nogales, Arizona. According to an autopsy, Rodriguez was struck ten times in the back with gunshot wounds to the head and arteries. Prosecutors questioned why Swartz would remember details like throwing up and injuries to other officers yet fail to recall shooting at a subject....
Tonight at Thalia Hall Pilsen-based nonprofit San Jose Obrero Mission hosts Music to End Homelessness, a concert to raise funds and awareness for some of Chicago’s most vulnerable people. The goal of San Jose Obrero Mission, which was founded in 1981, is to provide a safe haven for families and individuals who struggle with permanent housing and work to improve their lives in the long term. Headlining the event is local jazz-folk wunderkind Ryley Walker, who’s been a favorite around the Reader for years now....
At Taste of Thai Town you can eat khao kha mu in what was once a holding cell. You can slurp tom kha gai in booking. And you can spoon up green curry and rice in a basement that once might’ve been reserved for cattle prodding and water boarding. Arun Sampanthavivat’s long-awaited second restaurant is a strange but karmically satisfying repurposing of the old Albany Park police station. Some two years in the making, it was billed as sort of a community center for Thai culture and an Eataly for Thai cuisine....
The publicly available catalog of Chicago R&B singer-songwriter Aaliyah Allah stretches back five years, to a song she recorded on GarageBand with just a USB mike; as she told Circus magazine in February, she didn’t know how to mix music in those early days, but that tune, the dreamy, slow-motion “Infatuated,” remains one of her favorites out of all the material she’s created. “It is probably the most raw, organic song I’ll ever be able to make,” she said....
This isn’t working for Donald Trump, and I’m concerned about him. No matter what he does he can’t stop running for president. Democratic rivals like Hillary Clinton saying “Hate is not an American value”; We’ve seen this before. It was episode ten, season four of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Mel Brooks, so sick of living with his hit Broadway show The Producers that he’ll resort to desperate measures to close it, casts Larry David in the lead part of Max Bialystock....
There are plenty of shows, films, and concerts happening this week. Here’s some of what we recommend: Mon 9/3: Prolific Chicago indie rocker Jason Balla expands his catalog with his new solo project, Accessory. 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, free. Mon 9/3: The Chicago Fringe Festival pares back to one week—what does it mean? Ultimately it means less shows, but several of this year’s still look promising. Times vary, Jefferson Park locations vary; see website, chicagofringe....
The most intense moment in playwright Young Jean Lee’s deliberately uncomfortable 2008 play, now being revived by Red Tape Theatre, happens in silence. Midway through the show, four out of the five members of director Wardell Julius Clark’s all-black cast step forward in a line. They point their gaze at the gallery—first one white face, then another, and yet another—as the house lights at the Ready’s 65-seat black box gradually come on....
Jimmy Fishbein Twista “I’m known for a certain tempo of music,” says Chicago hip-hop veteran Twista. The tempo is remarkably fast—after all, the man otherwise known as Terrell Mitchell landed in the Guinness Book of World Records in 1992, the same year he released his debut album, Runnin’ Off at da Mouth. More than two decades later and Mitchell is still at it—today he releases his ninth album, The Dark Horse....
