In 2012 Rocio Vargas had a vigorous marijuana plant growing in her closet, and three more in her West Lawn backyard. Thanks to the advice of an arborist friend, she and her boyfriend were growing more weed than they could smoke. Against doctor’s orders he flew to Mexico to his late mother’s farm in San Luis Potosí. Vargas followed. “When he passed away I took a step back from my career,” she says....
Jason Brooks was coughing up blood. He couldn’t stop vomiting. Within hours, the first of several Brooks Golden memorial murals went up. The collaboration between Clam Nation, DIRT, Lucx, Nice One, and Nudnik on Milwaukee Avenue in Bucktown featured Brooks’s tag, 7ist, which continues to haunt walls and newspaper boxes all over town. Now there’s talk of a book, and in early August, THOR, along with muralist Jeff Zimmerman and others, plans to paint a memorial along the 16th Street viaduct in Pilsen, not far from the giant owl by Brooks that’s become an icon of the 25th Ward’s Art in Public Places initiative....
With the much-anticipated race between Governor Bruce Rauner and J.B. Prtitzker coming down the stretch run for November’s election, voters everywhere are looking forward to . . . Watch—even with all the excitement over the mayor’s race since Rahm threw in the towel and announced he wasn’t going to run for reelection—when it finally comes around to electing a new mayor, everybody will be talking about who’s the best Democrat to beat Trump in 2020....
Cheech and Chong in Nice Dreams As the third of July approaches, I’m reminded of one of the more satisfying double features I’ve attended, Doc Films’ pairing of John Carpenter’s They Live and Cheech and Chong’s Nice Dreams on Independence Day Eve 2010. The inclusion of Nice Dreams—and on a newly struck 35-millimeter print, no less—can be credited to my friend and exploitation-film historian Joe Rubin, who was on Doc’s programming board at the time....
Daniel Ash, former guitarist of Bauhaus, Tones on Tail, and Love and Rockets, recently told Kansas City’s the Pitch that he was inspired to take to the road again following a half-asleep 4 AM encounter with Motörhead’s “Ace of Spades” during which he felt his late old acquaintance Lemmy urging him to get his ass back out there. It’s really no more outlandish than anything else in his career—including his final attempt at a Bauhaus reunion, which ended fairly decisively after the 2008 album Go Away White (Cooking Vinyl)....
MOLLY SODA Molly Soda 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.
The constantly growing Riot Fest has just announced the newest feature to the punk-rock carnival that hits Douglas Park in September: the Riot Fest Speaks Stage, which features two days of spoken word, panels, and poetry. The highlight of the Speaks Stage happens on Saturday, September 12, when punk legend Henry Rollins moderates a panel with Damien Echols and Jason Baldwin of the West Memphis Three; they will discuss the latter two’s release from prison after 18 years and the impact of musical activism....
Saul Steinberg liked to call himself “a writer who draws,” but during the 20th century few draftsmen could approach his inventiveness. In his drawings, Steinberg‘s lines seem to reinvent themselves as they progress, zigging when you expect them to zag, or disappearing abruptly just as they appear to be gathering steam. In the Art Institute’s revelatory new show “Along the Lines: Selected Drawings by Saul Steinberg,” curator Mark Pascale has gathered 54 examples of Steinberg’s work spanning from the 1940s to the ’80s (given to the museum by the Saul Steinberg Foundation in 2013), and has presented an artist who’s always searching for the purest distillation of thought through the act of mark making....
Things don’t seem to have gone well for Logan Square’s Red Lion Grill—originally to be named the Red Lion Pub and Grill—in its first few months. First it turned out that the Red Lion Pub in Lincoln Park, which closed six years ago, was reopening (plans to rebuild the Lincoln Park Red Lion were announced in the summer of 2013, but presumably the owners of the Logan Square Red Lion were unaware)....
The crime drama Red Ink (2000) plays at the Instituto Cervantes this Thursday. On Thursday nightTomorrow night at 6 PM, the Instituto Cervantes continues its monthlong series of recent Peruvian films with Red Ink, a crime drama from 2000. Upcoming screenings include the historical drama Crossing a Shadow (2007) on 7/16 and the suspense film Double Game (2004) on 7/23. All screenings are free of charge. The 2010 Academy Award nomination for The Milk of Sorrow notwithstanding, Peruvian cinema hasn’t made much of a mark on U....
Last week, in a private “prescreening” at Columbia College, artist and photographer Nancy Bechtol debuted her first-ever documentary film: Free Speech & the Transcendent Journey of Chris Drew, Street Artist. To try to change that, Drew put himself on the sidewalk, distributing patches of wearable art for free (to avoid breaking the law about selling it) and explaining his cause to anyone who paused to see what this scruffy, bespectacled, pony-tailed character in the knit cap was about....
Matt Ulery Fri 9/19 and Sat 9/20, 9 PM, the Green Mill, 4802 N. Broadway, greenmilljazz.com, $12. In the last few years Chicago bassist and composer Matt Ulery has emerged as one of the most sophisticated, prolific, and versatile figures in town, leading the postbop quintet Loom and composing elegant chamber music for a circle of musicians including members of Eighth Blackbird and the singer Grazyna Auguscik—both of whom appear on his new album In the Ivory (the third of his LPs to be released on Greenleaf Music, the label owned by trumpeter Dave Douglas)....
An Adler astronomer’s ambitious new public outreach plan shoots for the stars by cycling to them. Symbolically, at least. That scale is logarithmic, meaning that each step is ten times as long as the previous one. If that sounds complicated, don’t worry, Walkowicz is ready to patiently explain it on the trip. At each of the seven stops on the eight-day journey (she’ll take a break in Normal to recover from a 70 mile-in-a-day bike-a-thon), she and the small Galaxy Ride team from Adler plan to discuss their logarithmic map at pop-up astronomy events using household materials like toilet paper, balloons, and string....
There are two primary ways to criticize Donald Trump’s presidency right now. They aren’t mutually exclusive, but they’re at odds. And both are showing up in the editorial pages of the nation’s newspapers. Consider Trump’s insistence that the only reason he lost the popular vote in November is that millions of votes for Hillary Clinton were illegally cast. He demands a full investigation. Some see this as a golden example of a president ruled by vanity and delusion....
The people of Chicago need to come to terms with the fact that they do not know almost anything about the art of pastry.” That’s what Natalie Zarzour told me in 2011, shortly before shutting the doors for good on Pasticceria Natalina, her superlative but notoriously dear Sicilian pastry shop. Among the dupes she lumped all but two professional pastry chefs in town and a handful of food writers, me included....
The Chicago Reader Presents The Margarita Trail – A journey to map the top margaritas in town! Gear up for Cinco de Mayo by traversing the El Jimador Margarita Trail. Visit ten different Chicago establishments for a series of hosted happy hours with some of Chicago’s best and brightest bartenders. Sip on custom-made Margaritas of all kinds and let El Jimador get you in the mood for Cinco. Happy hour times, locations, and bartenders: (Click links for bartender videos....
If you’re so desperate to sit in an air-conditioned room that you’ll see any movie in town, then you might take a forgiving attitude toward The Vatican Tapes, a forgettable horror film currently playing at a few Chicago multiplexes. I wouldn’t call Vatican a bad movie, just an exceedingly familiar one, rife with sequences you’ve probably seen in numerous other Exorcist knockoffs. The most surprising thing about it may be how serious it is, given that the director is Mark Neveldine—one half of the duo Neveldine/Taylor, who made the live-action cartoons Crank, Gamer, and Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance....
The family and friends of fallen cyclist Bobby Cann were outraged late last month when Cook County circuit court judge William H. Hooks sentenced motorist Ryne San Hamel, who killed Cann while speeding and drunk, to just ten days in jail. The video footage shows the moment when the two young men’s paths tragically crossed, around 6:35 PM. Cann appears as a small figure on his bicycle. Heading north on Larrabee, he slowly approaches Clybourn, then proceeds north through the intersection, through a red light....
