No longer just a DJ set Local instrumental-heavy-metal unit Pelican is playing a just-announced show tonight at the Owl in Logan Square as part of Craft Beer Week. This avian-themed event is called Craft Beer Week Is for the Birds, and is a Goose Island-sponsored party that boasts a huge array of specialty brews and originally was to feature a DJ set from Pelican, a band that has at least one mega beer nerd in its roster....
Alexis Ellers Manifest Urban Arts Festival 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 The Silverman Group Brian Babylon hosts the Bronzeville Comedy showcase 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.
Two of the city’s most resourceful hospitality empires recently opened restaurants in response to the persistent ramen craze that’s swept across the nation, beginning with David Chang’s Momofuku Noodle Bar in New York City a decade ago. The fact that it’s taken that long for the Melman family’s Ramen-San and Brendan Sodikoff’s High Five Ramen to open their doors hopefully says more about the value of patience than it does about hopping on the bandwagon....
I was dismissive of the romantic comedy Sleeping With Other People when I reviewed it a few weeks ago, but a second viewing convinced me that I overlooked its more commendable qualities. I still find writer-director Leslye Headland’s arch dialogue distracting in spots, but I’ve come to appreciate the charming lead performances (by Jason Sudeikis and Alison Brie) as well as the ways in which the film subverts conventional rom-com formula....
One of the blessings of the human brain is just how much merciful work it does to soften the sharp edges of harsh memories, reconfiguring and rationalizing experiences through the lens of present-day needs and values. Take a step outside yourself, though, and critical moments past can appear so different as to be unrecognizable. Bright Half Life, Tanya Barfield‘s unsentimental yet open-hearted dissection of a five-decade-long lesbian relationship, hits rewind and fast-forward through time to highlight and reexamine the minutiae of flirtations, pillow talk, arguments, and conversations in a marriage that only reveal greater truths in hindsight....
The odds are slim that a better historical jazz release will surface this year than The Jimmy Giuffre 3 & 4 New York Concerts (Elemental Music), a mind-bending double CD collecting two previously unissued live performances by the reedist from 1965. The music dates from Giuffre’s lost decade, a period of time when almost no documentation of his playing exists. His fortunes took a tumble following the release of the brilliant 1963 album Free Fall (Columbia), a paradigm-shifting trio set made with pianist Paul Bley and bassist Steve Swallow that pushed the leader’s obsession with contrapuntal composition and improvisation to its apotheosis....
The result, though occasionally funny, is a genuine display of ugliness on both sides, and everyone involved spends the play alternating between exuberance and contrition over how far off the deep end they’re prepared to go for these two feet of dirt. Turning a suburban squabble over a property line into high art is for Zacarias a matter of making the land stand for something. By the end, the Butleys have become the frantic and unwitting imperialists who stole valuable property from the rightfully entitled if vaguely sharklike Del Valles....
On Monday, Mayor Rahm Emanuel sat down with graduate students at Stanford University’s business school to tell them what a wonderful job he’s doing in Chicago—as though his experiences would help them achieve their entrepreneurial dreams. In reality, CPS is hopelessly broke and Rahm has no clue how to fix the problem. That part of the talk has gathered all the notoriety. But it’s only a small portion of an one-hour talk....
The 1966 paella western The Texican starred Audie Murphy as a former Texas lawman on the lam in Mexico who rides back across the border to avenge his newspaperman brother’s death at the hands of the town’s crooked political boss, Luke Starr, played by a well-lubricated Broderick Crawford. Murphy’s character, Jess Garlin, who up until then was living easy with his Mexican girlfriend, is a good stand-in for the weird border cuisine that developed over the centuries among Tejanos, pre-Republican Texans of Spanish or Mexican descent....
Is experiencing music outdoors worthwhile if you can’t share it with those you love? Not to those guiding the Chosen Few Picnic, which began the way many great summertime activities should start—with a family barbecue. The original five members of south-side DJ collective the Chosen Few, who helped build the foundation for house music as teenagers in the late 70s, weren’t all living in Chicago by the late 80s, but they were in town together for certain holidays....
The Internet emerged out of the Odd Future collective in 2011, and with their R&B sound and charisma, they’ve effectively stood out among more than a dozen projects associated with the volatile hip-hop group. Much of the credit for their recent evolution goes to songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer Steve Lacy, who joined the Internet as a guitarist and vocalist in 2013, when they began working on Ego Death (which came out in 2015), bringing a refined ingenuity as co-executive producer....
Getty Images As The Trials of Muhammad Ali makes clear, Ali remains an inspiration all these years later. In need of a break from the utter madness of politics in Chicago, I went to see The Trials of Muhammad Ali, Bill Siegel’s brilliant documentary, which should have been nominated for an Academy Award but wasn’t. I saw it over the weekend at the Cultural Center. By chance, it’s playing tonight at the ShowPlace Icon (150 W....
Many of my Reader coworkers know that I have a somewhat amusing, mostly annoying habit of requesting that all our covers should take the form of Mad magazine fold-in covers. When I propose this in editorial staff meetings, it is under the assumption that it will never happen. Well, dreams do come true. This year, local genius Jason Frederick made his annual Pitchfork Music Festival B Side cover a Mad magazine-style fold-in....
Spies, Traitors, and Saboteurs: Fear and Freedom in America,” now up at the Chicago History Museum, is an exhibit with a provocative subject that’s hobbled by poor presentation. For example, a massive time line—inexplicably mounted on wavelike plastic bas-relief rather than a flat wall—takes up the long hallway at the entrance and immediately confuses the viewer. Walking back and forth along its span, it’s possible to trace the events chronicled in each of the exhibition’s sections, yet much more difficult to discern connections between them....
Michael Gebert Soul food cafeteria line at Morrison’s, 8127 S. Ashland The richest food cultures come from the people with the hardest histories, in which food was always a matter of immediate concern. That’s why you can’t go wrong reading a book about Jewish food (or writing one), and you won’t regret a minute spent with Adrian Miller’s lively, eye-opening Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time, which just won a James Beard Foundation award in the reference and scholarship category....
“One of the things I got from [Ernst] Borinski was that I could do anything I wanted to do, that I was a student comparable to any other student anywhere.” While Jim Crow laws were forcing segregation upon African-Americans in the southern United States, Nazi Germany produced more than 400 pieces of legislation severely limiting the public and private lives of its Jewish populations. The 1935 Nuremberg Laws deprived Jews of their citizenship; two years before that, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service ousted 2,000 German and Austrian academics, mostly Jews, from their teaching positions....
In spring 2015, keyboardist Jaime Fennelly drove to Milwaukee to meet with David Ravel, the curator behind the long-running Alverno College performance series Alverno Presents. Fennelly has been making drone-based music under the name Mind Over Mirrors since a few months before settling in Chicago in 2010, and Ravel had met him earlier in 2015, when Fennelly played the Alverno series as a member of the Death Blues project led by Milwaukee percussionist Jon Mueller....
Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago. Artist Ellen Nielsen and her kitty backdrop
