Every so often we ask you to show us something. This week it’s Michelle DiGiacomo’s medical marijuana card. As she placed the eyedropper in her mouth and administered a homemade tincture of marijuana, Michelle DiGiacomo felt a distinct pang of paranoia. Her hope for a life less painful now rests with the marijuana tincture she cooked up on her stove.
The teen sex comedy was once a major box office draw. During the 80s, movies like Porky’s and Revenge of the Nerds grossed millions despite the fact that most teen sex comedies told the same basic story. The formula was simple: male virgin seeks deflowering, preferably with the help of his hard-partying chums and at the hands of the community’s most desired woman. Armed with this familiar premise, whose roots reached back to English Restoration theater, a writer could forgo the usual story and character development and spend most of his time concocting gags and comic set pieces....
Matthew Lux’s Communication Arts Quartet September 21 Matthew Lux is the Kevin Bacon of Chicago music, connected to just about every important living player in the city. He’s been a key presence in local jazz, rock, soul, and dance-music circles since graduating from Lane Tech in 1991, but it’s taken him till now to release his first album as a leader. Contra/Fact (Astral Spirits) presents a brooding jazz quartet with trumpeter Ben Lamar Gay, drummer Mikel Patrick Avery, and reedist Jayve Montgomery, and tonight the band plays in its honor....
Courtesy the iO The Armando cast of 1995, the same year the iO’s Clark Street location opened With a major move right around the corner, iO founder Charna Halpern recently announced the final performance at the improv theater’s Wrigleyville location. Come July 20, everything will be packed up and ready for 1501 N. Kingsbury, a space that’s easily more than double the current theater’s size. But before starting a new chapter in iO’s story, a proper send-off is required for the hallowed halls that have been the stomping grounds of some of comedy’s most talented performers for nearly 25 years....
Curtain up on the Joffrey’s third season of Christopher Wheeldon’s Nutcracker, which resituates the popular Christmas ballet in Chicago during the 1893 Columbian Exposition. In his note to the program, artistic director Ashley Wheater quotes historian Peter Bacon Hales: “The White City is a utopian city, a model for redefining modern urban life.” However, Wheater doesn’t get to the end of the paragraph: “But it was doomed to decay and disappearance: its best hope ....
A couple weeks ago I DJed a Friday-night party before a friend’s wedding the following day. Even though I played various funk, disco, hip-hop, R&B, indie rock, and new wave, the song that got the most people excited and dancing was Lucinda Williams‘s 1988 song “Passionate Kisses,” from her self-titled album. That’s because it’s one of the best songs ever made, at least in its original version. In the early 90s Mary Chapin Carpenter covered the song and it landed on the Billboard Hot 100 (at number 57) and Hot Country Songs (at number four) charts, but her version is dumb....
ARTIST: Josh Davis SHOW: Unsane, Child Bite, Rash, and Bruges at the Empty Bottle on Sat 7/14 MORE INFO: deadmeatdesign.com
Don’t forget Ida B. Wells Wells lived in Chicago for many years, at 36th and King Drive, and became the namesake of the city’s first public housing development for black families. With the destruction of the projects her name was erased from the city’s landscape. For the last ten years, Duster has been fundraising to build a monument in Bronzeville to preserve Wells’s memory—often at the expense of her own identity, since most people want to talk to her only about her great grandmother and seem to overlook that she, Michelle, a writer and lecturer at Columbia College, is her own woman....
Al Podgorski / Sun-Times Media On the agenda for First Tuesdays at the Hideout this week: a reenactment of Bruce Rauner denying that he knows anything about any company he owns. In keeping with the stipulations of the Illinois Open Meetings Act, we’re posting the agenda for next week’s First Tuesdays show at the Hideout. So much to talk about. Sample lines: At some point, Natasha will be asked to discuss the general state of corruption in Illinois—a topic she knows much about, since she wrote a book called Only in Chicago, which is all about the Rod Blagojevich scandal....
ANDREA BAUER Adam Burke 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.
Krystyna Janda stars in Interrogation Tomorrow night at 6:30 PM Cinema/Chicago will present a free screening of Polish filmmaker Ryszard Bugajski’s period drama Interrogation at the Cultural Center. The film should hold special interest for anyone who attended the classic Polish cinema series at the Siskel Center in May and June, as Interrogation can be viewed as a coda to the era of filmmaking (roughly the late 1950s to the early ’80s) covered by that retrospective....
Dick DeMarsico/Library of Congress Sarah Simmons, a relatively unknown midwife, honored Dr. King by standing up to the mayor. To commemorate the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., Sarah Simmons decided to crash an interfaith breakfast and denounce Mayor Emanuel’s school policies. The interfaith breakfast is a command performances for civic Chicago that’s sponsored by BMO, Walmart, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, United Airlines, and several other corporate titans. Just saying . ....
To paraphrase Martha and the Vandellas, summer’s here and the time is right for sitting in the seats. Chicago’s conventional theater season may still (roughly) follow the September-to-June academic calendar, but festivals have burgeoned—along with outdoor Shakespeare—to fill up the warm-weather down period. For example: A physical theater festival called Physical ran here earlier this month, as did the Drekfest rotten-play competition. The three-day Abbie Hoffman Died for Our Sins performance marathon begins this Friday....
ARTIST: Tom Counihan SHOW: Sweet Figurines, Cells, Addisons, and Farewell Captain at Livewire Lounge on Fri 1/20 MORE INFO: tcounihan.com
Gil Leora There’s nary a coffee shop or bar in Chicago these days that doesn’t display the Windy City Rollers’ league poster in their window come derby season. Even those who have never been to a bout are well aware of the group of bad-ass girls who are slamming into each other on four wheels. Some people have even turned to derby as a recreational fitness regimen (OK, I’m totally talking about myself here)....
Courtesy Chicago Alternative Comics Expo CAKE 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.
Over his lengthy career guitarist Alan Licht has covered lots of disparate terrain, whether playing naif indie rock in Love Child or creating works of conceptual sound art as he did on his 2003 album A New York Minute (XI). He’s an inveterate explorer with a deep historical sensibility, and he also writes about music with impressive clarity and unfussy analysis, but he’s never allowed his knowledge and respect for the past to confine his own work....
It can be lonely at the top—particularly from the great heights of the unusual musical instruments known as carillons. Or so it seemed for Hunter Chase, the UIC graduate student who was one of only five people chosen to venture alone to the top of the 132-foot bell tower to perform at the Rees International Carillon Competition in Springfield’s Washington Park on Saturday night. Watching him play—it’s easy to see why that might be the case....
The big news about this year’s Chicago Blues Festival is that it’s followed in the footsteps of Jazz Fest and moved to Millennium Park. This should finally guarantee state-of-the-art sound, at least on the main stage at Pritzker Pavilion—the system there leaves Petrillo’s PA in the dust. The change of scenery seems to have had a salutary effect on the bookings as well—at the very least, they present more of a challenge to genre boundaries than those at some previous Blues Fests....
Keanu Reeves in John Wick John Wick, the Keanu Reeves vehicle opening today, probably has more in common with Carlos Saura’s dance films than with any other actioner currently at the multiplexes. The film is deliberately lacking in suspense. There’s no question as to whether the title character will triumph over the Russian crime family that ruined his life—Wick is presented as such an outstanding hit man that even other killers fear him....
