Shamis McGillin Chicago’s bike, the BLACKLINE At a Friday night release party, held in a warehouse next to Minimal’s West Loop office, the bike prototype developed by Chicago’s Oregon Manifest team was finally revealed to the public. Other standout features of the BLACKLINE include:
Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Tuesday, January 3, 2016. Happy New Year! Man shot to death by off-duty cop in Hermosa after a “verbal altercation” An off-duty cop shot a man in Hermosa Monday morning after a “verbal altercation,” DNAinfo Chicago reports. The man later died at Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center. The 57-year-old police officer was assigned to the Mass Transit Unit. The two men also had “a confrontation” that happened “a few weeks ago,” Chicago Police Department chief Eddie Johnson said....
UK alt-pop group the XX have built an empire out of monochromatic, minimalist movements. Their first two albums, 2009’s XX and 2012’s Coexist, both were seemingly capable of moving a mountain with the slightest of nudges, and they so successfully project a sense of intimacy that they’ve almost antithetically become a phenomenon that packs thousands into theaters. On January’s I See You (Young Turks) the XX augment their sound to fit bigger stages in the same way they’ve done everything else—subtly and skillfully....
Larry Busacca/Getty Images for MTV Charli XCX performs on a red-carpet stage sponsored by State Farm at Sunday night’s Video Music Awards. In 2008 I was assigned by a prominent music magazine to cover the MTV Video Music Awards for its blog. That might sound like torture to some people, but I eagerly accepted. I needed the money (probably the biggest reason), but I was also curious to witness the state of the delightfully obnoxious awards show....
Bored Reaching Bored seemed as easy as dialing 773-669-TURD. Bored styled an Albany Avenue sidewalk to resemble a Monopoly-board square, with a pair of to-scale green houses stuck to the pavement. Outside of Lula Cafe he installed a stack of wooden panels painted to look like Chance cards; the top card read Carissa, will you marry me? if yes, please advance one block south to the nearest church. A Community Chest card was more cutting: Go to jail for public douchebaggery....
Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago.
AP Photos George Will throws the ceremonial first pitch before a Cubs game in April. He was later unceremoniously dumped by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. If you’re a print media groupie with a long memory, you might remember that George Will won a Pulitzer Prize in 1977 as a columnist for the Washington Post. If you can’t get enough of the Sunday morning TV talk shows, you might know him as the regular on ABC’s This Week who last October jumped to Fox News, putting him, in his golden years (he’s 73), in company too cozy by half....
Lots of underground black-metal bands shun media attention: they refuse to grant interviews, maintain no online presence, conceal their members’ names, and hide their faces in photos (or simply make no photos available). I’ve long assumed that these bands just don’t want press—that they’d rather not deal with an influx of gawkers and rubberneckers eager to slum it among musicians with titillating reputations for occultism, misanthropy, or worse. Thoughtfulness characterizes everything about the face that False present to the public....
Hiroshima, Mon Amour One of the current programs at the University of Chicago’s Doc Films is a partial retrospective of work by the great French filmmaker Alain Resnais, who passed away in March. The series, which wraps up Wed 6/4 with a screening of the recently restored Je t’aime, Je t’aime; in advance of Doc’s presentation, the Gene Siskel Film Center screens the film on Mon 5/26, which gives Chicago moviegoers double the chance to catch one of the director’s rarest films....
Michael Gebert Plating venison, one of the few meats Mexico had before 1492 How do you make a seven-course Mexican meal without pork or beef, without limes, without garlic or onions? That’s the challenge that Rick Bayless’s Topolobampo just set itself—because Mexican cuisine had none of those things before the Spanish arrived and brought them. The result is that rarely do you feel deprived of anything in the meal—maybe only when the absence of dairy is most obvious, as with a boniato (sweet potato) puree....
Any book about a young girl growing up in a poor immigrant neighborhood in a large city sometime in the early part of the last century faces comparison to Betty Smith’s classic A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and usually suffers for it. Ronna Wineberg’s first novel, On Bittersweet Place, is no exception. The best and most powerful sections of On Bittersweet Place are the ones that concern Lena’s parents, Reesa and Chaim (aka Henry), who were brought together in an arranged marriage and whose loyalty to each other is frequently at odds with a fundamental difference in temperaments and the scars of their shared history: while he went ahead to America to earn money to bring the rest of the family over and fell in love with a beautiful, gentle, and Gentile woman, she was left behind with the children in Belilovka to face a war and a devastating pogrom....
Southern Avenue are named after the original Memphis address of Stax Records, and that tells you most of what you need to know about their sound. Their self-titled debut—on Stax itself, naturally—is a boiling retro-soul primer. Israeli guitarist Ori Naftaly can be a bit fussy, but at his best he plays dirty blues licks that would make Billy Gibbons smile from behind his beard. Drummer Tikyra Jackson keeps the beat crisp and soulful....
Two years ago, when the cabaret musical theater company Theo Ubique announced that it would be relocating a mile north from the No Exit Cafe in Rogers Park, its snug, hidden oasis-like home of 13 years, to Evanston, critics and fans alike poured one out for the beloved venue. Director Fred Anzevino and music director Jeremy Ramey’s company was largely distinguished by its exceptional use of the tight space, which they filled with illustrious voices and ensembles that befitted a significantly larger room....
Jason Van Dyke shot Laquan McDonald because McDonald threatened him with a knife, Van Dyke told a detective at the scene of the fatal shooting. In a second interview a few hours later, Van Dyke, the Chicago police officer now charged with McDonald’s murder, offered further reasons why he opened fire on the 17-year-old—including concerns that McDonald’s knife could be spring-loaded or could shoot a bullet. After McDonald fell to the ground, he “continued to grasp the knife, refusing to let go of it,” March’s summary says....
Patti Smith’s 2010 memoir Just Kids was about beginnings, her early years in New York when she and her artistic coconspirator Robert Mapplethorpe made art and explored the world and rose from poverty to rock stardom. In her newest, M Train, she’s still working and making art and exploring, but now she’s alone and grieving for the many things she’s lost: photographs, a favorite camera, a perfect black coat, a neighborhood, a coffee shop, her brother, Todd, and most of all, her husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith....
Neil Kirk Bryan Ferry 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.
ARTIST: Sarah Squirm SHOW: Helltrap Nightmare with Itsi at the Hideout on Sun 12/2 MORE INFO: sarahsquirm.tumblr.com
Chicago soul singer and karate instructor Doug Shorts might not have the audience he enjoys today had he not met Brian “Robust” Kuptzin in the late 2000s. As I explained in a 2013 feature on Shorts, the singer had put aside his decades-long pursuit of music stardom when he met Kuptzin, a rapper with releases on local hip-hop indie Galapagos4. They became friends while Shorts worked as a doorman at a condo building where Kuptzin’s girlfriend lived, and Kuptzin introduced Shorts to beat maker and record buyer Andrew Brearley....
