It’s kind of amazing, if you think about it, how many common experiences have never been described in fiction, even though they seem so obvious in retrospect. For instance, how many bookish girls have read the Little House series and desperately wanted to be Laura Ingalls, to be a brave and plucky pioneer girl and live in a log cabin or a hole in the ground and get to be around horses all the time and churn butter?...
I’ve recently been stuck on Tacit in Tact, the newest release from Options, a pop-centric, mathy fourth-wave emo band helmed by local multi-instrumentalist Seth Engel. Tacit in Tact is Engel’s first release of the year, but he’s involved in a handful of other projects—including screamo outfit Guillement and fourth-wave emo outfit Lifted Bells, which is fronted by Bob Nanna of Braid—so I knew I’d hear some more new tunes from him soon....
Getty Images/Keith Levit Photography RF Freedom Fest 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 Ginza Chicago Ginza Chicago 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.
Kyle Schwarber, the Cubs’ slugging left fielder, needs a nickname. TV announcers at the first playoff game against the Mets tried out “the Hulk,” which is lame. Reader alum Neil Tesser, the Grammy-winning jazz writer, tells me he’s heard other broadcasters trying to promote the “New Baby Bull.” First baseman Orlando Cepeda was the original Baby Bull half a century ago. Boxer Juan Diaz is the Baby Bull today. Back in the 1920s, heavyweight Luis Firpo was the Wild Bull of the Pampas....
A first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. “I was always in meetings. Always on the phone. You’re making sure that whatever vision the mayor has for the project you’re assigned to can be realized. Sometimes you’re a headache to people because you’re coming in with a change at the eleventh hour. Say the mayor was on a plane and he read in a magazine that Berlin was doing green roofs, so suddenly everyone has to plant gardens on their rooftops....
Q I’m a 25-year-old gay male into puppy play. About a year ago, I joined a pack with one Sir and several puppies. I became very close to one of my “pup bros” and became his alpha—meaning between the two of us, I’m more dom but still sub to our Sir. Fast-forward nine months, and the pack has fallen apart due to each of us going through our own relationship troubles....
Most of the features in contention for the Academy Awards have been screening in town for months, but this week brings your first (and, in some cases, probably your last) chance to see the nominated short films. Music Box screens the best documentary shorts in two different programs, and Landmark’s Century Centre presents the best live-action and animated shorts. I confess that I look forward most to the animations, if only because they tend to be a little more adult than the nominees for best animated feature....
Mark Bailey and Ed Hemingway’s collection of cocktail recipes 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.
Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago.
In my capsule review, I describe the found-footage documentary Propaganda (which screens at the Gene Siskel Film Center tomorrow at 5:30 PM and on Tuesday at 8:30 PM) as “a provocative thought experiment,” which is another way of saying I enjoyed reflecting on the movie more than I enjoyed watching it. Propaganda is presented as a North Korean “educational video” about the evils of western capitalist societies. Crude-looking and blunt in its narration, it contains no winks to the audience hinting that it’s a forgery....
Let Sleeping Corpses Lie Among the mass of Halloween-related revival screenings hitting the city this week, the lone zombie feature—aside from those showing as part of the Music Box of Horrors—is Zombie 4: After Death, the conveniently titled 1989 Italian film that doesn’t actually have anything to do with the Zombi franchise. Zombie movies are a fixture of Halloween programming, so it’s kinda surprising that barely any are playing in the city, especially as theaters like the Logan and Music Box get into the season....
There was no obvious moment when the torch passed during host Jeremy Scahill’s interview with Seymour Hersh on a recent live episode of Intercepted, but it wasn’t difficult to imagine one. Raised by activist Catholic parents, Scahill took to political agitation himself at a young age, notably working as a student organizer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison before dropping out in 1995. He hitchhiked east and spent a year working with the radical anti-war ex-priest Philip Berrigan at a religious community in Baltimore....
Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago.
On behalf of working stiffs everywhere, I’d like to thank Oprah Winfrey for saving us from having Andrew Puzder as our secretary of labor for the next four years. It was bad enough that Trump had nominated a labor secretary who had vehemently opposed raising the minimum wage, once joked about hiring “no more people behind the counter unless they have all their teeth,” and ran commercials for Carl’s Jr. that featured scantily clad women chomping down on big juicy hamburgers like they were—well, you can figure that out....
The best way to see Adam Brooks’s most enduring piece of artwork—a list of 69 names that includes Martin Luther King Jr., Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Rush Limbaugh—is briefly and frequently, through the windows of an el train. “You ascertain that there’s some kind of connection,” Brooks says of the banner mounted on the side of 325 W. Huron. “There’s no title on the work, so you have to make the association of names....
Chicago rapper Probcause is known for rapping in speedy vocal loop-the-loops that can bring vibrancy to a droll beat. But it’s a real pleasure to hear him do the opposite—vibe off an instrumental that bustles and burns— as he does on his latest single, “M.I.A.” Producer Drew Mantia fuses liquid synth stabs, incandescent soul melodies, and bone-snapping percussion for a jubilant end-of-summer jam that Probcause takes to with ease. Ace local MC Saba also gets in on the fun of “M....
Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Monday, August 21, 2017. Happy solar eclipse day! Rahm: Trump administration is “playing politics” to promote its law enforcement policies Mayor Rahm Emanuel says President Donald Trump’s administration is “playing politics” in order to promote its stringent law enforcement policies, and claimed the White House is using a “racial component” to link big cities like Chicago and high violence rates. “They use cities as a way of describing violence, as a characterization which they never use around the violence associated with opiates and the drugs that are in suburban and rural communities,” the mayor told former Obama senior adviser David Axelrod on an episode of the Axe Files, a podcast from CNN and the University of Chicago Institute of Politics....
ARTIST: Trek Matthews SHOW: Andrew Bernstein, Timeghost & John Bender, and Kohl/Long/Clinkman at the Hideout on Wed 9/12 MORE INFO: trekmatthews.com
