We all know about how absence makes the heart grow fonder, but I think with music sometimes absence makes the ears grow sharper. A few weeks ago I stumbled across live footage of the B-52s playing “Private Idaho,” and I couldn’t tear myself away. In my teenage years, the B-52s were my gateway into nonmainstream music, opening the floodgates for every weird, outsider, and experimental act I’ve sought out in the decades since....
Mike Sula Colombian dog, Rapidito Chicago doesn’t have an insignificant Colombian population, so I can’t understand the rarity of the perro caliente, unless the prohibition on ketchup is so entrenched among the majority of hot dog eaters that those with more equatorial tastes in tube steak fear to leave the closet. If the Colombian hot dog makes Chicago’s garden on a bun look conservative in comparison, our minimalist Depression dog looks downright puritan....
The Interview I’ve failed to write about the influential filmmaker, theorist, and video essayist Harun Farocki since he died three weeks ago, in large part because I knew very little about him before this past January, when Kevin B. Lee presented a program of his work at the Nightingale. The numerous memorials written about Farocki in the past four weeks have made it clear that he was a great teacher both in and out of the academy....
Chicago’s influential Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. Many of the organization’s surviving founders have spread out across the U.S., and its influence spans the globe, but our city’s importance to its formation is indisputable. Throughout the year, musicians from every chapter of the AACM’s history have been playing celebratory concerts around town, and the 2015 Chicago Jazz Festival will close with a performance of the Experimental Band, led by pianist and AACM cofounder Muhal Richard Abrams and featuring key early members such as Roscoe Mitchell, Henry Threadgill, Wadada Leo Smith, Amina Claudine Meyers, and George Lewis....
“What if American slaves had embraced Satan instead of Jesus?” That’s the question used to describe the style of Zeal & Ardor, an audacious mix of black metal, Negro spirituals, electronic accents, and synth interludes created by Swiss-American singer and multi-instrumentalist Manuel Gagneux. The closest analog might be the soulful, political, gospel-infused postpunk of Algiers, but Zeal & Ardor ratchets up the sonic animosity by an order of magnitude. It’s a genuinely moving amalgamation that channels the darkest chapter of American history while leaving ample opportunity to head-bang....
Oleksiy Mark/Photos.com Writing about the New York Times is a lot like it used to be writing about Mike Royko during his last few years at the Tribune. Much as I admired him, I never seemed to find an opportunity to say so; instead, he had me picking one nit after another. Watching Fox News actually increased its audience’s ignorance! Which means Blow said one thing about MSNBC in his article and the illustration to his article said another that contradicted it....
Joe Carsello Shapers 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.
During the Pitchfork Music Festival, local nonprofit writing and tutoring center 826 Chicago sends a handful of students to Union Park to interview some of the performers as part of a music-writing workshop called “The Rest Is Noise.” I got the chance to serve as one of the volunteers for this outing, and it was a pleasure to watch these teenage journalists get a scope of the festival, kick back during the performances, and chat up musicians....
Gossip Wolf has been raving about Bleach Party since their live debut in 2013, and they’ve put out a constant stream of EPs, singles, and split releases over the years. Somewhat surprisingly, the new NOLA is the first full-length album from this local garage four-piece—and not surprisingly at all, it’s chockablock with ragers. Blowouts such as “Entertain Yourself” and “Lunar Moods” expand on the surf-rock tinge of the band’s signature sound with strutting rhythms and tough-as-Leather Tuscadero vocals from guitarist Meg MacDuff....
Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place. Older strips are archived here.
Zion Evangelical Lutheran, at 19th and Peoria in Pilsen, is a nice old church, made of gently worn red brick. It has a 90-foot-tall bell tower, a heavy wooden front door, and its name carved on the facade in old-fashioned German Gothic script. All it’s missing, really, are stained glass windows, an altar, pews, and back and side walls. If you look through the iron grates on either side of the main wall, you’ll see a well-kept lawn, interspersed with a few trees and piles of stone that once made up the building’s foundation....
Immigrants enrich every square inch of Chicago’s food culture—including my grimy little kitchen. Though I’m a garden-variety mixed honky from Texas, my favorite recipes are all Indian and Thai. I live in Edgewater, a short hop from two of the city’s densest concentrations of international groceries: the Indo-Pak strip along Devon and the cluster of Southeast Asian shops around Argyle. I learned to feed myself in college from the Hare Krishnas who catered for the student vegetarian club, and a couple years ago I started working my way through the lovingly researched cookbooks of part-time Chicagoan Leela Punyaratabandhu....
Pelican have entered the red-giant phase of their life cycle as a band. They’re as big as they’ve ever been, and they’re still active creatively, but on the surface things seem to have cooled down. Hell, I’ve been a fan for 13 years, and I haven’t found an excuse to write about them since 2013, when I went to Indiana to try their second Three Floyds collaboration beer, a beautiful black IPA called Immutable Dusk....
The good old great man theory tends to reduce the emergence of bebop to just a handful of musicians: Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Bud Powell. While there’s no doubt that those players did more than anyone to spread the gospel of the music in the mid-40s, they were hardly alone. The latest title in Uptown Records’ superb Flashback Series takes an invigorating look at the important role played—and the thrilling music made—by trumpeter Howard McGhee in Los Angeles during the same time....
NOEL CELIS/AFP/GETTY IMAGES Obama catches flak for keeping troops home. Articles in Tuesday’s Tribune and New York Times dwell on President Obama’s troubles defending a nonbellicose foreign policy, with the Times saying that the president, while visiting the Philippines, “lashed out at those he said reflexively call for the use of force.” The Times described Obama as “visibly frustrated” as he complained that his critics “had failed to learn the lessons of the Iraq war....
COURTESY FELD MOTOR SPORTS Grave Digger 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.
Charles Osgood The Dinner Party 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.
AP Photo/Jeff Chiu White Sox manager Robin Ventura kicks up a fuss in San Francisco yesterday about an overturned call at home plate. I haven’t seen Robin Ventura this angry since he charged Nolan Ryan 21 years ago. That’s when 7.13 entered the game. Baseball adopted the rule over the winter to cut down on collisions at the plate. It stipulates that a runner who goes out of his way to knock over a catcher will be called out....
Dan O’Sullivan admits that he had a “lame-ass excuse” for skipping the protests on January 28 at O’Hare International Airport over President Trump’s executive order on immigration: household chores. But as he quietly folded laundry at his Chicago apartment, the journalist and self-described “idiot with a keyboard” sparked a viral #DeleteUber campaign on social media that doubled as a possible blueprint to those who want to resist Trump by putting pressure on corporations that associate with the president and his administration....
When cops in trouble enjoy the benefit of the doubt, is it because they’ve earned it? Or is there something else going on? Do the people in charge think cutting cops some slack is the prudent thing to do? Why did other police officers at the scene let the firing continue, and why did 86 minutes of security video recorded at an adjacent Burger King disappear after police demanded a look at it?...
