On March 13 at South by Southwest, a drunk driver plowed through a police barrier and into the crowd. Four people died and more than 20 were injured, and two of the victims were former Chicagoans. Evan West and his wife, Jamie, moved to Austin a couple years ago, but from 2008 to 2010 Evan lived in Rogers Park, where he worked at the Red Line Tap and the Heartland Cafe....
Comedy Central Nathan Fielder “helps” a gas station owner. From the hidden-camera high jinks of Candid Camera (RIP Funt) to the faux news-correspondent interviews on the way-too-short-lived series Dog Bites Man, television has a vast and wonderful legacy of filming real people under false pretenses for comedy’s sake. If that’s ethically suspect, Nathan Fielder makes it easy to not care. For every “Oh look, aren’t they stupid” there’s an “Oh god, they must think Nathan’s so stupid....
Local punk stalwart Dave Collis wears many hats. He books DIY and aboveground shows all over town and is simultaneously playing in more bands than I can keep track of—the first that caught my ear was an eccentric outfit called My Dad, which went on indefinite hiatus last year. Collis had been working on new material for My Dad before the band played its final show, and about a year ago he started reworking one of the tracks with drummer Josh Sparks, who plays in Into It....
“There’s not too many times you see your face on a bottle and you’re still alive—it’s usually reserved for dead folks,” Lost Lake beverage director Paul McGee says. Actually, he’s paraphrasing Maison Ferrand proprietor Alexander Gabriel, who invited McGee to collaborate on the creation of Plantation OFTD Overproof Rum (Plantation is produced by Maison Ferrand). But McGee seems to agree with the sentiment. The other five faces on the bottle belong to fellow tiki bar head honchos Jeff “Beachbum” Berry (Latitude 29), Martin Cate (Smuggler’s Cove), Paul McFayden (Trailer Happiness), and Scotty Schuder (Dirty Dick), along with cocktail historian and author David Wondrich....
On Saturday, July 21, a trio of anonymous musicians operating under the name Neckbeard Deathcamp self-released an album of raw black metal called White Nationalism Is for Basement Dwelling Losers. The band’s artwork mockingly co-opts white supremacist symbols, including the death’s head made infamous by the SS (recast as a portrait of Rick Ross) and the Nazi eagle (with a penis for a head and a Pepe cartoon instead of a swastika in its talons)....
I’ve become bored by rock reunions. Well, less the actual reunion than the cottage industry that’s convinced any musician who once recorded something a small crowd called influential to get the old band back together—or worse, hire a team of young guns to play songs they never had a hand in and tour as the allegedly reunified band. These days reunions are like encores; an act bands once partook in because the feeling moved them, it’s now an event fans expect will happen....
Waffle Gang leader Shawn Childress, aka rapper-producer Awdazcate, is in the middle of putting the final touches on the “Summer Jam Edition” of Waffle Fest, a bash that pays tribute to local hip-hop and Childress’s favorite breakfast treat. Last night, in the midst of all his fest-related planning, Childress dropped “FRFR,” a woozy number featuring frequent collaborator Pugs Atomz. As a producer Childress has an ear for turning funk instrumentals into narcotizing hooks....
As an obsessed follower of the investigation into President Trump’s alleged ties to Russia, I was glued to my computer watching last Tuesday’s House Intelligence Committee hearings when I was hit with an unexpected jolt of hometown boosterism. That was back in 1998, when U.S. rep Henry Hyde, a DuPage County Republican, led the charge to impeach President Clinton for, among other things, not telling the truth when he said “I did not have sexual relations with that woman....
Debra Pickett’s book Reporting Lives Journalists who turn to fiction know better than to make their alter egos paragons. What journalists do—or at least the way we do it—is morally sketchy even to ourselves, and the finest thing about us is that we do it anyway. After all, liberty dies when ignorance reigns, and if it’s up to raffish reporters to hold ignorance at bay, well, someone has to. Then again, journalists also think of themselves as the finest people alive....
Chicago brewers Ale Syndicate, who started selling beer in March 2013, introduced their Sunday Session ale on draft last spring, and I first tried it at the Mash Tun Fest in June. I didn’t know that’s what I was drinking at the time, because I was judging, but when the hurly-burly was done, I learned it’d been one of three finalists my judging partner and I had picked from among the 22 entries in the session-beer category, “Every Day Is Like Sunday....
Q: I am a cis woman in my mid 20s. I get a pang or a spasm of pain in a place deep in my clit/urethra area. I can’t pinpoint which part exactly. It takes me by surprise every time it happens, so I jerk around and press my crotch for a hot second—which doesn’t help, but it’s about the only thing I can do. This obviously does not look cool in public, and regardless of when it happens, the episode irritates me....
The Reader’s archive is vast and varied, going back to 1971. Every week in Archive Dive, we’ll dig through and bring up some finds. There are plenty of “best of 2018” lists popping up this time of year (including a few to come here at the Reader), but do you ever wonder what were the most memorable movies, meals, and moments of 1971? If so, boy do we have the list for you!...
Actress, Ghettoville (Werkdiscs/Ninja Tune) British electronic-music artist Actress (aka Darren Cunningham) hails from the same quasi-grimestep/post-IDM interzone that’s home to artists as disparate as Burial, Kuedo, Flying Lotus, Lone, and Zomby—in fact, Lone and Zomby have released music on Cunninghan’s Werkdiscs label. But Actress also takes as reference points a few hipper bits of music-critic catnip: Suicide‘s menacing throb, Throbbing Gristle‘s creaky protoindustrial noise, and Cabaret Voltaire’s surface grit. Actress’s fourth full-length, Ghettoville, is being promoted as a sequel to the project’s debut, 2008’s Hazyville, but out of everything Cunningham has released so far, the new one is probably least like that album—like Autechre, he’s ventured further and further into abstraction and distortion over the years....
Pizza Time If for some reason you love live music so much that you need to see more after the three-day Pitchfork festival, you’re in luck, because there’s still more to take in. “Jolie Holland’s latest album, Wine Dark Sea, is the most aggressive, colorful, and dynamic batch of songs she’s made since her 2003 debut,” says Peter Margasak about the folksy singer-songwriter. “She fronts a resourceful band that gives her a rich, varied platform, and her voice is a stunner—pretty, precise, by turns breathy and guttural, and always assured....
The first time I played Cards Against Humanity I was buzzed on cheap wine, sitting on a friend’s hardwood floor and shuffling through a random pile of books and puzzles looking for something to entertain me. This was before the “party game for horrible people” was omnipresent at department stores. The set we played with was printed out from the website and hand-cut into jagged, flimsy paper rectangles. At the time we enjoyed it for what we thought it was: an inappropriate novelty game meant to embarrass Grandma at a holiday gathering or entertain friends under the influence ....
Here is a sign that you’ve become a person of consequence: you’re standing in line at a coffee shop, waiting to pay for your drink, when one of the baristas recognizes you and declares her love for you by using your Twitter name. Instead of backing away slowly in alarm, you respond with perfect poise, “Thank you! That’s so sweet!” In her scholarly research, Ewing studies how and why the city’s inequalities came to be....
Sometimes I think Christmas is wasted on the wrong people. On account of being Jewish, I have never gotten to celebrate a whole Christmas from start to finish—though I’ve gotten bits and pieces, thanks to friends and roommates and my boyfriend’s mother who one year gave me my very own stocking—but because of years of exposure to movies and popular songs I know all about it. And if you do it wrong, I will judge you....
The penultimate course among eight on the tasting menu at Elske is a forest-hued square of firm, chewy, sweet gelatinous matter, imbued with the cool flavors of fennel and mint. While it’s a perfectly refreshing intermezzo between the roasted brisket with creamed brussels sprouts and the vanilla ice cream with nicoise olive syrup, it looks a bit like Soylent Green, the processed food ration made from human remains that sustains overpopulated New York City in the 1973 dystopian science-fiction film of the same name....
The 2016 presidential election confirmed what most of us already knew: Chicago is a blue city in a red nation. But even within this blue island there are some red oases, chief among them Mount Greenwood, in the 19th Ward on the city’s far southwest side. In 1992 Isabel Wilkerson, author of The Warmth of Other Suns described Mount Greenwood is “an insular, Leave It to Beaver world where white people can live out entire lives without ever getting to know a black person, where people rarely venture beyond understood borders....
Jenny Magnus, who’s spearheaded the invaluable Curious Theatre Branch for 30 years, has always performed in her own plays. Now she takes a wide turn with her new 75-minute “non-opera,” not only staying offstage but crafting a fractured, protean, winningly guileless evening quite unlike anything she’s created before. Superficially, the piece is about the Writer (Vicki Walden), who’s struggling to write her way out of the current episode of her soap opera, Another Day....
