Long before Mac Blackout started playing in Chicago rock bands he spent his days as a graffiti writer in Indiana. “There wasn’t any graffiti in Indianapolis, where I was at, so we kind of kicked that off and were doing it back there,” Mac says. The Mac Blackout Band and Mickey front man started with graffiti in 1993, but his wall writing tapered off after he moved to Chicago and turned his focus to music....
The Marz beers that Maria’s had on tap last weekend. I think that’s Smoke Wheat Every Day out front. I’ve known Ed Marszewski for years—first as one of the troublemakers at Lumpen magazine, then as overlord of the Co-Prosperity Sphere, where my old band Brilliant Pebbles used to play his art festivals. I’ve hung out with him at Maria’s (he helped transform it in 2010 from its previous incarnation as Kaplan’s Liquors), and last June I accepted his invitation to judge the Mash Tun Fest he held to mark the publication of the third issue of his Mash Tun beer journal....
While the very name of this project helmed by veteran singer and antisocial icon Lydia Lunch addresses a rearview-looking mind-set, its unexpectedly long lifespan speaks to the way the combo has evolved into something bigger. Flanked by drummer Bob Bert—an old-school postpunk drummer who served time in Sonic Youth, Pussy Galore, and Action Swingers, among others—as well as guitarist and former Chicagoan Weasel Walter and bassist Tim Dahl, a pair as comfortable essaying punishing postpunk as they are lacerating free jazz, Lunch has improbably found the best, most enduring band of her lengthy career....
Ramin Bahrani is that rare dramatist who understands street-level economics. Raised in North Carolina and educated at Columbia University, the Iranian-American filmmaker made his feature debut with Man Push Cart (2005), the story of a Pakistani immigrant who scrapes through life selling bagels from a cart in midtown Manhattan. Chop Shop (2007), his second feature, followed a 12-year-old Puerto Rican orphan and his older sister as they try to pull together a life for themselves amid the auto garages and scrapyards of Queens....
Last month Riot Fest announced its first wave of artists, which included a few great headliners—most notably the reunited Jawbreaker. The influential Bay Area pop-punk band will play their first show in 21 years—and I can’t pass up the opportunity to mention that my 2015 oral history of Jawbreaker’s 24 Hour Revenge Therapy for Pitchfork’s defunct print quarterly is now available online. Among the other bright spots in that first wave were Nine Inch Nails, Queens of the Stone Age, TV on the Radio, New Order, Ministry, and Vic Mensa—but we’ve had to wait till today to see what else might be worth seeing at Riot Fest....
Leor Galil: Rain’s drenched two of the last three Riot Fests, and though the clouds were breaking as I approached Douglas Park early Friday around one o’clock, the morning’s downpour had already wreaked havoc. The mud spread as more and more people entered the festival grounds—though the damage paled compared to that in last year’s site, Humboldt Park. This year hasn’t been without its little bumps. Food vendors are using tickets instead of cash, and around dinnertime a couple of them ran out of stubs....
DJ Oreo seems to be everywhere all the time. Just this year I’ve run into him at the Era’s Lab Sessions (an informal footwork gathering at High Concept Laboratories in Pilsen), seen him spin an unannounced, impromptu set during Fake Shore Drive’s showcase (at Lincoln Hall with Cam’ron, SD, and ShowYouSuck), and spotted him side stage or in the crowd at more rap shows than I can count. Given that Oreo handles the ones and twos for Vic Mensa and Chance the Rapper, he’s often on the road and could easily have his eyes trained on opportunities on the coasts—but he remains grounded in the Chicago scene....
The 15 stories in Chicago Noir: The Classics (Akashic Books), selected by local literary notable Joe Meno (whose novel Marvel and a Wonder we wrote about earlier today), can be called noir in the sense that they generally examine the less illuminated sides of humanity, but they’re not all of the hard-boiled variety and some aren’t even all that crime-y. But the noirishness ranges from very dark to shady to just a bit shadowy—sometimes even a little light peeks through....
Documentary maker Alex Gibney made a name for himself ten years ago with Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005), a devastating indictment of the executives who ran the Houston energy company Enron into the ground. Since then he’s produced and directed some of the very best American political documentaries: Taxi to the Dark Side (2007), about U.S. torture of terror suspects; Casino Jack and the United States of Money (2010), about the malign power of lobbyists in Washington; and Client 9 (2010), about the sex scandal that took down New York governor Eliot Spitzer....
Here’s the cover of the new single by Fluffy (not to be confused with Lil Bibby) South-side drill rapper Lil Bibby is 19, but he sounds much, much older—his husky voice conveys a seen-it-all attitude that lends his dark street raps a weight that resonates. It’s a gift, one that Bibby knows how to use well and one that can make up for the MC’s weaknesses—when he performed “Water” on BET’s 106 & Park for the XXL “Freshman Class” episode, he walked around the stage listlessly while his voice came out booming....
New Memphis hip-hop label Culture Power45 has a special affection for Chicago: in its five-month life it’s released small-run, vinyl-only singles featuring local artists such as Infinito 2017, Rashid Hadee, Radius, and Thaione Davis. Those four also appear on the label’s forthcoming LP compilation, Fruition, which comes out in June—and which Culture Power45 celebrates with a free release party at 606 Records in Pilsen on Saturday, May 13. The event starts at 4 PM and includes DJ sets by Radius and Rashid Hadee; the shop is likely to sell out of the LP, so if you want a copy, you should get there early....
In April I was caught off guard when the New York Times previewed a Pinegrove show by saying, “On paper, this six-piece New Jersey band shouldn’t work, but its blend of country and emo somehow does.” That straw man is predicated on the idea that two genres built on guitars and deep subversive histories have nothing in common, but a brisk sweep of emo’s recent past easily brings up great examples of the two sounds meeting—hear the slide guitar ringing out on Small Brown Bike’s “A Lesson to Remember,” or maybe listen to Lucero’s entire discography....
Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Friday, April 14, 2017. City Council Black Caucus members want to change police union contract Meanwhile, members of the City Council Black Caucus are calling for changes to the police union contract that would make it easier to report police misconduct. All 18 members of the caucus will vote against the police union contract if Mayor Rahm Emanuel declines make the changes, caucus chair alderman Roderick Sawyer said....
You can be forgiven for not knowing that psychedelic spell casters Verma have a new album coming out tomorrow. Because they’re a Chicago band, you’d expect to be alerted to such a development by the appearance of a release party on the calendar of a local venue—but Verma don’t have any shows lined up at all. The reason for that is pretty simple: late this summer bassist Rob Goerke moved to Los Angeles, where former member TJ Tambellini has lived for a few years now....
Saul Steinberg was behind one of the most famous magazine covers ever: the March 29, 1976, issue of the New Yorker, which featured his depiction of big, bustling Manhattan against a background of fly-over country. And yet the cartoonist once said, “I don’t quite belong to the art, cartoon, or magazine world, so the art world doesn’t quite know where to place me.” The current Art Institute show commemorating the 100th year of the artist’s birth supports Steinberg’s statement....
If you spent even a sliver of time within a few miles of Soldier Field this past weekend, then you know that it was impossible to ignore the Grateful Dead’s three-day good-bye, “Fare Thee Well.” The unparalleled tie-dyed presence could be an annoyance for those folks who have no tolerance for jam bands—but who among us wouldn’t want to see a band we love bid adieu with the same sense of import and celebration that surrounded these “Fare The Well” shows?...
Ever since Mayor Michael Bilandic lost reelection to Jane Byrne after the great blizzard of 1979 paralyzed Chicago, snowplowing has been a highly political matter in our city. Here at the Reader we were curious about exactly how the city manages to clear the major streets so efficiently after a major snow event. So I checked in with Commissioner John Tully of the Department of Streets and Sanitation, which spearheads plowing efforts on a route system of more than 9,400 lane miles, to get the skinny....
Two months ago Marea Stamper, better known as the Black Madonna, took over Gramaphone Records to celebrate the release of the 12-inch single “He Is the Voice I Hear.” The store was the only place with copies of the record, at least on that day, and by closing time it had sold out—which I discovered when I dropped by Gramaphone a couple weeks later and asked if they had any tucked away in a corner....
Even though William A. Wellman directed more than 80 films between 1920 and 1958—including the first Oscar-winner, Wings—he’s still best known for the iconic 1931 James Cagney gangster film The Public Enemy. Streaming channel FilmStruck features Wellman as their “director of the week” and we’ve picked five of his 1930s pre-Code films, when he was at his best. The Public Enemy Time hasn’t been terribly kind to this 1931 gangster drama, which suffers more than it should from the glitches of early sound....
How many of us have sat around work, watching our colleagues act out one way or another, and thought, I should write a play about this? Lots. How many of us have followed through on that notion? Few. And that’s a good thing, because (a) most of us haven’t the talent and (b) what happens on the job seldom interests anybody else nearly as much as it interests us. 10 Out of 12 attempts to trace a similar evolution in a more constricted framework....
