Q: I am a 35-year-old straight guy. I met a nice lady through the normal methods, and we hit it off and have grown closer. I think we are both considering “taking it to the next level.” We are on the same intellectual wavelength, enjoy the same social experiences, and have a lot of fun together. So what could be the problem? My friend decided it was the time to inform me that she is transgender, pre-op, and will not be having gender reassignment surgery....
Peter Holderness Karen Lewis and Ben at the Hideout on Tuesday night For Tuesday’s big show—Karen Lewis live at the Hideout—they gave me the hand-held mike and told me to sit in the middle of the table. But, alas, I saw that crowd of faces in the audience, and I just couldn’t pull the trigger. Which probably got the mayor so mad he had to be restrained from closing 50 more schools—just to show her!...
Flamenco, Flamenco A couple weeks ago I invoked the concept of “pure cinema” in a blog post I wrote about Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. As defined by Alfred Hitchcock, pure cinema refers to a director’s ability to communicate meaning through the orchestration of all aspects of filmmaking, not just storytelling or dialogue. I thought of this concept again last week when I watched Flamenco, Flamenco, a 2010 performance documentary that opens at the Gene Siskel Film Center this Friday for a weeklong run....
Camera Shy Two bands that I’ve been listening to nonstop recently have been Whirr and Nothing, a couple of massively loud shoegaze revival acts. Nick Bassett, who is Whirr’s guitar player and primary songwriter (and a former member of Deafheaven) also plays bass in Nothing, so it makes sense that the sonic similarites—crushing layers of high-volume guitars, slow-moving tempos, dark moods, drawn-out song structures—are so blatant. A couple of weeks ago Bassett debuted a track from his new project, Camera Shy, a duo with Whirr vocalist Alexandra Morte that has almost nothing in common with his other bands....
The very first thing I did after finally purchasing Twilley Don’t Mind (1977) this past Saturday at the CHIRP Record Fair was come home, joyously crack my windows—it was a balmy 70 degrees, if you’ve already forgotten—and blast today’s 12 O’Clock Track, the album’s hard-strutting title track. Twilley, who visited town last year as a part of HoZac’s Blackout fest—tying in with the label’s release of the single “Shark”—famously never garnered the fame he was owed for being a power-pop trailblazer....
A friend who didn’t like that Kristen McQueary op-ed any more than anyone else did (myself excluded) has just introduced me to the idea of “disaster capitalism,” which is what we get when societies are shocked into disarray and submission and right-wing economic and political forces seize the moment. Here’s a video of the author Naomi Klein explaining disaster capitalism, which it appears she coined. And here’s AlterNet’s Adam Johnson arguing that its “dark heart” was just exposed by Kristen McQueary in the Tribune....
Earlier this year Highland Park’s Once Upon a Bagel bakery and deli—source of the quintessential egg bagel, the chocolate-chip bagel ball, and a mish-mosh soup that’ll cure just about anything—ventured into something a whole lot less kosher. A mile or so to the north, in the same Highwood strip mall that houses its hot dog outpost, the Mean Weiner, Once Upon opened a seafood diner, Lucky Fish Deli. The two small dining rooms, furnished with wood and Formica kitchen tables and comfy vinyl chairs, are separated from an open kitchen by a glass case that shows off scrupulously fresh denizens of the deep blue: oysters, lobster, shrimp, mussels, and clams, along with less trayf offerings like delicate lake perch (by the pound or half pound), which you can order fried, though I recommend it lightly blackened from the grill; either way, get it with the warm kettle chips or crunchy broccoli slaw....
There was a time when Therese Shechter, like most people, thought of virginity as a fairly simple concept. You had it, you lost it, you told a story about it. Then she started working on her documentary, How to Lose Your Virginity, which makes its Chicago premiere November 2, and realized it was ridiculously complicated. Shechter worked on How to Lose Your Virginity off and on for nearly seven years. The leisurely pace was unintentional: documentaries are expensive and she needed to take breaks for several rounds of fundraising....
CRSPIX/Shutterstock Here’s the good news according to a study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine: if you have diabetes, you’re 67.8 percent less likely to die of a heart attack than you would have been in 1990. You’re also more than 50 percent less likely to have a stroke or an amputation. Here’s the bad news: you’re about 300 percent as likely to have diabetes....
Onto Court Theatre’s spacious, moodily lit stage, Manual Cinema shoehorns three makeshift video production studios—featuring live actors, shadow puppets, and hand-cranked scrolling images—as well as all manner of acoustic, automated, and DIY musical instruments in an elaborate attempt to create a live silent movie on a huge screen floating above everything. The film’s subject is Mary Shelley’s titular and, at least right now in Chicago, inescapable 1818 gothic novel (this is the third of four local stage adaptations this year), inflected with bits of the author’s pre-Frankenstein biography....
Brian O’Mahoney/Sun-Times Media Mayor Rahm invited Whitney Young’s state-champion boys basketball team to be honored at City Hall. Why not Young’s girls basketball champs? On Wednesday, Mayor Emanuel brought Whitney Young’s boys basketball team to City Hall to take a bow in front of the aldermen and receive a resolution honoring their “star-studded team” for winning the state championship. Geez, Mr. Mayor. For your sake, I hope you haven’t forgotten that women also get to vote....
Looking for something to do today? Agenda‘s got you covered. A south-side staple, the African Festival of the Arts celebrates fashion, cuisine, spirituality, and art. The weekend includes performances by R&B songwriter Musiq Soulchild and jazz vocalist Dee Alexander in addition to a Temptations revue, a film tent, quilt-making sessions, and a drum village. The artists of Remix Chicago take the phrase “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” to heart....
Jazz is essentially live music. Musicians spontaneously negotiate and renegotiate their relationships with one another, the material they play, and the audiences who journey with them. That’s not to say that recordings can’t tell us a lot about it—and in fact the evolution of recording formats maps pretty well onto the history of jazz. The brief playing time of 78s, which typically held one tune per side, drove a focus on pithy songs and required soloists to get right to the point....
Courtesy of the band’s Facebook page The Pentaject Corporation Combing through the latest e-mail blast from Permanent Records I came across a listing for Blackmail Stretch, an EP from a defunct local postpunk outfit called the Pentaject Corporation. The group made 200 copies of the seven-inch back in 1982, but Permanent’s got some in stock—it’s another example of how the Permanent team is great at finding out-of-print records. You’ll have to fork up some cash for the originals—they’re listed at $99 apiece....
Sunday, December 20th11am – 5pm Chicago Plumbers Hall 1340 W Washington Blvd, Chicago, IL 60607 The Made in Chicago Market is back! Come shop local and support fellow Chicagoans as they showcase some of the best apparel, housewares, food and drink that Chicago has to offer! Free to the public Parking available #MadeinChicago Brought to you by Participating Local Vendors Drug Factory Press Kiku Handmade Sue Rosengard Jewelry Design Urban Art Chicago...
In 2007, an accident while shooting in Seattle severely damaged the Wilmette native’s right leg and eye, and cost him thousands of dollars in hospital bills. He won’t get too specific about the details—there’s a lawsuit pending—but he says it happened when he was up in a crane, photographing on a golf course. The crane shifted and toppled, slamming him onto the ground. His leg was shattered. Doctors managed to save it, but years later an infection forced them to amputate below the knee....
A couple years ago, Reverend Pervis Thomas of Englewood’s New Canaan Land Missionary Baptist Church was on the verge of ending the neighborhood’s annual Battle of the Blocks basketball tournament. Also known as the Englewood Peace Tournament, it gathers together young men from the area, many of whom Thomas says are members of rival gang factions, for a weeklong series of games. But eight years of organizing the tourney on his own had begun to wear on Thomas, and he wasn’t sure at the time whether the initiative was truly fostering peace in the community....
During this visit to lead the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen presents two proven ticket sellers in Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun and Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, but the program’s real draw is the local premiere of Scheherazade.2 by John Adams (in honor of the composer’s recent 70th birthday). In his program notes for conductor David Robertson’s performance of the piece with the Saint Louis Symphony—released last year by Nonesuch—Adams says that his “dramatic symphony” was inspired by an art exhibition he attended at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris....
False are the only black-metal band who’ve ever made me cry. Last September at Scorched Tundra, the cathartic gusts of “Saturnalia” (from False’s untitled 2015 album) blew open a window in the attic, so to speak, and suddenly my eyes filled up. At the end of July, Wisconsin label Gilead Media drops the first new music in what feels like ages from this Minneapolis six-piece: the two-song seven-inch EP Hunger. The seven-inch format required a radical change from False, whose previous releases have averaged more than 12 minutes per song....
Freddie Gibbs‘s rap career has been, to put it lightly, chaotic. In 2007 Interscope inked a deal with the MC from Gary, Indiana, who packed up and moved to LA only to be dropped by the label in October, about six months after he was signed. Gibbs stayed in LA and focused on work, strengthening his remarkable rapping technique, which draws from multiple regional gangsta-rap scenes. In 2009 he dropped two mixtapes, The Miseducation of Freddie Gibbs and Midwestgangstaboxframecadillacmuzik, that thrust him into the critical spotlight....
