Q I’m a 25-year-old straight guy. Last month, I was in the locker room at my gym. It was 4 AM, and I was the only one around. I was getting ready to leave, when I noticed someone exiting the showers. He kinda caught me looking (he was very well endowed), and I quickly turned my head, embarrassed. About 20 seconds later, he came around the corner and said, “Hey, how ya doin’?...
Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. Hey, did you read: A profile of new Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau? —Tal Rosenberg That Mayor Emanuel has blasted the Tasing and dragging of a man in a police lockup in 2012? —Steve Bogira About how the Chicago Red Line station has been decorated so it looks like a giant Trojan horse? (Beware of CTA employees bearing gifts.) —Ryan Smith That the U....
If Toni Preckwinkle is thinking about challenging Mayor Rahm Emanuel, her campaign coffers don’t show it. Still, she hasn’t been collecting checks like someone preparing to square off with one of the most prolific fund-raising politicians in the country. As of the end of the 2013, she had about $1 million on hand, and has reported raising about $135,000 since, according to state records. The truth is that no foreseeable Emanuel foe will be able to engage him in a financial arms race....
“Sea voyages are in almost every thing I’ve ever done,” Mary Zimmerman acknowledged in an e-mail exchange. The auteur, known for stage realizations of The Odyssey, The Argonauticka, and other watery epics, supposes that the ocean holds a “great romance” for her because she grew up in landlocked Nebraska. Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Inland” (“What do they long for, as I long for / One salt smell of the sea once more?...
There are few sounds that hypnotize me more than the Hardanger fiddle, a traditional Norwegian violin fitted with additional strings that run beneath the fret board, generating a dense web of ghostly overtones. In its purest manifestation music for the instrument deploys regional dance rhythms, but those slicing lines are gorgeously clouded by a sympathetic resonance that rings articulated patterns in spooky acoustic shadows. The remarkable Nils Økland has built a career by transplanting the Hardanger into other modes, developing a hybrid informed by moody jazz, contemporary classical, and free improvisation....
Pianist and composer David Moore is hardly alone in his love of American minimalism (particularly the hypnotically repetitive constructions of Steve Reich), but with his project Bing & Ruth he replaces that aesthetic’s often mathematical precision with something more fluid and human. On Bing & Ruth’s third and most recent album, No Home of the Mind (4AD), the group’s sound is at its leanest yet. As usual, Moore’s arpeggiated piano patterns cascade so rapidly that they almost blur into striated long tones, becoming graceful, billowing sheets of sound whose risings and fallings border on new age territory....
Every city has its own exportable signature-food cliches. We have our deep dish. Philly has cheesesteaks. Seattle has . . . teriyaki. But so far the ubiquity of grilled and sweetly glazed proteins in the Emerald City, a Korean-Japanese fusion born in the 70s, hasn’t spread too far beyond the west coast. That’s beginning to change with Glaze Teriyaki, a New York-based chain fronted by a native Seattleite, with branches in San Francisco and (soon) Madison....
“Keep your sisters close/ You gotta keep your sisters close,” backup singers breathe into the retro-90s R&B chorus on Natalie Prass’ “Sisters.” In line with the title of her new album, The Future and the Past, the Virginia singer-songwriter couches her up-to-the-minute anti-Trump feminism in sounds inspired by the music of an earlier era. The album is swathed in 80s Janet Jackson-style beats and Mariah Carey-quality hooks, summoning the spirit of iconic pop divas to help us boogie and twirl in the face of the rolling political apocalypse....
Zoran Orlic The Autumn Defense (John Stirratt and Pat Sansone) I’ve always been a fan of the elegant, meticulous retro-pop of the Autumn Defense, the long-running project of Pat Sansone and John Stirratt—better known to most folks as members of Wilco. The pair craft guitar pop with clear antecedents—the Beatles, Big Star, the Zombies, Raspberries, and the Beach Boys, among others—marked by a predilection for the soothing sounds of 70s soft rock....
It would be pretty easy to keep griping about this past winter—you know, the coldest four-month period on record in these parts. And now that it’s summer, who doesn’t want to kick back and put in minimal effort? So guess what? Winter sucked. It sucked hard. The long underwear, the salt stains, the heating bills, the agoraphobia, the snow, the sleet, the sludge. At a certain rock-bottom point even the best of us would’ve traded his or her firstborn for a weekend of lounging in a cramped, sun-beaten Chicago backyard, a cheap Mexican beer in hand and a toe dipped in a child-size inflatable pool....
A Good Family is Erik Fassnacht’s first novel, and like a lot of first novels, it brings to mind—my mind, anyway—Thomas Wolfe’s description in You Can’t Go Home Again of his protagonist George Webber’s own first novel: “in it he had packed everything he knew about his home town . . . and the people there.” A Good Family is packed with everything Fassnacht knows about Chicago and the people here, filtered through the perspectives of the four members of the Brunson family of Downers Grove....
In April, about a month before he released his second Domino album, Rocket, Philadelphia experimental rocker Alexander Giannascoli altered the stage name he’d used since 2010, adding “(Sandy)” to “Alex G,” the parenthetical a reference to the first song he posted on Bandcamp way back in June 2011. As Spin magazine discovered, LA musician Alexandra Gronlund had put a trademark on “Alex G” in late 2015, forcing Giannascoli to make an awkward adjustment just as he was about to take a big step in his career....
Two of Europe’s extreme-metal influencers, Poland’s Behemoth and Sweden’s At the Gates, represent a relative rarity in heavy music: beloved 90s veterans who are churning out some of their best work nearly 30 years after they formed. With its 11th album, I Loved You at Your Darkest (released in October on Metal Blade), Behemoth continues imbuing its blazing-fast blackened death metal with a sharp sense of dynamics and symphonic accompaniment. The results are just as sinister and blasphemous as on previous albums, but the band’s evolving songcraft is also on full display in the moderate tempos and the melodic passages supported by a 17-piece orchestra and a children’s choir....
Pat Kepic Mark Turner Quartet The first half of this week has a load of great shows, but a bunch of them—like Ty Segall, Sam Smith, and Clean Bandit—are already sold out. But there are still some great ones happening that you can see: there’s Paul Collins Beat at Cobra Lounge and Black Cobra at Reggie’s on Tue 9/23, and Spray Paint at the Empty Bottle on Wed 9/24. And if those don’t do it for you, there are a few more great picks for this week below....
Shemekia Copeland Last night the Tomorrow Never Knows festival kicked off with a couple of shows, but things go full swing tonight and through the weekend with shows from some great bands, including Mutual Benefit, Darkside, San Fermin, and Roomrunner. Grammy-winning pianist Robert Glasper has been spending the past few years blending the lines between R&B and jazz. Peter Margasak says of his 2012 release Black Radio, “There wasn’t a whole lot that anyone would recognize as jazz on that record; Glasper brought in an impressive collection of A-list singers and rappers, and most of the songs feature one of each....
Chicago surfers just have to make do with what’s nearby—which means Lake Michigan is their best option for carving waves. Unlike ocean surfing, where waves are built by weather that might be brewing far off the coast, lake surfing occurs in the fetch, with the very wind that creates the waves still overhead. Local surfer/photographer Mike Killion, like other nine-to-fivers, is part of the community’s dawn patrol, often heading to the beach before the sun peeks over the horizon....
Over the years the fantastic, genre-defying Norwegian label Rune Grammofon has published a few books mostly celebrating its own snazzy design aesthetic and rich history, but a gorgeous new volume by art historian Johannes Rød focuses more on the music and artifacts that have influenced label owner Rune Kristofferson, who penned one of the forwards for Free Jazz and Improvisation on Vinyl 1965-1985 (there’s a second one by notorious “discaholic” and reedist Mats Gustaffson)....
Cultural critic and serial provocateur Laura Kipnis wrote an essay in 2015 for The Chronicle of Higher Education about a new policy forbidding dating between professors and undergraduates at Northwestern University, where she’s a tenured professor of film. The article ignited a furor that included shocked Northwestern undergrads marching to the president’s office with mattresses on their backs in protest. Two students filed Title IX complaints against Kipnis, claiming her words had created “a hostile environment....
Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Thursday, June 8, 2017. ACLU slams Emanuel’s new police reform monitor plan The American Civil Liberties Union has slammed Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s new plan to have an independent party monitor the Chicago Police Department rather than put it under a consent decree overseen by a federal judge, calling it a “non-starter” and “hostile to police reform,” according to the Sun-Times. The ACLU hasn’t yet decided whether it will sue over the matter, “but we are considering every option,” said ACLU spokesman Ed Yohnka....
Jerry Yulsman Johnson and Kerouac, ca. 1957 I received one of my most important lessons about feminism when I was about 16 and attempted to read On the Road. I think I got as far as Montana, where Sal and Dean hitch a ride in the back of a pickup truck and gaze up at the stars. I liked that part, but shortly after, I fell asleep and didn’t bother picking it up again....
