I recently spoke at Curious Minds Weekend in Toronto at the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema. Audience members submitted questions on cards before the show—anonymously—but the moderator, Lisan Jutras of the Globe and Mail, and I were having so much fun talking with each other that we didn’t get to many cards. So I’m going to quickly answer as many of the questions from the audience at Curious Minds as I can this week....
Three years ago wildly imaginative producer and MC Residente (aka René Pérez) disbanded Calle 13, the shape-shifting hip-hop and reggaeton project he started with his stepbrother Eduardo José Cabra Martínez (aka Visitante) in 2004 in their native Puerto Rico. That project catapulted the duo to global fame, and it gave Residente the resources to pursue his vision for self-titled 2017 solo debut—a musical investigation of his ethnic roots inspired and fueled by the results of a DNA test....
It’s probably best to get this out of the way right up front: the Internet handle for Lesley Williams, Evanston Public Library’s beleaguered director of adult services, is “Cranky Librarian.” During the next week, as the city deliberated, the library board of trustees issued a statement in support of its director, Karen Danczak Lyons. The board announced that it had renewed Danczak Lyons’s annual employment contract, and complained that “unsubstantiated social media” protests (on Williams’s behalf) “undermine our strategic plan; demoralize our wonderful and hard-working staff; and threaten to burn the bridges EPL has sought to build throughout our city....
Patriots Day, Peter Berg’s new drama about the Boston Marathon bombing, arrives in theaters less than four years after the attack, which left three people dead and hundreds more wounded. Sensitive to this, star-coproducer Mark Wahlberg and director-cowriter Peter Berg take great pains to celebrate the humanity of those who were on Boylston Street near the finish line of the race in April 2013, when two pressure-cooker bombs exploded in quick succession, spraying shrapnel across the sidewalk....
In this modern ballet, performed as part of the Pivot Arts fest program “Gravity,” Kristina Isabelle retools the proportions of her dancers by literally sending them out on a limb, putting them onto stilts. A kind of next-generation pointe shoe, stilts perform a similar function, boosting dancers to different levels in space and elongating the lines of their legs. Ingeniously, Isabelle sometimes deploys the stilts asymmetrically. When dancers wearing one stilt ply it like a lever to swing their bare foot to sublime heights, the alien angles they produce abstract their legs into pure lines that show crisply against the Joan Mitchell-inspired scrim....
Last June local artist Tiffany Pruitt scored herself a Brother Entrepreneur 6 (the mother of all embroidery machines) and with the help of fellow artist Mike Simi started Approaching Happiness, “R-rated custom embroidery for the masses.” For now they primarily operate through Instagram, where they first caught my eye with a nearly perfect T-shirt featuring an embroidered John Goodman and Roseanne Barr. Since then one of their most popular designs (and the company’s sort of unofficial motto)—fuck you, i’m perf—has made its way onto patches, T-shirts, pillows, and most everything else that can be slid through Pruitt’s embroiderer....
Chicago’s literary scene seems to be in perpetual start-up mode—a constant stream of newly launched reading series, websites, and presses means there’s always some fresh blood. Back in 2003, Doug Seibold started Agate Publishing in just this vein, working out of his basement with, as he told the Reader in 2012, “a cell phone, a laptop, and a DSL line” and beginning with African-American fiction and business titles, both fields he’d worked in during his 15 years in local publishing....
Jessica Koscielniak/Sun-Times Media Seventh Ward alderman Natashia Holmes says city job cuts have a “dramatic impact” on struggling black neighborhoods. Even in job losses, there are two Chicagos. In a city as segregated as Chicago, that adds up to a serious blow to black and Latino communities already struggling with disinvestment and crime. These public-sector jobs formed the economic base of middle-class neighborhoods that are now imperiled, especially on the south and southwest sides....
Brian Posehn has a thing for farts—and he wants to share. Hell, his last two comedy albums are titled Fart and Wiener Jokes and The Fartist, and the bulk of his material can be boiled down to the basic idea that flatulence is funny. It’s simplistic stuff, for sure, but there’s something endearing about Posehn’s sophomoric outlook, which also focuses on subjects like weed and masturbation. But Posehn, the self-professed science-fiction and heavy-metal maniac, is 48 years old, and as he explains on The Fartist, it’s time to let go of such childish things....
You’re seated at the kitchen table, chatting with your mother, sister, and a classmate between bites of spaghetti when a gunshot rings out from somewhere near your house. Are you in danger? It’s possible, but you’ve lived in Englewood all your life and now that you’re 18 years old, you’re relatively used to the disruptive sound of random gunfire. And so you remain seated. “I’m so tired of all these shootings,” your ten-year-old sister, Taylor, says....
Richard A. Chapman/Sun-Times Media Could Anthony Porter be guilty after all? The abolition of the death penalty in Illinois is a story that goes back to the moment a bewildered governor, George Ryan, watching TV at home in 1999, saw Anthony Porter released from prison into the arms of a Medill professor and a handful of students. Ryan said to his wife, “How the hell does that happen? How does an innocent man sit on death row for 15 years and get no relief?...
Q: My brother is a virgin and turning 30 in a few weeks. He said he wants to hire an escort just for drinks and conversation for his birthday, but he doesn’t really know how to tell what’s a reliable service or what criteria he should be looking for to tell whether an agency is legit, reliable, etc. I’m very happy he came to me with this because I can tell it’s not something he wants to share with many people—but I don’t have any advice or knowledge to pass on regarding this and I want to respect his privacy by not discussing it with anyone in our social circles....
I saw the same Steppenwolf opening Sun-Times critic Hedy Weiss saw two weekends ago—Antoinette Nwandu’s Pass Over, a lacerating, absurdist exploration of racism. The play was genuinely shocking. It was a startling move by a major Chicago theater against a critic who’s logged more than 30 years—thousands of nights in storefronts and millions of words written on deadline—as a champion of the vaunted Chicago theater scene. Ironically, the bigotry that’s evident in all this has been piling on in Facebook discussions and other Internet comments (where the worst of her attackers have taken her past words out of context and maliciously distorted their meaning)....
Deliciously pink, with cakelike adornments, the confection that is the Edgewater Beach Apartments seems as if it could’ve been Wes Anderson’s inspiration for The Grand Budapest Hotel. (For the record, the director took his cues from the Czech Republic’s Grandhotel Pupp.) Built in the late 1920s, EBA was part of the Edgewater Beach Hotel, a north-side resort frequented by stars like Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, and Charlie Chaplin. The hotel was demolished in 1967, but the apartment building dodged the wrecking ball and is now a housing co-op....
New York label Dull Tools, run by members of Parquet Courts, has given the world a tape of an unlikely Chicago collaboration: four untitled instrumentals by noise punks Running and pastoral jazz-folk guitarist and singer Ryley Walker. In 2016, which now feels like a lifetime ago, Walker and all three members of Running holed up in the home studio of engineer Cooper Crain (from Cave and Bitchin Bajas) and laid down the tracks on Running & Ryley Walker....
It’s kind of amazing, if you think about it, how many common experiences have never been described in fiction, even though they seem so obvious in retrospect. For instance, how many bookish girls have read the Little House series and desperately wanted to be Laura Ingalls, to be a brave and plucky pioneer girl and live in a log cabin or a hole in the ground and get to be around horses all the time and churn butter?...
I’ve recently been stuck on Tacit in Tact, the newest release from Options, a pop-centric, mathy fourth-wave emo band helmed by local multi-instrumentalist Seth Engel. Tacit in Tact is Engel’s first release of the year, but he’s involved in a handful of other projects—including screamo outfit Guillement and fourth-wave emo outfit Lifted Bells, which is fronted by Bob Nanna of Braid—so I knew I’d hear some more new tunes from him soon....
Kyle Schwarber, the Cubs’ slugging left fielder, needs a nickname. TV announcers at the first playoff game against the Mets tried out “the Hulk,” which is lame. Reader alum Neil Tesser, the Grammy-winning jazz writer, tells me he’s heard other broadcasters trying to promote the “New Baby Bull.” First baseman Orlando Cepeda was the original Baby Bull half a century ago. Boxer Juan Diaz is the Baby Bull today. Back in the 1920s, heavyweight Luis Firpo was the Wild Bull of the Pampas....
Q I’m a 25-year-old gay male into puppy play. About a year ago, I joined a pack with one Sir and several puppies. I became very close to one of my “pup bros” and became his alpha—meaning between the two of us, I’m more dom but still sub to our Sir. Fast-forward nine months, and the pack has fallen apart due to each of us going through our own relationship troubles....
Most of the features in contention for the Academy Awards have been screening in town for months, but this week brings your first (and, in some cases, probably your last) chance to see the nominated short films. Music Box screens the best documentary shorts in two different programs, and Landmark’s Century Centre presents the best live-action and animated shorts. I confess that I look forward most to the animations, if only because they tend to be a little more adult than the nominees for best animated feature....
