“People consider me someone who knows a lot about spirits, but I have to admit that my experience had not included a true introduction to three-penis wine,” Michael Rubel (Henry’s Swing Club) says of the ingredient with which Violet Hour bartender Patrick Smith challenged him to create a cocktail. Smith—”someone I thought was my friend,” Rubel says—found a bottle of the Chinese rice wine at a store in Chinatown and personally delivered it to Rubel....
LEON NEAL/AFP/Getty Images Protesters demonstrate outside Nigeria House in London on May 9 to demand the return of more than 200 Nigerian schoolgirls abducted by the Boko Haram Islamist group. A newspaper column we have read a thousand times and will read a thousand more (providing newspaper columns continue to be written) is the one that sprays Windex on a matter we supposed was clear enough and invites us to take another look....
Two weeks ago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel let it be known that he was planning to raise property taxes by at least $500 million to pay off some of the many obligations he’s been ignoring for the last four years. I was sort of hoping to get through this budget season without mentioning TIFs, but that’s a little like walking through a rainstorm without getting wet. You know, I think this might be more fun to read about if I gave the property tax nomenclature colorful nicknames like crime reporters do for mobsters: Joey “the Clown” Tax Levy, Angelo “the Hook” EAV, or Jake “Greasy Thumb” Tax Rate....
Pursuit of Dopeness/Creative Commons Spencer Sims While local rapper Chris Crack has dropped a solid streak of one-off tracks and EPs over the past few months, his New Deal Crew cohorts have been busy tinkering away on their own tracks. Recently NDC MC Spencer Sims caught my ear with the psychedelic, smoldering guitar that wafts through his new track, “Show Me Love,” and he kept me on the line rapping about hooking listeners like tuna (yep, I took that bait)....
Salmon cooked in a beer cooler isn’t for everyone. It turns out, for example, that it’s not for me. But that doesn’t make J. Kenji López-Alt’s method for cooking salmon (or meat) sous vide any less ingenious. Sous vide—a technique in which food is vacuum-sealed and cooked in a water bath at a precise temperature—usually requires either an expensive circulator to hold water at a constant temperature, or a large pot, a thermometer, and a lot of patience....
Yo! Summer is here! The river is flowing, the beaches are glowing, the bullets are flying, and the city is at its annual peak of fabulousness! Everything looks great—including the plans for two major new arts initiatives the city recently rolled out. The fact that Grima was cocurator of an inaugural design biennial in Istanbul in 2012 raises the question whether we might be coming late to the biennial party. But the organizers have thought about the competition: the odd-year launch was chosen so as not to compete directly with the well-established Venice Architecture Biennale, which runs on even years and isn’t likely to be shaking in its handsome Italian boots....
The consensus on Pallbearer’s new third album, Heartless (Profound Lore), seems to be that the Arkansas doom-metal quartet have finally unmasked themselves as a prog band. But even if you’re one of those benighted souls for whom “prog” is a four-letter word, you needn’t be alarmed—the shift is more of degree than of kind. After all, on Pallbearer’s debut, 2012’s Sorrow and Extinction, the stately riffs follow long, serpentine paths, weaving together melody and countermelody in a complicated dance....
It’s tempting to envy Paul Salopek. While the rest of us were dealing with Donald Trump, he was walking across Central Asia. “I came to accept that this project, fragile as it is, provides readers at least one small outlet to a wider horizon,” Salopek wrote, “and maybe even empathy for The Other.” “I’ve never viewed my storytelling through a political prism,” he said. “The questions that confront, say, a Saudi fire healer or a Djiboutian shipping agent, or a Georgian mother, are what power my work....
Michael Gebert Paula Haney of Hoosier Mama Several of our favorite people in food in Chicago, who also have books out, will appear on the Printers Row Lit Fest’s Good Eating stage this weekend. Paula Haney of Hoosier Mama Pie Company will be doing a cooking demo at 10 AM on Saturday; Jacquy Pfeiffer, who just won a James Beard Award for The Art of French Pastry, will be on the same stage at 11; there will be a conference called Midwestern Writers on Food at 11:45 AM; Lidia Bastianich of Eataly will be there at 12:45 PM; Gale Gand of the new Spritz Burger (among many other things) appears at 1:45 PM; the lovely Ina Pinkney will do a cooking demo at 2:30 PM; and Andrew Zimmern of TV’s Bizarre Foods will be there Sunday at noon....
Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Friday, June 16, 2017. Have a great weekend! Cook County will no longer prosecute some traffic offenses due to lack of resources The Cook County state’s attorney’s office will stop prosecuting some traffic offenses due to lack of resources and personnel. “The state’s attorney’s office will not prosecute people accused of driving on licenses that have been suspended or revoked for financial reasons—such as failure to pay child support, tolls or parking tickets,” the Tribune reports....
So what came first for the 90s-era shoegaze band: the reunion tour or the new album? So easy . . . it’s the reunion tour. Because as My Bloody Valentine and Ride and, yes, Slowdive began working the festival circuit years back—closely followed by sold-out theater tours—they all became inclined to pile on the hype of the shoegaze rediscovery by kicking off even more dust and even more threadbare gloom from those effect-pedal boards....
Q: I’m a 24-year-old gay male with few resources and no “marketable” skills. I have made a lot of bad choices and now I struggle to make ends meet in a crappy dead-end job, living paycheck to paycheck in an expensive east-coast city. Recently, someone on Grindr offered me $3,000 to have sex with him. He is homely and nearly three times my age, but he seems kind and respectful. I could really use that money....
I tried to eat way more meat than is good for the body at Tête Charcuterie, but for days afterward all I could think about was a salad. At the moment Tête only has a few of its own cured sausages available—either a la carte (in one-ounce or one-and-a-half ounce portions) or arrayed on charcuterie boards featuring an ever-rotating assortment that includes the various pâtés and terrines made in-house. The cured sausages are on display in a glass case behind the bar that runs perpendicular to the open kitchen, and in a glass-enclosed annex housing a meat grinder and sausage stuffer....
If Willie Nelson is approaching death, he sure isn’t acting the way you’d expect someone to behave when afterlife is imminent. At 84 years old, he’s still releasing an album a year (sometimes two, as he did in 2016 with the tribute LPs Summertime and For the Good Times), smoking a ton of weed (while becoming something of a marijuana entrepreneur with his own strain, Willie’s Reserve), and running both a truck stop (Willie’s Place, in Carl’s Corner, Texas) and the best Sirius XM country-music station (the phenomenal Willie’s Roadhouse)....
Justin Broadrick already has a lifetime’s worth of incredibly heavy music behind him. In 1985, at age 16, the Birmingham native played guitar with UK grindcore pioneers Napalm Death; in 1986 he joined noise-rock band Head of David; and in 1988 he cofounded Godflesh, an ice-cold, beastly, drum-machine-driven band that helped lay the groundwork for industrial metal before dissolving in 2002. For much of the past decade, Broadrick has focused on relatively pretty music, mainly with electronic project Final and lush postmetal band Jesu, but even his beautiful soundscapes and earnest, heartfelt melodies have the mass and density he first learned to wield as a teen....
For the past decade, under a seemingly endless list of names, Chicago experimentalist Angel Marcloid has spread her tendrils across vast stretches of the world of noise and electronic music. Her diverse sonic identities—the hazily fluid, manipulated new-age sounds of Mindspring Memories, the more unsettling work she does under her own name or as Pregnant Spore—intersect but rarely significantly overlap. With a distinctive retrofuturistic aesthetic (which predates the vaporwave craze) that she fuses with a modern reinterpretation of older styles, Marcloid has carved out her own place in experimental music without rendering herself inaccessible to curious listeners....
1519 W. Warren, 312-660-1354 After a $22 million renovation, the old Viceroy Hotel on the near-west side reopened last year in stunning fashion. The architects behind the renovation, Landon Bone Baker, have restored the terra-cotta facade and the arched ceilings inside. The building originally opened in 1930 as the Union Park Hotel (because it faces Union Park), with 175 cramped rooms, most furnished with wall beds. It was renamed the Viceroy in 1963 and designated a landmark by the city in 2010....
Last year I moved from Evanston to Albany Park, and serendipitously my radio options changed. For decades I’ve appreciated the wide-ranging, unconstrained programming on local college and community stations, but I never spent much time actually listening to them, even during the years I hosted an international-music program on Loyola University’s WLUW. Maybe I couldn’t hear one station because I was too far from the transmitter, or missed out on another because I lived in a signal shadow cast by tall buildings....
The Homestretch, the latest social-issue documentary from Kartemquin Films, succeeds surprisingly well in having its cake and eating it too. Directors Anne De Mare and Kirsten Kelly persuasively indict America’s failure to assist homeless teenagers, which a title estimates at 1.6 million people. Yet the stories they present are genuinely uplifting, charting the lives of three homeless Chicago teens as they find housing, complete their high school educations, and ready themselves for the adult world....
George Brace / AP Photos Babe Ruth and his wife, Claire, captured by famed baseball photographer George Brace. Rifling through old files the other day, I came across a good idea I’d reported in a column in 1996. The status of writers and broadcasters has always been ambiguous at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. Neither trade belongs formally to the hall but both are celebrated there, in spaces honoring recipients of the J....
