Sunday, August 6, 2017 11 AM – 5 PM Plumbers Hall 1340 W. Washington Blvd., Chicago, IL 60607 The Made in Chicago Market is back! It’s a fun celebration of all things DIY—showcasing some of the best apparel, housewares, and food and drink that Chicago has to offer! Shop local and support your neighborhood makers. Free admission! Free parking! You should come! #MICM #MadeinChicago Food & Drink menu Beers: Guten Tag and Scentinel from Old Irving Brewing...
When the devil comes a-knockin’ on the door of village pariah Elizabeth (Audrey Francis) to offer a Faustian bargain for her soul, he tries out a unique sales pitch: Everyone in town already believes her to be a witch and treats her accordingly. So why not lean into it and actually reap some perks? Lyons’s cast is compelling from top to bottom (Francis, as a deadpan, strong-willed Elizabeth, is a consistent scene stealer), and without spoiling anything, a shocking sequence fight-choreographed by Matt Hawkins is undoubtedly one of the richest, most visceral scenes to play out on a Chicago stage all year....
The idea of unionizing the professional staff of Chicago Public Media, which operates NPR affiliate WBEZ, was an old one that for years never went anywhere. But last July CEO Torey Malatia resigned under fire, and the idea was reborn with urgency. In December CPM’s staff voted 40 to seven to join the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. “I wouldn’t want to speak for everybody,” Linn went on, “but I think we’re looking for someone who is a visionary, and who is inspirational....
Just minutes before the Chicago Police Department released a video Tuesday of a white police officer shooting a black teenager to death, several groups of black activists marched to Cook County state’s attorney Anita Alvarez’s office on the near west side of Chicago to attend a community forum. She had waited too long to charge officer Jason Van Dyke for the murder of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, they said. It was more than a year after the October 2014 shooting and the charges came only after a judge had ordered the release of the video showing his death....
If you’re well-versed in Chicago hip-hop, then you should certainly know the name Hurt Everybody, a rare group that landed like an asteroid in 2014 and vanished just as quickly. While outsiders positioned the city’s scene as a binary, dividing Chicago rappers into drill and poetry-bred alternative hip-hop (while ignoring, say, the joyful sound of bop, Hurt Everybody showed that it is possible to craft a sound for which there’s no local precedent—combining Mulatto Beats’ spaced-out, kaleidoscopic productions, Supa Bwe’s sweet and caterwauling battle cries, and Qari’s world-building, ballistic raps, which he delivers with an unruffled, grizzled grace....
As I write this, it’s been less than a week since Chance the Rapper first demanded that Governor Rauner send more state aid to Chicago’s dead-broke public schools. I don’t want to say anything that might deter his mission, but it seems like Chance is looking to Rauner for something our governor doesn’t have—a conscience. Chance was born and raised in Chicago. His father, Ken Bennett, was a political aide to Mayor Harold Washington and Barack Obama....
Ira Glass has landed in Chicago. The host of This American Life has just disembarked and he’s on the move. He asks if he can call me back once he finds a cab. A few minutes later, we’re chatting about a range of things, starting with Three Acts, Two Dancers, One Radio Host, his touring show with dancers Monica Bill Barnes and Anna Bass, which makes its Chicago debut at the Athenaeum Theatre tomorrow....
Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Friday, January 13, 2016. Have a great weekend! The ACLU will no longer receive the names of every CPD officer who stops a civilian on the street The local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union will no longer receive the name of every Chicago Police officer who stops someone in the street. A 2015 agreement between the ACLU and CPD dictated that cops were required to fill out a two-page document for each stop, but many members of the Fraternal Order of Police blamed the form for the “80 percent drop in the number of investigatory stops conducted by officers last year,” according to DNAinfo Chicago....
Aimee Levitt A plate of handwiches from Burke’s Bacon Bar The first day after the polar vortex when the temperature finally got back above freezing and everyone realized that 34 degrees feels pretty damned good, I felt giddy and celebratory enough to go review Rosie’s West Town Deli in Ukrainian Village, which didn’t seem too arduous a trek from River North. I took sandwich orders from some of my dear coworkers and cheerfully promised them I would be back in an hour....
In the years since Lollapalooza became a destination festival in 2005, organizers C3 Presents have perfected a formula for success. The fest’s tenure in Grant Park has outlasted its original seven-year run as an alt-rock package tour, and three-day passes to the 2014 version were all snapped up in March, before the lineup was even made public. Single-day passes became available a few days later, after the lineup announcement, and they were gone within two hours....
Since emerging at the start of the decade, Seattle singer-songwriter Mike Hadreas (who performs as Perfume Genius) has displayed steady growth and a dramatic expansion of sound, morphing from a soulful albeit tortured piano balladeer into a full-blown art-pop experimenter. His new album No Shape (Matador) was produced by Blake Mills, and it situates Hadreas’s rich, androgynous singing in the widest array of contexts yet, all of them far more explicitly pop than his previous efforts....
Over the last few months Mayor Emanuel has repeatedly vowed to use every tool at his disposal to help end the murders on the city’s south and west sides. The mayor established the approximately $20 million fund last year to provide property tax rebates to home owners who couldn’t afford his tax hike, intended to finally pay off our pension obligations. Indulge me for a moment as I return to a happier time in Chicago finances, when former alderman Richard Mell offered this breathless ode to Daley during the council’s debate on the Skyway deal: It’s good to know that pensioners somewhere are benefiting from our largesse—too bad they’re in another country....
Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Tuesday, May 16, 2017. Northwestern study links high blood pressure to segregated neighborhoods Segregated neighborhoods have a “powerful effect” on blood pressure levels, according to a new study led by a Northwestern University researcher and published in the JAMA journal Internal Medicine. The study tracked 2,820 African-Americans over decades and discovered that the subjects who left highly segregated neighborhoods experienced a drop in blood pressure, the Tribune reports....
Twin Peaks | 1:00 Artists’ names are in the color of the stage they’re appearing on. See our previews of the bands playing on Friday and Sunday. Pitchfork main » Circulatory System | 1:55 Brooklyn songwriter Lorely Rodriguez attracted Pitchfork’s attention with “Hat Trick,” a bubbling, gauzy single where she sustains a late-summer-evening mood with just a couple of synths and pedals and the upper register of her ghostly voice. The recent “Realize You,” on the other hand, collides her ethereal singing with cacophonous percussion in a way that makes the track sound like a slightly outre take on freestyle, the soap-operatic dance music that dominated New York and Miami airwaves some 20 years ago....
Born in 2002, the Chicago Sketch Comedy Festival celebrates its 13th birthday this winter with a marathon bar—or possibly bat—mitzvah party featuring 150 sketch troupes. Ten thousand guests are expected at Sketchfest, which unfolds over two long weekends, January 9 through 19. Among the relatives flying in from out of town are Brooklyn’s Boat (Fri-Sat 1/10-1/11, 9 PM), whose dry, smart wit references sources from Chekhov to The Usual Suspects, and Fuct (Fri-Sat, 1/17-1/18, 10 PM), also from New York but gravitating more toward routines about shooting babies and drinking spit....
There are scenes in American politics so familiar you could watch them with the sound off and not miss a thing. Near the top of that list has to be the public apology for infidelity. In fact, the disgraced politician’s words of remorse and promises to reform only distract from the spectacle’s most fascinating figure: the mute, shell-shocked wife standing next to the podium where her husband is trying with all his might to look and sound sincerely disgusted with himself....
It was only a few weeks ago that Mayor Rahm delivered a budget address in which he praised himself for doing the responsible—although boring and unpopular—thing of raising taxes to free future Chicagoans of onerous obligations. Oh, if Rahm were only so accommodating to, say, the mental health needs of low-income people in high-crime areas. When the City Council approves a TIF district, it basically freezes for 23 years the amount of property taxes the schools, parks, library, city, county, etc....
AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast Bruce Rauner’s campaign has accused the Sun-Times of an ethical violation. In April 2013, Bruce Rauner called allegations that he clouted his daughter into Payton College Prep in 2008 “stuff that doesn’t matter.” Recently, Rauner was irked by a Sun-Times-NBC5 News story about a lawsuit that cast him in a bad light. The story was authored by Sun-Times Springfield bureau chief Dave McKinney, NBC5 News’s Don Moseley, and Carol Marin, who works for both the Sun-Times and NBC5 News....
Saxophonist Andrew Bernstein is a major contributor to the churning intensity of noisy Baltimore art-rock band Horse Lords, and while the music on his forthcoming second solo album, An Exploded View of Time (Hausu Mountain), isn’t nearly as loud or propulsive, its concentrated sound and cycling patterns are hardly chill. With the exception of the piece “Deux Ex Machina”—which deploys custom resonance software that seems to elongate and smooth his slaloming, vibrato-heavy phrases while adding a ghostly sonic backdrop—everything is played live, without effects....
Scenes From a Marriage Among other things, Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac (playing this week at the Siskel Center) is an extended tribute-cum-insult to Ingmar Bergman, with the meandering intellectual blather delivered by Stellan Skarsgard’s character often coming off as a deadpan parody of the confessional monologues one finds in many Bergman chamber dramas. That the film runs four hours seems like part of the joke, a comment on the interminableness (for some viewers) of Bergman’s soul-searching....
