In her short career this 18-year-old vocalist, born in Calumet City as Trinity Home, has shown a considerable gift for blurring lines that other artists take for granted as fixed. Tink has sung R&B over a Chief Keef beat and rapped over Timbaland-style R&B; she’s appeared on the 2014 compilation Boss Shit Only with Atlanta mixtape superstars Migos and Young Thug; and she’s collaborated with avant-club artists such as Fatima Al Qadiri and Junglepussy....
The organizers behind Mamby on the Beach understand electronic music: its history, how it intersects with a panoply of other genres, and its future. The Sunday lineup for the dance-music tent at the annual festival this June included a headlining set by minimal techno titan Richie Hawtin and an opening set from veteran Chicago techno producer and DJ Hiroko Yamamura. She’s as embedded in the local dance scene as anyone can be—she routinely spins at hot spots such as Spybar, Sound Bar, and Smart Bar, and she’s also in with foundational house label Trax (which recently issued a digital compilation, That’s What I Call Trax!...
Chris Abani, Nigerian-born author, newly installed Chicagoan, and professor of English at Northwestern University, is on the same page with: Every Day Is for the Thief by Teju Cole I really love this book, which is about the city of Lagos, but really it’s a book about home and homecoming. [The narrator] is born in Nigeria, in Lagos, and then immigrates to America when he’s a child and spends a lot of his adult life here....
Chicago native, trombonist, composer, and scholar George Lewis wrote the definitive book on the history of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians with his 2008 masterpiece A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music. He knows about that history firsthand, as he got involved with the influential south-side organization in 1971. This year marks the AACM’s 50th anniversary, and there’s been no shortage of events and exhibitions marking the landmark, including the MCA’s wonderful show “The Freedom Principle,” which examines the enduring legacy of Chicago’s Black Arts movement, of which the AACM was a huge part....
When Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich won a Pulitzer in 2012, I commented on the eclecticism of the columns that she entered. For instance, “There’s a poem written as a tribute to Richie Daley when he left office. (She writes two or three poems a year. She’s got a knack.)” “People responded,” Schmich says. So she wrote some more Trump verses on Facebook. “One day I thought, ‘I’m doing a thing here,’” she says....
Gossip Wolf spent what felt like half the 90s tracking down illicit dance parties with fellow raver kids—we’d buy tickets with no idea where the party was going down, then hope it wasn’t 150 miles away in Sheboygan! On Sat 10/25 at 6 PM, eight raging local and international punk, noise, and industrial bands are playing at a DIY space that shall not be named—it’s within the city limits, though, we can tell you that much!...
If Split-Rail opened for breakfast and lunch I could see hanging out there all day talking to myself about chicken McNuggets. This bright, airy, open, industrial space in Humboldt Park, bedecked with fox-hunt-themed banquettes and vintage cheesecake from legendary pinup artist Gil Elvgren, is the home of a new restaurant from former Ada Street chef Zoe Schor, who offers, on a oddly constructed menu, a bowl of five bronzed chicken nuggets at almost twice what you’d pay for a ten-piece under the Golden Arches....
Over much of the past decade, Swedish bassist Torbjörn Zetterberg has pulled me into his world time and time again. He ostensibly works within jazz, but that category feels inadequate to his creative curiosity and artistic empathy. He’s a strong player, but to my ears his writing, arranging, and concepts are even more formidable than his instrumental skills. He recently released two albums whose radically different approaches suggest his range....
Mayor Rahm Emanuel likes to brag that Chicago is one of the leading cities for protected bike lanes, with 22 miles installed to date. That figure helped us garner Bicycling magazine’s award for America’s best biking city last September. CDOT originally installed the Marshall lanes in November 2012. Previously Marshall had wide travel lanes plus parking on both sides of the street in most sections. But in defense of the lanes, Hamilton noted that the “road diet” (as narrowing or removing travel lanes is called) had dramatically reduced speeding on Marshall....
Q: I’m a middle-aged homo trying to figure out Grindr. Is it impolite to go on Grindr if you’re not looking for an immediate hookup? My preferred form of sexual relationship is the friend-with-benefits situation. I go on Grindr looking to make friends who could, at least potentially, be sex partners, but I like to do the friend thing before the sex. I’ve had guys call me an asshole because I exchanged messages with them for 20 minutes and then didn’t come right over and fuck them....
When David Catlin’s bold, captivating version of Moby-Dick debuted at Lookingglass Theatre in 2015, it was praised by then Reader critic Zac Thompson as a “dazzling” spectacle. After its wildly successful local run came a national tour. Now the production’s back in Chicago, in all its acrobatic glory, and having seen it twice, I can safely say that for sheer visual splendor, breathtaking design, and epic storytelling, there’s nothing to rival it now or in recent memory....
Atlanta rapper Tauheed Epps, better known as 2 Chainz, has built a career out of recording self-aggrandizing verses even more outsize than his six-foot, five-inch frame. He litters June’s Pretty Girls Like Trap Music (Def Jam) with rich raps; on the lilting “Rolls Royce Bitch,” Epps explains that his life of luxury is at a different level than most of us can can grasp by telling us about his car’s unusual features (“My doors go that way”)....
Michael R. Schmidt/Sun-Times Media I just read Ben Joravsky’s Bleader post on the ISAT debate in Chicago’s public schools, and I want to add a point that is far from original but can’t be emphasized enough. Teachers didn’t like the ISATs even when they mattered. They interfered with education. Teaching to the test isn’t really teaching, and teachers were taught to teach to the ISATs as if nothing else in the whole school year was half as important....
So many big changes have taken place at the Reader in recent years, from minor masthead shifts to several handovers in ownership. We have new print facilities. (Do you like the new cover stock?) We made new T-shirts. Few changes are likely to be as impactful, however, as the one we’re about to make: the Reader is headed to the south side. Our new offices will allow for many splendiferous wonders, such as the entire workforce of the paper being under one roof and able to communicate without scheduling meetings days in advance, convenient parking facilities, and not having to walk through another newsroom to get to our newsroom, a path that always made me feel a bit like I was walking past the adults’ table at Thanksgiving to get to the kids’ table in the back....
Betsy DeVos, president-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of the Department of Education, might not be the worst of the megabucks donors and right-wing crusaders in Mr. Trump’s prospective cabinet. DeVos, as you’ve no doubt gathered by now, is not a friend of teachers’ unions. Nor of what she calls “government schools”—traditional public neighborhood schools—though she has no personal experience with them. She’s never been a teacher or a school administrator, and she never attended public school herself....
On April 2 and 3, the second Chicago Cocktail Summit returns to the Logan Theatre for two full days of seminars, panel discussions, and interactive workshops with local bartenders and a few guests from out of town, most notably author and historian David Wondrich. The first day is aimed at “consumers and home enthusiasts,” the second at industry professionals, though both are open to anyone who wants to pony up the $50 per day or $15 per session....
[Image-1] The Trump regime’s flood of attacks on democratic norms, rule of law, and vulnerable populations—most prominently its widely contested ban on immigrants and refugees from seven majority-Muslim countries—can seem calculated to induce outrage fatigue in Americans determined to oppose it. But it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that a repeal of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, remains a high priority of this administration. A week before Trump’s inauguration, the Republican-controlled House and Senate took the first steps in dismantling Obama’s health-care law—which has helped provide medical insurance to roughly 20 million people over the past three years—with votes that set the stage for eliminating some of its most important provisions....
As the world watched Donald Trump take the oath as the 45th president of the United States on Friday, I traveled across the city where the 44th, Barack Obama, left his mark—literally and figuratively. Photos, murals, and other images of Barack, Michelle, and daughters Malia and Sasha linger in storefronts in Hyde Park and pop up on buildings and viaducts in Bronzeville, Garfield Park, and Rogers Park. For me, Obama’s legacy is complicated and not flawless....
At any given time and for any given reason, history can be visualized as any given thing: a pageant, a staircase, a helix, a cage match, a bomb. In Erika Sheffer’s raw, strong, disturbingly funny Russian Transport, history is a disease spreading pathogens through time and across borders. Enter a germ named Boris. He’s Diana’s younger brother, who chose not to leave Russia with the others—a handsome, affable, well-toned, English-speaking dude on the early side of middle age....
Balena Balena, designed by Karen Herold, showing where the two buildings meet Yesterday, in the first part of my interview with restaurant designer Karen Herold of Studio K, she talked about the philosophy that goes into her designs, of how a restaurant works and serves its customers. When I first saw Balena, I was surprised that there was so much open space in it. Because there’s never that much open space in a restaurant in the city, a two-story main hall like that....
