Gene Page/AMC Alex (Tate Ellington) and Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) in The Walking Dead Whenever I have zombie apocalypse nightmares—which I do a lot; it’s awful—zombies aren’t the antagonists. Instead it’s the gang of men with leashed Dobermans who want the last of the canned food I have stashed in the strange bedroom I’ve hidden in for weeks, living in darkness so no one knows I’m there. Something like that....
UIC professor Therese Quinn lobbed a little bomb at her alma mater, the UIC College of Education, last week. The Urban Education program has a primary goal of recruiting students who’ve come through city schools and preparing them to go back into those schools as highly qualified teachers and inspiring role models. In Chicago, that means more Latinx and black teachers and especially more males of color. She also pointed to a drop in students of color in the college’s PhD programs, and the end of a policy of “conditional acceptance” for students who can’t yet meet the state requirements, observing that the only way she herself got into the COE graduate school was through such a conditional admittance....
Victor David Giron was a student at the U. of I. at Urbana-Champaign in the 90s when he cooked up the name Curbside Splendor for a hypothetical garage band. Now Giron operates a rising indie imprint under that name, and as its president and publisher he’s preserved the press’s musical roots (however tenuous), releasing books this year by Chicago band dudes Tim Kinsella and Brian Costello, and organizing a much-anticipated oral history due out next fall about the first 20-plus years of the Empty Bottle, where this reading/concert goes down....
Xavier Dolan’s mother must feel very proud of him, and possibly a little wary. A busy child actor in Quebec, Dolan amassed a small fortune and, when he reached the age of majority, immediately spent $150,000 of his earnings to finance I Killed My Mother, his first feature film as writer-director. A semiautobiographical story about a closeted gay teenager (Dolan) locked in a battle of wills with his steely divorced mom (Anne Dorval), the movie drew a standing ovation at the Cannes film festival in 2009 and collected enthusiastic reviews when it was released in Europe and the U....
On Monday Chicago rapper Nick Astro kicked off the rollout of his forthcoming EP, Nothing Is Original, with a video for a tune called “Black Interlude.” The MC packs quite a bit of fun into a song that barely crosses the one-minute mark by contorting his affable, easygoing flow with knotty syllables and Kanye-isms while name-dropping Wu-Tang, King Louie, and Lupe Fiasco. Astro’s performance is a bright contrast to producer Dee Lilly’s instrumental, which is anchored by low-rumbling, squelching synths and spastic, sparse percussion; with the rapper’s voice in the mix it makes for a lively joint....
By the end of the year SOB X RBE, the great rap hope of Vallejo, California, will have dropped their first two studio albums, February’s Gangin and its new sequel, Gangin II (both out on SOB X RBE/Empire), and possibly broken up—or at the very least, it seems likely they’ll no longer be a foursome. On Wednesday, September 19, rapper Yhung T.O. announced he’d be done with SOB X RBE after Gangin II via a now-deleted Instagram post....
High and Low This week, this Music Box hosts a special screening of Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, the Japanese director’s excellent Macbeth adaptation, to coincide with Chicago Opera Theater’s own forthcoming staging of the Shakespeare play. Throne of Blood‘s recent digital restoration was created in 2K resolution from the original 35mm fine-grain master print, and it’s said to be among the better digital prints out there today. This is an exciting opportunity to see the film in a new light while also getting a sneak peak of what COT has in store, as excerpts from its Macbeth are also previewed....
Anyone interested in DJing as a form of musicianship owes it to himself to see DJ Harvey at least once behind the decks. While not very well known for his own music, Harvey is a legendary DJ—working largely with his own record collection (forgoing the use of Serato or other MP3-DJing platforms), his sets each have their own arc and character. What you see and hear one night bears little resemblance to another Harvey set....
Tonight the Wicker Park branch of Dimo’s Pizza is hosting a benefit show for the inaugural Fed Up Fest, a DIY queercore extravaganza that’s going down at the end of the month. The bill features Arugula, Boots, and the Valenteens, who are behind today’s 12 O’Clock Track, “Mile Marker.” It’s a scorching punk tune that’s got some hardcore coursing through it; the song sits on the right side of the pop-punk fence and it fits in neatly with the rest of the band’s Fun in the Sun With ....
“Solarise,” a new installation by the artistic duo Luftwerk, uses light and color to produce five site-specific interventions that reflect the inner and outer structures of the plants at the Garfield Park Conservatory. The exhibition, which opened last month on the fall equinox, will run one day short of a full year, the longest exhibition Petra Bachmaier and Sean Gallero have ever produced. “Solarise” is still a work in progress; Bachmaier and Gallero will continue to study how each installation reacts to the changing seasons....
The bummer thing about most bondage gear—harnesses, leashes, and the like—is that it’s always black. Boring. I mean, sex play’s supposed to be fun, so why shouldn’t it look fun? Local queer designer Natalie Brilmyer—aka Gnat—makes vinyl cuffs, strap-on harnesses, and bras that are as colorful and sparkly as a carnival ride, and even more fun than that if you’re going to be, well, riding someone. Her website says: “Sexuality and kinkiness fuse with vibrant candy and toy plastic playthings to become the multidimensional bags, hats, and harnesses for those hyper individual, diverse, beautiful queer bodies!...
Brandon Baltzley On Wednesday, I linked to Sarah Freeman’s account at Zagat of dinner at TMIP in Michigan City, Indiana, the farm-to-table-on-an-actual-farm restaurant started by Brandon Baltzley, the much–written–about chef best known in Chicago for some abortive stints at dying restaurants (Mado, Pensiero). Or for being written about so much, really (and in my own case, caught on video). Just a day later, TMIP ran into a major snag in the form of the big orange shutdown sticker from the local Health Department, which Baltzley posted on Instagram....
The shuttering of the Portage Theater last May left numerous orphans in its wake: Northwest Chicago Film Society, with its weekly schedule of offbeat Hollywood relics; the Massacre and Sci-Fi Spectacular, annual day-long marathons of horror and fantasy fare; and perhaps most importantly, the Silent Film Society of Chicago—whose founder, organist Dennis Wolkowicz (aka Jay Warren), had managed the Portage for owner Eddie Caranza. SFSC decamped to the Des Plaines Theatre last summer for its annual Silent Summer Film Festival, a real loss to Chicagoans....
Just before the artist Matt Freedman left New York for Boston in the fall of 2012 to undergo treatment for adenoid cystic carcinoma— a rare form of cancer that by the time it was diagnosed had spread from his tongue to his neck and lungs—his students and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania presented him with a blank sketchbook. He resolved to record his thoughts and experiences, four pages a day, for the next seven weeks....
Courtesy of #HealthGoth Just do it. And by “it” I mean wear this shirt. If you’re eager to get in shape while blasting goth, industrial, and darkwave on your little white earbuds then electronic-music wiz and local party promoter Johnny Love is here to help. Love, the man behind nu-industrial outfit Deathface, just released a PDF of workout tips for fans of dark, menacing electronic music, which he calls the “#HealthGoth Fitness Bible....
On their terrific second album, Hurry Home (New West), New Orleans quintet Deslondes settle into a sweet spot at the nexus of various threads of southern sounds, building on the low-key charms of their eponymous 2015 debut. That means honky-tonk, R&B, rockabilly, swamp pop, and other rootsy variations commingle in a deliciously humid atmosphere crafted with producer Andrija Tokic, suggesting the Band if they had decamped to a Crescent City shotgun house rather than Big Pink....
Lebanese guitarist Sharif Sehnaoui is a soft-spoken man who’s spent most of his adult life making fiercely experimental music under difficult conditions. He emerged as part of the group of Beirut improvisers who since 2000 have organized the annual Irtijal Festival, and he’s a cofounder of Al Maslakh, a Lebanese label that functions as a kind of analogue to the festival. Sehnaoui’s own music is as quiet as his demeanor, but it’s plenty adventurous....
(This essay contains spoilers.) [content-1]As a former fundamentalist Christian and missionary, I’m one of the few people in the audience during a recent performance that may have needed something akin to a trigger warning in advance of the G-rated trauma portrayed in The Christians. Indeed, after reading a review of the show, which is about an evangelical church divided against itself, I nearly decided to skip it because of my deeply personal connection to the material....
Is there really such a thing as privacy anymore? This question is one of many asked by Sam Levinson in his second feature, Assassination Nation. But neither Levinson nor the film’s characters let you come out of the theater with an easy answer—that would miss the point entirely. Instead, Assassination Nation serves as a dizzying, aggressive, and controversial commentary on how desensitized we’ve become to violence in a world that won’t stop buzzing....
Lana Turner is rightfully remembered for striking performances in her mid- and late-career melodramas, but her range was wide. She was cast in early ingenue parts, traditional dramatic films, period films, comedies, and even had some horror and musical detours. Her status as a Hollywood star, though, was cemented due to roles in classic film noir. A glimpse of Turner’s talents can be seen in her films available on FilmStruck, where she is currently “Star of the Week....
