As soon as I saw the video of city aviation police dragging David Dao from a United Airlines plane, I said, “It’s a damn shame Dao can’t get Philip Corboy to file his lawsuit.” The case involved a retired Illinois supreme court judge named Thomas Kluczynski and his wife, Melanie, who were bumped from a Delta flight in 1976 because the airline had overbooked the flight. Back then, this case was big news on my beat....
Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn, 312-443-3800, goodmantheatre.org I first saw Mike Nussbaum act nearly 50 years ago, at Hull House Theater in Lakeview. I was a boy at the time; he was in his early 40s and hadn’t yet quit his day job. As you probably know, he eventually did, and—thanks mainly to his role in the Goodman’s 1984 debut of Glengarry Glen Ross, the Pulitzer Prize winner by another Hull House alum, David Mamet—became a late-blooming success on Broadway and in movies like Men in Black....
Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images John Baker after fanning in the first game Saturday When the Cubs won five straight early in June, we began to lose confidence in them. We’ve been tracking the team’s campaign to honor Wrigley Field’s 100th birthday with a 100-loss season, and the winning streak put that noble effort in jeopardy. David Banks/Getty Images Starlin Castro after whiffing in the second game Dropping 100 is a daunting challenge even for a franchise like the Cubs....
Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images Neil Tesser accepting his Grammy The applause that broke out as Neil Tesser accepted his Grammy Award puzzled me a little—and, as he told me later, surprised Tesser as well. He was taking the occasion to say a few words on behalf of the category he won in—album liner notes—and if the words rang, they also sounded self-evident. “It seems a lot of people remember reading these back-of-the-disc essays and learning from them,” he replied, “and that they miss the fact that music downloads and streaming, which are the preferred methods of consuming music these days, contain no information about the songs or albums—not even the personnel or recording statistics....
With Peter Roskam’s craven capitulation to President Trump in last week’s congressional Trumpcare vote, it’s time for suburban Democrats to play Rahm Emanuel. In short, he’s got a safe seat and, as such, is free to vote his conscience. So what did he do? He voted with Donald Trump to replace Obamacare with Trumpcare. His stated reason to reporters: “I think it was a good pathway forward because the status quo is not sustainable....
Local experimental trio Haptic adhere to two constants. One is the involvement of Adam Sonderberg, Joseph Clayton Mills, and Steven Hess, who formed the group in 2005. The other is that everything else changes. Originally convened to provide a framework for in-person improvisations with different musicians, they’ve since performed exacting scores and developed multilayered and complex pieces of music that can only be executed on a recording, often without collaborators. Their performances have ranged from quiet sounds to dense sensory overloads, and their instrumentation has included computers, drums, piano, turntables, a Morse code Instructograph, VHS tape decks, and heaps of rice....
Food writing is some of the most eupeptic writing there is. It’s impossible to feel completely miserable when you’re reading about someone enjoying a really good meal, especially if the writer is generous enough to provide sufficient detail to let you imagine it for yourself. Amy Thielen, however, is the first food writer I’ve ever read who makes me yearn for the hard physical labor of cooking. Whenever I have to prepare a meringue, I give thanks to the genius who invented the KitchenAid mixer, but in her new memoir Give a Girl a Knife, Thielen makes whipping egg whites with a whisk seem like a joyous experience and dinner service at a busy Manhattan restaurant absolutely transcendent....
AFP The newspapers have offered plenty of coverage of Belgium’s World Cup team—but what about Belgium itself? Television blazed the trail, spicing up its Olympics coverage with heartwarming stories of the arduous treks to glory undertaken by top competitors. Some of these competitors were well worth being introduced to, others not so much. A childhood passed in a snowbound village above the tree line often nurtures more fortitude than personality....
It’s been 19 years since local melodic hardcore outfit 88 Fingers Louie released a proper full-length, and on the brand-new Thank You for Being a Friend (Bird Attack), the reunited band haven’t skipped a beat. Throughout the 90s, 88 Fingers Louie made beyond-catchy, turbo-speed, uplifting punk that was without a doubt better than (but unfortunately not as popular as) that of their skate-punk peers. The band broke up in 1999, with two members going on to the massively popular Rise Against, but they’ve come back together for a couple reunion stints over the years....
Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, July 12, 2017. Mexican immigrant scheduled for deportation sues CPD for alleged gang database error A Mexican immigrant facing deportation has sued the Chicago Police Department, “alleging he was wrongly listed in a gang database and that it cost him the chance to get protection through a federal program and remain in the U.S.,” according to the Associated Press. Luis Vicente Pedrote-Salinas is scheduled to be deported July 20 after he allegedly was wrongly identified as a member of the Latin Kings during a January 2011 police stop....
Where you live is, for better or for worse, an expression of who you are. Some people, though, are better at expressing themselves through design than others. The new traveling exhibit “Everyone’s a Designer/Everyone’s Design,” which has its opening reception tonight, celebrates five especially distinctive Chicago homes. Tim Heppner, who was trained as both a carpenter and environmental scientist, renovated his house in South Chicago, originally built in 1875, to be a net-positive energy home....
Logan Square Preservation According to Logan Square Preservation president Andrew Schneider, this was taken in 1915. The Green Star Inn was, in his words, “a cabaret of mixed reputation.” Anyone who’s lived in Logan Square for more than a handful of years will talk your ear off about how much the neighborhood’s changed. A new exhibition of historic photos puts those anecdotes to shame. Logan Square Preservation Another photo Schneider believes was taken in 1915, this showcases a home on the southwest corner of Logan Square....
In 1980, a couple years before Shedrick Yarkpai was born, a master sergeant named Samuel Doe led a coup against Liberian president William Tolbert Jr., executing Tolbert and his entire cabinet. In 1990 Doe was executed in his turn by forces under the command of Charles Taylor. Yarkpai was a child at that point, living with his mother in the Liberian capital, Monrovia. There followed a civil war that’s reported to have displaced a million people and killed anywhere from 200,000 to 600,000....
The title character of Aditi Brennan Kapil‘s Brahman/I is a stand-up comic of ambiguous sexuality—ambiguous, at least, insofar as Anglo-American norms are concerned, there being no viable “other” classification to round out “male” and “female.” Born with bonus genitals, this Georgia-reared child of Indian immigrants (favored nickname “B”) lived as a boy until puberty started working its magic on him, at which point he found himself opting for makeup and saris....
In January, when I sat down for what ended up being a five-hour gabfest with Alderman Ameya Pawar (47th), he predicted that this year was going to be better than the last one in our fair city. The mayor, Alderman Pawar insisted, was not nearly as intransigent as I’d been writing. Moreover, his heart was in the right place when it came to fiduciary reform. It’s as if Mayor Emanuel said to the aldermen, “OK, I’ll let you pretend to be independent....
Courtesy of Strange Victory Touring Spray Paint I’m often playing catch-up when it comes to underground-rock scuzz these days and I’m certainly a late arrival to the joys of the Austin trio called Spray Paint, who today released their third and best album Clean Blood, Regular Acid (Monofonus Press). The group haven’t changed up their sound or approach since forming in early 2012, but they sound more focused than ever, distilling an already austere, stripped-down attack into something exhilaratingly compact and fat-free....
Long before Starbucks started claiming the title of the “third place”—a space besides home and work where people gather—the corner bar was already filling that role. The third place, according to Ray Oldenburg (who wrote a book on the subject, called The Great Good Place, published in 1989), fosters community and social interaction by providing a comfortable, welcoming space for both regulars and occasional visitors to congregate. Examples include cafes, barbershops, libraries, bookstores—and, of course, bars....
There are plenty of shows, films, and concerts happening this weekend. Here’s some of what we recommend: Fri 8/10: BlacKkKlansman retells the true story of a black cop who joined his local Klan chapter. “Lee’s vibrant docudrama BlacKkKlansman, which won the Grand Prix at the Cannes film festival earlier this year, is one of the director’s stronger films and—perhaps not coincidentally—one of his most focused,” writes Reader film critic Ben Sachs....
The boarded-up storefront on the northwest corner of Chicago and Drake not long ago looked like many of Chicago’s other 18,000 abandoned buildings. The plywood sheets covering its sidewalk-facing windows were a reminder of the commercial blight in this stretch of Humboldt Park. Today, the place remains vacant, but as vacant buildings go, it’s indisputably more pleasant looking. The exterior greets passersby with a cheery trompe-l’œil bakery scene that seems like an artist’s rough rendering of a Parisian cafe complete with tables topped by baguette loaves, pastries, and flowers....
Gossip Wolf can’t blame you for wondering what Siouxsie Sioux would sound like fronting a doomy Krautrock band—I mean, who hasn’t wondered that? Local four-piece Walking Bicycles haven’t released an album since 2009, but they recently posted two new jams, “Eyesore” and “Impending Doom,” as teaser tracks for the upcoming LP To Him That Wills the Way. If there’s a hole in your life in the shape of dark, crushing, velvety tunes with motorik beats, they’ll totally fill it!...
