I’m all done writing top five lists for the Reader. Last week was my final week on the job, and I’ve had a lot of fun concocting these posts for the last couple years. Hopefully one or two of you enjoyed reading them. If you’d like to go back and see the others, they’re archived here. 3. Targets (1968) A low-budget, down and dirty film, partly made up of leftover footage from Roger Corman’s Napoleonic-era thriller The Terror....
Kristen Radtke’s new book, Imagine Wanting Only This, is less a graphic memoir than a graphic essay, which is odd to think about. Comics are concrete, with their pictures and word bubbles, and essays deal in abstractions. But then again, many essays also rely on juxtapositions, the braiding together of two or more separate narratives or ideas, so why can’t an essayist juxtapose words and pictures to tell stories and explore ideas?...
At 10 AM on Thursday, July 6, Chris Widman, Henry Self, Luke Stokes, and Joshua P. Ferguson will settle into the studio for WLUW 88.7 FM at Loyola University’s School of Communications—they’ll have to get comfortable, because they’re planning to stick around till 6 AM the following day. The DJs regularly appear on WLUW as the hosts of Abstract Science, a program that’s focused on the breadth of electronic music rather than a specific genre beneath that large umbrella, but their block usually takes up the last two hours of Thursday night....
Lorenzo Tassone Josh Zagoren (Chad the Bird) and Paper Machete founder Christopher Piatt will keep August’s newbies in line. On a Saturday in late July, Christopher Piatt, a bald gentlemen in a plain white T-shirt and a pair of sparkly studs, took the stage at the Green Mill to hilariously lip sync Betty Hutton’s jazz standard “Murder, He Says.” Piatt is the ringleader of the weekly variety show the Paper Machete, and he’s a pro at perfectly setting the tone for the next two hours of anything-goes performances....
AP Photo/Charlie Riedel Before I moved back here to Chicago, I was a reporter in Saint Louis for five and a half years. I worked for the Riverfront Times, the city’s alt weekly. A few months before I left, I wrote a story about Ferguson. Well, it was about a group of record collectors who wanted to preserve their 50 tons of 78s; Ferguson was where they happened to live....
On Wednesday, as the city council performed its annual ritual of approving the mayor’s budget, I was wondering how I’d vote, if I were an alderman. And, as such, jacking up property taxes by well over $600 million this year alone—let’s not forget the TIF surcharge, people—is the least regressive alternative we have at our immediate disposal. In other words, for all of its awfulness, this budget is better than the alternative of falling further and further into debt....
The menu for Logan Square’s upcoming Young American will feature “Goth” bread, blackened with activated charcoal and leek ash, along with hummus stained with black sesame tahini. There will be “nighttime sisig,” the porky Filipino pig face skillet, stir-fried with squid ink. And there will be a fermented Chinese black bean brandade, garnished with dulse, the umami-rich sea vegetable that looks like something that would wrap around your limbs and pull you under the water....
1459 W. Irving Park, 773-549-1594, deluxetattoo.com I am, for the most part, a huge wimp. I try to avoid pain, heights, fast-moving vehicles, and generally uncomfortable situations at any cost. So when I decided to go against all my natural instincts and get a tattoo, I knew it would have to be somewhere that felt more like a spa than the dimly lighted places in gritty crime dramas. (Everything is the same in real life as on TV, right?...
Jim Brockmire is a fitting TV hero for America in 2017. He’s a famous baseball announcer who disappears from public view after an on-air meltdown, then attempts to resurrect his life and career as the voice of a struggling minor-league team in a dying rust-belt town. Brockmire’s longing for a quaint rose-tinted past that never existed and his vulgar means of getting what he wants are an apt reflection of the country right now....
When Chance the Rapper announced via a single in July that he was buying Chicagoist—the hyperlocal news site closed by billionaire owner Joe Ricketts the previous November—there was a ton of speculation about what he’d do with it. At an invitation-only event Friday morning, a collection of journalists, young aldermanic candidates, professors, and supporters got a first glimpse of the goods. Champ/Chance then delivers a 101-level lesson in Chicago politics, set to music with what Sun-Times journalist Kathy Chaney astutely described as a Schoolhouse Rock vibe....
Gwynedd Stuart: I’m impressed that Chicago weather is so predictable. A rainy morning gave way to an incredibly beautiful Saturday. I started my day late with the Damned, who were fucking great. I heard a friend say they were low energy—I’d say they were exactly the right energy for playing a way-too-early slot. The Dead Milkmen agreed. I was walking back toward the press area when I heard Rodney Linderman say what a bummer it was that the Damned had to play so early, because Dave Vanian is a vampire....
DJ Shadow wasn’t the first to repurpose sampled records into wholly original music, or even the first to do it artfully—there were Double Dee and Steinski, the Dust Brothers, and Negativland, not to mention hundreds of hip-hop producers. But with his early singles and the long-player masterpiece Endtroducing . . . (Mo’ Wax, 1996), Shadow was the first to make sophisticated, drawn-out, cinematic sample-based cuts that were both undeniably hip-hop and yet something else entirely....
Inspired by the Gene Siskel Film Center‘s screenings this upcoming week of Ingmar Bergman’s The Magic Flute—all part of the theater’s extensive “Bergman 100” series—we’ve selected five other opera films of note. If this list seems a bit highbrow, know that we would have listed Chuck Jones’s great Bugs Bunny/Elmer Fudd cartoon What’s Opera Doc? in all five spots if we could have. But these are good too. Don Giovanni Joseph Losey’s film of Mozart’s opera (1979) has redundant trappings of Freud and Marx, as if Losey felt the need to make the material more personal....
Drummer Nate Smith has taken his time as a bandleader. Last year the 43-year-old musician dropped Kinfolk: Postcards From Everywhere (Ropeadope), his second album and debut as a bandleader, which shows that his patience has yielded serious dividends. The record is a product of a superior musician and careful thinker who has absorbed ideas and assimilated them into his personal vision while tamping down his virtuosity (he takes only one solo, on “Spinning Down”)....
You know what sounds like a terrifyingly wild idea? Pack the Metro full of the rabid Leftover Crack and Negative Approach fans, set them up in the middle of the venue’s floor, and let ’er rip. Headliner Leftover Crack’s fusion of ska with anarcho-crust punk has aged about as well as a torn-open bag of Franzia, but they’ll bring some major house-show energy to the historic club, and their devotees will come out in droves for the experience....
On an April afternoon in 2017, 35-year-old Vairrun Strickland came to the intersection of 63rd and Ashland in Englewood with dozens of other people wearing black T-shirts and brandishing green, red, and black Black Liberation flags. As part of New Era Chicago, a community service and black empowerment group, Strickland and the others were there to clean up the neighborhood and mingle with residents. A firefighter with the Markham Fire Department who grew up in Englewood, he’d helped organize similar cleanup outings in other south- and west-side neighborhoods....
For their queasy new album Sincerely, Future Pollution (City Slang), Montreal trio Timber Timbre traveled to France, setting up in a small studio outside of Paris equipped with a wide array of vintage synthesizers. Over the course of their career they’ve embraced an evolving stream of unlikely styles, warping off-kilter bits of doo-wop, cocktail jazz, and soul complemented by a lounge-lizard croon, all uses of nostalgia to couch the decidedly creepy and unsettling narratives of singer Taylor Kirk....
For Latin American drug kingpins, there are few fates as terrible as extradition to the United States. Former DEA director of operations Mike Braun says of the typical extradited drug trafficker: “Once he’s convicted [in the U.S.], he knows he is going to be spending the rest of his life in prison. He’s not going to have access to a cell phone. He’s not going to be able to run his organization from the direct lines of the federal penitentiary anywhere in the United States....
Chicago garage-pop wonders Twin Peaks formed in 2010 and debuted at Riot Fest in 2013, the first year it took place entirely in Humboldt Park. The fest was beginning its rapid expansion, and organizers booked plenty of well-established locals—as well as a few, including Twin Peaks, who were beginning their own rapid rise. At the time, the band’s original members were all 19. If Twin Peaks were aware of the sound problems, they kept it to themselves, playing straight through their hour-long set with professional precision leavened by playful goofiness....
The Cubs’ Kyle Schwarber is the sort of instantly identifiable and prodigiously talented phenom who just seems to demand a nickname. Sun-Times sports columnist Rick Morrissey recognized as much earlier this summer, when he called out for submissions from fans. Yet the dozens of suggestions he got from readers were, by my way of thinking, pedestrian, foremost among them: the Hulk, Smash, Schwar Machine (Morissey’s favorite), the Hoosier Hitman (which at least has a classic feel), and Bamm-Bamm, which is actually somewhat akin to what I’ve been calling the Cubs’ slugging catcher-outfielder for a while now....
