Q My son is 19, but due to some physical and social disabilities (mostly unseen), his emotional maturity level is closer to 14, though he is quite intelligent. After a lifetime of therapists, specialized education, and other interventions, he is now a freshman in college far from home. His dad and I are paying for his tuition, room and board, and books. He was expected to use his summer job earnings for personal expenses....
Last year, to celebrate International Women’s Day, we published a list of some of the best stories about women kicking ass from our decades of archives. The inspiring things we learned on that deep dive into the strong femmes of the past—not to mention the disgusting misogynistic flailings of a certain infantile new president—made it a given that we’d do it again this year. In the intervening 365 days, the Reader featured so many stories by or about amazing women (if not both!...
Russian pagan folk-metal legends Arkona really didn’t need to hit the reset button and rerecord their 2004 debut, Vozrozhdenie (Napalm)—as their first throwdown of a chain-mail gauntlet, it still reverberates beautifully. But they did, and on their 2016 redo, driven now by the duo of front woman and songwriter Masha “Scream” Arkhipova and her husband, guitarist Sergei “Lazar” Atrashkevich (who mixed and mastered), the band joyously reaffirm their pagan roots with a more polished and savage version of the record with which they began....
Few people in heavy music are as versatile or prolific as New York multi-instrumentalist and singer Toby Driver. With his exploratory bands Kayo Dot, Maudlin of the Well, and Vaura; his electro-goth group Piggy Black Cross; and his long list of other collaborative and solo projects, he’s consistently digging into new sounds and textures, sometimes engineering unlikely combinations of influences—avant-garde metal, jazz, postrock—even within a single track. On his second solo album, last year’s Madonnawhore (The Flenser), he annexes still more fresh territory, making his first full-scale venture into ballads....
Donald Trump is president. Our oceans are turning into globe-spanning acid baths. Illinois is on the verge of becoming a banana republic. But perhaps you’d like to distract yourself from the impending apocalypse with our annual Pitchfork Music Festival cover-illustration contest. Take an extra long look at the Jason Wyatt Frederick illustration on the cover of this week’s Reader, our annual Pitchfork preview. It’s a little like Where’s Waldo?, except you’re trying to find dozens of people, and you don’t know in advance who any of them are....
One of the art restorers featured in Wiseman’s National Gallery Frederick Wiseman’s National Gallery, which received its local premiere last night at the Chicago International Film Festival, climaxes with a dance performance inside one of the exhibition halls. Though Gallery is a film about painting, I wasn’t at all surprised that Wiseman worked in a scene of ballet. He’s already devoted three features to the subject (Ballet, La Dance—The Paris Opera Ballet, and Crazy Horse), and his last film, At Berkeley, concluded with a choreographed sequence as well....
When Alexander Eisenschmidt moved to Chicago in 2007, the German-born architectural theorist was disturbed by how the city talks about its buildings. Sipping a glass of rosé in the cafe at the Art Institute’s Modern Wing, he describes a kind of “museum-ification.” Take, for example, the time architect Rem Koolhaas proposed that his student center at IIT incorporate the Mies van der Rohe–designed Commons Building—it sparked public outrage that the new structure attacked the “purity and simplicity” of the existing architecture....
Chicago novelist and playwright Joe Meno has published his most ambitious work to date. The Nelson Algren Literary Award and Pushcart Prize winner and author of books such as Hairstyles of the Damned and Office Girl now offers up Marvel and a Wonder, which he describes as “a contemporary epic set in the midwest.” The story centers on Jim Falls, a man struggling to sustain his Indiana farm and to raise his 16-year-old grandson, Quentin, in the mid-90s....
With the opening of Cherry Circle Room and Game Room inside downtown’s stately but hip Chicago Athletic Club Hotel, it’s been a big year for Land and Sea Dept. Hell, it’s been a big half decade. The group responsible for Longman & Eagle, Parson’s Chicken & Fish, Lost Lake, and other spots has proven capable of executing a concept. That’ll make Land and Sea a good first partner for the MCA’s new Prime Time events, an after-hours series meant to bring together creative types from across Chicago’s cultural landscape....
Early this morning the folks behind Lollapalooza announced the lineup for the annual three-day festival, its tenth in Grant Park; as Gossip Wolf long suspected, OutKast are headlining. The reunited Atlanta hip-hop duo join the four headliners Greg Kot leaked last week—Eminem, Kings of Leon, Skrillex, and Arctic Monkeys, spicing up a bland list of acts that have played Lolla in the not-too-recent past. The sixth headliner, Scottish electronic producer Calvin Harris, also played Lollapalooza in 2012....
Orson Welles has invaded Chicago movie screens. F for Fake played at Doc on Friday; The Lady from Shanghai is currently at the Gene Siskel Film Center, alongside Carol Reed’s The Third Man; the Music Box‘s weekend matinee is Welles’s adaptation of Kafka’s The Trial; and the Northbrook Public Library, which recently resumed its screening series after a prolonged break, is showing Martin Ritt’s The Long, Hot Summer, in which Welles plays “a ceegar-chomping southern paterfamilias,” according to Dave Kehr....
On the morning of July 15, 2016, the first day of last year’s Pitchfork Music Festival, Netflix debuted the horror/sci-fi drama Stranger Things. Within a couple weeks the eight-episode show had become an inescapable part of the pop-culture churn. Somebody even set up a website where you could create your own version of its title card—big, bold neon-red lettering (the font is “Benguiat”), bracketed with horizontal lines and overlaid on the midnight blacks and blues of a barely lit forest scene....
Some of the greatest experiences with live music came courtesy of the eccentric multiinstrumentalist and bandleader Hal Russell, whose work with his NRG Ensemble brought gonzo wit, fierce improvisation, and boundless energy to performance after performance. During the late 80s and early 90s they were fixtures at great subterranean bar Lower Links, playing madcap sets that generated laughter as much as awe. As an observer of the local free jazz and improvised music scene, I feel Russell’s importance to what came in his wake over the last couple of decades is undiminished....
Burn: The Nowhere Hotshots vs. the Brain-Plant From Beyond the Moon Writer and director Peter Storey taps into his personal experience fighting forest fires for this experimental sci-fi poetry thriller. An elite squad of first responders dubbed “hotshots” are called to action when a sinister sentient plant wreaks havoc across the world by hooking humans on a smokable drug called Queen. There doesn’t seem to be a consensus among the cast of what the drug does, exactly, and the 15 actors, often blocked to be onstage simultaneously, understandably appear preoccupied with the task of finding space on Gorilla Tango’s cabaret-size stage....
A taxpayer-subsidized bike-share system that’s mostly used by relatively wealthy and well-educated white folks isn’t equitable. But that’s the situation with Chicago’s Divvy network. A 2015 Chicago Department of Transportation questionnaire found that 79 percent of responding members were non-Hispanic whites, most of them had middle to upper incomes, and 93 percent had college degrees. These lopsided numbers are in line with those from bike-share systems in other cities such as Washington, D....
Several months before Laquan McDonald was shot dead, before a multi-million dollar settlement was paid to his estate, the chief co-sponsor for the “Recall Rahm” bill raised the issue of police accountability with Mayor Rahm Emanuel and then-police superintendent Garry McCarthy. But they stonewalled her efforts. “I never got a one-on-one with the mayor,” Flowers says. “No returned call, no returned letter, and not even a form letter acknowledging the office received my letter....
New York-based beauty brand Glossier knows how to build buzz. In June it posted a photo to Instagram of a pink Bean in Millennium Park—utilizing the same shade as its popular brand color (Pantone 705 C)—and shared plans to come to Chicago this summer. The post generated nearly 135,000 likes—well over double what those bookending it commanded—as well as more than 4,000 comments, ranging from “OMG I’M STOKED I LIVE THERE ILY GUYS!...
Courtesy Robert Morris University eSports Members of Robert Morris University’s eSports team get their gaming on. On the third floor of Robert Morris University‘s State Street campus, there’s a room that looks like a cross between a NASA control center, a submarine deck, and an arcade. Nearly every piece of equipment inside the room has a splash of red, from the ergonomic DXRacer chairs to the hard drives that have a display noting the CPU core temperatures....
Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Tuesday, August 8, 2017. Lawyer: Ex-Northwestern professor plans to plead not guilty to murder of Trenton Cornell-Duranleau Northwestern professor Wyndham Lathem—who was fired by the university effective August 4—is expected to plead not guilty to first-degree murder charges for the July 27 stabbing death of 26-year-old Trenton Cornell-Duranleau in River North, according to his California attorney, Kenneth Wine. On Monday afternoon Lathem appeared in court in suburban San Francisco, where “he agreed to waive his arraignment and right to oppose extradition to Chicago,” the Sun-Times reports....
The Loop, as you may have noticed, is lousy with Potbellies, Paneras, Corner Bakeries, Einsteins, Au Bon Pains, and Pret a Mangers at every corner, all eager to feed and nourish hoards of office workers as efficiently as possible and make them feel good about the decision to resist the siren call of McDonald’s or Chipotle and spend their money on a salad or sandwich they could have just as easily made at home....
