Robert Service I’ve always admired Robert Frost’s poem, “Fire and Ice,” but today I’m not so sure. Will the world end in fire or ice, Frost wonders, and he considers it a darned good question. Probably fire, he muses—”from what I’ve tasted of desire.” On the other hand, “I think I know enough of hate / To say that for destruction ice / Is also great / And would suffice....
Ethan Miller/Getty Images I don’t like e-mail asking me to sign a petition any more than I like a telemarketer calling at dinnertime. A digital petition doesn’t signify much of anything because big numbers are so easy to come by; furthermore, it advances the most sinister work of the Internet—which is slicing and dicing the American population into niches that don’t know, don’t want to know, and despise each other....
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins has written about death before. His Gloria deals with the after-effects of an office shooting. His Appropriate focuses on the secrets of a newly deceased white southerner. But Jacobs-Jenkins’s Everybody doesn’t merely concern death. It concerns Death. An update on the 16th-century morality play Everyman, this finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize follows a human soul through her encounter with the honest-to-God Grim Reaper. The soul in Everyman experiences the medieval equivalent of Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief, running through various emotions and tactics before arriving at understanding and submission....
Chandler West/For Sun-Times Media “Literally less than a handful” of neighborhoods were right for Obama College Prep, Mayor Emanuel told reporters when he announced plans for it on April 24. For a school that won’t begin rejecting students until 2017, Obama College Prep has already ticked off a lot of people. Why? Location, location, location. In order to save Stanton Park, the city is now considering other sites in the neighborhood, Burnett told me ten days ago....
In the gospel according to Joel Osteen, the flood myth described in the Old Testament was prime opportunity for Noah to test his mettle as an entrepreneurial DIY kind of guy—MacGyver for the antediluvian age. Because hell hath no fury like cable news, Osteen’s church finally began changing its message once CNN and Fox started reporting on it. By Tuesday, Lakewood changed course and announced it was opening its doors to Harvey evacuees and donations and the multimillionaire televangelist himself appeared on CBS This Morning to go on the defensive, claiming Houston officials asked Lakewood Church be a “distribution center....
AP Photo/M. Spencer Green Mayor Rahm’s pension plan socks it to geezers, jacks up your taxes, and increases the flow of slush to his TIFs. As you may or may not have read in the papers, Mayor Emanuel’s in a big hurry to have the state enact his pension plan. He says it’s good for the city. The bill will, among other things, cut payments to municipal retirees, jack up property taxes, and give the mayor more slush funds to play with....
Rapper Maria Kelly, better known as Rico Nasty, is transparent to a fault. When XXL recently asked her why she signed to Atlantic, she said, “Because I have a 2-year-old. And these bitches don’t! See y’all in five years, when y’all bitches is burnt and broke. I will be sitting cute and clothed, fuck all that.” Born in D.C. and raised in the DMV (that’s the D.C. Metro area that spans Maryland and Virginia; she grew up in Prince George’s County, Maryland) Rico forged her superstar-on-the-rise persona across six mixtapes and the usual social media suspects....
Song to Song may not be the best movie playing in town this week, but it’s surely the most important. The film is the latest by Terrence Malick, one of the handful of working narrative directors who has created what critic and director Paul Schrader once termed a transcendental film style. Like Yasujro Ozu, Robert Bresson, and Carl Dreyer (the directors Schrader considered in his 1972 study of transcendental cinema), Malick operates in a unique cinematic language that evokes a spiritual presence in the material world....
It makes no sense to adapt a beloved novel for the theater. In fact, it’s absurd—basically the same as saying, “I’m going to take this thing you enjoyed, throw out the parts I can’t use, rearrange the rest, maybe add a bunch of other stuff I made up myself, pour it all into a completely different format, and invite you to go see the results out of respect for what it was before I started slapping it around....
At the annual convention of the Modern Language Association held here earlier this month, the MLA’s delegate assembly passed a resolution critical of Israel for its visa policies. The resolution urges the U.S. State Department to challenge Israel’s “denials of entry to the West Bank by U.S. academics.” None of this usually attracts much outside attention, but the session “Academic Boycotts: A Conversation About Israel and Palestine” had generated quite a bit of controversy....
Reverend Anthony Randall stepped to the pulpit at Twelve Gates Missionary Baptist Church, a small congregation that meets in a storefront space on West Division in Austin. “The next voice you’ll hear is from someone who’s become a friend of mine,” he said, “and I hope he’s going to become our next mayor.” Over the last three years Fioretti has emerged as one of the few outspoken critics of Emanuel in the City Council....
Links Hall at Constellation, 3111 N. Western, 773-281-0824, linkshall.org The hottest blind date in dance is the series of unconventional collaborations going on at Links Hall. For each show, different artists—two local dance companies and a musical guest—meet, greet, and get on the floor. Before everyone, audience and performers, takes a seat to listen to a (usually) never-before-heard composition written by the musical guest, the dancers hop around, all piss and vinegar and adrenaline-fueled restlessness....
The rhythmic —thwap of a fist knocking a speed bag reverberates down the stairs of the Beautiful Zion Missionary Baptist Church in West Englewood before even reaching the area the Crushers Club boxing gym has called home for the past two years. Collages of photos line the stairwell leading to showing young boys—their little boxing gloves framing their baby faces—next to their more seasoned, teenaged mentors—muscles gleaming with sweat, sometimes mean-mugging the camera....
I want to say the day of the fire I started at Bernie’s Grocery was the hottest day of the year, but it might not have been; it was always hot back then, and all I did in that heat was wait for someone to come out and join me on the corner. I sat out there and wondered why God had wasted the only swimming pool in Bridgeport on Billy Coz, who never wanted to swim in it....
For one bright moment at last week’s City Council meeting, Alderman Nick Sposato—a lowly independent—pulled a badass move straight out of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s playbook. In case you were busy counting the money from your hedge fund and missed it, this all started last year, when Mayor Emanuel announced his bright idea of spending $55 million of your property tax dollars to buy two plots of land near the corner of Cermak and Michigan....
Investigative journalist Julia Angwin is a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal, where she was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing corporate corruption. Now at the New York-based nonprofit journalism center ProPublica, she’s been writing about the expansion of corporate and governmental surveillance, and the concomitant loss of individual privacy. The U. of C. alum’s sold-out Chicago Humanities Festival lecture “Citizens Under Surveillance” will draw on her 2014 book Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance....
Q I’ve got a question I doubt you’ve ever gotten before. It has a bit of everything: sex-work etiquette, long-distance phone interaction, and a het cis chick anxious not to lose her tolerance badge. Here it goes: A few months ago, I started getting hang-up calls from numbers I didn’t recognize in Boston. Then weird texts started showing up, trying to set up “dates.” I responded to the first few because I figured someone was giving out a fake number that just happened to be mine....
Michael Gebert Majestic time-lapse views of day and night play over the real thing at Sixteen. Once restaurants had floor shows full of dancers and strolling Gypsy violinists and waitstaff dressed like they were in the Habsburg army. Then suddenly such things were gauche, and dining was straight faced and serious for a couple of generations. In the last couple of decades this began to change again; the conceptual games of Alinea and the magic tricks of Moto and, more recently, the whole-meal concept dinners of Next were efforts to bring entertainment back into dinner, to make the table itself a show, art exhibition and personal vision and mind bender....
Courtesy the artist Lykanthea Even after taking Carnatic vocal lessons for a decade during childhood, Lakshmi Ramgopal didn’t really start to think of herself as a singer until she found herself on an isolated island off the coast of Greece. She was visiting Delos to do research for her dissertation when, with no Internet or phone service, she started singing into her laptop microphone to pass the time. “Being on this little island surrounded by the sea caused me to approach songwriting in this way that I’ve never approached it,” she says....
Satan formed in 1979 and went on to become one of the biggest names of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. The band brought a meaner, faster sound to the movement than their peers, operating closer to the vein that thrash bands would come to dominate in the metal world a short time later. Satan broke up and got back together a couple times following their initial ten-year run—at different stretches they even transformed into the bands Blind Fury and Pariah—but since officially reuniting in 2011, they’ve maintained the same lineup that recorded their 1983 debut, Court in the Act, and throughout this decade they’ve been releasing a steady stream of totally great records....
