In 2012 Rocio Vargas had a vigorous marijuana plant growing in her closet, and three more in her West Lawn backyard. Thanks to the advice of an arborist friend, she and her boyfriend were growing more weed than they could smoke. Against doctor’s orders he flew to Mexico to his late mother’s farm in San Luis Potosí. Vargas followed. “When he passed away I took a step back from my career,” she says....
With the much-anticipated race between Governor Bruce Rauner and J.B. Prtitzker coming down the stretch run for November’s election, voters everywhere are looking forward to . . . Watch—even with all the excitement over the mayor’s race since Rahm threw in the towel and announced he wasn’t going to run for reelection—when it finally comes around to electing a new mayor, everybody will be talking about who’s the best Democrat to beat Trump in 2020....
Cheech and Chong in Nice Dreams As the third of July approaches, I’m reminded of one of the more satisfying double features I’ve attended, Doc Films’ pairing of John Carpenter’s They Live and Cheech and Chong’s Nice Dreams on Independence Day Eve 2010. The inclusion of Nice Dreams—and on a newly struck 35-millimeter print, no less—can be credited to my friend and exploitation-film historian Joe Rubin, who was on Doc’s programming board at the time....
Agamemnon When Court Theatre looked in on King Agamemnon of Argos last year, in a powerful adaptation of Euripides’s Iphigenia in Aulis, he was busy sacrificing daughter Iphigenia to the gods in exchange for favorable winds to take him and his armies to Troy. Now Court is visiting him again, this time through the lens of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon. A decade has passed, Troy has fallen, the king is returning in triumph, and as for his crimes—well, victory is its own justification, right?...
Though the relatively weak box office numbers for Ant-Man (its $57 million opening weekend was Marvel’s second-lowest ever) and Fantastic Four ($42 million total) suggest that superheroes have hit their saturation point, that memo never made it to television. The fall TV lineup is bloated with special powers and comic adaptations, some new, some older, and some reboots. Certain mainstays will return, though after the August premiere of AMC’s Walking Dead prequel Fear the Walking Dead, zombie fans will have to wait seven weeks before the show comes back for a sixth season (10/11)....
When Jonathan Kinkley was growing up in the 80s, his parents refused to buy him a Nintendo. So it was via dad’s IBM PS/2 that the fledgling gamer got his fix of virtual environments, spending countless hours exploring the medieval fantasy land of King’s Quest IV. Kinkley’s love for video games hasn’t waned. He studied art history as an undergrad at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and as a master’s student at UIC, where he wrote his thesis on virtual art and architecture....
You may have seen the black-and-white footage, shot on the Yale University campus in May 1962. A middle-aged man sits at an electrical console, posing memory-recall questions to someone strapped into a chair in the next room and administering electric shocks for each wrong answer. As the shocks get worse and worse—150 volts, 165 volts, 180 volts—the victim complains, shouting that he has a heart condition and demanding to be let out....
Tim Boyle/Sun-Times Media It turns out that Mayor Daley remembers that R.J. Vanecko (pictured above exiting Cook County Circuit Court in December) is his nephew! As the old guy on the staff in charge of remembering stuff, I’d like to report some good news on the all-important Mayor Daley memory beat. You might also remember that neither the police nor the state’s attorney seemed especially concerned about Koschman’s murder until Tim Novak, Chris Fusco, Carol Marin, and other reporters from the Sun-Times wrote about it again and again and again....
Daniel Ash, former guitarist of Bauhaus, Tones on Tail, and Love and Rockets, recently told Kansas City’s the Pitch that he was inspired to take to the road again following a half-asleep 4 AM encounter with Motörhead’s “Ace of Spades” during which he felt his late old acquaintance Lemmy urging him to get his ass back out there. It’s really no more outlandish than anything else in his career—including his final attempt at a Bauhaus reunion, which ended fairly decisively after the 2008 album Go Away White (Cooking Vinyl)....
The constantly growing Riot Fest has just announced the newest feature to the punk-rock carnival that hits Douglas Park in September: the Riot Fest Speaks Stage, which features two days of spoken word, panels, and poetry. The highlight of the Speaks Stage happens on Saturday, September 12, when punk legend Henry Rollins moderates a panel with Damien Echols and Jason Baldwin of the West Memphis Three; they will discuss the latter two’s release from prison after 18 years and the impact of musical activism....
Saul Steinberg liked to call himself “a writer who draws,” but during the 20th century few draftsmen could approach his inventiveness. In his drawings, Steinberg‘s lines seem to reinvent themselves as they progress, zigging when you expect them to zag, or disappearing abruptly just as they appear to be gathering steam. In the Art Institute’s revelatory new show “Along the Lines: Selected Drawings by Saul Steinberg,” curator Mark Pascale has gathered 54 examples of Steinberg’s work spanning from the 1940s to the ’80s (given to the museum by the Saul Steinberg Foundation in 2013), and has presented an artist who’s always searching for the purest distillation of thought through the act of mark making....
The crime drama Red Ink (2000) plays at the Instituto Cervantes this Thursday. On Thursday nightTomorrow night at 6 PM, the Instituto Cervantes continues its monthlong series of recent Peruvian films with Red Ink, a crime drama from 2000. Upcoming screenings include the historical drama Crossing a Shadow (2007) on 7/16 and the suspense film Double Game (2004) on 7/23. All screenings are free of charge. The 2010 Academy Award nomination for The Milk of Sorrow notwithstanding, Peruvian cinema hasn’t made much of a mark on U....
Last week, in a private “prescreening” at Columbia College, artist and photographer Nancy Bechtol debuted her first-ever documentary film: Free Speech & the Transcendent Journey of Chris Drew, Street Artist. To try to change that, Drew put himself on the sidewalk, distributing patches of wearable art for free (to avoid breaking the law about selling it) and explaining his cause to anyone who paused to see what this scruffy, bespectacled, pony-tailed character in the knit cap was about....
Brent Knepper Gamers Johann Sebastian Joust-ing You can hardly throw a game token ten feet without hitting a vintage arcade bar in certain Chicago neighborhoods. The arcade bar boom has been a boon for lovers of old consoles, and it’s also piqued people’s interest in new indie games created by up-and-coming developers (as evidenced by the popularity of the ten-player arcade console Killer Queen at Logan Arcade). On September 6 at Bit Bash, Chicago’s first indie-gaming festival, it’s all cutting edge all the time....
Tomorrow at 7 PM, Northwest Chicago Film Society will present a 35-millimeter print of Out of the Blue (1980), Dennis Hopper’s third directorial effort, at Northeastern University. Hopper described Blue as a follow-up to Easy Rider, even though it contains none of the same characters or that film’s fascination with motorcycle culture; rather, the connection is spiritual and stylistic. As Reader emeritus Jonathan Rosenbaum once wrote, the movie is defined by “the Hopper flavor: relentlessly raunchy and downbeat, and informed throughout by the kind of generational anguish and sense of doom that characterizes both of his earlier films [Rider and The Last Movie]....
Last Wednesday, Mayor Rahm Emanuel proclaimed the arrival of a fresh new era of sincerity and openness concerning policing in Chicago. “I know that personally, I have a lot of work to do to win back the public’s trust, and that words are not enough,” the mayor told the City Council. The mayor fought for months to suppress the video showing the slaying of the 17-year-old McDonald. And now he’s continuing to fight to suppress videos of the fatal police shooting of 17-year-old Cedrick Chatman almost three years ago....
High Zero is a festival of improvised and experimental music that made its debut in Baltimore in 1999. Created by the Red Room Collective, an artist-run organization that’s been holding concerts at Normal’s Books & Records in Charm City since 1996, High Zero is on a mission to confront both audiences and performers with situations they’ve never faced before. Every festival set features a new collaboration, and the combinations of sound, motion, and visual artists they introduced transgress stylistic, generational, cultural, and social boundaries....
Actress Lee Stark would appear to be the consensus vision of what a nonwhite lawyer wants in a white woman. Back in 2012 she played pink-skinned, blond Emily, wife of Amir, the second-generation Pakistani-American whose sophisticated facade cracks in Ayad Akhtar’s Disgraced, revealing deep-seated tribal instincts. Now here she is playing pink-skinned, blond Suzy, significant other of Jackson, the hood-raised African-American whose sophisticated facade cracks in Tracey Scott Wilson’s Buzzer, revealing—well, you get the idea....
The Grand Budapest Hotel “What in the world is Noah doing outside the ark while it’s raining?” asked one reader, Daniel Cristancho, in his comment on my recent essay about Darren Aronofsky’s Noah. “The bible clearly tells us that Noah and his family were locked into the ark 7 days before the flood began.” This statement is typical of many negative responses to the film, which are quick to point out Aronofsky and cowriter Ari Handel’s departures from the Biblical text....
Unless I see something in the next 15 months that impresses me more, I’m prepared to name Johnnie To’s Life Without Principle (2011) as my favorite film of the decade. Principle blends comedy, melodrama, suspense, and a Minnelliesque sense of movement and color to contemplate the ethical quandaries of life in the speculation economy. It’s one of the rare films that succeeds as both an entertainment and a moral provocation. Writing about it in 2012, I likened Principle to the masterpieces of John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock, and like those directors, To came to mastery through deepening themes and experimenting with form within the realm of accessible genre filmmaking....
