HBO We’ll miss you Rust Cohle, most lovable nihilist. We battled Carcosa-themed nightmares, the flat circularity of time, and HBO Go’s epic server crash to bring you this Gchat about the flawed but still pretty great finale of the best television show ever. GS: Well, I’m always a little bit drunk, so . . . MS: Why do you think you (and I and everyone else) were sold so early on?...
Juraj Lehotsky’s Miracle screens tomorrow and Tuesday. In addition to hosting Chicago premieres from internationally lauded filmmakers, every year the European Union Film Festival spotlights active directors who aren’t especially well-known here because their work is either too modest, too strange, or too culturally specific to attract U.S. distributors. I enjoy catching up with these filmmakers as much as the famous ones—sometimes it’s nice to chart a director’s maturation on his or her own terms, without having to contend with a backlog of criticism....
Motivational Jumpsuit In 2012, Dayton’s finest, Guided by Voices, released three full-length albums, an impressive feat even for the megaprolific indie-rock pioneers. Last year was slightly less productive for Mr. Robert Pollard and the gang, with only one album out and a mere two live appearances (the Denver and Chicago Riot Fest dates). Over the course of 2013, it seemed like the band might once again come to an end: drummer Kevin Fennell was booted from the group, and Pollard stated in an interview that he was considering pulling the GBV plug....
DePaul Art Museum, 935 W. Fullerton, 773-325-7506, museums.depaul.edu Steps from the Fullerton el stop, the DePaul Art Museum is comfortably cozy, just two floors, a handful of rooms on each—you can walk through the whole thing in 45 minutes. It was a perfect venue for the homey, just-closed exhibit “From Heart to Hand,” devoted to African-American quilts from Gee’s Bend, Alabama. Some pieces were relatively symmetrical, like Mary Maxtion’s Everybody Quilt, a delightfully imperfect grid of panels each individually patterned, so you feel like you’re looking into a series of only partially glimpsed alternate dimensions....
With the 2018 Carnaval of New Latinx Work, a festival celebrating new works by Latinx theater artists, Latinx Theatre Commons, founded in 2012, aims to connect national audiences to the Chicago theater community. “In the midst of the current administration’s virulent hostility towards the Latinx community, promoting new Latinx stories and the artists who create them has become all the more urgent,” Lisa Portes, LTC Carnaval Champion, or organizer, and head of directing at the Theatre School at DePaul University, said in a press release....
Get ready to gawk Riot Fest turns ten this year and it returns to Humboldt Park in September with a pretty fantastic lineup: the Cure, Jane’s Addiction, Slayer, Weezer, Wu-Tang Clan, the Offspring, and Patti Smith are just some of the big names that are at the top of the bill, but those are hardly the only names worth mentioning. It’s honestly difficult to focus on a single portion of the list, which is jammed with reunited acts (Hot Snakes, Mineral), beloved old-school groups (Buzzcocks), indie crossovers (Tegan and Sara, Metric), perennial picks (Andrew W....
Pardon me for sounding paranoid, but it sure looks as though the three most powerful politicians in our universe are teaming up to drive our schools into bankruptcy. Each year Chicago gets hundreds of millions of federal dollars—most funneled through the state—largely intended for schools with high concentrations of low-income students. If you recall, last year Mayor Emanuel finally tried to make good on obligations to the Chicago teachers’ pension fund....
We’re losing time this weekend thanks to Daylight Savings, but thankfully you’ll be able to fit in an extra hour of drinking green beer to make up for it at these Saint Patrick’s Day celebrations: Fitzgerald’s Saint Patrick’s Day Festival A full day of traditional Irish food and drink plus live music and dance from the Mayer School Stepdancers, the Dooley Brothers, Fitz & the Celts, and more. Sat 3/18, 1 PM, FitzGerald’s, 6615 Roosevelt, Berwyn, 708-788-2118, fitzgeraldsnightclub....
The main thing you need to know about Mayor Emanuel’s recent comments on marijuana and the city budget is that most if not everything he said was false. To demonstrate his resolve, our chief executive looked directly into the camera and—as if he’d been up all night rehearsing his lines—sternly said: “I experimented with marijuana a time or two, and I didn’t like it. I didn’t inhale and never tried it again....
Director Joshua Oppenheimer received international acclaim a few years ago for The Act of Killing, a groundbreaking documentary about the Indonesian genocide of 1965-66. Rather than deliver a straightforward history lesson, Oppenheimer introduced viewers to several perpetrators of the genocide, who not only described the atrocities they committed, but even dramatized some of them onscreen. This shocking approach conveys the horrifying reality of contemporary Indonesia, where the perpetrators of the genocide remain in power, having never been brought to justice for their crimes....
Yesterday I came across my copy of the first Gun Club album, Fire of Love (Ruby/Slash), from 1981; last year it was reissued by Superior Viaduct. At the time of its release the combo, led by Jeffrey Lee Pierce, was kind of a breath of fresh air in the LA punk scene, creating a kind of roots-injected mayhem marked by Pierce’s crude slide-guitar figures and drug-soaked caterwauling, which at times suggested Suicide‘s Alan Vega without the chronic hiccups....
Frank Maugeri had been with Redmoon Theater for 23 years when it collapsed in December 2015. He’d worked his way up from volunteer to producing artistic director at the Chicago-based company, known for its inventive urban spectacles performed everywhere from neighborhood streets to the White House and involving everything from an otherworldly river procession to a fantasia built around a nonexistent Norwegian pop star. And he most definitely loved it. Redmoon, the 49-year-old Maugeri told me during a recent phone interview, “fit my spiritual nature, it fit my emotions, it fit my community-galvanizing impulses, and it fit my need and desire to create ritual....
Davide Laffe Bianca Del Rio was crowned queen queen. Finales are hard, you guys—don’t worry, I’m not going to get into the minefield of series finales (HIMYM is still dead to me). I’m talking about season finales, which, depending on the type of show—sitcom, reality show, or whatever in hell The Bachelor is these days—can vary from your standard cliffhanger (think Scandal or, going way back, Dallas) to declaring the deserving winner on a talent-based competition (definitely not the last season of Top Chef)....
The Annoyance Theatre is a low-key haunt where improvisers and other comedians incubate new, unexpected material. Sharing DNA with Antoinette Nwandu’s critically acclaimed drama Pass Over, the comedic sketch show Teen Cudi Presents Black Boy Joy showcases young black men as lighthearted, silly, and carefree—a rare and refreshing take to see onstage or -screen. Written and performed by up-and-coming comedians Devin Middleton and Jordan Stafford and directed by Atra Asdou, this show strikes the perfect balance, sending up race with levity without pulling punches....
There aren’t college courses on how to put together a stand-up show. Even at famed Chicago institutions such the Second City and iO or within Columbia College’s comedy studies program, the lessons are much more about what’s happening onstage rather than what’s happening behind the scenes. So how does anyone learn the ropes when it seems like the most common training available to an aspiring comedy producer is taking tickets at a box office?...
Martha in her final resting place: the Smithsonian Institution 2014 is the year of the passenger pigeon. Not that any passenger pigeons are around to appreciate this fact: the last one, Martha, died in the Cincinnati Zoo exactly a century ago, on September 1, 1914. What makes the extinction of the passenger pigeon particularly tragic is that less than 50 years before Martha’s death, there were millions, even billions, of passenger pigeons in North America....
Former BANG BANG PIE SHOP owners Dave and Megan Miller have spent the last year milling flour and baking breads and pastries (as well as making more substantial dishes) at Baker Miller Bakery & Millhouse, which they opened last September in Lincoln Square. Now, less than a mile west of the bakery, they’re opening Baker Miller General, a grocery store with a hot food bar. Dave Miller describes it as a “typical small-scale grocer,” offering produce, bread, coffee, grains, and the like, but with the addition of a hot bar where they’ll sell food to go....
For the next two weeks Gene Siskel Film Center presents a new digital restoration of Marcel Pagnol’s beloved “Marseille Trilogy,” three long dramatic features—Marius (1931), Fanny (1932), and César (1936)—about a fractured family in the French seaside town. A tale of parenthood and its heartache, the movies struck an emotional chord in France and were enormously successful. Critics noted their lack of visual invention, calling them “canned theater,” but the movies, arriving near the dawn of the talkies, laid down a marker of sorts with their resolutely theatrical style....
Tal Rosenberg, Reader digital content editor Charles Mingus, Oh Yeah At home, I’ve been listening to a lot of Mingus while reading, picking things up off the floor, doing dishes, petting my cat, writing, and waltzing on my own. I don’t really have a “favorite” album when it comes to Mingus, though if forced to pick I’d probably be lame and go with Black Saint and the Sinner Lady. But the record I’ve played most frequently is 1962’s Oh Yeah, where Mingus forgoes double bass entirely in favor of piano....
You’ll have to forgive me for feeling a little paranoid these days, as I recently saw Kill the Messenger, a great new movie starring Jeremy Renner. But while many of us have been consumed by that mess, there’s been another spooky development at City Hall: a switcheroo in the city treasurer’s office, where one investment banker is about to be replaced by another. This led to one of the great exchanges of my journalistic career, when, back in 2002, I was granted an audience with his Rahmship while he was running for Congress....
