In the days since Mayor Emanuel jacked up property taxes, I’ve been fielding calls from millennials wanting to know how much more they’ll have to pay. Last month, Mayor Emanuel got the City Council to raise the property tax levy—how much the city spends—by roughly $588 million. You might think that it would be as simple as this: if your assessed value goes up, your taxes go up. Oh, if it were that simple!...
What we think of as “folk music” is generally played on traditional acoustic instruments, but as technology weaves itself ever more inextricably into human lives, electronics have become as much “of the people” as fiddles or nylon-string guitars—maybe even more so. Producer, performer, and multimedia artist Tieraney Carter (who runs the video blog URL GURL) calls herself a “digital folk artist,” and the eclectic music she creates as Wizard Apprentice uses lo-fi electronics, looping pedals, and clean, melodic vocals....
J. Scott Applewhite / AP Photos Should writers feel sheepish for describing former Secret Service director Julia Pierson as sheepish in the wake of security lapses that could have been disastrous? If I take the time to find a pen and circle things in the morning paper, I can take a few minutes more and explain why I bothered. Maybe Ahmed is a cynical mercenary. Maybe what he actually feels is shame....
Eclipse Theatre Company continues its season dedicated to the work of William Inge with this 1955 play set in a Kansas bus-stop cafe during a blizzard. A chanteuse tries to evade the advances of a lovestruck cowboy before succumbing, the diner’s proprietress disappears for a tryst with the bus driver, and a young waitress is charmed by the erudite blather of a soused former professor. The setting and light design evoke the midcentury melancholy of a Hopper painting, but references to Dante’s Inferno and a recitation from Romeo and Juliet hint that Inge was after bigger game....
Multitalented playwright and actress Danai Gurira’s new play Familiar has a pulsing, beating heart. A deft writer who knows when to end a scene, Gurira’s portrayal of a Zimbabwean-American family in Minnesota preparing to give away their daughter in marriage while fighting to hold onto everything they can of their culture is rich with hearty belly laughs that leaven heart-wrenching revelations. Riotously charming, this cross-cultural sitcom is grounded by a startlingly unique American story and a stellar cast....
Peter Gannushkin / downtownmusic.net Dan Weiss For close to a decade Dan Weiss has been one of the more interesting and reliable percussionists on the New York jazz scene, a team player with an excellent sound and a steady curiosity. He’s also a superb tabla player, having spent nearly two decades studying with Pandit Samir Chatterjee. Those dual skills have made him a natural, valuable fit in some of the bands led by alto saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa, which seamlessly explore the worlds of postbop and music of the Indian subcontinent....
Jim Frost / Sun-Times Media Media columnist Robert Feder, shown in 2002, when he was with the Sun-Times, now writes for the Tribune. On Wednesday, media blogger Robert Feder made an important announcement. Chicago’s foremost itinerant reporter—he’s bunked with the Sun-Times, Chicago Public Media, Time Out Chicago, and the Tribune—Feder announced that as of next Tuesday, his RobertFeder.com “will become part of the exclusive, premium digitalPLUS tier of ChicagoTribune.com.”...
I don’t normally check in with Yelp in the course of writing a review (well, I never do), but after my meals at Andersonville’s new Mexican restaurant Cantina 1910 I couldn’t help but take a look at what the sheeple were saying. Whatever happened in the interim, she’s returned as a chef full of surprises and ready to upend expectations of what Mexican food has to be, with a keen sense of what works, and the superb raw materials to make it happen....
The other day I sent a friend an e-mail letting him know I couldn’t go to his birthday party because our grandson was turning one in Michigan. When I told my wife I’d spotted the conflict and dealt with it she pointed out that the birthday party is at the end of September and our grandson was born a year ago this past Sunday. Even if 75 is the new 30, August isn’t the new September....
Upon exiting a press screening of Good Time, which opens in Chicago tomorrow, I was ready to recommend the film. The movie had shaken me, commanding my attention with a brilliant interplay of camerawork, editing, music, and performance. I had been under its spell as I watched it, and I left it in that heightened state that you achieve by engaging with worthwhile art. Before Pattinson can have sex with the girl, the man he’d believed was his brother wakes up, takes off the bandages, and reveals himself to be someone else....
Q: I’ve been faithfully reading your column in the Chicago Reader for years, and now I’m reaching out to you about my own problem. I’ve been dating this guy for almost a year. Everything is great, except one thing: He wants me to kick him in the nuts. It really bothers me, and I’m not sure what to do. He’s very serious about it, and he brings it up every single day....
Jim Luning Martha Lavey Martha Lavey is an unsentimental romantic. A Kansan by birth, she speaks with prairie earnestness about the practical uses of certain large concepts such as love, citizenship, and leading by following. She’s also one of the few people I know who seems actually to consider the validity of the things she says as she’s saying them. Earlier this month Steppenwolf Theatre disclosed that Lavey will be stepping down from her position as the company’s artistic director in 2015, after a round 20 seasons in the role, to be succeeded by fellow ensemble member—and Tony-winning director—Anna D....
Since 2004, San Diego’s Tristan Shone has been transforming himself into an extreme industrial metal cyborg he calls Author & Punisher. A mechanical engineer by trade, Shone built a series of “drone machines” and “dub machines”: heavy-duty steel sliders, levers, and knobs that add a factory-floor swing and tactile human weight to the midi samples and synth drones they control. Shone hit his stride on 2013’s Women & Children, creating a dynamic record that added emotional depth and forlorn melody to the skull-rattling electronic beats and explosive Nine Inch Nails-flavored darkness, all created live by his elaborate machinery....
The last production in the Eclipse Theatre Company’s season dedicated to William Inge is a perfectly crafted, mildly melodramatic 1957 drama about a domineering, unfaithful traveling salesman, his stalwart, long suffering wife, and their two unhappy children. In the hands of a less capable director and cast, this once-popular play could come off as just another museum piece, interesting only to theater history aficionados. To be sure the three acts unfold slowly....
Melaku Belay is a master of Eskista, a shoulder-popping Ethiopian dance style thought to have been inspired by the movement of snakes, as well as a student of the dance traditions of the approximately 80 tribal groups within his country. In 2009 he founded the performance ensemble Fendika, which is based in a similarly named nightclub in Addis Ababa, Fendika Azmari Bet. The group showcases variations that have developed in both rural and urban settings, combining energetic dance routines with azmari vocal numbers on which singers work oblique commentaries upon current events into lyrics....
Gossip Wolf was honored and privileged to meet and write about Lorna Donley, who cofounded totally excellent early-80s Chicago postpunk band Da; before she passed away suddenly in December at age 53, she was by far the raddest rock librarian at the downtown Harold Washington branch. It seems like just yesterday we were howling our lungs out at Da’s 2010 reunion shows at the Empty Bottle and Abbey Pub! Donley’s old bandmate David Thomas (also a former Reader receptionist and delivery driver) tells us he’s working on a two-hour audio documentary that will include a wealth of live Da performances, interviews, and studio outtakes, plus material from Donley’s film soundtracks and unheard cuts from her post-Da collaboration with Thomas, the Veil....
Sun-Times Media State representative Kelly Cassidy says legalizing marijuana is “right” for Illinois. Marijuana legalization just entered the political mainstream in Illinois. County commissioner John Fritchey, who organized the press conference, said they all realized that it could be several years before the state allows recreational sales and use. “If we were to introduce a legalization bill today, it would be shot down,” he said. “This is not going to happen in weeks or month, but it’s not something that’s ever going to happen if we don’t start now....
Newer Spanish restaurants in Chicago—and I’m talking about Vera (which is almost three years old) and the upstart MFK—have pursued a rigorously minimal approach, focusing on just a few excellent ingredients in each dish and cooking them simply, without a lot of manipulation. There haven’t been many complaints, as far as I’ve heard. And though we haven’t been deluged with Spanish food like we have with Italian, I’m not unhappy that the latest chef to put a foot on the Iberian Peninsula is doing something a bit different....
In the years following their volcanic 2014 Sub Pop debut, CLPPNG, LA group Clipping got swept up in the tidal wave of a massive cultural phenomenon: Hamilton. Between albums Clipping rapper Daveed Diggs landed a gig to play the dual parts of Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson for the runaway hit, and by the time he hung up his purple coat last year he’d won a Tony for Best Featured Actor in a Musical....
Upon hearing the news that Mayor Rahm plans to close seven downtown TIF districts sometime in the near future, I got almost as excited as a hockey fan on the night the Hawks clinched the Stanley Cup. Tresser is the north-side activist who formed the TIF Illumination Project, a local watchdog group that holds public meetings where, among other things, he shows locals what the city would never show them in a million years....
