Republican U.S. House speaker Paul Ryan is coming to Chicago Thursday for a big-ass fund-raiser! If you have $1,000 to spare, you can join him for dinner at the Chicago Club and offer him your thoughts on the Trump administration and the new GOP health-care plan (known to some as “Ryancare”). Or you can stand outside and protest for free. Or, if standing around and yelling is getting old, you can drink beer on Wednesday night instead....
There are two overwhelmingly positive developments to this year’s Chicago International Film Festival. One is that the fest will present a program of experimental cinema for the first time in decades; that screens on Monday, October 15, at 8:30 PM and features short works by Apichatpong Weerasethakul and local filmmakers Melika Bass and Deborah Stratman. The second is that the festival will screen more features directed by women than ever before, most of them first- or second-time filmmakers....
Cheryl Lindo Jones via Flickr Not an alien invasion: the aurora borealis over Chicago in 2006. This has been a strange week here in Chicago. Boiling water turned to snow. (It also retained its ability to burn.) Steam rose from Lake Michigan and the Chicago River, at least in the parts where they weren’t frozen into modernist ice sculpture. If we still believed in signs and wonders, and that the world will end not in fire but in ice, a very good case could be made that this week is the beginning of end times....
Robert Altman was one of the greatest filmmakers America ever produced, a true maverick with a panoramic vision of the United States and sharp insights into the national character. His first big success, the antiwar comedy MAS*H (1970), introduced people to his signature style of large ensemble casts, overlapping dialogue, corrosive social satire, and sudden, startling moments of drama. Altman followed it with several more strong, idiosyncratic movies—Brewster McCloud (1970), McCabe and Mrs....
Q: I’m a 20-year-old submissive woman. I’m currently in a confusing affair with a 50-year-old dominant married man. He lives in Europe and has two kids close to my age. We met online when I was 17 and starting to explore my BDSM desires—out of the reach of my overbearing, sex-shaming, disastrously religious parents—and we’ve been texting daily ever since. We’ve since met in different countries and spent a total of three weeks together....
You can hardly blame Philadelphia comics creator Brian “Box” Brown for his infatuation with professional wrestling. By the time he was a toddler, Junkyard Dog, Ricky Steamboat, and Hulk Hogan were household names. They pummeled one another in nationally broadcast matches powered by a promotion machine that, according to Sports Illustrated, produced “a showbiz package so flamboyant that it makes the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade look like a Russian funeral procession....
Forward-looking new-music ensembles dedicated to the work of living composers, especially young ones, seem to be proliferating unstoppably in Chicago these days. The likes of Ensemble dal Niente, Fifth House Ensemble, and Eighth Blackbird regularly perform pieces written for vocalists, but Fonema Consort has distinguished itself by focusing on vocal music. Costa Rican composer Pablo Santiago Chin and singer Nina Dante founded the group with composer Edward Hamel in 2011, and it’s already become an important creative force in the city....
It Felt Like Love Returning to the subject of worthwhile art movies with unpromising titles, tomorrow Facets begins a weeklong run of a new American indie called It Felt Like Love. With regards to the title, I suspect this one was meant to evoke junior high poetry—the main character, after all, is a 14-year-old girl beginning to experience feelings of lust and romantic longing. Writer-director Eliza Hittman makes it clear that the heroine doesn’t experience these feelings naturally, but rather is forced into them....
Prairie School Late September A collaboration between Heisler Hospitality and Jim Meehan, founder of New York’s PDT bar, Prairie School is inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright—both the design of the physical space and the drinks will reflect the architect’s aesthetic. The bar, which occupies the northeast corner of the Google building in the West Loop, will serve minimalist cocktails from Meehan and head bartender Kristina Magro (Pub Royale, Queen Mary) and has a Japanese tap system designed specifically to dispense whiskey highballs....
Q: I’ve been dating this guy for almost two months. It’s been pretty good, except the sex isn’t really the best. I have this other male friend who has had a crush on me. Long story short: My friend made a move on me the other night. I told him I couldn’t, and he knew why, but to be honest, I was insanely turned on by his forwardness. He apologized, but a week later we hung out, and I told him that it really intrigued me, and we ended up having crazy cool sex—satisfying in all the ways the guy I’m dating isn’t....
Clint Eastwood in Honkytonk Man As Drew Hunt noted the other day, Jersey Boys isn’t the first time Clint Eastwood has directed a film about musicians. His Charlie Parker biopic Bird (1988) cemented his reputation as a serious filmmaker (a mere 13 features into his directorial career); but there’s also Piano Man (2003), his contribution to the PBS miniseries The Blues, and Honkytonk Man (1982), his adaptation of Clancy Carlile’s Depression-set novel....
I don’t know what the hell is going on in Los Angeles, but no city has done more to recharge my love of rock music in the past few years. I don’t want to overstate the case, because honestly everything I’ve been digging seems to come from a relatively small circle of players, all of whom are loosely in the orbit of Ty Segall and John Dwyer of Oh Sees fame....
Important news for Chicago journalists—especially the ones with mortgages: A big job has just been filled, and another ten attractive vacancies have just been posted. ProPublica announced Tuesday that it’s named Louise Kiernan to head ProPublica Illinois, its first regional, autonomous operation. Now it’s up to Kiernan to hire her staff. Click here for the list of newly available jobs, most of them as editors or reporters. An associate professor at Medill since 2010, Kiernan earlier spent 18 years as a reporter and editor at the Tribune, and was lead writer on “Gateway to Gridlock,” a 2001 report on air travel in America that won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting....
courtesy of the artist Milton Suggs At the 2012 Chicago Jazz Festival, young singer Milton Suggs gave a galvanizing performance that signaled he was on his way to becoming one of Chicago’s finest singers. Then, a few months later, he was gone, transplanted to New York. And whereas a bunch of jazz musicians who’ve also decamped to the east coast—such as saxophonists Greg Ward and Christopher McBride—have returned so frequently it would be easy to think they never split, Suggs hasn’t popped up much at all in his hometown....
Michael Gebert Menu with optional tattoo A month ago I chronicled the process by which Sunday Dinner Club, the underground half of Honey Butter Fried Chicken, made cassoulet for 500 people for its month-long, entirely polar-vortex-appropriate series of cassoulet dinners. (You can see part one here, and part two here, and the audio version of the story is here.) Michael Gebert Cassoulet by the pan Michael Gebert Like a lot of long-baked things, a bit monochromatic...
Under the name Soccer Mommy, 20-year-old Sophie Allison creates the type of mellow rock songs that can break your heart and then make you feel like you’re getting a giant, warm hug in the shift between a verse and a chorus. It’s the type of brilliant songwriting maneuver that might come as a surprise from someone who’s on record in the Fader saying that Avril Lavigne’s Under My Skin (2004) was the first album to change her life....
This Babes With Blades Theatre Company world premiere is a rowdy, rollicking spoof of 18th-century English Restoration comedy, infused with fast-paced farcical energy and lots of swashbuckling swordplay. A product of Babes With Blades’s Fighting Words Program—which develops new works that place heightened language on a par with stage combat in the storytelling-Arthur M. Jolly’s play concerns 15-year-old Trothe (Deanalís Resto), the daughter of a nobleman, who is in love with a flamboyant poet (Felipe Carrasco)....
It was a May midafternoon on the first day of this year’s Sweets & Snacks Expo, and I was catching my breath and charging my phone when I accidentally met the biggest celebrity at the whole three-day event. I was in the Jack Link’s pavilion, one of the largest at the expo, with my friend Sarah Joyce, a photographer and founder of GlitterGuts. Aside from the charging station, the pavilion included a claw arcade game filled with rolled-up T-shirts and several tables of samples—including bites of a new “breakfast bacon” flavored like brown sugar and maple, which had a cloying syrup aftertaste....
Michael Gebert Tunde Wey If you’ve traveled outside the prosperous west, you’ve met the kind of entrepreneur that emerging economies tend to produce—the cabdriver who’s also a travel agent, a caterer, a handyman, a schoolteacher . . . Tunde Wey: We started (revolver) about a year ago. Neither of us had any sort of restaurant ownership experience. [Peter] had worked in restaurants going to college, I hadn’t really worked in any restaurants, though my first job ever, when I was 18 or 19, was at Wendy’s....
Chicago’s bustling new-music community usually focuses on instrumental material—while there are a number of excellent, boundary-pushing singers in town, most ensembles don’t tackle vocal music. Over the past four years or so, that’s made Fonema Consort distinctive and important: the local group, directed by composer Pablo Chin, emphasizes adventurous new work that centers the human voice, even if the sounds those voices contribute don’t usually sound very songlike. On Friday, Fonema Consort releases its second album, Fifth Tableau, on Chicago cassette imprint Parlour Tapes, and on Saturday it celebrates the occasion with a concert at Experimental Sound Studio....
