On Friday the Empty Bottle hosts a show by Radioactivity, a relatively new band from the incestuous garage-punk scene in Denton, Texas. Front man and chief songwriter Jeff Burke used to play in the Marked Men, who split in 2009 after four top-notch albums; from 2010 till 2012 he led a group in Mito, Japan, called the Novice, which became Radioactivity when he returned home and put together a new Texan lineup....
Courtesy XO Infinity’s Bandcamp page J.C. Thayer A couple weeks ago I ran into rapper J.C. Thayer when I wandered into KnockBox Cafe to take a reprieve from the blisteringly cold winds. I’d met Thayer last summer while hanging out at a taco joint with some mutual friends, but I wasn’t aware that he made music until I saw him looking at ordering pages for cassettes at KnockBox. When Thayer told me he was pressing up an album of “weird downer hip-hop” I immediately asked him to pass along some tracks—using the phrase “weird downer hip-hop” in a sentence is a great way to pique my interest....
I couldn’t find any wide-screen stills from Words and Pictures, so enjoy this one from Cukor’s A Star is Born. Words and Pictures, which opens in Chicago tomorrow, might be the first American, star-driven romantic comedy in years to use the wide-screen frame purposefully—and the achievement is all the more remarkable when you realize how much of it takes place indoors. I’ve gotten so used to American genre movies taking the format for granted—giving the audience what are essentially 1....
Local artist Jesse Malmed feels that his work bears a relationship to language that’s “somewhere between poetry and comedy.” His video pieces—which will be exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art this Tuesday at 6 PM in a show called Untitled (Just Kidding)—are filled with puns and formal jokes, not to mention appropriations of mainstream comedy, video games, and other materials that might be considered too silly to be included in the world of experimental cinema....
How does one cook a four-course dinner for 35 people in a bike shop with no kitchen? To be honest, I don’t really know—but I do know that on Sunday night at Let’s Roast Cycles, chef Won Kim pulled it off admirably. Course after course made its way from the back of the shop, where paper-covered worktables were being used for plating dishes and mixing cocktails, to the front, where diners sat at folding tables tucked between rows of bikes that had been draped with strings of lights....
Columbia College Chicago fitness studio, 731 S. Plymouth, 312-369-6920 (classes September-December and February-May); Core Power Yoga, 4428 N. Broadway, 773-271-9642, corepoweryoga.com Last summer I thought sinking my toes into the soft sand during down dog as the wind off Lake Michigan played with my hair was equivalent to nirvana. But my worries never have been melted away as sublimely as they were by the voice of Dana Fares. Her instruction is silky, melodic, and delicately persuasive....
The Chicago punk scene wasn’t very kind to Donté Oxun after the 29-year-old moved here from Washington, D.C., in 2007. “These punk dudes gave me the name ‘the faggot’ or ‘culero,’ meaning ass fucker or ass man,” Oxun says. “There was a lot of machismo, antiblack sentiment, sexist and homophobic sentiment, and lots of side comments and treatment like that.” Oxun, who moved from Chicago to New Orleans last year, went to Georgetown University in D....
In spring 2011, New York music journalist Amanda Petrusich convinced her husband, Bret Stetka, to learn scuba diving with her. She invested hundreds of dollars in lessons and gear and trained in a local pool. Then she traveled to Beaufort, North Carolina, where Stetka’s parents have a vacation home, to complete the open-water dives required for certification. And she did it all for one reason: so she could visit Grafton, Wisconsin, and sift through the bed of the Milwaukee River looking for 78 RPM records and metal masters....
Over the years the Reader has covered the comings and goings of local bands at recording playground Pieholden Suite Sound more than a few times, but the Ukrainian Village studio’s most fascinating product might be the new generative iPhone music app, Chicago Avenue Moon, developed in part by Pieholden co-owner Josh Dumas. Using more than a thousand musical phrases written by Dumas and recorded by a slew of Chicago musicians (including members of Gossip Wolf faves Quarter Mile Thunder, Verma, and Mar Caribe), Chicago Avenue Moon uses data from a user’s GPS location—as well as the date, time, and phase of the moon—to create a constantly evolving soundtrack for your headphones, and you don’t have to be anywhere near Chicago Avenue for it to do its thing....
We were a road-trip family. Every few weeks, no matter the season, my mother, little sister, and I would pack up the sedan and depart from the small north-central Illinois town where I was raised. Mom believed it was important to initiate us early into a world bigger than the tiny agricultural bubble that we called home. Our destinations were all over the midwestern map: Ronald Reagan’s boyhood home in Dixon, Illinois; Big Powderhorn Mountain ski resort on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula; Amish country in northern Indiana; a rented lake house in Door County, Wisconsin; a Chicago hotel room with spectacular views of Fourth of July fireworks....
Into the Storm One of the best things about my job is that it regularly forces me to confront my aesthetic prejudices and the limitations of my cultural literacy. Just a few weeks ago, for instance, someone commented on a blog post I wrote that I knew nothing about post-70s Bollywood cinema, and I had to admit this person was right. Thankfully another modern-Bollywood fan e-mailed me a few days later with a list of recommendations....
The 1982 independent film Losing Ground—which plays tomorrow at 7 PM at Columbia College’s Film Row Cinema—barely screened at all until Milestone Films premiered a restored version earlier this year. It’s easily among the most important cinematic rediscoveries of 2015. One of the first narrative features written and directed by an African-American woman, it exhibits a sensibility that’s closer in spirit to the casually wise naturalism of Jean Renoir or Eric Rohmer than much in the American film canon....
The craft-beer boom has accommodated all sorts of business models: Madison-based MobCraft, for instance, uses crowdsourced recipes voted on by nerds across the country (in 2013 RateBeer named it the best new brewer in Wisconsin). And of course for years craft breweries—perhaps most famously Samuel Adams and Stone—have been rewarding the winners of their home-brewing contests by bottling the champion beers. Label art by Matthew LaFleur Middle Brow has existed for almost a year and a half—it’s already held four home-brewing contests—but its first beer has only just come out....
Mike Sula Five-headed chicken soup The grippe recently swept through my household, leaving me without strength, courage, or voice. Friend of the Food Chain Kristina Meyer must have tired of my wheezy, desperate whispers between bouts of bronchial death rattle, so she set about the heroic task of making me a very special soup. “This isn’t food,” she told me. “It’s medicine. It won’t necessarily taste great.” Incorporating five heads of garlic (hence the name), a whole hand of ginger, and more than 15 fingers of fresh turmeric, plus chicken, beef bone marrow, a half-dozen different varieties of chile, a eucalyptus teabag, frozen tofu, skin-on limes, and much more, it was medicine I feared might make my hair fall out....
I’m not sure an exhibition of large oil paintings of shipwrecks is the most auspicious subject for a fledgling restaurant to surround its guests with. But that’s what’s happened at the Cotton Duck, a Wicker Park art gallery/restaurant (artstaurant?) that will present a new menu every three months inspired by the work each time it mounts a show. For now all I can say about his food’s relationship to broken battleships is that it features lots of seafood, much of it with haute ambitions, lots of blank space on the plates, many squiggles and smears of rich, voluptuous, and often salty sauces, strong flavors competing for attention in each dish, but little harmony or balance....
Alone, With Friends Steve (Jonathan Rivera), the awkward star of Lee Peters’s new play, is gay, lonely, and miserable. He’s always around straight boys (he feels safe with them) but he wants to know—are they really his friends? Is Alex (Ben Page) a friend, or do they just hang out? Conveniently, they’re both getting over breakups; but trading bong rips in Alex’s gross apartment and brooding over mayonnaise sandwiches about how their exes could possibly have left them doesn’t feel all that genuine....
White Heat The latest film in Jonathan Rosenbaum’s ongoing “Unquiet American: Transgressive Comedies from the U.S.” series is Blonde Crazy, a 1931 pre-Code comedy directed by Roy Del Ruth and starring James Cagney that comes recommended by J.R. Jones. Cagney appeared in Blonde Crazy shortly before his famous turn in The Public Enemy, the film that essentially kick-started his reputation for playing wild, petulant gangster figures. But if the Del Ruth film had been a bigger hit, it’s possible the actor could have taken more comedic roles during his career....
If you’re Heading west on Fullerton from Logan Square to Hermosa, it’s impossible to miss Dulcelandia. Its otherwise dreary facade—wedged among lots of other dreary facades—is lit by an enormous, rainbow-colored neon sign. The fluorescent glow from inside backlights rows and rows of roughly three-feet-tall papier-mache humanoids: from an orange-haired mermaid that resembles a certain Disney character to masked lucha libre-style wrestlers to a caped guy whose likeness is similar to that of Superman....
In his Pitchfork Music Festival coverage for today’s Tribune, onetime Wilco biographer Greg Kot wonders if the group’s headlining set this evening will offer a preview of a new album, their first since The Whole Love (2011). Last night, after his piece had been put to bed, Wilco released its 11th studio album, Star Wars, for free via its website, wilcoworld.net, providing a pretty clear answer that tonight’s set will include a bunch of new material....
As funny as it sounds, the future of an elected school board in Chicago may come down to who Illinois governor Bruce Rauner likes the least: Mayor Rahm or Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis. The mayor says he opposes an elected school board because he doesn’t want to “politicize” the schools. I think we can all agree that what he really means is he doesn’t want any other politicians to have a say in how the schools are run....
