Do yourself a favor and don’t Google it. Oozing Wound, the local thrash trio made up of members from noise outfits like Cacaw, Bad Drugs, and Unmanned Ship—a band that I have unabashedly and publicly gushed over since I covered their second show in January 2012—have just been picked up by local mega-indie label Thrill Jockey, home to some of the biggest and most eclectic sounds in underground music today....
QI am currently dating a guy who is nice, funny, has a good “dating resumé,” i.e., never married, good job, no issues. I have a good time when we are together, and he treats me fine. The problem is that we have the most ridiculously boring sex. Super vanilla, totally predictable, and I never come. There’s no foreplay, he rarely eats pussy, and when he does it’s not good. It’s totally frustrating, but I try not to put too much weight on it since other aspects of our relationship are ideal....
On February 16, the Union League Club gave out its Democracy in Action award to deserving local high school students, and Mayor Daley was on hand to give a rousing speech—calling on regular public schools to make like the charters and transform ordinary neighborhood students into high-scoring, high-achieving, college-bound stars. What Mayor Daley didn’t say—what he probably didn’t even know—is that just days before his speech eight students from Pritzker College Prep, a school just down the street from Kelvyn Park, unceremoniously showed up at Kelvyn’s door, having flunked out, dropped out, or been kicked out....
Produced by the Inner-City Muslim Action Network (IMAN), the Takin’ It to the Streets festival runs from 9 AM-9 PM this Saturday in Marquette Park (6734 S. Kedzie), at 323 acres the largest on the southwest side. Bookings on the fest’s four music stages include hip-hop, indie rock, world music, soul, folk, and spoken word, along with a handful of DJs and dance troupes. The Streets Stage, toward the southeast corner of the grounds between California and Kanst, hosts music from 11 AM-8:30 PM, including some of the fest’s biggest names: Mos Def, Tinariwen, and Kindred the Family Soul....
In 1997 John Edgar Wideman wrote an essay for Esquire magazine called “The Silence of Thelonious Monk,” about love and poetry and words (all that jazz), the sublime way in which the quiet between a maestro’s key strokes elicits the glory of all of the above, and about Paris, too. Wideman penned the work, or at least framed its reflections, around his own sojourn in that hub of western culture and democracy and romance and empire and revolution, Gaul—safe haven for so many black American performers, artists, thinkers, and radicals over the postmodern years....
As the thirsty Reader staff fanned out across Chicago to bring you our neighborhood bar guide, we realized we had an opportunity in our hands. An excuse to go to our favorite bars is also an opportunity to ask bartenders the answers to questions we’ve always had in the back of our minds. What should I get? What’s the best way to stave off this looming hangover? What’s the worst shit that’s ever gone down at your bar?...
Will Nedved, cofounder of the Gift Theatre Company, can’t put down: How Should a Person Be? One of my favorite novels of the last year is Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be?, a hilarious and at times unsettling investigation of the title question through the follies of Heti, a recently divorced writer who transcribes the conversations of her friend Margaux Williamson in a misguided effort to complete a long-procrastinated playwriting commission....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Marisa Monte Universo ao Meu Redor (Metro Blue) The Brazilian singer collaborated with onetime Beastie Boys producer Mario Caldato on this highly personal take on the samba, and while there are plenty of electronic touches, the music is surprisingly gentle and warm without ever suggesting retro coziness. A mixture of originals—most cowritten with Monte’s Tribalistas cohorts Carlinhos Brown and Arnaldo Antunes—and old gems are treated with exquisite care and tenderness....
The Chicago company of Wicked will host a cabaret performance, Defying Inequality, to benefit several organizations working for gay and lesbian civil rights–including the right to same-sex marriage. The organizations are Equality California (the state where voters recently passed a law overturning same-sex marriage), New York’s Empire State Pride Agenda, New Jersey’s Garden State Equality, and the Vermont Freedom to Marry Task Force. The concert will feature members of the casts of Wicked and Jersey Boys, the Chicago Gay Men’s Chorus, and others....
TOC has a beef with our “whitewashing” of Disco Demolition Night: “Disco Demolition looked like a chance for some powerful members of the local media and business community to gather followers to blow up records and vent their hate for a music and culture that just happened to be a commercially potent outgrowth of black and gay culture” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There’s an active debate in the comments of our story, but if you’re really interested in the intersection between disco, homophobia, race, and the entirely legitimate point that a lot of disco really did suck, USC prof Alice Echols has a thoughtful chapter in her book Shaky Ground (chapter 11, you can read it here)....
The cover of Wire’s 154 From the chatter on the streets (by which I mean the chatter among about a dozen of my friends), the acts people seem to be excited about seeing at the Pitchfork Music Festival are R. Kelly, Bjork, and the Breeders. But I’m eager to see Wire, one of my favorite bands, perform today. At this stage, Wire occupy a status all-too-often ignored in indie-rock circles: a great band who made their best work years ago but still happen to be cranking out very good albums (see Mission of Burma)....
Last Halloween at Beauty Bar’s Monday-night variety show, Salonathon, I happened to see a synth-pop group called Daan—a trio of svelte gay men who on this particular evening were decked out S&M style, in black hot pants, leather chest harnesses, chains, and studded codpieces. The moment they hit the stage they launched into a tightly choreographed dance that would’ve made a boy band blush—between the lascivious petting and pelvic thrusting, two members took turns literally picking up the third by the crotch....
I just read The Gift of Death, Jacques Derrida’s late-career foray into deconstructionist theology. Of course, to come out and say that you’ve been reading the famously abstruse French philosopher is a major throwdown. (“Look at my brain!”) It’s also a little embarrassing. What sort of poseur lets it be known that he reads Derrida? In my case, the pretension is compounded by my motivation. I picked up the book because my brother the English professor had just mentioned his own Derrida reading, and I was feeling inadequate....
You had to look fast to catch the Chicago Publishes interview with indie publisher Gabriel Levinson earlier this month. The first in a series spotlighting the scrappy independent arm of the business, it went up on the CP website—the city’s nerve center and support system for the industry—December 5, and vanished December 7. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But when Levinson went back to the website the day after the interview went up, he noticed something odd....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Conrad Black, former owner of the Sun-Times, reported to a federal prison in Florida Monday to begin a six-and-a-half-year sentence for fraud and obstructing justice. His own man to the end, Black posted a statement Monday in Canada’s National Post, a paper he founded, insisting on his innocence and declaring that he has “endured the most comprehensive international defamation I can recall in over four decades of close acquaintance with the media....
people We have always seen ourselves as an audience-based festival, so our mission is to bring the best in international cinema to Chicago, with the view that film is a wonderful tool for cross-cultural understanding. There are other festivals that maybe are more market-based than we are. But every year there are films that do get picked up here. We have U.S. distributors as well as European distributors, and recently I’ve been getting requests from Asian distributors to come to the festival....
When he was a kid growing up in Milwaukee, Eric Simonson recalls, “my dad came home one day with a cowboy hat and a pickup truck.” Simonson’s father, a real estate agent, announced that he’d had enough of city life. “He moved us to a farm in Eagle, Wisconsin, where he raised pigs. It was a culture shock. I’d been a city boy till that time. But I’m glad we did it....
The saxophonist Joe Lovano has regularly spoken of his malleable quintet Us Five as a band that’s capable of doing and playing anything, and on the group’s brand-new Cross Culture (Blue Note), its third album, that’s never seemed more apparent. The group tackles the Ellington/Strayhorn classic “Star Crossed Lovers,” but the other ten pieces are all Lovano originals—some of which he’s recorded previously in other contexts—yet they all feel more like superflexible settings or structures than rigid compositions, allowing the players great internal latitude....
Psst: Running a small nonprofit arts organization? Starved for funding? Looking for eight or ten grand to balance the budget or get that next project off the ground? Ken Kaulen, 26, has a sweet deal for you: easy money and fast, barely any effort, and you won’t have to take your clothes off or deliver any mysterious packages. Kaulen, aka ChicagoKenny, owns a new company called Chicago Poker Live. He wants to help you throw a series of four casino events–mostly poker parties, with maybe a blackjack table or two....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » While drafting my capsule review of Shaka King’s Newlyweeds, a charming New York indie about a pot-smoking repo man opening this Friday at Facets Multimedia, I had to refrain from comparing the movie to such breezy, early-sound-era programmers as James Whale’s The Reluctant Maiden, Mervyn LeRoy’s Three on a Match, or William Wellman’s Night Nurse. I’ve invoked this comparison in my reviews of the recent low-budget features Gimme the Loot, Yes We’re Open, and The Crumbles, and I nearly did when writing about several others (e....
