So the story goes… Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Those are so bad! Those letters I mean. You get the run down of some forgotten ‘oh yeah, that person’ and you feel obligated to explain your biggest accomplishment(s) of the year. And you know it will happen, you will run into the person at the worst time, like doing last minute holiday shopping or when you really have to use the bathroom while at the bar....
A couple of months ago I became obsessed with a song called “Goodies” by a New York rapper named Cakes da Killa, an engagingly loud and twitchy dance-rap song with one of those kind of beats that’s almost enjoyably obnoxious. That beat was made by a Bronx resident named JX Cannon, who I immediately started following on SoundCloud. I recently checked in on Cannon’s page to see what he had been up to and discovered that he recently uploaded a five song EP called, fittingly, JX EP....
Is there any other home accessory that is more of a guilty pleasure than the expensive scented candle? But once you get addicted to the complex nature of high-end candle fragrances, lighting a Yankee Candle is akin to wearing drugstore perfume. At about $14 to $36, Tatine Candles are an affordable splurge, especially when you consider that they’re made by hand in small batches, and in Chicago to boot. (They can even do double duty as a subtle personal fragrance if you rub the wax onto pressure points....
The obligatory tasting-glass shot. This is Sun Goddess, a wheat ale with lemongrass and tarragon. In my capacity as the Reader‘s music editor, I’ve gotten to know Jamie Proctor, director of marketing and digital media at Thrill Jockey Records. Last week I learned that Proctor is a member of a local home-brewing collective called CHAOS Brew Club, and has been since fall 2011 (“CHAOS” allegedly stands for “Chicago Homebrew Alchemists of Suds,” but I suspect a backronym)....
When the sculptor Richard Hunt was still a student at the School of the Art Institute, he sold a piece to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. That was back in 1957; Hunt was 22. When he was 35, in 1971, MOMA mounted the first retrospective of his work. Hunt is nearing 80 now, but he continues to work in his Lincoln Park studio, welding industrial metal into art....
Every Halloween musicians don Kiss makeup or torture their hair into Misfits devil locks, and all year round a herd of mersh cover bands plays the hits of the 70s, 80s, and 90s to cash in on the Lincoln Park/Wrigleyville knucklehead circuit. But it’s something else altogether to cover a band as fearlessly inventive as the Minutemen—reigning champeens of musical thunderspiels, hailing from San Pedro, California. Charity is all well and good, but Econoline have another hurdle to clear: they’ve got to satisfy die-hard Minutemen obsessives like me, for whom Double Nickels on the Dime exists in a sacrosanct musical space shared only by A Love Supreme and Trout Mask Replica....
QI love my husband of 20 years, but our sexual differences are putting a strain on our marriage. Ten years ago, he asked me to talk dirty to him about having sex with other men. It has progressed to him wanting to be a cuckold. I only want to be with him, but he presses the issue by verbalizing cuckold situations during sex. This makes me close my eyes and shut down....
Because variety is the hallmark of Spanish dance, Ensemble Espanol really gets a workout at the performances that close the company’s annual American Spanish Dance Festival. The first half of the program this year features Spanish classical, neoclassical, and folk dance while the second focuses on flamenco. During a rehearsal, the dancers went from artistic director Dame Libby Komaiko’s neoclassical Tiempos de Goya, in which line and placement are crucial, to Paco Alonso’s Alma de Aragon, celebrating the jota, a boisterous folk dance accompanied by castanets and marked by legs flying out in seemingly impossible orbit around the dancer....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At one time in his life, Frank Meeink used to get drunk and beat up strangers on the street for fun. As a member of Philadelphia’s skinhead scene in the early 1990s, Meeink—a neglected, abused child of divorced drug addict parents—punished his body with alcohol, projected his anger onto others, and recruited other youth to the white supremacy movement....
Last April EMI made headlines worldwide with its decision to allow Apple’s iTunes music store to sell its songs without the anticopying measures called DRM (digital rights management) that had become more or less standard for major digital retailers. Industry pundits had long considered DRM a dead end in the evolution of online retail because it punishes legitimate consumers by restricting what they can do with music they’ve bought but doesn’t have any effect at all on pirates trading in unlocked files....
The demise of HotHouse, now characterized as a personality dispute, obscures what’s actually been at stake in my removal [The Business, April 20]. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Last summer, fellow board members wrote to protest my dismissal and warned that if I was not allowed to complete funding requests, HotHouse would experience a shortfall of $150,000. They also repeatedly objected to bylaw violations, questionable elections that gave the board president and his minority a “majority,” and other abuses of power....
Michael Gebert: Congratulations on your second anniversary. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Mark Mendez: That running a kitchen and running a business are two totally different things. Some things I had certainly been exposed to, and knew. But there was a lot that I didn’t know and had to learn. Running a kitchen and making good food is something we know how to do....
Detroit native Robert Mitchell, aka Cyon Flare, moved here from Ann Arbor almost a year ago. He lip-synchs and dances at Circuit and is working with a producer to record original songs. During the day, he assists the staff at a suburban hospice. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I am wearing, in short, a lamp shade, mirrors, rhinestones, masking tape, duct tape, felt, and a grocery bag....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Randall, mononymous creator of the webcomic xkcd, is based in Massachusetts, but in today’s strip he absolutely nails not only the common annoyance Chicagoans face of people moving into our city only to brag at length at how much more perfect their hometowns are, but also the quintessentially midwestern (i.e. exceedingly patient and passive-aggressive) way we let Mother Nature serve those people their comeuppance....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » So what in the world is Kasper doing helping independent 25th Ward aldermanic challenger Cuahutemoc Morfin in his ongoing election challenge against incumbent alderman and Daley stalwart Danny Solis? “I don’t know the answer to that question,” says Richard Means, Morfin’s lawyer. “I can tell you this–I got a call from Kasper and he wants to help.” Meanwhile, Morfin’s challenge suffered a blow yesterday....
Mike Sula Momo, so tight you can bounce them I can’t fathom the logic the folks behind the South Loop’s Chicago Curry House employed in opening another Nepalese restaurant less than half a mile south—especially since the mother ship Curry Hut got its start in faraway Highwood, Lake County. OK, Nepal House has a much more trafficked location, but I can think of a dozen other neighborhoods that could use, and would support, a reliable source for momo, gundruk ko takari, or goat chhoela....
Matthew Shipp has been making music at a relentless pace since the 1980s. On occasion, the Delaware-born, New York-based pianist has copped a David Bowie move and threatened to retire from recording. But now that he’s reached the age of 60, he’s apparently too busy making new records to talk about quitting. So far in 2021 he’s appeared on seven albums, including a run of virtuosic duo exchanges with drummer Whit Dickey, bassist William Parker, and saxophonists Evan Parker and Ivo Perelman....
The Luxurious Liver This smart BYOB started life as a casual deli and cafe, and still does double duty as a catering kitchen, but owners Shin Thompson and Kurt Chenier hit their stride when they spiffed the place up a bit and introduced multicourse prix fixe dinners, now available in 5, 7, and 13 courses. The eclectically influenced contemporary American menu showcases clean, streamlined, seasonal flavors; the spring menu is currently a work in progress, but the restaurant’s offerings include Duck, Duck, Goose, a trio of duck breast, duck confit, and goose liver paté imported from France....
Q So I have been in a relationship with the same guy since I was about 16. It’s been a little over four years now, but I came out to him a year ago about the fact that I’m bisexual, which he has no problem with. So since then, I have had wild fantasies about a threesome with a really hot girl. But it’s a lot harder to arrange that than it seems....
Chicago hates you. That’s the message many local rappers face when they come up in the Chi, which has also come to be called “haterville” and “the city of hella haters.” Andrew Barber, founder of Fake Shore Drive, the blog of record for Chicago’s surging hip-hop scene, breaks it down like this: “I think it stems from artists becoming big and people feeling like there’s only room for, like, one person to get through every few years....
