Update II: The Times (of Northwest Indiana) has updates. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Update III: Quoting an American history grad student friend: “I love that one of the CNN talking heads just raised the possibility of electoral fraud because Lake County isn’t releasing its totals, yet failed to comment on tiny Union county, with maybe 5500 voters, which has yet to provide any data either....
Spring food books are sprouting up like sweet peas and stinking onions, and I’ve been indoors, digging into them instead of my own little patch o’ dirt. Here’s a half dozen of my favorites, in no particular order—I’ll run down a bunch more over on our blog the Food Chain. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Based at the Center for Sustainable Environments at Northern Arizona University, Renewing America’s Food Traditions (RAFT) is an alliance of organizations devoted to identifying and rescuing heritage animal breeds and heirloom plants....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This annual collaboration between the Empty Bottle and British music magazine the Wire, which runs from Wed 9/28 to Sun 10/2, leans hard on synthesizer explorations this year: the post-Tangerine Dream workouts of Oneohtrix Point Never, the dark synth-pop of John Maus, the ambient drones of Nicholas Szczepanik, the glitchy software-driven constellations of Oval. But as always, most of the fest’s individual shows collide all sorts of different styles, and the opening-night bill in particular—transcendental tremolo picking from black-metal band du jour Liturgy, ghostly retro-pop from the collaboration of Dirty Beaches and Frankie Rose, electro-funk from Chicago’s own Chandeliers, and the aforementioned synth-pop from John Maus—should be a synapse-shorting hoot....
A nameless man appears in a small farm town on the northern French coast, spending his days wandering the fields and praying. In the following months, he finds an acolyte in a sulky young woman, commits murder, and has violent sex with a random traveler. That’s about it for the story of this 2011 French drama, which evokes the Old Testament in its opaque simplicity, and Bruno Dumont’s commanding, atheistic style—rooted in purposely empty wide-screen vistas and the inexpressive faces of his nonactors—doesn’t offer many clues as to its meaning....
I grew up near Hamilton, Michigan. My father grew up in that area. He grew up on an industrial pickle farm. We had, when I was growing up, just under 400 acres that was mostly to pickles. So I grew up witnessing the farm because my dad was farming part-time. Both my parents were anesthesiologists. Abra Berens, 31, divides her time between professional Chicago kitchens like those at Floriole Cafe & Bakery and her Bare Knuckle Farm, 350 miles away on Michigan’s Leelanau Peninsula....
More Than MakiJapanese, from sushi to shabu-shabu Katsu2651 W. Peterson | 773-784-3383 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » rrr Long before the tsunami of overpriced, overdesigned sushi bars struck West Town, Katsu Imamura was quietly and unpretentiously elevating sea creatures to their edible ideal in less fashionable West Rogers Park. No Prada-toting poseurs cram this pair of narrow dining rooms, but Imamura and his wife, Haruko, have earned the loyalty of traveling Japanese businessmen and discerning locals with their friendly attention and superb high-quality fish....
Shannon & the Clams’ new sixth album, Year of the Spider, is a welcome anomaly in this wretched second pandemic summer. The band completed the record in early 2020, just before COVID-19 brought the country and its music industry to a grinding halt, so it’s unmarred by that particular global catastrophe. Instead the album’s 50s- and 60s-inspired garage punk reckons with a series of challenges that had befallen Clams bandleader Shannon Shaw: In 2018, a Northern California wildfire nearly forced her parents from their home, and a year later she was exiled from her apartment of 14 years due to a relentless peeping tom....
MIC TERROR BLUEBERRY FIST Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » When he named this band, lead singer John Tristan hadn’t yet seen the Urban Dictionary entry defining blueberry fist as a euphemism for beating off with a broken hand; he just plucked the phrase out of the air. I was hoping it was a reference to something, since that’d at least mean these guys weren’t entirely responsible for it—the shitty name is the only real problem I’ve got with their band....
Getting a national holiday named after you is tough to do. In the U.S. you have basically two options: discover the country (already taken) or stand up for liberty and justice against the kind of opposition that tends to involve assassination attempts. The government is hardly likely to give everyone the day off to celebrate the birth of the guy who’s arguably the most important hip-hop producer of the past two decades....
Some people have a spirit animal—a guardian creature residing within, acting as guide and patron and providing metaphysical kinship. In case you’re interested, mine is the owl. (According to a quiz available at keshasparty.com—Ke$ha’s spirit animal quiz. Yep.) But that’s neither here nor there because what I really have is better: I have a spirit bar. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve heard that Zanzabar (2100 S....
QI’ve been a fan of your Savage Lovecast for a long time, but I had to write after hearing Marty Klein’s awesome talk about the fallacy of “sex addiction.” I am 27, and for most of my adult life, I have suffered from complete sexual dysfunction with partners. I was ashamed and thought I was too sexually screwed up to be with a partner because I’m kinky. (I have a fetish for tights and pantyhose....
American metal is thriving like never before, and Chicago has one of the country’s strongest scenes. Almost every small to midsize venue in the city regularly hosts metal shows: the Empty Bottle, Bottom Lounge, Subterranean, House of Blues, Reggie’s, the Logan Square Auditorium, Double Door, the Beat Kitchen. Metal Shaker—true to its name—books almost nothing but metal. Even the Hideout, with an established identity as a home for rootsy music and indie fare, gets in on the action from time to time....
Carrie Hanson of the Seldoms creates a four-ring circus in This Is Not a Dance Concert, satirizing audiences and performers but giving both a little love, too. The new, hour-long piece consists of four separate segments of dance and often very funny text (cobbled together from Yelp reviews, the casting call for Spider-Man, dancers’ own stories, and other sources), which are performed simultaneously at four locations in the Harris Theater—two lobbies, the seating area of the auditorium, and backstage....
A rich, middle-aged socialite and a dumb but sexy young dancer exploit each other for fun and profit. Locked in a loveless marriage, the socialite wants a little something on the side; the dancer, a gold-digger with the morals of an alley cat, wants someone to pay the bills. The socialite sets the dancer up in a “love nest,” as it used to be called, and bankrolls the would-be star’s new nightclub....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Whirr is a band out of San Francisco that was founded by former Deafheaven guitarist Nick Bassett. Deafheaven has been on a lot of people’s radars lately, catching a bunch of attention for blending pretty, post-rocky shoegaze with the blastbeats and tortured shrieks of black metal. Listening to Whirr, it’s obvious that Bassett came from the same school of thought as Deafheaven: the guitar work has the same dramatic, forlorn beauty, but instead of complex arrangements and a blur of percussion and aggression, it’s slowed down to a crawl and filled out with more guitars (the band sometimes plays with three on stage), synthesizers, and sweet, dreamy female vocals....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Blow, Bill Callahan, and Fuck Buttons. Three top-notch (and Reader-recommended) shows on a Monday in October. Not too bad. Even better for the Blow show at Lincoln Hall is the opener, Love Inks. Minimalist, electro-branded indie pop, the Austin trio have the distinct ability of sounding ethereal and in a mesmerizing sway one moment—thanks in large part to the easy breeze of Sherry LeBlanc’s vocals—and slightly disjointed and grim another....
The Empty Bottle and British music magazine the Wire once again bring Chicago the Adventures in Modern Music festival, with five nights of exciting nonmainstream sounds from several continents. To call the lineup eclectic would be an understatement. LA-based global bass duo Nguzunguzu headline the first show on Wed 10/3, after sets by outsider-music legend R. Stevie Moore, Rob Mazurek’s Brazilian-jazz fusion outfit Sao Paulo Underground, and others. Dark electronic act Demdike Stare (see Soundboard) headlines Thu 10/4, with openers including New Hampshire black-metal band Vattnet Viskar (see Soundboard) and Chicago improvising bassist Joshua Abrams and his Natural Information Society....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tremaine Johnson, the rapper and producer better known as Tree, hooked me long before I wrote about him for a Reader B Side cover feature. I’ve kept his mixtape Sunday School on repeat for months, thoroughly under the spell of its “soul trap” sound. Johnson has a knack for combining off-kilter samples and sparse drum patterns in a way that’s dissonant and strange but still melodic and soulful....
When I wrote about the second Lord Mantis full-length, Pervertor (Candlelight), in March, I said that it “puts me in mind of a huge rampaging machine from the Matrix movies.” The machines I was picturing are called Sentinels—flying squidlike hunter-killers that pursue our heroes through the abandoned sewer tunnels of the “real” world. Lord Mantis’s sludgy, demented black metal has an obsessive rhythmic drive and a busily mechanical feel, but more important it’s suffocatingly, apocalyptically hateful....
Sure, it wins by default, since it’s the only state park within the city limits. But Wolf Lake Recreation Area, as it’s also known, is an alluring spot anyway. To get there you have to drive or bike south of the Skyway, past the site of the long-closed Wisconsin Steel mill, and almost to the humming Ford plant—but with a quick turn off a busy road you end up on 160 acres of trees and fields along the shores of Wolf Lake, where the loudest noise is the honking of geese....
