Bolat African Cuisine 3346 N. Clark 773-665-1100 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Palm wine, made by fermenting the sweet sap from any of several species of palm tree, is common in tropical and semitropical regions of Africa and Asia, from Ghana to the Philippines. But it’s tough to find in Chicago, especially if you’ve got no special connection to an immigrant community from a country where it’s popular....
Sue Kwong This winter, the Reader has set a humble goal for itself: to determine the Greatest Chicago Book Ever Written. We chose 16 books that reflected the wide range of books that have come out of Chicago and the wide range of people who live here and assembled them into an NCAA-style bracket. Then we recruited a crack team of writers, editors, booksellers, and scholars as well as a few Reader staffers to judge each bout....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » My friend Mark Rappaport, a filmmaker and writer now based in Paris, has responded to my long review of The Hoax in this week’s Reader with some demurrals about my assertion that “the movie’s most outrageous claim” is “that the [Clifford Irving] hoax somehow led to the Watergate break-in.” He also has a few demurrals about his demurrals, which I’ll cite first: “I’m not really sure I got all the facts right....
SSION | Fool’s Gold | Self-released NO AGE | Every Artist Needs A Tragedy | PPM Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Between bands like Foot Village, BARR, and Lavender Diamond (see reviews below), LA is undergoing a scene explosion unlike anything the city has seen since Darby Crash was alive and puking. One of the central forces is the guitar-drums duo No Age. Formed out of the ashes of the gloriously short-lived Wives, they’re a pop band with noise motives, writing sun-bleached songs that at once chime and roar....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tonight’s planned performance by Good Stuff House—the trio of Mike Weis and Matt Christensen (both of Zelienople) and Scott Tuma (ex-Souled American)—was technically a reunion, but it’s not like the world wept after the group’s last performance in 2009; in fact, probably few if anyone even knew it would be a final gig. Nonetheless, it’s good to have this low-key outfit back, even if the reunion will have to wait a bit longer....
Q I’m a 23-year-old female, sexually active for seven years, and I can’t reach climax. I’m extremely frustrated. I have a wonderfully patient and helpful partner. He’s tried hard to no avail. I can’t even get myself there. I feel like I’m broken. My partner and I talk out anything that’s bothering me, we try different things, but no matter what the situation, I can never reach orgasm. When I went off birth control, I brought up to my doctor that I’d never had an orgasm, and she told me that female orgasms are largely a mental thing....
Goose Island sent me several sexy photos of this years’ Bourbon County lineup, but because I am stubborn and prideful I insisted on taking my own. When I reviewed Goose Island’s Bourbon County beers last year, I explained that I had mixed feelings about stoking the “alarming acquisitive frenzy” surrounding these sought-after limited releases. But I know the Bourbon County train will keep a-rollin’ no matter what I do—and it’s not as though I want to stop it....
This wolf has been a fan of Chicago cassette label Teen River since it launched in late 2011. Its catalog so far contains tapes by postpunk group Toupee, garage-psych band Bigcolour, and bedroom-pop dude J Fernandez, among others, and the six new releases the label has on deck include music by Quicksails (the synth project of Ben Billington, drummer for Tiger Hatchery and Moonrises) and psychedelic prog outfit Cool Memories. Those two acts play a joint release party at the Empty Bottle on Tue 2/5, which has been designated “Teen River Nite”; Columbia Fasciata and Famous Laughs open....
Like it or not, you can’t think Hyde Park without also thinking University of Chicago. For as long as most of us can remember, this culture-rich south-side lakefront community—extending from 51st Street to Midway Plaisance and Cottage Grove Avenue to the lake—has been more like an elite college town dropped into a big and sometimes alien city than like, say, any of Chicago’s ethnic neighborhoods. Both Hyde Park and its neighbor, Kenwood (especially south of 47th Street) have been dominated by the university and—for better or worse—would not be what they are today without it....
August Wilson’s play, set in 1911, represents the second decade in his decade-by-decade cycle of works about 20th-century African-American life. Produced by the Goodman in 1991, it’s back in a vibrant production by Congo Square Theatre Company, directed by Derrick Sanders and presented as part of the Goodman’s “August Wilson Celebration” (which also includes the local premiere of Wilson’s final play, Radio Golf). Joe Turner was a real person who ran a racket in which black men were taken under various pretexts and put to work in prison camps, and the play concerns Herald Loomis, a man searching for his lost wife after he’s released from forced labor....
fair game directed by doug liman Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Joseph Wilson spent two decades in the U.S. foreign service, working to foster democracy in Niger, Burundi, and the Congo. Assigned to the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, he was the last American diplomat to meet with Saddam Hussein before Operation Desert Storm drove Iraqi forces out of Kuwait in January 1991, and seven years later Wilson orchestrated President Clinton’s 11-day tour of the African continent....
Deep in the second act of The Iron Stag King: Part One—a visually lush but utterly confusing new fantasy romp from the House Theatre of Chicago—our underdog heroes wheel out a scale model of a battlefield and review their plan for the climactic confrontation. It’s a classic, even hackneyed exposition scene, but I drank it in like a marathon runner at the mile-20 water station. At last I had a clear sense of what these characters were thinking, and why....
Q I’m a mostly gay male with a boyfriend who is also mostly gay. We’re into BDSM—we’re both tops and sometimes play with other sub men. I say we’re “mostly” gay because we do like to fuck/top submissive women once in a while. We haven’t done this a lot, and never together because we don’t have the same taste in women—until recently. One of our new neighbors, a straight female, is very shy, but she’s opened up to us about her interest in BDSM....
Go back to the “Valentine’s Day: Why Bother?” table of contents page Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The second to last of these zany affairs was in December 2007. The boy was named Vince, though it should be mentioned that, on the night in question, he also introduced himself to a friend of mine as “Tony.” I met him at FKA, the monthly queer party at the north-side bar Big Chicks, where we started dancing and, pretty quickly, making out....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » WHPK, the student-run radio station at the University of Chicago, originally started its own modest take on the school’s big Summer Breeze concert as an antidote to that end-of-year student bacchanalia. These days the station’s own outdoor event is practically part of the official festivities, but its program still stands in stark contrast to the evening lineup, which this year includes Talib Kwele, Cake, Andrew Bird, and the Cool Kids (if you’re not a student at U....
Seemingly poised for world domination, tap dance is big even in Japan. Tappers wearing traditional sandals fitted out with cleats rocked a massive Busby Berkeley-esque dance scene in the 2003 Japanese action flick The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi, set during the Edo period of roughly 150 to 400 years ago. One of the featured tapsters was hip-hop stylist Yuji Uragami, aka Suji, who’s performing at all three of Chicago Human Rhythm Project’s Juba!...
The recent spate of inclement weather has been dreary, and even that feels like an understatement; yesterday’s mix of grey rainfall and thick, muggy humidity created an environment that made me want to stay inside for as long as possible, which is hardly the kind of thing I should be thinking with June around the corner. But at least I can turn to music to gear myself up for the kind of summertime activities romanticized by anyone who has ever blown off their responsibilities to relax and enjoy the scenery....
For the past two years, Mayor Emanuel has knocked over the civic and business elite in this town like a bowling ball crashing through pins. Yet McHugh’s pretty much the only thing standing between the mayor and his $92 million plan to build a basketball arena and hotel in the South Loop. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Most property owners have one of three different reactions when the city moves to seize their land....
Kimberly Atwood, owner of Elephant Room, opens her eyes for: Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind I first saw Too Much Light back in high school. As a rebellious teenager, taking the Orange Line to the Red or Brown Line for punk-rock concerts and thrift stores was a regular weekend excursion. When a friend told us about this quirky theater where they run 30 plays in an hour, we were immediately intrigued....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A few minutes ago Donald Trump released a statement concerning an issue that in his estimation has been overlooked, to the nation’s detriment, by both candidates in this year’s presidential race. “Taxes and government spending. Health care. Immigration. Financial regulation,” said Trump. They’re all the questions that have dominated the race—but what about income inequality? What about the overall standard of living in the United States, which seems inexorably to be on the decline?...
