I spent last Friday at the Congress Theater for the Chicago installment of the Hard Festival tour headlined by Rusko, Crystal Castles, and Sinden. I expected it to be kind of a rave, which it wasn’t. However it did turn out to be a pretty good time, if almost sickeningly hot and sweaty inside. I mention the hot-and-sweatiness in the review I wrote up for this week’s Reader, but I didn’t have room to really convey exactly how disgusting it was in there. Imagine that you are in a sauna and the person on the bench across from you ladles water out of a bucket and onto the hot stones until it’s just suffocatingly humid in there. Then he or she leans across to you and says, “This is a bucket of random strangers’ sweat.” And then you’re extremely skeeved out but you can’t leave because you’re on assignment and you have a column to turn in first thing Monday morning. It was kind of like that. Not mentioned in the piece: both myself and photographer Andrea Bauer independently deciding to wear jeans to the event, when most people there opted for just a few scraps of clothing to cover their illegal areas.
