Illinois news

• Ain’t Misbehavin’ hits its stride at Drury Lane

  03-07-2024 23:16 via chicagoreader.com
  
  When Thomas Wright “Fats” Waller died at 39 of pneumonia on December 15, 1943, while riding a train from LA to Chicago, he left behind a legacy as a popular singer, composer, and performing artist few have equalled. His formidable body of work includes 400 songs. The range of this music was remarkable; he could […]
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• The Hyde Park Jazz Festival faces down uncertainty with defiant artistry

  05-10-2024 00:34 via chicagoreader.com
  
  The Hyde Park Jazz Festival, one of the most astutely curated and organized arts events on the Chicago cultural calendar, reached its 18th year the last weekend in September. Except for one brief shower, the forecast rain stayed away, and though the Hyde Park Herald had just published a story on the financial headwinds faced […]
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• The kind of prevention we need

  04-10-2024 18:07 via chicagoreader.com
  
  An overdose prevention center (OPC), also referred to as an overdose prevention site, safe injection site, or supervised consumption site, is a legally sanctioned space where people can use drugs without fear of harassment, arrest, or overdose death.  At an OPC, participants are provided with the tools they need to use drugs more safely—like sterile […]
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• Awards and divas

  03-10-2024 23:17 via chicagoreader.com
  
  This week’s announcement of the MacArthur Fellows (aka the “genius grants”) didn’t include any Chicago (or former Chicago) theater artists as in past years with Mary Zimmerman and David Cromer, but we’re thrilled that Chicago fiction writer Ling Ma and visual artist Ebony G. Patterson are among this year’s 22 recipients of a no-strings-attached $800,000 […]
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• Two Destinos shows look at immigration through different perspectives

  03-10-2024 18:08 via chicagoreader.com
  
  The seventh Destinos: Chicago International Latino Theater Festival, kicked off this past Monday, featuring an exciting lineup of national, international, and Chicago-based performances just in time for Hispanic Heritage Month. Now in its seventh year, the 2024 Destinos will showcase 21 productions at stages across the city, including four world premieres. Destinos is produced by […]
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• Megalopolis overflows with ambition

  03-10-2024 17:27 via chicagoreader.com
  
  Megalopolis in wide release in theaters
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• The Chicago music-zine revolution wants you!

  02-10-2024 19:24 via chicagoreader.com
  
  On Sunday, September 8, I went to the ninth annual ZineMercado. Dozens of zinesters sold their wares from tables spread out around the green space next to Comfort Station in Logan Square. I’ve gone to ZineMercado often enough to know I’ll see familiar faces at those tables. I can reliably pick up a copy of […]
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• Women make movies

  02-10-2024 19:22 via chicagoreader.com
  
  The Moviegoer is the diary of a local film buff, collecting the best of what Chicago’s independent and underground film scene has to offer. Some of the most exciting programming happening now is taking place as part of Films by Women/Chicago ’74, an abbreviated and more loosely organized remounting of a festival that took place […]
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• Boxing Amongst Chickens

  02-10-2024 19:11 via chicagoreader.com
  
  By Casey Cereceda
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• Explore a century of follies and film at the Elmhurst History Museum

  02-10-2024 19:02 via chicagoreader.com
  
  The idyllic Main Street is a classic image of American ephemera. Before expressways and Cybertrucks changed landscapes, these stretches of early suburbanization forged hubs for commerce, character, and community. In Chicagoland, the remains of this Rockwellian Americana can still be found punctuating Metra stops—but of course, the times, they are a-changin’, and the character and […]
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• ‘America needs to hear more Palestinian voices’

  02-10-2024 18:25 via chicagoreader.com
  
  “Life for artists in Gaza has never been easy,” says Chicago-based Palestinian designer and visual artist Linda Abdullah. Illustrating this point is Abdullah’s latest curatorial endeavor, “Landscapes From Under the Rubble,” which opens Friday, October 4, at Co-Prosperity.    Presenting work in three parts, the exhibition includes work produced in Gaza prior to October 2023—much of […]
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• MJ Lenderman brings riffs and regrets to Thalia Hall

  02-10-2024 17:58 via chicagoreader.com
  
  MJ Lenderman is back in Chicago again. These two Thalia Hall shows take place just months after the Asheville artist’s headlining set at the Logan Square Arts Festival (and Sleeping Village show) in late June. This time around, he’s touring in support of his acclaimed new fourth record, Manning Fireworks, which follows 2023’s And the […]
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• Chicago Reader Volume 54, Number 1

  02-10-2024 17:56 via chicagoreader.com
  
  Chicago Reader Volume 54, No. 1. October 3, 2024
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• Pumpkin bread at the Common Cup

  02-10-2024 17:45 via chicagoreader.com
  
  Autumn is the pumpkin bread at the Common Cup. Fresh out of the oven in the morning or wrapped in plastic and marked at half price the following afternoon, with chocolate chips or protestant plain, it’s the best pumpkin bread, quietly perfected at the Rogers Park coffee spot. I normally pair a slice with a […]
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• Wax Vinyl Bar and Ramen Shop puts a spin on Japanese cuisine and listening cafes

  02-10-2024 17:30 via chicagoreader.com
  
  Gina Barge-Farmer and Lee Farmer are passionate music lovers. Barge-Farmer grew up with a musician as a parent, and her husband, Lee, has DJed since he was 12 years old. “[Lee’s] always had this dream of opening a bar centered around music and DJ culture,” says Barge-Farmer. The couple own West Town’s newest hot spot, […]
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• One of China’s leading importers of midwest emo play their first Chicago show

  02-10-2024 17:29 via chicagoreader.com
  
  This four-piece from Wuhan, China, have never been particularly subtle about taking inspiration from midwest emo icons American Football. Unlike many of their peers in the subcultural space of meme emo (meme-o?), Chinese Football have resisted the urge to use their album art to riff on “the house” from the cover of American Football’s debut, […]
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• Anatolian psych-pop band Derya Yıldırım & Grup Şimşek make their Chicago debut

  02-10-2024 17:20 via chicagoreader.com
  
  Derya Yıldırım & Grup Şimşek are an Anatolian psych-pop band with a global point of view. Formed in 2014, they include German singer and bağlama player Derya Yıldırım; two French musicians, keyboardist Axel Oliveres and bassist Antonin Le Gargasson; and since 2022, South African drummer Helen Wells. Their music reimagines the traditional Turkish folk music […]
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• The three string players of Universal Light unite around spontaneity, acoustic resonance, and American folk

  02-10-2024 17:10 via chicagoreader.com
  
  Universal Light is a new trio with deep roots in shared history. Fiddler Mike Gangloff has been part of drone deans Pelt and old-time torchbearers Black Twig Pickers since the 1990s; 12-string guitarist Jesse Sheppard has explored the convergence of American Primitive guitar, psychedelic rock, and spiritual jazz from myriad angles in the duo Elkhorn; […]
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• Ravyn Lenae makes superstardom sound imminent on Bird’s Eye

  02-10-2024 16:53 via chicagoreader.com
  
  Chicago R&B singer Ravyn Lenae has held me in a trance for close to a decade. She impressed me with the self-released 2015 EP Moonshoes when she was still a teenager, and even in an increasingly unstable music industry, she seemed sure to achieve future success. Her 2022 full-length debut, Hypnos, broadcast her skills to […]
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• Anohni & the Johnsons showcase their stunning, transformative sound at Symphony Center

  02-10-2024 16:43 via chicagoreader.com
  
  Anohni was born a wandering spirit. The British daughter of Irish parents, she relocated with her family to California in 1981 following a brief stint in Amsterdam. After graduating high school, she took flight once again, landing in New York, where she studied experimental theater at New York University and cofounded the now legendary Blacklips […]
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• Champaign-born phenom Somi brings her African immigrant heritage to her vocal jazz

  02-10-2024 16:36 via chicagoreader.com
  
  Jazz singer Somi Kakoma is a multihyphenate talent—she’s also a composer, actor, and writer—but she’s best known for her rich, soaring voice. Born in Champaign to parents who’d come to the U.S. from Rwanda and Uganda, Somi split her childhood between Zambia and Illinois. Her father worked as a professor at the University of Illinois […]
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• New but old again

  02-10-2024 13:00 via chicagoreader.com
  
  As the focus on old, reused, and recycled clothes grows in the mainstream, Wicker Park’s longtime vintage and consignment stores are seeing the change happen around them. And for better or worse, these stores still serve the communities they always have. Carlos Pascoll owns Vintage Underground, a vintage store that has operated on North Milwaukee […]
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• Review: Rez Ball

  01-10-2024 23:55 via chicagoreader.com
  
  Rez Ball streaming on Netflix
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• Review: Daaaaaalí!

  01-10-2024 23:55 via chicagoreader.com
  
  Daaaaaal! opening 10/11 at the Music Box Theatre
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• Thrashing around

  01-10-2024 23:39 via chicagoreader.com
  
  Northwestern University president Michael Schill fared better than some of his predecessors when he went into the lion’s den of a hearing on anti-Semitism on college campuses by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce last May. Two of three university presidents who’d testified before the committee at a previous hearing—Harvard president Claudine Gay […]
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• It’s Pupusa Time at the next Monday Night Foodball

  01-10-2024 23:07 via chicagoreader.com
  
  Everything changed the day Jon Anleu first made pupusas with heirloom masa. “I brought my brother and sister over, and we all sat down and ate,” he says. “They just looked at each other like, ‘What is this? This is amazing. What have we been eating? Life is a lie.’ Since that day, I never […]
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• A solo show that falls flat

  01-10-2024 22:21 via chicagoreader.com
  
  “The Deep Element,” on view at Patron, is Alice Tippit’s second solo presentation with the gallery. Comprised of oil paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, it is a hopelessly pat exhibition.  It’s unclear what Tippit is attempting to accomplish by painting. Quit, with its corpulent limbs, and Bling, with its sliced fruit, manage to make […]
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• Chicago Lore(s) delves into the history of the Young Lords

  01-10-2024 22:02 via chicagoreader.com
  
  Sammy A. Publes’s Chicago Lore(s), now in a world premiere at UrbanTheater Company, is a political play in the best sense. This isn’t theater that tendentiously tells us how to think about sociopolitical issues. Rather, it’s an absorbing story that makes you consider what it takes to try to change yourself and your community—one hard-fought […]
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• Evanston punks Verböten release their debut album 41 years after breaking up

  01-10-2024 21:05 via chicagoreader.com
  
  Evanston singer and multi-instrumentalist Jason Narducy has had a long career—he landed his first major-label deal in the 1990s with Verbow, joined Bob Mould’s band in 2005, launched his Split Single project in 2011, and started touring as Superchunk’s bassist in 2013—but before all that, he played in a short-lived punk band called Verböten. They […]
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• Misery just misses

  01-10-2024 21:03 via chicagoreader.com
  
  For 12-year-old Amanda, the macabre was tantalizing. I gobbled up horror books like Pennywise devoured kids. One summer I introduced Stephen King to the mix with four books: It, The Shining, Pet Sematary, and Misery. King’s gripping Misery enthralled me. A tale of a megafan gone mad who holds her beloved author hostage after a […]
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