• Great like 68?

    Great like 68?
    Nothing loomed over this year’s Democratic National Convention (DNC) like the specter of 1968, when live footage of Chicago police cracking the skulls and dragging the bodies of anti-war protesters invaded living rooms worldwide. Earlier this year, national news outlets began to draw comparisons between then and now: “Is it 1968 all over again?” NPR […]
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  • Footballhead’s mammoth Before I Die should be an alt-rock hit

    Footballhead’s mammoth Before I Die should be an alt-rock hit
    I can’t listen to the Footballhead mini album Before I Die (Tiny Engines), which came out in August, without thinking of an interview I did with front man Ryan Nolen last September: we talked on the phone for nearly an hour because I was writing about the death of one of his best friends, Space […]
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  • Caterina Barbieri sails into the seas of a retro future

    Caterina Barbieri sails into the seas of a retro future
    The music of Italian composer and multi-instrumentalist Caterina Barbieri shimmers and pulses at the intersection of ambient, new age, minimalist electronics, and drone. She uses primarily modular synthesizers to build her tracks, creating canvases of sustained tones that spread flat like aural wallpaper and then splashing them with digital and analog color, including guitar, strings, […]
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  • Thievery Corporation bring their “outernationalist” electronic music to Outset

    Thievery Corporation bring their “outernationalist” electronic music to Outset
    Calling Thievery Corporation “eclectic” is an understatement—their sound’s been described as downtempo, but it can also light up a dance party. Cofounders Eric Hilton and Rob Garza would likely blanch at attempts to define their band within any category—though ambient, trip-hop, house, and global fusion all come to mind. They borrow from a variety of […]
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  • Chicago rapper Femdot. celebrates his 2019 breakthrough album, 94 Camry Music

    Chicago rapper Femdot. celebrates his 2019 breakthrough album, 94 Camry Music
    Evanston-raised rapper Femdot., born Femi Adigun, upholds the broad-shouldered, self-assured poetry of homegrown hip-hop to rep Chicago with an artisan’s touch. His signature pencil-behind-the-ear aesthetic and million-dollar smile telegraph his dedication to writing impactful lyrics and doing what he can to strategically win at the game of life. Education is also a pillar of his […]
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  • POWERPLANT

    POWERPLANT
    The term “egg punk” didn’t initially see much use outside of niche memes that placed it on one end of a spectrum that had “chain punk” at the other. It described a loose network of underground midwestern bands in the early 2010s whose wacky experiments with hardcore punk sounded like an agitated Devo buzzing from […]
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  • London miscreants Powerplant offer a thrillingly misshapen vision of egg punk

    London miscreants Powerplant offer a thrillingly misshapen vision of egg punk
    The term “egg punk” didn’t initially see much use outside of niche memes that placed it on one end of a spectrum that had “chain punk” at the other. It described a loose network of underground midwestern bands in the early 2010s whose wacky experiments with hardcore punk sounded like an agitated Devo buzzing from […]
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  • The Englewood Jazz Festival celebrates 25 years of music and community

    The Englewood Jazz Festival celebrates 25 years of music and community
    This week the Englewood Jazz Festival celebrates its 25th anniversary with three days of music in Hamilton Park—a remarkable achievement, especially considering the neighborhood Whole Foods lasted just six years. The determination of the festival’s visionary founder, saxophonist Ernest Dawkins, and a host of local supporters have made this community event much more than an […]
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  • Review: The Killer’s Game

    Review: The Killer’s Game
    The Killer’s Game in wide release in theaters
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  • Blake Chastain on #exvangelicals

    Blake Chastain on #exvangelicals
    In 2016, Chicagoan Blake Chastain started the hashtag #exvangelical, a pithy descriptor that quickly took off as an umbrella term for anyone who has left evangelical Christianity. Faith changes are not a new phenomenon, but over the past decade, exvangelicals have found new ways to form community through social media. Their journeys take divergent paths, […]
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  • ‘No new revenue without reform’

    ‘No new revenue without reform’
    Chicago’s transit agencies are nearing the edge of a fiscal cliff. Ridership plummeted at the start of the pandemic, and it’s struggled to return in the years since. Where exactly those missing riders have gone—and why—is up for debate, but that lost revenue has put transit agencies, which rely on ridership fares to fund roughly […]
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  • Review: Speak No Evil

    Review: Speak No Evil
    Speak No Evil in wide release in theaters
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  • An oral history of Ragamala

    An oral history of Ragamala
    In fall 2013, Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events kicked off its annual World Music Festival with an ambitious new program: an overnight celebration of Indian classical music called Ragamala. According to Ragamala cofounder and DCASE performing arts programmer Carlos Cuauhtémoc Tortolero, the event drew enthusiastic crowds from the jump. In the years […]
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  • Sunken treasure

    Sunken treasure
    You think the Titanic had a disastrous maiden voyage? Consider the Vasa, a Swedish warship constructed by King Gustavus Adolphus (sometimes called “the father of modern warfare”) between 1626 and 1628, that sank its first time out, after only clearing about 1,400 yards from shore. Now housed in her own museum in Stockholm’s Royal National […]
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  • Last supper

    Last supper
    The tense family dinner has long been a trope for American realism. Just off the top of my head, plays that have such a device as a central dramatic event include Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County; Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Purpose (heading to Broadway in winter 2025 after its Steppenwolf run earlier this year); Stephen Karam’s The […]
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  • Free your mind (and your buds will follow) when Morgan Street Snacks comes to Monday Night Foodball

    Free your mind (and your buds will follow) when Morgan Street Snacks comes to Monday Night Foodball
    Ryan Cofrancesco was finishing a six-month bid for possession at the Vienna Correctional Facility when he started making pizza. He’d never been in trouble before, but the longtime restaurant worker had a drug problem and got busted with two dime bags of heroin. After two “terrible” months at Stateville, he was sent to a 120-bed […]
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  • Against domestication

    Against domestication
    D Rosen’s primary artistic mediums are their own time and labor, expended in service of “cultivating interspecies friendships.” Rosen’s “day jobs” as an animal caretaker (farmworker, pet sitter, etc.) allow them to both observe and bond with nonhuman animals, who then act as source material, collaborators, and activators of the artist’s practice. This significant investment […]
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  • Review: The Becomers

    Review: The Becomers
    The Becomers opening Fri 9/13 at the Music Box Theatre and in wide release on VOD on Tue 9/24
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  • Review: Mickey Hardaway

    Review: Mickey Hardaway
    Mickey Hardaway streaming free on Pluto TV and Tubi
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  • Review: I’ll Be Right There

    Review: I’ll Be Right There
    I’ll Be Right There in limited release in theaters
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  • Köfte and potato tostini at Tostini

    Köfte and potato tostini at Tostini
    Reader Bites celebrates dishes, drinks, and atmospheres from the Chicagoland food scene. Have you had a recent food or drink experience that you can’t stop thinking about? Share it with us at [email protected]. Sometimes, a restaurant is secretly beloved: you never hear about it, but once you mention it, it turns out everyone has loved it […]
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  • The Chicago Urban Ag Crawl promotes south-side food solidarity

    The Chicago Urban Ag Crawl promotes south-side food solidarity
    The urban agriculture ecosystem in Chicago has grown fivefold in the last 23 years, according to Grow Greater Englewood lead steward Anton Seals Jr. In the past, Englewood has seen the closure of several grocery stores—notably Whole Foods in 2022. However, a growing national spotlight on food insecurity and access to city land has led […]
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  • The window and the incident

    The window and the incident
    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. Just as football fans are excited for their season to have started, so, too, are local moviegoers overjoyed with the abundance of screenings in this and coming weeks. Case in point: […]
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  • George E. Lewis embodies a unique strain of musical Afrofuturism

    George E. Lewis embodies a unique strain of musical Afrofuturism
    Every year the Chicago Jazz Festival presents a memorial to recently departed musicians, projected on a screen behind the stage, and this year the list of the fallen was particularly heartbreaking: it included Carla Bley, Calvin Keys, Richard Davis, Eleanor Collins, and David Sanborn. This got me thinking about celebrating jazz’s living heroes—and these heroes […]
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  • From ’74 to ’24

    From ’74 to ’24
    If you’re reading this the week before September 17, then exactly 50 years ago, Films by Women/Chicago ’74 (which started on September 3 that year) was underway at the Film Center of the School of the Art Institute. Sponsored by the Chicago Tribune, the festival came to fruition when film critic Gene Siskel, who’d attended […]
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  • Chicago Reader Volume 53, Number 32

    Chicago Reader Volume 53, Number 32
    Chicago Reader Volume 53, No. 32. September 12, 2024
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  • Broad shoulders and pointed words

    Broad shoulders and pointed words
    Here’s the thing about icons: they’re not known for their flexibility. Take Pablo Picasso’s towering, untitled 1967 Core-Ten steel sculpture outside Daley Plaza. It’s been featured on so many postcards, B-roll clips, and travelogues that it’s easy to overlook just how many residents rolled their eyes at the thing when it was first unveiled.  Royko: […]
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  • This Is Our Youth is a twentysomething roller-coaster ride

    This Is Our Youth is a twentysomething roller-coaster ride
    As my first experience with this Kenneth Lonergan 1996 contemporary classic, seeing it in a small black box, directed by and starring twentysomethings, was a visceral thrill. Under Andrew Shipman’s direction, Gwydion Theatre Company’s intimate production elicits the roller-coaster ride of feelings of that certain age, which have not changed since the Reagan-era ʼ80s setting. […]
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  • Within a Shadow illuminates big questions

    Within a Shadow illuminates big questions
    Within a Shadow, now in its world premiere from Lex the Movie in association with Red Theater, is an ambitious two-act dramedy that digs into the complexities of estrangement, cultural identity, and the ever-elusive quest for self-love. Written, produced, directed by, and starring LaRose Washington as Alexis (“Lex”)—a Black woman grappling with loneliness in her […]
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  • Sentimental Journey

    Sentimental Journey
    By Casey Cereceda
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