Chicago apartment buildings have fire escapes in the back, the story goes, because after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 the new city fire code stipulated that every apartment have at least two means of escape. The alley system allowed plenty of room for solid staircases in the back of the buildings instead of rickety metal structures in the front, as in New York. But those back stairways were meant to be used as entryways only!...
I’ll be honest that the name Campdogzz—which conjures some third-rate hip-hop crew from the end days of No Limit Records or an indie band that makes songs for toddlers—left me without interest in the group’s music for a long while, but I’m glad I ignored that and checked out the brand-new second album, In Rounds (15 Passenger). There’s something about the raspy tone and breathy catch in the singing of Jess Price that’s hard to resist, especially when her dusky melodies split the difference between humid folk and crisply played indie-rock grooves....
Courtesy Ravinia Festival Kiri Te Kanawa sings Emily Dickinson Can you set Emily Dickinson to music?
My favorite film by Agnès Varda—who arrives in town tomorrow for a weeklong residency at the University of Chicago—is the shorts compilation Cinevardaphoto. It’s an ideal introduction to her career, illustrating her artistic practice as it extends from still photography to moving pictures. (Two of the three pieces included in that work are featured in a program that Varda attends this Sunday afternoon at the Logan Center for the Arts.) In each of the shorts, Varda employs cinematic means (editing, narration, camera movement) to bring still images to life and then interrogate their meaning....
The Chicago Teachers Union has struck back at The Teacher’s Strike. “They had to go and say they didn’t want to associate with ‘a new erotic spanking novel’? That’s unnecessary because it implies prudish, conservative sentiments on gender and sexuality. It also seems to disparage the legitimate genre of erotica,” Matthews said in an email. “So I wrote a ‘spanking novel’—who cares? What’s really important here, are the issues. Economic strangulation in Chicago and elsewhere expressed through cuts to education and other public resources—these are life-and-death matters....
Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Tuesday, February 28, 2017. Without more state funding, CPS will end school 20 days early Chicago Public Schools will have to end the 2016-2017 school year 20 days early, on June 1, if the cash-strapped district doesn’t get more funding from the state, according to CPS CEO Forrest Claypool. “This is the worst-case scenario,” he said. “We have very few options left.” Among the possibilities: a court could order the state to give CPS more money....
A six-pack of Contact High looks like a power-up in a video game about drinking beer. Saint Louis brewery 4 Hands (not to be confused with Tired Hands, which is based in Pennsylvania) has been distributing in Chicago for months now. Unless you leave the autopilot on when you do your beer shopping, you’ve seen their stuff—including Cast Iron Oatmeal Brown, Divided Sky Rye IPA, Reprise Centennial Red, and Smoked Pigasus porter....
After two years of preparation and jumping through multiple legislative hoops, Dispensary 33 received its official license to sell medical cannabis Friday. It’s a big step for the dispensary—which opened its doors to the public last weekend—but there’s still a lot to do before patients can start picking up their own supply: all staff members still need to be certified by the state, and patients need to fill out a “dispensary selection form” to register Dispensary 33 as their official dispensary as well as a boatload of other forms (like new patient registration)....
Between “Takashi Murakami: The Octopus Eats Its Own Leg” at the Museum of Contemporary Art and “Then They Came for Me” at Alphawood Gallery, local residents can encounter a major contemporary Japanese artist and learn about some of the history of Japanese life in America. Yet over at Shane Campbell Gallery in the South Loop there’s a show with a Japanese painter as its focus that has received less attention but is equally worthwhile: “Yui Yaegashi: The Rain Is Gone,” the second time the gallery has presented work by the artist....
Over the course of her five-decade career, Chicago-based artist Barbara Kasten has experimented with some pretty complex processes. To create her photographic series from the late 1970s and ’80s, she carefully positioned props—often large geometric objects made from wood or plaster—among fiberglass screens, wires, mesh, mirrors, et cetera, then shot these abstract installations with a large-format camera. The resulting images are richly colored and feature a disorienting interplay between light and shadow—like a dream sequence staged in an 80s mall after hours....
Lakefront Runner-Up Millennium Park
kampfirekowboys.com Runners-Up Blind Staggers Hillbilly Rockstarz
Scary Lady Sarah www.facebook.com/TheScaryLadySarah @ScaryLadySarah Runner-Up DJ Rae Chardonnay
Steppenwolf Theatre 1650 N. Halsted Runner-Up Remy Bumppo Theatre Company
2338 N. Milwaukee coleschicago.com Runner-Up Small Bar, two locations
A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. Rico Nasty’s appearance on Warhol.SS’s C.H.E.W., Feeding Frenzy C.H.E.W. are hands-down one of the best bands in Chicago. See them live once, and you’ll have no choice but to agree. Feeding Frenzy, their debut LP, was highly anticipated, and still the band surpassed all expectations. The first side blows by at a blistering pace, but on the second side, C....
Jeopardy Productions, Inc. Our hero, Julia Collins Last week was a demoralizing week in television. As for her Jeopardy! run, she’s second only to Ken Jennings in number of consecutive wins; Jennings won an obscene 74 games back in ’04. Her take, $428,100, makes her the third-winningest contestant of all time. And there aren’t any statistics I can quote, but it’s my unscientific opinion that she’s also the number one least smug multigame winner in Jeopardy!...
ARTIST: Emek SHOW: Foo Fighters at Wrigley Field on Sat 8/29 MORE INFO: emek.net
American Hero Bess Wohl came up with a delicious premise for her 2014 comedy: abandoned by their bosses almost as soon as they’re hired, three bewildered would-be “sandwich artists” go rogue, banding together to keep their submarine franchise open. The result might’ve been anything from a blue-collar farce or a corporate satire to a kind of fast-food version of Sartre’s No Exit. But while Wohl has the wit to keep things amusing in the short run, she never gives us a good reason to think the trio are anything but stupid for holding on....
The headline in question reads “Dozens Dead in Chicago-Area Meatwave,” and it’s still such a good dig. Meat Wave guitarist and front man Chris Sutter and drummer Ryan Wizniak are old friends, and Sutter says Wizniak so frequently quoted the 2003 Onion story—which goes into gory detail about the “estimated 40 residents dead of steaks, chops, ribs, bacon, and various other forms of meat exhaustion”—that it became a running joke between them....
