Update: Curious “A Chef’s Playground” closed in mid-June, 1917. He—let’s face it, we—had little confidence in Curious. And then there’s that fillet of fish, which to everyone’s surprise was perfect: moist, flaky flesh jacketed by a cheesy brown crust. Who cares if the promised potato gratin was replaced by smashed sweet potatoes? At least we wouldn’t be darkening the McDonald’s drive-through. 2020 W. Chicago 773-360-7534facebook.com/CuriousChicago
My art was developed towards an increasing participation, and the mistrust in the gallery and museum business,” the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica wrote in a letter to an art critic in 1969. This disinterest in institutional art settings, coupled with the experiential, immersive nature of much of Oiticica’s work, makes him a difficult artist to exhibit. Perhaps this is why “Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium,” on view now at the Art Institute of Chicago, is the first full-scale retrospective of the artist in the United States....
Most Chicago metal bands seem to find inspiration in its famously brutal and unforgiving winters, resulting in some of the darkest, most hateful music ever committed to tape. Local four-piece Mount Salem, on the other hand, play windswept, lysergic guitar boogie that has more in common with “desert rock,” a style that evolved in the arid wilderness of southern California. The group formed in summer 2012 and the following year self-released an EP called Endless that blends witchy, organ-driven psychedelia with doomy sounds from the dawn of heavy metal—it feels like something that could’ve been recorded in 1970 but was too freaky and dark to find an audience till now....
Brian Case is front man and guitarist for darkly Krautrocking local outfit Disappears, and Jeremy Lemos is the multi-instrumentalist half of noise-worshipping experimental duo White/Light (as well as a well-traveled soundman and occasional Reader contributor). For their mutual side project Acteurs, though, the two of them have mostly jettisoned the sounds of their long-running groups in favor of a tenebrous, synth-heavy mix of early industrial music, Suicide-style protopunk, and avant-garde electronic compositions from the earliest days of the synthesizer era....
Frontera Grill 445 N. Clark Runner-Up Cafe El Tapatio
Tonight, just two days short of the anniversary of their first gig— opening for Knox Fortune as part of his sold-out record-release show at Lincoln Hall—Chicago synth-based indie-pop duo Grapetooth celebrate their self-titled debut album on Polyvinyl. Grapetooth don’t play out often, but when they do, audiences clamor to see them—on their return to Lincoln Hall in July for a headlining set during Pitchfork weekend, they sold out the entire venue....
Tonight the second Old and New Dreams Festival begins, an endeavor organized by the influential, long-homeless music venue HotHouse. Last year’s three-day extravaganza took place at the Promontory, and this weekend’s events remain in Hyde Park, scooting west to the Logan Center on the campus of the University of Chicago. Tonight’s headliner is the Odean Pope Trio, a group led by the great Philadelphia saxophonist known for his lengthy membership in bands led by Max Roach....
Robert Drea Reparations activist Conrad Worrill: “What happened to African people has never been repaired.” In 2002 a group of African-Americans filed a federal lawsuit in Chicago demanding restitution from JP Morgan Chase, Aetna, CSX, and other corporations with links to slavery before the Civil War. That changed in May, when the Atlantic published “The Case for Reparations,” the provocative and deeply reported article by Ta-Neisi Coates. It showed millions of readers that the issue wasn’t rooted in an abstract philosophical argument but in specific, widespread, and ongoing discriminatory policies, particularly in housing....
When interior designer Aleks Furman’s parents began struggling with health issues, she needed to find a place they could all call home so she could help care for them. She and her sister bought a former tavern in Bridgeport, but the purchase was hardly glamorous. “This building kept dropping in price because it was terrifying,” she says. “I was desperate enough to buy it, and the owner was desperate enough to sell it....
505 N. State 312-755-9704 sablechicago.com Runner-Up Roof at the Wit Hotel
Hamilton PrivateBank Theatre www.broadwayinchicago.com/show/hamilton-an-american-musical Runner-Up Dundee: A Hip-Hopera
Book reviews don’t often make the front page, but Harold Henderson’s “City On the Hot Seat”— an analysis of Northwestern sociologist Eric Klinenberg’s book Heat Wave—made for essential reading when it hit the Reader cover on July 25, 2002. In his Reader essay (which can be read online) Henderson applauded much of Klinenberg’s “social autopsy,” but also poked holes in the author’s pat “left liberal” analysis that pointed a big finger at income inequality and the city’s increasing reliance of the privatization of services....
“It’s kind of ironic,” Matty Colston says, that just a few days before bartender Lee Zaremba of Billy Sunday challenged him to create a cocktail with Cheez-Its, “I went on a huge rant about how much I love Cheez-Its,” prompted by a friend complaining that his son had scattered the crackers all over his car. After rimming a glass with a mixture of crushed Cheez-Its, Korean chiles, and celery salt, Colston combined the drink’s other components and strained them into the glass....
A couple months ago Vice’s music site, Noisey, debuted an eight-part video series about the local hip-hop scene (or, more specifically, the drill scene) called Chiraq; it’s the second major extensive, embeddable film about Chicago rap to come out this year following World Star Hip-Hop’s documentary, The Field, which tried to focus on the intersection of violence and rap in this city. The people behind Chiraq had the same lofty goal, or at least that’s how they’ve pitched the series, which places Chief Keef at the narrative’s center and moves out from there to cover a few of his pals while occasionally jamming in a “big picture” question about drill’s relationship to Chicago’s ongoing struggles with crime, poverty, and segregation....
Do professors have freedom of tweet? The professor is Steven Salaita, who had given up his post as associate professor of English at Virginia Tech to take a tenured position as a professor in the American Indian Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was to have started this week. In effect, job offer rescinded. When the News-Gazette contacted the university for comment for that story, spokesperson Robin Kaler confirmed that Salaita would be on board as an associate professor, adding “Faculty have a wide range of scholarly and political views, and we recognize the freedom-of-speech rights of all our employees....
Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. Hey, did you read: • That King Tut’s tomb might have actually belonged to Nefertiti—who was his mother or stepmother, or maybe his predecessor on the Egyptian throne?—Aimee Levitt • That notorious joke thief the Fat Jew no longer has a pilot in the works with Comedy Central? —Kevin Warwick
Two American expats founded a restaurant in Shanghai in 2014. They called it the Fortune Cookie. It served chow mein, egg foo young, hot-and-sour soup, and, naturally, fortune cookies. You cannot get these things at any other restaurant in Shanghai. According to my American expat friend who lives in the neighborhood, it wasn’t very good, and she strongly discouraged me from eating there when I went to visit her. Likewise, the grilled sliced tenderloin looked complicated and elaborate—bunches of lemongrass, hearts of palm, and scallion bundled in slices of dried, thin-sliced beef reminiscent of a bland pastrami, all dolloped with some sort of gelatin that made it appear that the plate was staring back at us with googly reddish-brown eyes—but it tasted friendly and familiar....
In 2015 Franco-German bassist Pascal Niggenkemper dropped a bracing solo album called Look With Thine Ears (Clean Feed), serving up 13 visceral, aggressively tactile studies of his instrument. With the aid of sharp-edged amplification he revealed a particular genius for sound exploration. Niggenkemper prepared his bass with objects like Styrofoam or sticks, then bombarded it, bowing its strings like he was sawing through them and thwacking them to generate a fiercely snapping twang....
Slagel Family Farm 23601 E. 600 N Rd, Fairbury, IL Runner-Up Montalbano Farms
