The other day Damon Locks was at Stateville Correctional Center in suburban Crest Hill, where he teaches art to inmates, when one of the prison’s guards wandered into his classroom. Each of Locks’s 11 students at the all-male maximum-security facility had spent the semester making brief animations with pencils and tracing paper—among the few art supplies allowed in the jail—and the curious guard was trying to get a sneak peek....
The Milk Room 12 S. Michigan Runner-Up Deadbolt
Lever leverband.bandcamp.com @LeverBand Runner-Up Laverne
Princess Nokia There are a whole bunch of shows going down this weekend, and even though a handful of the really good ones are already sold out (Black Lips, Waxahatchee, and two Lydia Loveless shows) there are still some great things to catch. Tonight there’s Daniel Bachman at Burlington and Sweater Beats with Different Sleep at Empty Bottle. Bobby Bare Jr. plays at Schubas tomorrow while a huge metal show that includes Behemoth and Inquisition is happening at House of Blues....
For most of the 36 years that the Hadassah House thrift shop occupied a two-story building just west of the Highland Park Metra station, it was a bargain- and treasure-hunter’s bonanza—chock-a-block with carefully used furniture and high-end clothing (along with housewares, jewelry, what-have-you) from homes in the North Shore suburbs, all at pennies-on-the-dollar prices that were almost always negotiable. But earlier this year Hadassah House moved to new quarters in a Deerfield strip mall, where it now sits between a California Tan and Deerfield Dialysis....
In Robert Altman’s 1992 film The Player, a satirical noir thriller about a Hollywood movie studio exec who literally gets away with murder, a minor subplot involves two hustling screenwriters pitching a dark-spirited “independent” picture called Habeas Corpus. It’s a gritty drama about a woman wrongly accused of murder who still fries in the gas chamber, but only after falling in love with her prosecuting attorney, who tragically then manages to produce evidence of her innocence moments after her death....
Brian Jackson/Sun-Times Ninth Ward alderman Anthony Beale spoke against passing the ordinance. The City Council voted 34-10 yesterday to approve legislation that regulates Chicago’s rideshare industry. (They also voted to make “upskirt” photographs illegal, but that’s a post for another time.) Ninth Ward alderman Anthony Beale, who chairs the transportation committee, drew applause from taxi drivers in the gallery when he implored his colleagues to delay passage of the ordinance....
Virginia guitarist Daniel Bachman regularly demonstrates curiosity and practice outside of the hazy contours of the American Primitive style of acoustic guitar made famous by John Fahey. While those excursions have been limited and discreet—and he’s generally veered back to his comfort zone—they’ve neverthless indicated his admirably restless creative streak. He dives in completely on his dazzling new double album The Morning Star (Three Lobed), masterfully complementing his stellar guitar work with an array of sounds including mesmerizing drones and environmental presences that together foster a turbulent kind of meditation....
Chicagoans is a first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. This week’s Chicagoan is Janice Wilson, 35, police officer and youth baseball coach. The police academy? I thought it was going to be tougher than what it was. It was actually fun. After the academy, I went to work in the Fourth District. The station is on 103rd and Luella. That’s where I started my training in the field....
Ravenswood Runner-Up North Center
Chicago Architecture Foundation River Cruise 112 E. Wacker Runner-Up Chicago for Chicagoans
Toward the end of Bob Eisen’s duet with Kristina Isabelle, an untitled work he’s reprised twice with different dancers since last year’s premiere in Russia, I was touched by an impulse—at once amusing and alarming—to obsessively list English words with connotations of movement, then spend the rest of the dance ticking off terms, Bingo style, as their analogues surfaced. With pleasure, I imagined striking out every last adjective, noun, and verb in a long, vertiginous streak....
Festival season ain’t over till Red Bull says it is. The energy drink’s music operation has so far thrown six festivals in New York and one in Los Angeles, and in November it’ll host a similar event in the midwest for the first time. (Last year’s 30 Days in Chicago—one big show every night, with Red Bull’s muscle and money allowing for relatively inexpensive tickets—was a different beast.) Saturday, November 3 GOOD Music showcase:NasPusha T Teyana TaylorValee Desiigner 070 Shake Venue: Wintrust Arena...
wavebreakmedia/Shutterstock Hooray, you get a tax break now! Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, amuse, or inspire us. • About how racial tensions in Ferguson have been exposed by the killing of Mike Brown? —Aimee Levitt
Michael Gebert Gracie’s Cafe program participant Peter with manager Mike Ellert The restaurant industry has always been an open door into the workforce for people with legal trouble in their pasts. Show up, do the dishes, and you’ve established a first foothold in the working world, no other questions asked. That’s the reason Saint Leonard’s Ministries, a 60-year-old residential program for recently released prisoners on the Near West Side, has long included food-service training among its programs for helping the formerly incarcerated learn the skills to make it in the world of work....
Windy City Paws 2523 W. Eastwood Runner-Up Windy City Dog Walkers
Mitsuko Uchida If you’re sick of hearing about South by Southwest I recommend checking out a flyer lo-fi pop musician Jimmy Whispers made for his headlining show at the Hideout on Friday; he’s calling the show the “Mid by Midwest Interactive Festival,” and Whispers’s artwork pokes fun at the rampant corporate #branding taking over SXSW. I also recommend checking out the show, which, in addition to Whispers, features Yawn, Roommate, Thin Hymns, and special guests Sharkula and Chris Condren....
Pat Metheny Unity Group If you’ve got access to a friend’s ex-girlfriend’s father’s coworker’s HBO Go account, chances are high that you spent the weekend binge-watching True Detective and could stand to spend an evening or two away from the glow of one screen or another. Fortunately there are plenty of concerts to see during the next few days. It took me quite some time to get hooked on pop-punk outfit the Wonder Years, but they recently got me with their even-handed approach to making songs about the suburbs: “The Wonder Years’ sublime ‘We Could Die Like This’ is one of many high points on last year’s The Greatest Generation (Hopeless), the group’s fourth full-length; it’s about the way certain trinkets, memories, and sensory triggers (such as the smell of Coppertone) can make you nostalgic for a place that’s no longer home....
I Am Furious Yellow Yesterday I noted the upcoming screenings of Brillante Mendoza’s Thy Womb, rare opportunities (in Chicago, anyway) to catch up with one of the most controversial Filipino directors working today. Incidentally this weekend also brings a revival of a film by one of the most controversial Filipino directors of the 1970s and ’80s, Kidlat Tahimik. I Am Furious Yellow (1994) will screen from 16-millimeter at the Drake Hotel on Friday at 6 PM and Sunday at 4 PM as part of the Prak-sis New Media Art Festival, a three-day conference about artistic responses to the legacy of Cold War-era social upheaval in southeast Asia....
