AP Photo/Darren Hauck Sammy Sosa wants to make amends. Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, amuse, or inspire us. • And on that note: that the late Gabriel García Márquez used to say, “The day when shit becomes worth something, the poor will be born without asses”? —Steve Bogira • About the trick that Jim Koch, cofounder of Boston Beer Company, uses to drink all day without getting drunk? —Julia Thiel
The cover of Zath’s new seven-inch is fairly metal California garage wizard Ty Segall is a man with many hats, and one of them is the head of a label called God? (yep, with a question mark). Segall is about to drop a seven-inch by local punk kooks Running, and it’s the label’s second release by a Chicago act this summer—last month underground thrash supergroup Zath put out a seven-inch through God?...
1623 N. Milwaukee 773-342-6832 redhenbread.com Runner-Up Cellar Door Provisions
Redgrave Into pioneering electronic music? Or maybe super-underground black metal? Well it’s a good weekend to be in Chicago. Tonight Kraftwerk plays a massive 3-D concert at the Riviera, and this weekend we get the fifth installment of the Cathedral of the Black Goat festival. Good weekend if you have tickets already, that is, because both are sold out. Sorry guys. Chinese Sonic Youth enthusiasts Carsick Cars make two appearances in town on Friday: a free in-store at Permanent followed by a later gig at the Burlington....
Courtesy of Def Jam Records Common headlines Aahh! Fest on Sunday. Riot Fest is all done, but World Music Festival is going strong; I suggest digging into our guide to the 11-day blowout to see which of the remaining shows might strike your fancy. There’s plenty of other concerts beyond World Music Festival that are also worth seeing. “As the mastermind behind LCD Soundsystem, James Murphy presented the anxieties of an aging New York hipster via straightforward lyrics and gold-standard musical touchstones (Bowie, Eno, the Fall, New Order, et cetera),” writes Tal Rosenberg....
It’s been 17 years since the husband-and-wife duo of Jon Spencer (of Pussy Galore and Blues Explosion fame) and the confrontational, underrated Cristina Martinez have released a full-length album as Boss Hog—though last year’s EP Brood Star was a tantalizing taste of things to come. Parenthood has had a lot to do with their unapologetic hiatuses—their son, now a college student, is an aspiring electronic musician—and they pick right up with their weird and wailing blues-noise as though they’d tucked the sound away in a time capsule and buried it in a Lower East Side basement in 1989....
Imagine a looming dystopian future in which Italian restaurants have replaced all the city’s faux Irish bars, and the only things left to go out for are risotto and little scraps of raw fish. That’s where we’re headed. But truthfully—excepting the 800-pound gorilla on Ohio Street—2014’s most unoriginal restaurant concept has had a pretty good track record so far, as witnessed by the Reader‘s own reviews of Joe Fish, Nico Osteria, Cicchetti , and Azzurra EnoTavola....
Adam Homer Lawson www.goodreads.com/author/show/16659469.Adam_Homer_Lawson Runner-Up Samantha Irby
A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. Arabrot, Who Do You Love Led by Norwegian singer-guitarist Kjetil Nernes, avant-noise weirdos Arabrot suck you into a surreal world with depraved takes on religion, literature, and politics. Following 2016’s The Gospel, written in part during Nernes’s fight with cancer and saturated with WWI-era imagery, Who Do You Love digs into the murky lines between good and evil....
Last month Domino Records released a deluxe version of High Land, Hard Rain, the 1983 debut album by the Scottish pop band Aztec Camera. The release added a second disc of B-sides, live tracks, a BBC Radio session, and some utterly lame remixes from the time of the record’s origin. I can’t deny that the album triggers a sense of nostalgia in me—I bought the record when it first came out and listened to it religiously, and I saw the band in ’83 when they toured the U....
Hip-hop wunderkind Timothy Jones, aka DJ Timbuck2, passed away December 19, and his friends have banded together to put on a tribute show: tomorrow night’s Timbuck2uesday at Metro. Jones launched a series called Timbuck2uesdays seven years ago at the Shrine, spinning hip-hop every week; he brought the night to Beauty Bar five years back. Timbuck2uesdays was just one of the platforms from which Jones (also a WGCI on-air personality and Treated Crew member) helped hold the Chicago hip-hop scene together....
Second City 1616 N. Wells 312-337-3992 secondcity.com Runner-Up Nick Mikula
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GapersBlock.com Runner-Up BitchesGottaEat.blogspot.com
You might notice, browsing Best of Chicago, that we’re big on specifics. We at the Reader use the occasion of our annual Best of Chicago edition to steer you to the people, places, and things you might not otherwise find, along a route you might not otherwise take. Craving red meat? Allow us to recommend not the city’s best NY strip, but its best NY strip at a strip club. Want to work out your issues with local elected officials—or at least watch them beat the crap out of each other?...
1219 W. 76th, 312-747-2602, mlkskating.com In fact, it’s the only place in Chicago with a roller rink and a bowling alley under one roof. The facility in Auburn Gresham, owned by the Chicago Park District and privately managed, opened 11 years ago. The south side had a handful of bowling alleys back then, but most have since closed. The King Center has a dozen lanes, and a game is usually only $2, with plenty of open times....
If Nottingham’s Sleaford Mods have anything that might be considered a breakout single it’s “Jobseeker,” a track that landed them on the BBC’s Later . . . With Jools Holland in 2015. The hyperaggressive and starkly minimal duo were a sight never before seen on the late-night circuit, right away making them something of a black sheep for the mainstream variety show. Foregrounded by an old busted laptop resting on a keg, beat maker Andrew Fearn slammed a plastic cup of beer while awkwardly bobbing to a simple, driving beat that sounded like a gloomy Casio keyboard demo....
First, let’s tackle the nickname controversy. I recently took part in a Twitter debate about the proper nickname for the six-way intersection of Damen, North, and Milwaukee. “Stop calling it Six Corners,” exhorted Robert Loerzel (winner of the Reader‘s 2016 reader poll for Best Chicagoan to Follow on Twitter), arguing that the real Six Corners is in Portage Park. First CDOT staffer Mike Amsden provided some basic stats, telling the audience that the department had observed more than 5,000 pedestrian crossings at the junction during the morning and evening rush hours of April 18....
Not that anything is necessarily wrong with the Big Picture, but journalists determined to provide it can be a little befuddling. Aren’t we getting carried away? I sometimes wonder. And readers could only marvel at Kass’s uncanny ability to sense that until that very second none of us had been thinking of rhinoceroses.
