Ghosts in the Schoolyard by Eve L. Ewing

Field Notes Expedition edition fieldnotesbrand.com Field Notes provides the perfect pocket-size notebooks to make you feel like you’re in a Wes Anderson movie, exemplified by the charmingly specific details of the Expedition edition. It’s easy to imagine a pastel-tinted Anderson sequence outlining the 12 scientific tests the notebooks passed—they scored especially high marks in “tensile strength” and “acid resistance.” But for all the impressive field tests, the notebooks’ ability to ward off liquid is the greatest thing to happen to avid pen-and-paper users....

Brian Posen’s exit this past November from Stage 773, the theater he founded and ran for many years, was one of the least dramatic departures of a powerful man during the fall of Harvey Weinstein. Yes, it’s true Posen had a history. Plenty of improv performers around Chicago, particularly women, had stories about him; seven of those women shared theirs with the Reader. There was the time he slapped his assistant’s ass....

Like many other participants in Chicago’s contemporary jazz scene, drummer Charles Rumback is both a sideman and a leader. Whether backing singer-songwriters such as Steve Dawson and Angela James, playing space-bound Americana with guitarist Ryley Walker, swinging behind jazz saxophonist Dustin Laurenzi, or leading this trio with bassist John Tate and pianist Jim Baker, he sustains momentum and adds atmospheric accents without hogging the spotlight. The three pieces that he wrote for June Holiday, the trio’s third album, invite the listener to appreciate his accompanists’ strengths....

Hoisin sauce—usually made with fermented soybeans, garlic, vinegar, soy sauce, and sesame oil—is sweet, salty, and viscous. It’s commonly used in Chinese cuisine, rarely used in alcoholic drinks. But when Sam Ruppert (DryHop Brewers) challenged Adrienne Stoner of Lost Lake to create a cocktail with the sauce, she had a supply at the ready. The menu at Lost Lake is Asian inspired, and chef Fred Noinaj makes hoisin sauce in-house to accompany a duck dish....

In 1999, two midwestern professors, Cary Nelson (University of Illinois) and Stephen Watt (Indiana University), teamed up on a cheeky pseudo-dictionary that was also a serious critique of academia. The MLA convention, which is part bone-chilling interviews for precious few jobs, part deeply quirky research reports by panels that can outnumber their audiences, and part a bookworm’s version of hard-partying weekend on the town, is also a guaranteed source of frustration....

Whatever the original intent of the lecture Wednesday, much of the event was devoted to a discussion of the election. Davis then read from civil rights leader Anne Braden’s 1972 “Letter to Southern White Women” : Following the lecture, Davis engaged in conversation with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, a rising star in African-American studies who teaches at Princeton University. The majority of questions (submitted on note cards anonymously by audience members) were about what to do in the the face of a Trump presidency....

“We’re gonna win,” Clem Balanoff told me in late February when I asked him how Bernie Sanders was doing in Illinois. Balanoff’s directing the Illinois campaign for Sanders, so it’s his duty to be optimistic, and I took his prediction with a grain of salt. Hillary Clinton was trouncing Sanders in the polls back then. And the previous time I’d spoken with Balanoff, he was directing Jesus “Chuy” Garcia’s campaign for mayor....

Motoworks 1901 S. Western 312-738-4269 motoworkschicago.com Runner-Up: Acme Cycle

On James Hunter’s recent Whatever It Takes (Daptone) a brief liner note by pianist Sam Boncon delivers some straight talk that might seem like a dis in most contexts: “There’s nothing new here.” Indeed, not only does the album sound of a piece with his last four, it remains easy to think that the British soul devotee made this collection six decades ago; he elegantly collides influences like Ray Charles, Curtis Mayfield, Sam Cooke, and Freddie King for a rippling old-school R&B record that crackles with ease and concision....

Cerqua Rivera Dance Theatre launches a hybrid 2021 season on April 22, with an in-person and livestream performance to inaugurate a new partnership with Epiphany Center for the Arts; new works by co-founder and artistic director Wilfredo Rivera and choreographers Stephanie Martinez, Monique Haley, and Shannon Alvis; and a fall concert series three weekends in October. At Epiphany Center for the Arts, an 1885 Episcopal church in the West Loop recently redeveloped into an arts, music, and performance space by owner and developer David Chase, CRDT will present its first in-person performance in over a year, a performance that will launch a long-term partnership with the center and open the door for other dance performances at the venue....

Charli XCX has no chill. The pop star has spent much of her time during the pandemic making a new album, How I’m Feeling Now, which came out May 15. The record’s 11 bittersweet electro-pop tracks document the minutiae of her life under lockdown, including her conversations with her therapist, her online shopping expenditures, her experiences sheltering in place with her boyfriend, and her intense nostalgia for pre-pandemic partying. Charli also churned out supplementary content through every step of her process, including Instagram Live songwriting sessions and a delightfully DIY green-screen video for the love song “Claws,” and this transparency made the project feel like performance art....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Thursday, October 13, 2016. Fire Department lieutenant dies weeks after bike crash Chicago Fire Department lieutenant Danny Carbol died Monday from the injuries he sustained in September when he was hit by a car while riding his bike home from work. Carbol is the seventh person in Chicago this year to die after a biking accident. [DNAinfo Chicago] [NBC Chicago]

Fences, in theaters now, is the first August Wilson play to be adapted into a feature film backed by a major film studio (The Piano Lesson, which was first produced in 1987, was made for TV in 1995). The sixth entry in Wilson’s ten-part “Pittsburgh Cycle”—which focuses on a former Negro League baseball star turned trash collector in 1950s Pittsburgh who takes his bitter frustrations out on his family—premiered on Broadway in 1987 and won the Pulitzer Prize for drama....

The sun was just starting to rise when I woke up in the front seat of my parents’ minivan. We were on our way back to Chicago from Nashville, traveling overnight through the flat and repetitive landscape of southern Illinois so my mom and I could sleep during the most boring stretch of the journey. And even though the town’s rural location and tiny population (around 6,500 people) are more reminiscent of Smallville, the farm town in Kansas where a young Superman first landed, the real Metropolis is trying its darnedest to mirror the bustling fictional metropolis of, um, Metropolis in every way possible....

While peering out the window at a procession of Greek Orthodox faithful on Good Friday, Katherine Ozment’s eight-year-old son wanted to know why their family didn’t partake in the ritual. He learned from his mother that the reason was because they weren’t Greek Orthodox. “Then what are we?” he asked. Ozment, a former senior editor at National Geographic, was stumped. She tried answering her son’s question and fumbled royally. “We’re nothing,” Ozment told her child....

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