Chicagoans is a first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. This week’s Chicagoan is Barbara Nellis, 72, former Playboy editor. It wasn’t about the models for me. The mystique of the world I was living in was the writers. I had lunch with Joan Didion. I have a wonderful poem Shel Silverstein did for my five-year-old daughter. William Styron once said to me, “I’ve always thought of you as Miss Chicago....
Dangerous Game Last week, I was happy to finally see Abel Ferrara’s film Welcome to New York, a biopic about Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a member of France’s Socialist Party and managing director of the International Monetary Fund. As Ben Sachs notes in his review, this is the first Ferrara film to play in Chicago theaters since 1998, so even though I had a fairly ambivalent response to the film, I still appreciate being able to see the film, period....
Disaffected teenagers hanging out at the forest preserve to smoke and solve the world’s problems couldn’t ask for a better soundtrack than 1999’s Busse Woods, the third album by San Francisco stoner-doom band Acid King. Guitarist and singer Lori S., the only constant member, founded the group in 1993 with drummer Joey Osborne and bassist Peter Lucas. Lori is a Chicagoland native, and Busse Woods is named for the forest preserve outside Elk Grove Village that served as her chamber of secrets during her rocker teen years....
There’s something irresistible about eating food off a stick. At Canton Regio, the brochetas arrive dangling from a little metal stand. It’s a setup that’s satisfyingly medieval, and it’s tempting to grab one and point it at the person across the table, and shout “En garde!” But then a piece of meat or a shrimp might fall off and land on the floor, lost forever, and that would be sad because those brochetas really are quite tasty....
Getting a handle on the music of avant-pop singer-songwriter Mary Ocher is like volunteering to board a canoe piloted by a blindfolded Sandra Bullock: given who’s driving, you’re going to enjoy the adventure, but nothing can prepare you for the rocks and dips ahead. Born in Russia, raised in Tel Aviv, and based in Berlin since 2007, Ocher displays an impressive range of influence and technique on her early albums, moving between Lotte Lenya-style avant-garde torch songs and Robyn-style electronica....
Dennis Lee of thepizzle.net For his generally revolting blog the Pizzle, “Dannis Ree,” as he calls himself, has eaten bull cock, cat food, and diarrhetic escolar. He’s juiced an entire meal of surf and turf, cooked Taco Bell sous vide for 48 hours, and made a party dip designed to maximize flatulence in fellow food writers. In a world of increasingly self-indulgent, corrupt, and turgid food writing, he is its fearless and hilarious GG Allin....
Pelican pelicansong.com Runner-Up: Bloodiest
A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. A mortar and pestle I don’t make it to the practice space where I keep my drum kit often enough, but I do cook most weekends—and making a Thai curry paste from scratch in a granite mortar tickles similar parts of my brain. Sure, it’s like playing only one drum, and the tone is lousy, but it smells a lot better....
The Reader‘s archive is vast and varied, going back to 1971. Every day in Archive Dive, we’ll dig through and bring up some finds. Sophia Danenberg reached the top of Mount Everest on May 19, 2006, at 7 AM. She was the first African-American—and the first black woman— to make the summit. And she’d grown up in Homewood, though as an adult she lived in Connecticut. But it was a stealth operation—or as much of a stealth operation as climbing the world’s tallest mountain can get....
Autopilot/Wikimedia Commons If you see this on the street, just keep walking. Last week a mysterious Soundcloud account operated by “user48736353001” slowly posted, for a couple days, more than a 100 songs that sound uncannily like Aphex Twin. After some confirmation from close friends of the artist formally known as Richard D. James, it was revealed that the tracks are likely unreleased Aphex Twin material from the 90s. Expertly detailed by Philip Sherburne in this Pitchfork article, the tracks bear keyboard sounds and drum programming that identify them with certain eras....
This week features a charity dinner, an improv show, and plenty more events. Here’s some of what we recommend: Wed 3/14: Chicago chefs from the Purple Pig, Gale Street Inn, and more come together for an evening of food during Recipe for Relief at the Lakewood (1758 W. Lake). The money raised will support restaurants and other industries in Puerto Rico. Those unable to attend can still donate through GoFundMe. 6-9 PM, $75 (includes open bar)
Steppenwolf Lookingglass Finalists: Otherworld, Ghostlight Ensemble
You want a list, I’ll write a damn list. By Ben Joravsky Four plays that recast history—collective and personal—with searing defiance. By S. Nicole Lane Yes, there are some ties.
Q: I know you and other sexperts say that kinks are ingrained and not something you can get rid of, but mine have all vanished! Ever since I started on antidepressants my relationship with my body and how it reacts to pain, both physical and mental, has completely changed. I used to love getting bit and spanked and beat black and blue, but now all that just hurts. I used to love getting humiliated and spit on, commanded to do dirty things, but none of that holds much appeal anywhere....
Tweet, Let’s Eat Yolk Finalists: Funkenhausen, Joe’s Imports, SX Sky Bar
To call a work of theater a “graphic novel for the stage,” as playwright Caridad Svich does in the preface to her script for De Troya, implies a couple of things: (a) a heavy emphasis on dynamic visual storytelling, and (b) some novelistic character development—maybe something that takes advantage of the illustrated medium’s lack of limitations when it comes to fantasy. The degree to which Rinska Carrasco-Prestinary’s Halcyon Theatre production delivers on those varies from recognizable but off the mark to downright inscrutable....
“I’m working-class,” says Danny Cimaglio, when asked to describe his occupation. The 63-year-old’s matter-of-fact demeanor and scrappy work history were the norm in Bucktown back in 1986, the year Cimaglio and some friends opened Danny’s Tavern, a funky bar in a solidly blue-collar hood that helped usher in the area’s bohemian phase. In the mid-80s, Damen Avenue was the dividing line between Mexican and Puerto Rican gangs—not a place to buy yoga pants—and Cimaglio and his wife, Barbara, were raising their daughter Anna in a three-flat on Armitage and Hoyne....
Chicago author Daniel Kraus announced in a tweet today that he is finishing an epic zombie novel left behind by George A. Romero, the legendary director of Night of the Living Dead. The book, titled The Living Dead, will be published in the fall of 2019 by Tor Books. The book is epic in scope, jumping between three different points in history and spanning the globe. Kraus believe that as an independent filmmaker, the book was Romero’s “way to do all the things he never had the budget for with movies....
After the Dance This 1939 drawing-room drama by British writer Terence Rattigan (The Winslow Boy, The Browning Version, Separate Tables) concerns dissolute middle-aged socialites David and Joan Scott-Fowler, whose marriage seems to be a model of fashionable frivolity until David falls in love with his young cousin’s fiancee, with tragic results. Not one of Rattigan’s best works, the play is nonetheless an effective period piece—a portrait of carefree “bright young things” of the 1920s as they ungracefully age while their world slips inexorably toward another world war....
