Posts

The Violet Hour Runner-Up: Scofflaw

Lake Forest Theatre 400 E. Illinois Rd. Lake Forest 847-604-4975 lakeforesttheatre.com Runner-Up: The Hypocrites

Fabulous Freddie Ninja Unlike you and me, Fabulous Freddie Ninja (aka Freddie Leroy) irons his white jeans before an all-styles dance battle. And unlike anyone else, he fearlessly integrates breaking and voguing—two of the perhaps most disparate elements in Chicago underground dancing—spinning on his head, then jumping to his feet only to collapse to the ground in a precipitous Vogue Fem dip, one leg tucked behind his back, one up in the air....

For a second consecutive year, activists delivered symbols of death to Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s doorstep. But unlike November 2015, when protesters circled City Hall with caskets and calls for his resignation, this time they took the message directly to the mayor’s Ravenswood home. It’s not only gun violence and police killing people, attendees said—it’s also city policies. Speakers stressed the need for leaders to follow through on housing policies to help the homeless, including those living in Lawrence Avenue’s tent city, located under a viaduct at Lake Shore Drive....

Hogtown Last year we created the category Best Chicago Story in hope that it would become a perennial, and that every year we could single out the locally produced short or feature that best captured the life of the city. This year we didn’t even need that category, because the best Chicago story was also the best locally produced drama, period. Daniel Nearing’s Hogtown takes place in 1919, as the city and the nation are trying to absorb the domestic aftershocks of World War I, and culminates in the eight-day race riot that erupted on the south side that July, leaving 38 people dead....

Band of Bohemia 4710 N. Ravenswood 773-271-4710 bandofbohemia.com Runner-Up: Owen & Engine

Prolific DIY punk rocker Craig Woods won me over last year with Hot Bagels; he released a slew of gritty, lo-fi recordings with that project, which he launched shortly after moving to Chicago from Philadelphia in late 2013 and has since become a full-fledged band. But Woods has a lot more on his plate than just Hot Bagels, and tomorrow night he’ll join together with his cohorts in gnarly punk outfit Pink Eyes to celebrate the release of their self-titled debut at Fizz Bar & Grill....

“Most long-form is bad,” Alex Balk writes in a recent, decidedly short-form post on the Awl. “The problem arises from the ‘long’ part. If you need more than 600 words to say what you need to say you are trying too hard for accolades or you’re getting paid by the word.” Just yesterday the Reader published a story Alex Balk would probably hate. “Tl;dr,” he’d sniff, scrolling quickly past the feature’s 12,496 words....

Monte Booker Peter Cottontale Finalists: Boathouse, Bean Carrots

Ever since Michelin deigned to start reviewing Chicago restaurants back in 2010, its name has been the one most associated with print guides to local establishments, for better or worse. Last year Mike Gebert, editor of the Web publication Fooditor (and videographer for the Reader‘s Key Ingredient series), entered the fray with the Fooditor 99, subtitled “Where to eat (and what to eat there) in Chicago—right now! From the acclaimed local food site....

Gerard Johnson, who wrote and directed the moody crime drama Hyena, claims to have spent over three years researching human trafficking and police corruption in London, and his effort shows in the film’s immersive presentation of both subjects. Johnson’s camera is rarely more than a few feet away from his characters; intimations of the knotty system they inhabit—a crisscrossed network of corrupt cops, immigrant crime families, informants, and modern-day slaves—enter the frame from all directions....

For more than three decades, the Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival has brought much of the best current, mostly short avant-garde work to Chicago, and this year’s edition is no different, with four installations and nine shorts programs screening through Sunday at Defibrillator Gallery. The best examples of this type of cinema confound expectation, elude fixed categories, and challenge and provoke viewers. “What the hell was that?” might be an apt response to Jake Barningham’s Pink Horses, Blue Oceans I (Saturday March 5, 4 PM), a work of haunting fragility in which the outline of a horse hovers before us in different forms, seeming at times like a cave painting and at times like a video illusion....

G etting ready to write about the future of Lyric Opera a couple of weeks ago, I was scrolling through its latest annual report when three words caught my eye: interest-rate swaps. The swaps are a financial management strategy that was popular among governments and nonprofits in the early years of this century. But for the last decade they’ve looked like a costly folly. Here’s how it works: The bond borrower agrees to pay the opposite party in the swap, usually a bank, a flat rate of interest (along with a fee for entering into the agreement)....

Gibsons Steakhouse Runner-Up: Chicago Cut

Brett Suzuki is a purist. He sells pasture-raised beef at Arigato Market but he will never serve you a carne asada taco. When you own the only Japanese taco stand/butcher shop in town—maybe in the world?—you have to take a stand on cultural appropriation. White flour tortillas, or something like them, the theories go, were possibly developed in northern Mexico by Spanish Jews (or Muslims) during the time of the Inquisition, adapting their own foods to the conditions of the colony they were lamming it in....

The Brokedowns have been a staple of Chicago punk for pretty much as long as I can remember. The first time they blew my mind was back in 2002, the year they formed, when my high school band played a show with them at an Elgin skate park that’s since been shuttered. Over the years, their musical peers have come and gone as the members of the Brokedowns entered adulthood, complete with families and careers, while somehow continuing to get better and better as a band....

As the sun set on a temperate fall evening October 5, roughly 200 people gathered outside the Wellington United Church of Christ in Lakeview to honor the memory of TT Saffore—and join a call to action. Within the broader dialogue about black lives, trans and gender-nonconforming people don’t receive the same levels of solidarity or empathy offered to black cisgender men killed by police officers or racist vigilantes. But Chicago activists refuse to let that keep them down....

Some folks would have you believe that everything is running smoothly, A-OK even, as the globe keeps spinning toward its next mass extinction—one that will almost definitely include us. We’ve got vaccines (though only a third of Chicago has received a shot as of this writing), we’ve got the beginnings of economic recovery (though most $1,400 stimulus checks have gone to silly things like medical debt)—Jesus Christ, are you still complaining?...