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Molly Costello Soap Distillery Finalists: Last Craft, Facture Goods, Whiffahugs, Erin Burke

Derrick Clifton is a writer and commentator focusing on the intersections of identity, culture, and social justice issues. Clifton wrote the Reader‘s award-winning Identity and Culture column during the 2016 election season. The loved ones I’m sheltering with live in a food desert, so I journey at least four to five miles away to the south suburbs to gather groceries and supplies. That includes venturing for paper products at the Walmart superstore in Evergreen Park where two employees recently died from complications of COVID-19....

Dandelion Theatre presents the world premiere of Brynne Frauenhoffer’s plaintive, often overloaded exploration of family and identity, directed by Ben Kaye. When expectant parents Josh (David Stobbe) and Michelle (Gabriela Diaz) leave Chicago to visit Josh’s small Missouri hometown, a powder keg of hot-button issues goes off. Josh’s teenage half sibling (K. Holland) is wrestling with gender identity and at constant loggerheads with their mother, who grudgingly agrees to call them “Ru” rather than Ruth....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Friday, December 2, 2016. Have a great weekend! San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick donates to Black Youth Project 100, discusses Chicago ahead of visit San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick has made national headlines by kneeling during the national anthem before NFL games to protest racial inequality in the U.S. Now the football player has donated an undisclosed amount of money to the Black Youth Project 100 to help the fight for racial equality....

Chicagoan Angel Marcloid has been making experimental tunes under more than a dozen pseudonyms since the 90s. As Fire-Toolz she conjures sounds that align with experiencing music during the current streaming era, where it’s possible to leapfrog between disparate artists, genres, and generations of music with the same dizzying speed and apathetic carelessness with which couch potatoes channel surf through thousands of networks. But unlike a TV zombie’s viewing habits, Marcloid’s work is always purposeful, even when it’s hard to figure out where she’s going; part of the fun of relistening to February’s Drip Mental (Hausu Mountain) and the brand-new Interbeing (Bedlam Tapes) is retracing her path through a ten-car pileup of retouched elevator music, unflinchingly harsh noise, industrialized and sugary pop, crunchy metalcore, and samples of computer technology and sputtering music gear....

Chicago Fringe Opera is presenting the local premiere of this compact 75-minute transgender coming-of-age story, which has had an unusual number of productions since its first appearance in 2014. That might be due to its economical structure—it requires only two singers and a string quartet—but also, no doubt, owes to its topical subject. As One is loosely based on the experience of colibrettist Kimberly Reed, whose 2008 documentary Prodigal Sons traced the story of her own transition from high school football hero (and class president) to adult woman and lesbian (who incidentally makes the surprising discovery that her brother is the grandson of Hollywood legends Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles)....

When you think of the staggering levels of violence that members of the LGBTQIA+ community continue to endure (or, even more tragically, don’t survive), the title of Terry Guest’s 90-minute two-hander, produced by Story Theatre, feels like a blow. Guest explores the impact of trauma survived not just once or twice, but as a regular occurrence over decades, passed down through generations and carried in the very genetic makeup of African Americans....

By Tyson Karrasch, stand-up comic “I’m, uh, Tyson.” “You bought popcorn without any clothes?” Naked and outnumbered, I finally came clean, explaining I don’t know where I am, that I’m still very drunk, and that I’ve pissed the bed. The very unhappy trio watched me put on my pants, the only item of my clothing I was able to find, and exit with zero dignity. During the cab ride home, the driver observed, “It smells like pee!...

I’m certain that no matter how you feel about the food at Ukrainian Village’s Boeufhaus you’ll find it hard to resist repeatedly blurting out to your friends, family, and pets the satisfying portmanteau of the French word for “beef” and the German for “house.” Truthfully, I’m certain I know how you’ll feel about the food too. Bar snacks like the goat-cheese-stuffed onions, which are fried in bread crumbs and sauced with a savory acidic duo of black olive tapenade and salsa verde, are as sophisticated as the Alsatian sausage and pasta roulades fleischnacka are irreverent....

Over the course of her decades-long career, Carrie Mae Weems has repeatedly demonstrated how adept she is at navigating the human experience. Yet she does so while making her audiences consider uncomfortable questions. Her early photo series “Colored People” consists of black-and-white portraits of African-American children tinted with shades whose names, coined by Weems, double as descriptions of their skin tones—Blue Black Boy and Golden Yella Girl, for example—which historically have played a role in determining the social hierarchies of black communities....

On June 19, 1865, news of the Emancipation Proclamation freeing American slaves finally reached Galveston, Texas—a full two and a half years after it was signed. Accounts differ as to why it took so long for the slaves of Texas to be told of their freedom, but they didn’t hesitate to celebrate, dubbing the day Juneteenth. For decades, Juneteenth celebrations were common in Black communities, but the holiday gradually faded into obscurity as it was written out of history....

Update: The event on January 30 at Women & Children First has been canceled due to extreme weather. That performance will be rescheduled soon. Despite the proliferation of spaces exclusively for female-identifying and nonbinary performers in recent years, Cheng doesn’t shy away from inviting men onto the show. An important part of dismantling the dangers of the culture surrounding toxic masculinity is involving everyone in the conversation, and Cheng encourages men to reflect on their own experiences....

On July’s Full Flower (Topshelf), Baltimore’s Us & Us Only play indie rock reminiscent of the brackish waters that split the eastern part of the state of Maryland, the Chesapeake Bay. The genre is open to mixing many different things; Us & Us Only’s version is multilayered, charmingly timid and tender to the touch. The group allows their music to breathe and give it room to stealthily borrow ideas from other genres, such as the pondering melodies of slowcore, the minimal plaintiveness of folk, and the bare verses and walloping choruses of emo....

Big Chicks Runner-Up: Berlin

Best new music blogger Best musical anniversary Best honorary member of Chicago’s footwork scene with a day job at a steel mill in Gary Best consequence of a broken HVAC system Best transcendental deep-space synth trip Best group of veterans of the Blue Man backing band Best classical label Best instructional dance video Best onstage psychedelic costume party Best 4 AM bar for live music Best cross between the Breeders and Lightning Bolt Best group making music with the contents of a thrift-store basement Best career reboot by a septuagenarian harmonica player Best feminist rock ‘n’ roll exorcism Best band primed to break out this year Best hot dice Best new south-side nightlife spot Best punk-rock LGBTQ night Best reason to hang out at a barcade after midnight on a school night Best way to footwork in an art gallery during off-hours Best lasers at an underground rave Best nomadic collective for weird, druggy, hard-hitting underground techno Best progressive cumbia and tropical bass night Best-dressed DJs Best music venue Best band Best music festival Best up-and-coming band Best rock club Best DJ Best band name Best hip-hop artist Best 4 AM bar Best karaoke Best jazz club Best singer-​songwriter Best local record label Best dance club Best dance party Best jazz musician Best dive bar

Blackhat Catching up with Blackhat over the weekend, I found myself reminded—and surprisingly often—of selections in this year’s Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival, which I previewed for this week’s issue of the Reader. Michael Mann’s latest is, on one level, a catalogue of textures that can be achieved with digital video. According to IMDB, the filmmakers used no fewer than five different video cameras, ranging from professional-grade equipment to “prosumer” models you can find at Best Buy....

ARTIST: Dan GrzecaSHOW: Built to Spill, Wooden Indian Burial Ground, and Clarke & the Himselfs at Metro on Sat 5/30MORE INFO: dangrzeca.com