Posts

Cindy’s Rooftop Signature Room at the 95th Finalist: SX Sky Bar

The sketch group Hijinks has never settled for just being funny. In fact, the five-person troupe has never done the same show twice, no matter how many laughs it might have gotten on a particular night. Having for the past year put on monthly experimental shows utilizing offbeat formats and styles in nontraditional venues, Hijinks this month moves to a permanent home at iO. As a housewarming in its new digs, the group is doing something else it’s never done before—a 12-hour marathon production dubbed Hijinks Fest: We’re All Gonna Die....

Noah Berlatsky: Jeremih’s Green Stage set on Sunday had a similar communal vibe to that of fellow Chicagoan RP Boo the day before, albeit with less frantic virtuosity and more sex. The crowd enthusiastically shouted again and again for “old shit” rather than “new shit,” and Jeremih obliged, encouraging call-and-response and repeatedly thanking old fans, a number of whom were dancing on stage along with him. Chance the Rapper showed up too, bouncing around enthusiastically for a song or two....

Chicago has earned bragging rights as the birthplace of Black gospel music. It was here that gospel was first composed, sung, played, published, promoted, recorded, broadcast, and formalized—the last via a national convention with regional chapters. Migrants to Chicago from the south in particular found comfort in it, because it articulated their shared experiences as strangers in a strange land and reminded them of their southern roots. The seeds of gospel took root in Chicago with the planting of Pentecostal and Holiness churches on the south and west sides in the 1910s and 1920s....

If you want to understand race in Chicago in the months after the end of the First World War, the letters written by two soldiers from the south side are illuminative. Throughout the war, Lieutenant Charles L. Samson wrote his wife, Loula, at 6730 S. Perry multiple times a week. A mechanical engineer, he’d had a close scrape with death after a German submarine sunk his troop ship off the Scottish coast....

Brian Jackson/Sun-Times Alderman Emma Mitts (37th Ward): not a fan of the Chicago Teachers Union On election night Alderman Emma Mitts let her 37th Ward constituents know that she was ready for war. Just a few months after that school opened, the Chicago Plan Commission approved a new $20 million charter in Mitts’s ward, this one part of the Noble Network of Charter Schools. Mitts—and Mayor Rahm Emanuel—received pushback on that school because it’s across the street from a regular public high school, Prosser Career Academy....

American Honey, now playing a six-day encore engagement at Facets Cinematheque, is a hypnotic road picture about a crew of wayward young people selling magazine subscriptions across crumbling middle America. After winning the Jury Prize at the Cannes film festival in May, this fourth feature and first U.S. production from British writer- director Andrea Arnold (Fish Tank, Wuthering Heights) met a slightly weaker reception stateside, where some critics dismissed it as overlong and self-indulgent....

Choreographer Ayako Kato makes discoveries in stillness. For her latest work, Stück 1998/Anchor 2018, she was inspired by the moments of silence in contemporary classical composer Manfred Werder’s 4,000-page score Stück 1998, a piece containing 160,000 12-second units of time with six seconds of music and six seconds of silence in each. “For a mover, silence is equivalent with stillness,” says Kato. “When I experience that stillness I realize there is no such thing as stillness....

Most of my favorite films to have premiered in Chicago in 2019 played here before September, which is when I began my career as a special education teacher. Since then I’ve slowed down on my intake of new movies, but what I saw in the first eight months of the year provided me with much to admire. I’m especially grateful for the brief run, in May, of László Nemes’s Sunset at the Landmark Century and AMC River East....

Gethsemane Garden Center Runner-Up: Sprout

When David Weathersby’s Thee Debauchery Ball premiered at the Black Harvest Film Festival last year, it was followed by a party—a house music party, one that was a fitting reception for the documentary about Black music, community, art, and sexuality. “I always say that I don’t feel like I’m a filmmaker without Black Harvest,” he says. “They were the first festival I ever submitted anything to and got a response ....

In their nearly 30 years as a band, Boris have developed the rare ability to alchemize practically any sound in the vast realm of heavy, atmospheric, and psychedelic rock into their distorted, amplified vision. The Tokyo trio’s release and tour schedules have been equally ambitious (they’ve played Chicago so often over the past decade they almost seem like locals), and as the live-music industry ground to a halt along with the rest of the world due to the COVID-19 pandemic, they turned to the studio for respite....

Despite everything, the sun still rises, and as always, there is plenty to do this weekend. Here’s some of what we recommend: Sat 11/12: The Empty Bottle (1035 N. Western) hosts the Handmade Market Chicago, where with mimosas in one hand and herbed biscuits from Bite Café in the other, shoppers can browse locally-made jewelry, clothing, crafts. Noon-4 PM For more stuff to do this weekend—and every day—check out our Agenda page....

Time to plan the week. Here’s some of what we recommend: Through 4/23: The Borderline Collective presents “Northern Triangle,” a group show at Rational Park (2557 W. North) featuring work inspired by the refugee crisis at the U.S./Mexico border.

Q: I’m a 31-year-old straight woman. I have a good job, great friends, and average attractiveness. I’ve dated close to 30 men at this point, and I can’t wrap my head around this: I’ve never had a boyfriend or dated anyone for more than a couple months. It’s really starting to wear on my self-esteem. I don’t believe anything is wrong with me, but the more time goes on, the more I think I have to be doing something wrong....

Montrose Beach Foster Avenue Beach Finalists: North Avenue Beach, 31st Street Beach, Oak Street Beach

Billy Boy Arnold‘s career spans no fewer than three historical blues epochs. Mentored as a teenager in 1948 by harmonica master John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson, who’d helped define the mid-20th-century Chicago style, Arnold began playing professionally just as Muddy Waters and his contemporaries kicked off the postwar blues insurgency. Then, in 1955, he participated in what was, for all intents and purposes, the birth of rock ‘n’ roll—in fact, he’s often credited with coining one of rock’s most iconic stage names....

Q: I married my high-school sweetheart at 17, had a baby, together a few years, mental illness and subsequent infidelity led to things ending. My ex-husband remarried, divorced again, and is now in another LTR. I’m in a LTR for a decade with my current partner (CP), we have a few kids, and I’m so in love with him it terrifies me. My ex frequently makes sexual remarks to me, low-key flirts and I feel an animal attraction in the moment....

All year the Jazz Institute of Chicago has been celebrating the legacy of singular tenor saxophonist and crucial mentor Von Freeman, who would’ve turned 95 in October (he died in 2012). Friday night’s concert is built around the music of pianist, composer, and bandleader Sun Ra, but it’s part of the Freeman series too—Freeman played in the Arkestra off and on in 1959 and ’60, shortly before Ra and his group left Chicago in ’61....