Tag: Vol. 52 No. 24
Issue of September 7, 2023
On the cover: “The Books Issue”
Photography and artwork by Kirk Williamson for Chicago Reader
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Posted inNews & Politics
Lose your car, but keep the debt
It feels like something I don’t have much power to prevent. Like an occasional mosquito bite that you can’t control, it’s just in the air. Except that mosquito sucks $100 from you here and there. Eric Hoskins Eric Hoskins has never owned a car in Chicago. The slew of expenses car ownership incurs in the […]
Posted inNews & Politics
A city of sanctuary: Chicago’s role in the 1973 Chilean coup
Hortensia Bussi held back tears as she addressed a crowd of more than 2,000 people gathered at DePaul University on a December afternoon in 1973. She was in Chicago because, on September 11, 1973, with spring in the air and Chile’s national holiday on the horizon, military aircraft launched from the port city of Valparaíso […]
Posted inCity of Win
Stock Marley invites us to show genuine love
“I’m not tryna get high, man. I’m tryna get righteous,” says Stock Marley. He’s in his west-side apartment, delicately rolling up a joint. “This is a daily sacrament. It’s a way of life. I’m not tryna do things fast—I’m trying to do it right. With the weed, with the music, we’re just trying to be […]
Posted inMusic
Experimental musicians Bill Nace and Haley Fohr team up for two nights at the Hungry Brain
For more than a decade, Chicago musician Haley Fohr, who also makes music as Circuit des Yeux, has been honing and expanding her craft. She’s taken her transcendent vocal explorations, art-rock ensembles, and live film scores to far-off places around the globe. Just when I thought I’d witnessed her lend her powerful four-octave voice to […]
Posted inMusic
The Impromptu Fest celebrates classical music’s fringe with its most ambitious year yet
Update Mon 9/11: Renée Baker’s Modern Black Music Ensemble have canceled their appearance at High Concept Labs on Fri 9/15. Audiovisual artist and turntablist Allen Moore will instead present selections from his project The Black Arcade. Chicago has its fair share of festivals that orbit within the solar system of contemporary classical music, including the […]
Posted inMusic
After ten years in action, the Chris Speed Trio gets to the gist
In his own projects and his collaborations with others, tenor saxophonist and clarinetist Chris Speed often makes music with a compounded quality, as though he and his associates are trying to concentrate as much information as possible into the available space. Human Feel packed the divergent aesthetics of four strong players into each tune; Pachora […]
Posted inArts & Culture
A new home for experimental literature
“We are identifying ‘micro-movements’ and allowing others to explain them to us,” says Jourdain Barton, a cofounder of Chicago’s TEMPER Press. Born to foster experimental writing, TEMPER emerged from such a micro-movement: a bond shared by Barton and her grad school classmates Geoffrey Billetter and Nat Holtzmann. To them, micro-movements are smaller, unidentified capsules of […]
Posted inOn Culture
The butterfly in your throat
My throat was slit. It was back in the dark ages of the 20th century, but if you take a close look at me you can still see the scar—a fine line running along the base of my neck, from ear to ear. It’s the necklace I can’t take off, the trail of a scalpel. […]
Posted inMusic
Dead Lucid suture together postpunk and psych rock into tantalizing freak-outs
Chicago rock trio Dead Lucid self-released their debut, titled simply EP, in 2016, and since then they’ve tightened up their bedraggled, bluesy psych-rock style by borrowing from classic postpunk. On their self-released third EP, May’s Vision, they summon an austere composure to compress their former fuzz and fury into newly sparse arrangements. The EP’s best […]
Posted inMusic Review
Austin’s Blk Odyssy merges eclectic influences into a fresh take on Black music
Blk Odyssy is the brainchild of singer and producer Juwan Elcock, a New Jersey native who moved to Austin, Texas, in 2015. At first he explored Austin’s Americana scene, but then he carved out a niche in crooning, experimental neosoul rap, using the name Blk Odyssy. Working with guitarist Alejandro Rios, he’s transformed the project […]
Posted inArts & Culture
I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times follows its road home
With vivid imagery and a staggering wit, Taylor Byas paints portraits of her childhood on the south side and the city in warm hues. I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times leads her quest for self-discovery with grief, longing, and the late-night monologuing of a seasoned writer. With poems modeled after the likes of Patricia […]
Posted inTheater Review
Cooking With Soul
Near the end of Black Ensemble Theater’s (BET) superb new revue A Taste of Soul, co-emcee Qiana McNary mentions that the show’s creators hope to leave the audience both “full and hungry at the same time.” The show’s central framing device—a television cooking program veering into musical numbers, concurrently leading the audience through the history […]
Posted inTheater Review
Rose’s show
The titular showgirl in Gypsy isn’t necessarily Gypsy Rose Lee, the reluctant vaudeville child star who—per the “musical fable” from Stephen Sondheim (lyrics), Jule Styne (score) and Arthur Laurents (book)—blossoms into an internationally renowned burlesque artist. In the Marriott Theatre’s sturdy production, the stage belongs to Mama Rose (Lucia Spina), the so-called stage mother raised […]
Posted inTheater Review
Between the lines
The title of writer/director Mark Pracht’s second installment to his Four-Color Trilogy, a series about the comic books publishing industry, could easily be mistaken for one of the real-world pre-Code, sultry cheesecake books Pracht’s play centers on. But it’s actually a reference to the markedly un-horny Seduction of the Innocent, German American psychiatrist Fredric Wertham’s […]