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Growing up with ComEdon June 28, 2021 at 1:43 pm

Retired in Chicago

Growing up with ComEd

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Growing up with ComEdon June 28, 2021 at 1:43 pm Read More »

Write Something Nice Day — Here’s to you, Barb.on June 28, 2021 at 1:03 pm

Getting More From Les

Write Something Nice Day — Here’s to you, Barb.

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Chicago Cubs Rumors: 5 trades to make for starting pitcher at deadlineon June 28, 2021 at 12:00 pm

WASHINGTON, DC - MAY 30: Max Scherzer #31 of the Washington Nationals pitches against the Milwaukee Brewers at Nationals Park on May 30, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Will Newton/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON, DC – MAY 30: Max Scherzer #31 of the Washington Nationals pitches against the Milwaukee Brewers at Nationals Park on May 30, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Will Newton/Getty Images)
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Chicago Cubs, MLB Trade Deadline

Chicago Cubs (Kamil Krzaczynski-USA TODAY Sports)

After a tough outing against the Los Angeles Dodgers on Sunday Night Baseball, the Chicago Cubs have now lost six of their last 10 but remain in place to make a run at both the NL Central and/or a Wild Card berth.

The Cubs are three games out of first place and begin a series with the Milwaukee Brewers today that could have big implications on the entire season. If the Cubs were to come away winning this series, maybe they’ll still end up buying at the 2021 trade deadline.

The closer we get to the 2021 MLB All Star Break, the more fans wonder whether the Cubs will be big buyers. We already assume that they’re going to look to add talent, despite recent struggles. That has all but been confirmed.

The only question now is whether or not the team will look to make a splash or rather a couple of so-so moves here and there.

Before the 2021 MLB Trade Deadline, the Chicago Cubs could look to add more starting pitching.

What will the brass decide to do? If they’re smart, the Cubs will add a starting pitcher. There was no way Chicago was going to be this good in 2021. They were subtracting this past offseason, not adding.

But, here we are. The Cubs are in need of a starting pitcher and there will be a few available.

One of the major questions when looking at which starting pitcher the Cubs could pursue is whether or not they will part with any of their top two prospects, Brailyn Marquez or Brennen Davis.

It would take one heck of a return for the Cubs to part with either of those guys, but one of the following pitchers could get them to do it — or could they? Let’s look at a few trade packages for some starting pitching, just about a month ahead of this year’s deadline.

Next: 1. Jose Berrios

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Flowers for an unsung casualty of the post-Nirvana feeding frenzyon June 28, 2021 at 11:00 am

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Steel Pole Bath Tub: Dale Flattum, Mike Morasky, and Darren Mor-X - COURTESY THE ARTIST

It’s been a while since I wrote about a band I got into decades ago that nobody else cares about now. I’ve done Gravitar, Star Pimp, Phleg Camp, Straitjacket Fits, and God Is My Co-Pilot, and today y’all get to hear about Steel Pole Bath Tub.

Formed in 1986 in Bozeman, Montana, by bassist Dale Flattum and guitarist Mike Morasky, this unruly noise-rock band soon relocated to Seattle, already a hotbed of such foolishness. There they picked up drummer Darren Mor-X before settling in San Francisco, back when that was a thing a noise-rock band could reasonably do without inherited wealth.

I fell in love with Steel Pole Bath Tub more than 30 years ago as a DJ at KTRU in Houston, Texas, when I encountered the record that combined their 1989 album Butterfly Love with their 1990 EP Lurch. I already liked plenty of grotty, unhinged guitar bands, but these guys had more than just nasty riffs going on. Morasky’s use of cassette loops and sly, sinister TV and movie samples, in combination with Mor-X’s fluid, busy drumming (ten bucks says he played in his high school’s jazz band), makes SPBT’s songs feel thrillingly disorienting, even divided against themselves. The seething rippers always seem just about to explosively unravel, like a ball of rubber bands nicked with a knife; the grinding dirges might collapse at any moment. I got to see the band play live a few times back in the day, and onstage they could create an almost overwhelming firehose of barely controlled volume and energy.

I also dug the complementary flavors of SPBT’s dueling songwriters: Morasky tends toward messy, pulpy noir, while Flattum indulges in what often sounds like gutter journaling. Taken together with the music, the lyrics suggest a titanic struggle to hold it together in the face of emotions that rip through human bodies the way hurricanes squeeze through wind socks. My feelings don’t necessarily work that way anymore–I’m pushing 50, after all–but in my early 20s I played the Butterfly Love tune “Tear It Apart” to close my radio shift every week for nearly a year. Its closing lines? “Tear it apart / Tear the phone off the wall / I’ve got nothin’ to say / Why’d you even call.”

After two more brilliant records, 1991’s Tulip and 1993’s The Miracle of Sound in Motion, Steel Pole Bath Tub signed to Slash (distributed by Warner and Reprise) during the post-Nirvana major-label feeding frenzy. That decision finished them off pretty promptly. They released Scars From Falling Down in 1995 (with almost no samples, at the legal department’s insistence) and then out-Melvinsed the Melvins by informing Slash that their next record would be a cover of the Cars’ first album in its entirety. The label declined to entertain this smart-assery, naturally, but the demos SPBT submitted included three Cars covers anyway, fucked up almost beyond recognition and retitled “What I Need,” “The Good Times,” and “My Best Friend’s a Girl.”

Label execs described the material as “unlistenable,” and that spelled the end of Steel Pole Bath Tub’s recording career. When the rights to the music reverted to the band in 2002, they were already all but defunct, but they released it as Unlistenable (of course). SPBT reunited briefly to support the album, then once more in 2008–and as far as I know, that was their last hurrah. Seattle reissue label Sinister Torch put out a new vinyl version of Tulip in 2015, but I haven’t seen anything since.

Morasky and Flattum also appeared in 90s noise-rock “supergroup” Duh, alongside Star Pimp bassist Tom Flynn, who owned Boner Records–which put out seven Steel Pole Bath Tub records between 1989 and 1994. And all three members of SPBT played in the short-lived Tumor Circus with Dead Kennedys front man Jello Biafra (and Charles Tolnay of King Snake Roost).

Morasky now works as a music designer for Valve, where he’s composed for both Portal games and the Left 4 Dead series. Of the three, Flattum has stayed busiest with other bands, playing in Novex, the Nein, and most recently the Hand (with former Low bassist Zak Sally). He’s also been focusing more on his visual art.

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The back cover of Lurch makes it somewhat easier to see the engine parts. Tap on the image to enlarge.

The most interesting bit of trivia I’ve picked up as a Steel Pole Bath Tub fanboy (assuming any of this is interesting, I guess) begins with the cover of Lurch. It depicts a mechanized monster from the bonkers 1989 Frank Grow short film Red & Rosy–in the movie, that toothy, goggle-eyed beast is what remains of former drag-racing champ Richard “Big Red” Friedman. After losing his adrenal glands in a horrific crash, Red becomes addicted to the drug that replaces them, then builds a drag-racing simulator powered by adrenaline extracted from the blood of murdered job applicants at his wife’s scrap-metal business. As one does. What you’re looking at is the inexplicable climactic fusion of Red and his machine.

Steel Pole Bath Tub clearly knew Frank Grow. In 1993 one of Morasky and Flattum’s other side projects, Milk Cult, put out an album of ominous junkyard beat-and-sample collages called Love God, which includes “The Original Soundtrack Recording of Frank Grow’s ‘Love God'”–and some of Grow’s storyboards from the still-in-development film appear in the liner notes.

The thing is, the movie Love God wouldn’t be finished until four years later, in 1997, and there isn’t any Milk Cult music in it. Though the group continued to release material till 2000, Grow’s soundtrack is packed instead with the likes of Lubricated Goat, Cows, Unsane, and Wesley Willis. I’ve seen Love God, and I implore all fans of lunatic trash to seek it out–its premise is so hilariously convoluted it makes Red & Rosy seem entirely plausible, and shit only gets weirder from there. The YouTube upload I found is gone, but as recently as three years ago Grow was replying to comments on his own channel by offering to send a download link or a DVD to anybody who asked via [email protected].

Love God is 82 minutes long and paced like a 1990s music video nearly the whole way through. It’s lurid, exhausting, tasteless, and also (rather confoundingly) thoughtful, engaging, and solidly structured. In that sense it has a lot in common with Steel Pole Bath Tub. v

The Listener is a weekly sampling of music Reader staffers love. Absolutely anything goes, and you can reach us at [email protected].

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Flowers for an unsung casualty of the post-Nirvana feeding frenzyon June 28, 2021 at 11:00 am Read More »

Chicago rap star Polo G takes a long victory lap on Hall of Fameon June 28, 2021 at 11:00 am

In a self-aggrandizing public announcement last month about the return of Lollapalooza, Mayor Lori Lightfoot tweeted a cringey promotional video where she played music for Department of Public Health commissioner Allison Arwady onstage at the Petrillo Music Shell in Grant Park. Early in the clip, Lightfoot changes the soundtrack from a Foo Fighters tune to Polo G’s “Rapstar,” which had debuted atop the Billboard Hot 100 in April. But I don’t believe that this mayor, who violently upholds the status quo, has ever considered Polo G’s lyrics or even listened to the songs that have propelled him to international fame. If she had, she would’ve noticed him writing about a deep well of trauma stemming from decades of racist disinvestment in Chicago’s Black communities and the resulting violence. If Lightfoot enjoys anything about Polo G’s music, it must be the way it can separate upwardly mobile Lolla attendees from their money. The video says less about her than it does about the city’s biggest recent rap star, who rose to heights reached by fewer and fewer artists in the streaming era on the strength of two acclaimed albums: his vivid, commanding debut, 2019’s Die a Legend, and its forceful follow-up, 2020’s The Goat.

Polo G, born Taurus Bartlett, doesn’t need to prove himself to anyone. And yet his new third album, Hall of Fame (Columbia), seems engineered to impress a music industry he’s already conquered–and whose ranks include the people who’ve booked him for an afternoon set preceding treacly, inoffensive California pop artist Lauv at the largest music festival in the rapper’s hometown. (Though to be fair, the segues on the Lollapalooza schedule are generally a mess across the board.) Hall of Fame includes a few too many guests (among them Lil Wayne, Nicki Minaj, Rod Wave, G Herbo, and Lil Durk), a few too many songs (at 20 tracks, it’s his longest album), and a handful of odd musical choices that clash with the star’s baseline of melodic drill (the pedestrian pop-punk affectations of “Broken Guitars”). Fortunately, Polo G’s nonchalant magnetism and high-caliber vocals are strong enough to push through some of the album’s weak spots. On “Epidemic” he addresses the fragility of Black life amid factional gang violence in succinct, plainspoken lines and a sweetly sung hook, proving his singular strength by teasing out such complexities with an emotional performance. v

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Chicago rap star Polo G takes a long victory lap on Hall of Fameon June 28, 2021 at 11:00 am Read More »

Notre Dame Hockey: 3 players that will be drafted to the NHLon June 28, 2021 at 11:00 am

MANCHESTER, NH - MARCH 30: Nick Sanford #33 of the Notre Dame Fighting Irish warms up before a game against the Massachusetts Minutemen during the NCAA Division I Men's Ice Hockey Northeast Regional Championship final at the SNHU Arena on March 30, 2019 in Manchester, New Hampshire. The Minutemen won 4-0 to advance to the Frozen Four for the first time in school history. (Photo by Richard T Gagnon/Getty Images)
MANCHESTER, NH – MARCH 30: Nick Sanford #33 of the Notre Dame Fighting Irish warms up before a game against the Massachusetts Minutemen during the NCAA Division I Men’s Ice Hockey Northeast Regional Championship final at the SNHU Arena on March 30, 2019 in Manchester, New Hampshire. The Minutemen won 4-0 to advance to the Frozen Four for the first time in school history. (Photo by Richard T Gagnon/Getty Images)
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Notre Dame, Jonathan Toews

(Photo by Stacy Revere/Getty Images)

The University of Notre Dame loves its sports. A lot of people know them for their football program which is consistently a contender. Outside of the COVID-19 2020-21 season where they competed in the ACC Conference, they normally are just an independent school in that sport. Basketball is another sport where they are a more nationally recognized brand but they deserve their respect in hockey. This is a sport where they compete in the Big Ten and they have become a highly regarded program.

The Notre Dame hockey program is hoping to see plenty of their players drafted.

The 2021 NHL Draft is coming up really soon. The Buffalo Sabres are going to make the first overall pick followed by the Seattle Kraken. We pretty much have an idea of the top five or six players but we don’t know exactly which order. Thanks to a strong stretch of development out of Michigan, the NCAA is going to be well represented in the first round.

The question remains, will there be a lot of Notre Dame flavor in this draft? The answer is yes. There are certainly going to be some players taken from the program that are either already there or are committed. The prospects that Notre Dame has as draft potential players vary in talent and their projected draft selection.

It would mean a lot to fans of Notre Dame hockey to see them be well represented at the draft. That just means that the program is getting good with the potential to get better. If they show themselves well year after year, people are going to want to go there. You have already seen good Notre Dame alumni like Kyle Palmieri and Vinnie Hinostroza make names for themselves so there is certainly a chance for more. These are the three players to keep an eye on going into the 2021 NHL Draft:

Next: Player One

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Notre Dame Hockey: 3 players that will be drafted to the NHLon June 28, 2021 at 11:00 am Read More »

2 teenage boys, 15, wounded in Lawndale shootingMadeline Kenneyon June 28, 2021 at 8:38 am

Crime scene tape is stretched around the front of a home where a man was shot on May 28, 2017 in Chicago, Illinois. Chicago police have added more than 1,000 officers to the streets over the Memorial Day weekend.(Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)
A 15-year-old boy was wounded Sunday night in a shooting on the West Side, authorities said. | Scott Olson/Getty Images

A 15-year-old boy was wounded Sunday night in a shooting on the West Side, authorities said.

Two 15-year-old boys were wounded Sunday night in a shooting on the West Side, authorities said.

One teenager was walking in the 1200 block of South Lawndale shortly after 9 p.m. when he heard gunfire and fell to the ground, Chicago police said.

His mother took him to St. Anthony Hospital, where he was treated for a gunshot wound to the leg, police said. He was listed in good condition.

Another 15-year-old was also hurt in the shooting, police said. He was struck in the hand and was taken to Stroger Hospital in good condition.

No one is in custody, according to police. Area Four detectives are investigating the incident.

Read more on crime, and track the city’s homicides.

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2 teenage boys, 15, wounded in Lawndale shootingMadeline Kenneyon June 28, 2021 at 8:38 am Read More »

2 teens wounded in Lawndale shootingSun-Times Wireon June 28, 2021 at 7:44 am

Two teen boys were shot June 27, 2021 in Lawndale.
Two teen boys were shot June 27, 2021 in Lawndale. | Adobe Stock Photo

The teens, both 17, were in an alley about 5:25 p.m. in the 3200 block of West 15th Street whentwo people got out of a vehicle and fired shots.

Two teenage boys were critically wounded in a shooting Sunday in Lawndale on the West Side.

The teens, both 17, were in an alley about 5:25 p.m. in the 3200 block of West 15th Street whentwo people got out of a vehicle and fired shots, Chicago police said.

One teen was struck in the stomach and leg and was taken to Mount Sinai Hospital in critical condition, police said. The other was shot in the neck and shoulder and was transported to the same hospital in good condition.

Area Four detectives are investigating.

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2 teens wounded in Lawndale shootingSun-Times Wireon June 28, 2021 at 7:44 am Read More »

Horoscope for Monday, June 28, 2021on June 28, 2021 at 5:01 am

Moon Alert

Avoid shopping or making important decisions until 1 p.m. Chicago time. After that, the moon moves from Aquarius into Pisces.

Aries (March 21-April 19)

This is a feel-good day, which is why you feel compassion and concern for those who are less fortunate. If you can do something to help someone in need, you will feel gratified. You might join forces with someone else to do this.

Taurus (April 20-May 20)

A discussion with a female friend will be a rewarding experience for you. You might also become involved with a charitable group or others who wish to help people in need. Today, whatever you give will come back to you multiplied.

Gemini (May 21-June 20)

You look good in the eyes of others, especially bosses, parents and VIPs. Even if you don’t do anything special, you appear to be successful, wise and generous. Well, it never hurts to have good press. (There’s also a strong likelihood you deserve this praise.)

Cancer (June 21-July 22)

Today you’re full of big plans, especially for future travel or anything to do with future education or training. You might also have ambitions related to medicine, the law, publishing or the media. Enjoy a heady exchange about metaphysical ideas.

Leo (July 23-Aug. 22)

This is an excellent day to discuss how to share something because you will come out laughing all the way to the bank. Gifts, goodies and favors from others might come your way. This is also a good day to explore financial negotiations and discuss shared property.

Virgo (Aug. 23-Sept. 22)

You feel warm and generous to others, especially those who are close to you — partners, spouses and close friends. This is a good day to make a suggestion about some big plans that you’re hoping for in the future. Perhaps a trip? Or a way to expand something?

Libra (Sept. 23-Oct. 22)

Work-related travel might be happening today. This is an excellent day to join forces with others to form working units or to work with groups. Because you feel confident, and you’re in a positive frame of mind, you will be productive.

Scorpio (Oct. 23-Nov. 21)

Enjoy good times today! This is great day for social outings, sports events, fun activities with kids or any chance for you to express your creative talents in the arts. Basically, you want to have fun. Remember you will get what you give — kindness, friendship and loving support to others.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22-Dec. 21)

Family discussions will go well today, especially with a female relative. This is a good day to be generous to others because whatever you give will come back to you multiplied. You’ll find it easy to be patient with others. In fact, you might have some excellent advice for someone.

Capricorn (Dec. 22-Jan. 19)

Because you’re in a positive frame of mind, you’re thinking big today! You have big plans! Others will be encouraged by your ambitious ideas, especially relatives, neighbors and siblings. (It’s amazing how one person can influence a group.)

Aquarius (Jan. 20-Feb. 18)

This is an excellent money day for you. Look for ways to boost your income or possibly, look for a better paying job. You are more inclined to “think big” today regarding financial matters, including spending money. Nevertheless, keep your receipts. (And the box.) Better safe than sorry.

Pisces (Feb. 19-March 20)

Today the moon is in your sign lined up with lucky Jupiter, which makes you feel happy and generous to others. Your confidence is strong and you feel kindly toward others. This is a good thing because you will get what you give. What goes around, comes around.

If Your Birthday Is Today

Entrepreneur Elon Musk (1971) shares your birthday. You have a wide variety of interests and you are very spontaneous. You are an excellent planner and you are also persuasive. You are certainly dominant and determined. This year you have every right to seek your personal happiness. Ask yourself what you want and where you want to go. Enjoy socializing with others and exploring hobbies. Claim your world.

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Horoscope for Monday, June 28, 2021on June 28, 2021 at 5:01 am Read More »

15-year-old boy wounded in Lawndale shootingon June 28, 2021 at 5:41 am

A 15-year-old boy was wounded Sunday night in a shooting on the West Side, authorities said.

The teenager was walking in the 1200 block of South Lawndale shortly after 9 p.m. when he heard gunfire and fell to the ground, Chicago police said.

His mother took him to St. Anthony Hospital, where he was treated for a gunshot wound to the leg, police said. He was listed in good condition.

No one is in custody, according to police. Area Four detectives are investigating the incident.

Read more on crime, and track the city’s homicides.

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15-year-old boy wounded in Lawndale shootingon June 28, 2021 at 5:41 am Read More »