Best of the New Chicago
The 58 people, places, foods, and finds that emerged from the darkness of the pandemic to make our reopened city even better than before
July 27, 2021, 8:01 am
Best of the New ChicagoLynette Smithon July 27, 2021 at 1:01 pm Read More »
Derrick Rose is a free agent this offseason at the perfect time the Chicago Bulls are in desperate need of a star-studded point guard to lead their team.
“Such uncertainty is why secondary targets such as Derrick Rose can’t be ruled out. In fact, internal conversations on the viability and fit of the former Bull and former most valuable player have occurred, just as they have with all candidates,” according to Bulls insider K.C Johnson.
I never got to see the amazing double bill that was Foster The People and Grouplove at Schuba’s Backroom on that frustrating night of April 2nd, 2011.
I walked down to the music hall as I did on many other nights, with a beer in my pocket. The same beer that I would drink on my five-block walk to the best concert hall in Chicago. But on this night, there was impending doom.
[embedded content]The PR person I was working with never put me on the guest list, and the show was sold out. I was devastated. I went back and forth with the girl who had the list and she just kept saying, “I don’t see your name on here!”
She wouldn’t let me in. Said there were no tickets left and that they were at capacity. I was so pissed. “Capacity?” I know they could easily fit me inside, but I understand the protocol, and she was just doing her job.
I remember swearing under my breath, turning to the side door, and walking out. On my way out I noticed a really cool poster hanging on the door of the backroom. As a big “Fuck You” to the whole situation, I took this poster off the wall, and, damn, it was a beautiful one. Now it’s become a memory of what I missed, and the reason why I decided to write about the show that got away.
The clerk could’ve let me into the backroom, the PR person could’ve made preparations, and I could’ve bought a ticket, guaranteeing my spot at the show. But that’s all in the past.
Foster The People and Grouplove were making their way through Chicago, together, and I missed it. For a music fan and completionist like myself, that’s hard to let go of. But holding onto this poster doesn’t make sense anymore. That’s why I just sold it on eBay. Enjoy!
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Foster The People & Grouplove @ Schubas Backroom: 04/02/2011on July 27, 2021 at 1:29 pm Read More »
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UPDATE: Streets are now shut down around Grant Park this week for the Lollapalooza music fest that starts Thursday and ends Sunday.
Street closures in place for LollapaloozaSun-Times Wireon July 27, 2021 at 12:09 pm Read More »
Alvin Ailey and Bill T. Jones may have a generation between them, but the two influential choreographers crossed paths at a few pivotal moments. Ailey was the one who commissioned Jones’ first work, “Fever Swap,” in 1983. A few years later in 1989, at the height of the AIDS epidemic, Jones, then famous in his own right, would create one of his most notable works and a response to the crisis: “D-Man in in the Waters.” It was also the year Ailey died at age 58 of complications from the disease.
So it’s a fateful coincidence that this summer both men are getting the spotlight in two terrific documentaries: “Ailey,” opening nationwide on Aug. 6, and “Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones and D-Man in the Waters,” which is currently in theaters.
“Ailey” director Jamila Wignot said the project found her in 2017. She’d been a fan of Ailey influential modern dance work and his company, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, but realized she didn’t know much about him beyond that. It may have been intentional on his part: Despite his fame, Ailey was a private person.
The documentary is partially framed around a new staging of a classic Ailey dance from choreographer Rennie Harris, who, like Wignot, is trying to figure out “what made Mr. Ailey Mr. Ailey.” Thankfully, Wingot made a pivotal discovery that helped inch closer to an answer: Revealing audio recordings that he conducted in the last year of his life.
“That really opened up the possibilities for the film,” Wignot said. “He revealed things that certainly were not part of his, you know, public presentation of self.”
Ailey in the recordings talks candidly about his childhood in a segregated, impoverished Texas in the Depression, the deep wounds of a non-existent relationship with his father, the transformative experience of seeing a pioneer like Katherine Dunham dance and his own sexual awakening, which for him was a beautiful experience.
“There’s so few in particular Black institutions that survive their founders and it’s an extraordinary institution in that regard,” Wignot said. “But I wanted people to remember this kind of deeply passionate, vulnerable, sensitive person who is at the heart of it and whose presence you still feel.”
The Bill T. Jones project came about differently. Co-director Rosalynde LeBlanc, who herself had been a member of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, was restaging “D-Man in the Waters” in 2012 and felt that it wasn’t coming alive.
“That question as to why the dance was so elusive was really what fueled the project,” LeBlanc said. “Originally, I wanted to put the piece in its historical context. The idea was to create an immersive experience for the students so they could understand the birth of the piece.”
In 1988, Zane, who was Jones’s co-director and romantic partner, died of AIDS complications. While creating a new dance after the loss, based around water and waves, one of the dancers in the company Demian Acquavella (D-Man) was also diagnosed with AIDS. In this context, the dance took on a different tenor and became about survival in the face of an epidemic.
LeBlanc enlisted noted documentary cinematographer Tom Hurwitz for help creating the piece. But soon they realized their small project had evolved into something bigger and distinct from the other documentaries about Jones.
“I’ve been doing this for a really long time and this was certainly one of the very, very best set of interviews I’ve ever shot in my life,” Hurwitz said. “The dancers, their experience was so rich, their ability to convey it was so rich, the accessibility of their emotions and just their personalities were so vibrant that it really felt to me like this was a big story. The story that they were telling was so much bigger than just this simple dance. It was a story that really talked about the role of art in the human experience and the necessity for art and community in the face of the catastrophes that befall us regularly.”
So they decided to dive in and make a feature, although it took a little longer than either thought at the time.
“He really is one of the most impactful and preeminent artists of our time,” LeBlanc said. “And if that 14-year-old-kid, a young Black boy in a class who loves to move, could see this film one day and be like ‘being a choreographer is an option?’…that would be incredibly gratifying to me.”
It was a really interesting turn of events for the Chicago Blackhawks over the weekend. They made as big of trade as any team in the National Hockey League so far this summer when they acquired Seth Jones from the Columbus Blue Jackets.
It is a trade that allows the Hawks to add someone that is going to be their new number one defenseman for a long time. They gave him an eight-year contract extension upon his arrival at 9.5 million per on top of the one year he had left.
When you can’t outrun your past, one option is to face it with your own poetics. That’s the approach King Woman front woman Kris Esfandiari takes when confronting the Biblical archetypes branded on her psyche while coming of age in a Charismatic Christian family that practiced speaking in tongues and at-home exorcisms. On Celestial Blues, the follow-up to King Woman’s 2017 debut album, Created in the Image of Suffering, Esfandiari and her bandmates weave tales of doom, woe, and resurrection with gilded threads of metal and shoegaze. But Celestial Blues is far less vehement and dirgelike than its predecessor, in keeping with Esfandiari’s established knack for reinventing herself. The prolific vocalist has spent the past few years cycling through artistic identities, including the breakcore endeavor NGHTCRWLR, the doomgaze solo project Miserable, and the bleak R&B duo Sugar High. Celestial Blues documents Esfandiari’s final severing of her religious ties, but its theme of redefinition and reckoning doesn’t always extend to the music–that is, King Woman don’t completely abandon the formula that made them one of heavy music’s most celebrated newcomers half a decade ago. Joseph Raygoza’s drumming is still brick thick and brutish; Peter Arendorf’s riffs still fill each track like a flood of godly proportions; and Esfandiari’s vocals still carry an air of melodrama. The band’s creative renewal is most apparent on lead single “Morning Star,” which backtracks Lucifer’s fall from grace through the lens of Esfandiari’s own incredulity (“The next thing I knew / I was falling fast / Lightning hit my wings / Heard thunder crack”). “Boghz” showcases the range of Esfandiari’s elastic voice, which oscillates among syncopated sprechgesang, thunderous barks, and breathy lulls. Themes of resurrection weave throughout “Coil” (“Five wounds you rape me / But I resurrect”) and “Golgotha” (“The snake eats its tail / We return again / To this hell”), foreshadowing Esfandiari’s personal metamorphosis. Celestial Blues closes with “Paradise Lost,” a feather-light canticle based on John Milton’s epic poem, which Esfandiari received as a gift while plotting the album’s creative direction. Her vocals are so mumbled they’re nearly indecipherable, a siren song almost buried beneath plucky guitar and cymbal thrums. The mythologies retold by Celestial Blues have roots in trauma, but King Woman still startle with moments of nonplussed beauty, leaving you somewhere between exorcism and ecstasy. v
A man was shot while driving on the Dan Ryan Expressway near 61st Street Monday night, but a 4-year-old in the backseat was not harmed, according to officials.
The man, 32, was traveling outbound about 8:30 p.m. when someone in a dark-colored Dodge Charger began shooting at his car, Chicago police said.
He was struck in the leg and exited the expressway near the Chicago Skyway, where he stopped for help at the toll booth, police said.
He was transported to the University of Chicago Medical Center where his condition was stabilized, police said.
No one was in custody.
Aaron Rodgers is returning to the Green Bay Packers organization for the upcoming NFL season. However, at the looks of his newly restructured contract, the Chicago Bears should be able to benefit in the future.
Rodgers’s contract is extremely uncanny. No other athlete in the world could create a contract like this. Adam Schefter reported multiple stipulations to Rodgers’s redrafted contract for the upcoming season.
In 1981, a Southern Illinois University student from Naperville scored an interview with Chicago-based improv legend Del Close for the SIU radio station, and lucky for us, that student kept the cassette tape all these years and we hear snippets from it and recollections from the SIU student in the fascinating documentary “For Madmen Only.”
Says the former student: “He had just quit Second City the day before, and he had just quit cocaine a few weeks before and he’s changing his life now, and he would love to talk about that.”
With the tape rolling, Close says, “You got any dope by any chance” and the student says no and Close says, “F—. Oh well, bleep that out,” and off we go, with Close revealing he went to a witch’s coven to quit coke and, as always with Del Close, the story might be true or could be utterly false or most likely it was somewhere in between.
Oh, and by the way: That college student was one Bob Odenkirk, who along with Tina Fey and Tim Meadows and Jane Lynch and George Wendt and many, many others sing the praises of the mercurial madman who has influenced generations of comedians and actors with his revolutionary takes on improvisational theater. The director Heather Ross implements a variety of bold and creative tools to tell Close’s amazing story, including the use of comic-book-style graphics and staging some scenes with actors, with James Urbaniak doing a fabulous job of portraying Close and talented comedic performers such as Patton Oswalt, Matt Walsh and Lauren Lapkus contributing sharp supporting turns. The result is a comprehensive doc-biopic that works as an introduction to Del Close for those who might not know the name — but the comedy nerds who revere Close will certainly be geeking out over this deep dive into the man’s life and times.
As the late Robin Williams puts it in an old clip, “The cult of Del, it should be the church of Del.”
With the wonderful character actress Michaela Watkins providing narration, “For Madmen Only” takes us through Close’s troubled childhood in Kansas, with Close telling the story of how when he was just a boy, his father told him to hand him a glass of water and dad downed the entire glass — but it wasn’t water, it was battery acid. As with so many of Close’s stories (he claimed to have told L. Ron Hubbard to form a religion), that wasn’t exactly how his father committed suicide, but throughout his adult life, Close indulged in hyperbole as well as every drink and drug imaginable.
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We follow Close’s career he teams up with Mike Nichols and Elaine May and the Compass Players improv group in St. Louis in the 1950s, moves to Chicago in 1960, spends time with the San Francisco-based improv team the Committee later in the 1960s — and then settles more or less permanently in Chicago in 1972, where he worked at Second City for years before teaming up with the great Charna Halpern at ImprovOlympic, later iO. (Halpern is a wonderful interview subject in the doc, adding sanity and humor and perspective to the story.)
“For Madmen Only” chronicles Close’s breakdown and his stay at the psychiatric ward of Cook County Hospital — not the first time Close “went temporarily nuts,” as he puts it. And for all of Close’s breakthrough success as an improv pioneer and the incredible roster of greats he mentored, he lamented, “I’m the one that stays behind while the others go on to do movies and television.” As with so many comedic geniuses, Close was a dark and deeply troubled soul — but some 20 years after his death, his acolytes still have us laughing.
