Videos

Sean Conley managed to kill THREE birds with one stoneBob Abramson October 6, 2020 at 11:41 pm

The Chicago Board of Tirade

Sean Conley managed to kill THREE birds with one stone

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Sean Conley managed to kill THREE birds with one stoneBob Abramson October 6, 2020 at 11:41 pm Read More »

Shoot some stuff and save President Teddy in Bartlow’s Dread Machine!Jessi Moenon October 7, 2020 at 12:45 am

Jessi’s Media Review – A Chicks Point of View!

Shoot some stuff and save President Teddy in Bartlow’s Dread Machine!

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Shoot some stuff and save President Teddy in Bartlow’s Dread Machine!Jessi Moenon October 7, 2020 at 12:45 am Read More »

Watch tonite in the Chicago Metro N & NW Suburbs & City Ex- cop & state rep John Anthony debate race, police conduct & O’Brien v. Foxx w/Berkowitz on Cable & webJeff Berkowitzon October 7, 2020 at 1:21 am

Public Affairs with Jeff Berkowitz

Watch tonite in the Chicago Metro N & NW Suburbs & City Ex- cop & state rep John Anthony debate race, police conduct & O’Brien v. Foxx w/Berkowitz on Cable & web

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Watch tonite in the Chicago Metro N & NW Suburbs & City Ex- cop & state rep John Anthony debate race, police conduct & O’Brien v. Foxx w/Berkowitz on Cable & webJeff Berkowitzon October 7, 2020 at 1:21 am Read More »

Pool Holograph give their dreamy indie-rock a sharp new clarityLeor Galilon October 6, 2020 at 5:00 pm

Singer-guitarist Wyatt Grant launched Pool Holograph as a solo endeavor a decade ago, and around 2015 he brought in a few friends from Loyola University to turn it into a band: Zach Stuckmann on bass and brothers Jake and Paul Stolz of local indie rockers Discus on drums and guitar, respectively. Pool Holograph became a collaborative outfit, with everybody pitching in on songwriting, and they’ve remained active even though Grant left Chicago earlier this year for Asheville, North Carolina. As he told local music site Chicago Creatives in 2019, Pool Holograph thrive on the process of forcing everyone’s disjointed ideas to hang together: “We don’t aim to meet in the middle,” he said. “We like the tension of a new band image bubbling up and us having to deal with it.” Pool Holograph’s dreamy indie rock feeds off this friction; a little tension goes a long way to keep their sleepy melodies from feeling directionless or indolent. On 2017’s Transparent World, the band drape their melodies in a thin sheet of reverb, but on the new Love Touched Time and Time Began to Sweat (Sunroom) they largely abandon that aesthetic in favor of a new clarity. This has the beneficial side effect of throwing their unexpected flourishes–the country twang on “For Years,” the acerbic postpunk rhythms on “Medieval Heart”–into sharper relief. v

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Pool Holograph give their dreamy indie-rock a sharp new clarityLeor Galilon October 6, 2020 at 5:00 pm Read More »

‘Fete Galante’ invites us to celebrate lavishlyS. Nicole Laneon October 6, 2020 at 4:10 pm

Gwendolyn Zabicki began thinking up the exhibition “Fete Galante” while in Paris in 2016 after seeing Antoine Watteau’s Pilgrimage to Cythera at the Louvre. The paintings in that part of the museum are “joyful and beautiful and the first group of paintings in the museum that felt really modern to me,” says Zabicki. After visiting the museum, she began to read up on the artist Watteau and the fete galante. In Pilgrimage to Cythera, figures dressed in lavish clothing are celebrating love, as many cupids fly around the sky, and others are seen flirting with one another in the grass. A statue of Venus, the goddess of sexual love, is seen in the right hand corner with the presence of little cupids urging couples to play together in the hazy landscape.

A fete galante is a depiction of a courtship party painting most properly in the French Academy during the 1700s. There are various types of scenes–either in natural grassy hills or in masquerades in a large hall–that comprise the painting style. Watteau’s painting style would ultimately go out of fashion–one of his paintings was even used for target practice. The public saw his work as flippant and meaningless.

Zabicki dealt with her own contentions from galleries. “I think that the idea of the fete galante felt too frivolous for many people, considering the work being done by other artists to address the nightmare of our current political reality, social injustice, and income inequality (not to mention the pandemic that we are living through). But I still insist that this is an important show,” she says. After several years of proposing the show, it’s finally found a home at Heaven Gallery. She urges the idea that folks need an occasional break. “All I want to do is go to a party or an art opening and be packed in a room with my friends, but that will have to wait until it is safe to do so. In the meantime, we can remember that we will see our friends again someday, there will be dinner parties and flirtation and joy.”

“Fete Galante”–the exhibition and the painting style– celebrates the satins, elaborate feasts, flirtations on the dance floors, and whispering sweet nothings. It’s a celebration of many things that we’ve lost in the past six months.

Brooklyn-based painter Tess Michalik has been painting for 15 years. “As a person that grew up in an unstable environment with PTSD and mountainous anxiety, [I have] a paint practice that feeds my desire to harness and embrace and master such feelings,” she says.

Her draw toward memorials, shrines, celebrations, and rituals that bring joy is exemplified in her paintings. Her work, referencing cake and parties, is a reflection of a desire to “want to show the good, find the good, [and] turn my nervous mania into a presentable light and cuddly kind of thing.” She says she wants to “package it as something pleasant,” when under the surface she is dealing with anxiety. The thickness of the oil paints is reminiscent of cake or pastry, which creates a whimsical celebratory feel. I want to lick her paintings. Buttercream Daydream teases the viewer to stick their finger in the center and try and taste. Let me eat cake! Michalik calls herself a “paint pig.” She says she’s always covered in it, “always gotta mix up huge piles of paint and slather it onto a surface.” And her works illustrate this process with detailed layers of inch-thick paint that appear too scrumptious to look away.

The whimsical nature of her works references the entire theme of the exhibition. The pieces are intimate and tangible. “I have drawn upon themes of sex in the past and have made paintings about touch, courtship, physical intimacy–I feel like this is all the same realm of thought, just packaged in a different image. It is still the sensation of physical sexual energy, you’re just not looking at naked bodies. They are physical/textural manifestations of sensations, sculpted out of paint that is reminiscent of flesh or a seductive piece of cake that was in the room at Versailles where people flirted in masquerade.”

Zabicki found several of the artists on Instagram, some on Painters Table, and a few she knows from the Chicago art scene. I’m immediately drawn to Power Couple by Katarina Janeckova. A figure is facing the viewer with their ass up in the air as a creature rests on her backside reading a book or examining her body–I’m not entirely sure. It’s the most overtly sexual piece in the exhibition with others more subtle and soft, like Karen Azarnia’s In the Garden II showing two figures holding hands.

Many of the works have similar details that tie them together, like Aubrey Levinthal’s Zoom Birthday Party and Aglae Bassens’s Sweet Nothings, which both include cherries. Fodder by Melissa Murray and Socially Distanced Picnic by Sophie Treppendahl are picnic scenes, each displaying a large spread of food eaten in the sun. They all look at human connection, intimacy, and the thrill of those interactions. I leave the show wanting to hug my friends. I want to dance under a disco ball. But, for now, I’m content at seeing the party come alive on the walls of a gallery. v

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‘Fete Galante’ invites us to celebrate lavishlyS. Nicole Laneon October 6, 2020 at 4:10 pm Read More »

A load of CrapDmitry Samarovon October 6, 2020 at 4:40 pm

Crap is a fun and easy word to say. But what crap is is a lot harder to pin down. In Crap: A History of Cheap Stuff in America (University of Chicago Press), Wendy Woloson’s heavily researched book devoted to the many objects and ideas under that moniker, she does her level best to find a definition but doesn’t quite nail it down. But it’s not for lack of trying. Crap, it turns out, is an elusive target.

In broad terms–as her subtitle indicates–the book is a history of cheap stuff in America. Woloson traces the rise of five and dime stores like Woolworth’s to show the change in societal preferences from craftsmanship to thrift. Badly-made products flew off the shelves if the public was convinced they were getting a bargain. By making everything one price there was an illusion that one was making a smart choice, whereas, in fact, the actual value of individual products became muddled. The various deceptive psychological means employed to get consumers to loosen their purse strings are richly illustrated throughout the book with reproductions of newspaper ads going back to the 19th century. No claim was too outrageous if it might lead to turning a buck. Turn on the news in 2020 and the consequences of the success of this hucksterism will be obvious to a blind man.

Woloson makes some compelling discoveries and connections, especially where etymology is concerned. ” . . . ‘fancy’ was an early modern contraction of ‘fantasy’ and a more refined descriptor than ‘variety.’ ‘Fancy’ meant, according to one account, ‘a great variety of ‘good- for-nothing’ things which women are so fond of purchasing.” In this way and myriad others salesmen duped the public into wanting and buying things they often didn’t need. Woloson references Marx’s idea of commodity fetishism to explain this phenomenon. It’s quite a trick to get someone to buy something bad when they know it’s bad and to do so happily. “Even the most pedestrian of things–fly swatters, calendars, ballpoint pens–have helped kindle warm feelings between sellers and buyers, creating loyalty.”

Giveaways and promotional swag were two other ways to ensnare shoppers, or more accurately, marks, because so much of this business resembles a cheap carnival midway. Many ads devoted the majority of the space to “premiums” and other add-ons rather than the product itself. “All of it was crap, but it was free crap, which was all that mattered.” Somehow the feeling of getting something for nothing made one forget what they actually paid for. “But wait! There’s more!” is a familiar refrain from an untold number of late-night infomercials. What you get isn’t nearly as important as the promise of “more.”

“Giftware” is a near perfect encapsulation of the marketeer’s dark art–a compound word in which the two components are at odds to the point of becoming oxymoronic. An unholy marriage of frivolity and function. By selling something which has no practical use and is labeled “collectible,” the merchant implies that his product is desirable and aspirational, while not actually pegged to any measurable value or currency. Beanie Babies, Precious Moments, and Hummel figurines all promised enchantment and prestige, yet often goosed sales by artificial scarcity. The last Beanie Baby was a black bear named “The End,” but there’s no end to the con. Ebay, Craigslist, Amazon, and Etsy are drowning in worthless treasures.

Woloson shows how far back some gimmicks go. Chia Pet, for instance, has an ancestor named Murro the Wonder Pig back in Germany. “In the first decade of the twentieth century, ingenious novelty manufacturers realized they could turn the literal act of watching grass grow into a profitable product line.” But are trinkets, intentional collectibles, cheap wares, gadgets, and commemorative coins all part of the same thing?

If a reader were to take a shot every time Woloson used “crap” in her book, they’d die of cirrhosis halfway through. Woloson is nothing if not thorough, giving a dozen examples where two or three might have sufficed. She clearly loved doing the research and couldn’t help sharing, but at times the litany of lies, scams, and tricks becomes tiresome. But no matter how much crap she lets fly, I couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that all crap is not the same. It’s not really the products themselves that are at the heart of her book: it’s the schemes and schemers who lighten our wallets which is its true subject. They’ve figured out a million ways to take us and as many to make us feel happy to be taken. We’re covered in it but keep asking for more. v

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A load of CrapDmitry Samarovon October 6, 2020 at 4:40 pm Read More »

Second City is looking for a buyerDeanna Isaacson October 7, 2020 at 12:00 am

Yes, And . . . Second City is for sale!

It was announced today that the iconic comedy company is on the block, for only the second time in its 60-year history.

The longtime leader in improv and sketch comedy performance and education, with theaters in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Toronto, Second City has expanded over the years into television production (SCTV) and touring companies, as well as business services; it now serves 25,000 students and “hundreds of Fortune 1000 clients.”

There’s been some recent upheaval, however. In addition to the pandemic shutdown, which has temporarily put a stop to live performance at its Chicago and Los Angeles theaters, longtime producer, co-owner, and former CEO Andrew Alexander abruptly left the staff in June, after accusations of institutional racism surfaced. Alexander took responsibility and apologized as he exited, and Anthony LeBlanc was immediately named to replace him as interim executive producer.

“I have had an extraordinary 47-year run,” Alexander says in today’s announcement, but “it is time for a new generation with fresh ideas to take the company to the next level.” President Steve Johnston touts the company’s “green shoots” and a growth plan that “leverages Second City’s unique position in the comedy ecosystem . . . to capture market share in the short to medium term, as well as accelerate a transition toward digital delivery of programming, which is already off to a great start.”

The sale is being handled by Los Angeles-based investment bank Houlihan Lokey.

Founded in 1959 by Bernie Sahlins, Paul Sills, and Howard Alk, Second City was sold by Sahlins in 1985 to Alexander and investor Len Stuart. (Alexander had become head of Second City’s Toronto outpost in 1974, and Stuart, who died in 2016, first came on board as an investor in SCTV.) Its unequaled roster of alumni include Alan Arkin, John Belushi, Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Tina Fey, Bill Murray, Amy Poehler, Gilda Radner, and Joan Rivers.

Yes, And so many more. v






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Second City is looking for a buyerDeanna Isaacson October 7, 2020 at 12:00 am Read More »

Matt Nagy: Bears WR Anthony Miller ‘playing really good football’ despite dip in snapsJason Lieseron October 6, 2020 at 10:41 pm

The Bears are still waiting on wide receiver Anthony Miller’s breakout.

This is the second year in a row that coaches came into a season promising he’d be new and improved after two seasons of holding their “breath hoping that he was gonna go to the right place,” as position coach Mike Furrey put it. They’ve said they couldn’t trust him to know the playbook and be in the right spot, but now he’s past that problem.

Is he, though? Miller’s playing time has dipped from 64% of the snaps last season to 52% through the first four games of this one, and he is consistently playing slightly less than rookie Darnell Mooney.

Bears coach Matt Nagy defended Miller by saying his decline in snaps is due mainly to the Bears playing multiple tight ends more often.

“He’s definitely getting better, week by week, year by year — that part I love,” Nagy said. “I think he’s playing really good football right now.”

That depends on how he defines good.

To Miller’s credit, he had the game-winning touchdown catches against the Lions and Falcons. But he has just nine receptions for 133 yards overall, had an episode with Mitch Trubisky in the opener in which one of them had the play wrong and the ball sailed incomplete in the end zone and, regardless of how Nagy frames it, coaches find playing time for guys who produce.

Without Miller or someone else stepping up, the Bears find themselves again having no consistent receiving option other than Allen Robinson.

Last season, no one but Robinson hit 80 yards receiving in a game until Miller did it on Thanksgiving. This season, Robinson has more than double the yardage per game (82.8) than the next player, Mooney at 36.3.

Miller is supposed to be that clear No. 2, but if he doesn’t get on track, there’s little chance the Bears will be interested in talking about a contract extension going into the final season of his rookie deal. And that would make him another in a string of costly draft misses on offense by general manager Ryan Pace.

After whiffing on wide receiver Kevin White (No. 8 overall), outside linebacker Leonard Floyd (No. 9 overall), quarterback Mitch Trubisky (No. 2 overall) and tight end Adam Shaheen (No. 45 overall) in the first and second rounds, Pace traded a fourth- and second-round pick to the Patriots to take Miller 51st overall.

He was the sixth receiver selected that year and ranks eighth among his peers in yards (1,212), seventh in receptions (94) and fourth in touchdown catches (11).

That’s respectable standing within his class, but Mooney’s overachievement outshines it. He was the 25th receiver picked this year and ranks fifth in catches and seventh in yards so far.

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Matt Nagy: Bears WR Anthony Miller ‘playing really good football’ despite dip in snapsJason Lieseron October 6, 2020 at 10:41 pm Read More »

Replay Lincoln Park Launches Haunted Drive Thru and Stranger Things Pop Up PatioAlicia Likenon October 5, 2020 at 8:17 pm

Spooky season is here, people! Although many Halloween events will likely be canceled thanks to COVID (no trick-or-treating, parades, or parties), our favorite local arcade bar has gotten creative in quarantine. Replay Lincoln Park has officially transformed their back alley into a Haunted Drive-Thru and built a Stranger Things Pop Up Patio! Get all your thrills and chills while keeping your distance and staying safe. Here’s what you can expect.

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The Alley of Darkness

Experience a hair-raising, blood-curdling corridor filled with demons, zombies and terrifying creatures! When you arrive, you’ll watch a quick drive-in flick to “set the scene” and up the ante. You’ll then be asked to put your car in park for about a half hour. From there, expect to see all sorts of wicked, horrifying characters, insane sound effects, grotesque props, and fake blood. Yes, your car will get sprayed with fake blood. Just a heads up, you won’t be able to exit your car at any point during the experience. So buckle up and prepare for goosebumps! 

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The Nitty Gritty, Creepy Crawly Details

Replay is located at 2833 North Sheffield Avenue, Chicago, IL. All ages are welcome and you’ll need to book a reservation for $75 per car. If you don’t have a set of wheels, no problem. The folks at Replay are offering up cars for an extra $25. Get your reservations in ASAP, the Alley of Darkness will be dishing out scares until October 31st between 5 PM and 10:40 PM every night. Eek!

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View the Best Oktoberfest Bars in the City

Need something to attend after Replay in Lincoln Park? Here are some good Oktoberfest stops to get in the spirit.

View the Best Oktoberfest Bars in Chicago

Replay Lincoln Park
Photo Credit: Replay Facebook

Stranger Things Pop Up Patio

After you’ve properly screamed your face off, head to the Stranger Things Pop Up Patio to knock back a few cocktails. Oh and you might see Chief Hopper’s Chevrolet Blazer and a Demogorgon or two. $30 per person gets you a table for one hour, 2 drinks of your choosing: a signature shot or drinks from their themed cocktail menu, any of their ales, wine, canned cocktails and more. Their drink specialities include festive titles like “What About Barb?” “The Upside Down,” and “11 Special.” You can also snag a custom Stranger Things t-shirt for $20 (sizes XS to XL). Advance tickets are sold out but walk-ins are welcome. 

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👹 The Upside Down is coming to Replay Lincoln Park this Halloween! 🎃 An all new Stranger Things inspired outdoor patio experience, with new drinks, photo-ops, food items and more! With iconic locations from all three season like Scoops Ahoy🍦 Joyce’s living room, an 80s arcade with games, and of course, under the train tracks…the UPSIDE DOWN. This will be a socially distanced, outdoor experience, and masks 😷 are required! Stay tuned for themed events like trivia, costume contests, and more! Tickets are not required but HIGHLY recommended since we will sell out!! We will announce walk-up availability daily, but it will be VERY limited! Tickets come with an hour reservation, two themed cocktails, and a shot! Those who purchase tickets for guests under 21 can opt out of the drink package for pop-up themed t-shirts instead, sizes ranging XS-XL. All ages before 6pm. 21+ all other times. **ALL TICKET SALES ARE FINAL. IN THE EVENT OF RAIN/BAD WEATHER YOU MAY RESCHEDULE YOUR TIME** Purchase tickets here: https://strangerpatio.ticketbud.com . . . . #replaylincolnpark #replay #arcade #arcadebar #chicago #chicagobar #strangerthings #80s #retro #lincolnpark #lakeview #halloween #halloween2020 #sociallydistanced #games #videogames #pinball

A post shared by Replay Lincoln Park (@replaylincolnpark) on Sep 25, 2020 at 1:38pm PDT

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Featured Image Credit: Replay Pop Up on Facebook

 
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Replay Lincoln Park Launches Haunted Drive Thru and Stranger Things Pop Up PatioAlicia Likenon October 5, 2020 at 8:17 pm Read More »