Spooky, scary skeletons . . . in leather? Yes, of course, says John McDevitt, kinky movie buff and film programmer of the Leather Archives and Museum’s Fetish Film Forum. Now in its second year...
https://chicagoreader.com/film/movie-feature/fetish-film-forum-kinky-horror-movie-recommendations/
Early last summer, when the Randolph Street lindens were bursting with clusters of tiny yellow-white blossoms, Callie Roach’s honeybees went crazy. Roach is the general manager at Fulton Market...
https://chicagoreader.com/food-drink/reader-bites/kaiser-tiger-rooftop-honey/
My first introduction to playwright Eboni Booth was in 2022, when Steep Theatre produced her play Paris, about a young Black woman working in a big-box store in a small Vermont town. That story c...
https://chicagoreader.com/arts-culture/theater/theater-review/primary-trust-goodman-theatre/
For anyone who wishes that spooky season could last year-round, just head to Edgewater, where Loaves & Witches is open late. The cafe serves up magical pastries and coffee alongside weekly tarot ...
https://chicagoreader.com/food-drink/food-drink-feature/loaves-and-witches-sober-cafe/
Though first produced in 1666, Molière’s The Misanthrope still feels daisy-fresh in its observations on how humans are driven by the foibles of social (or in today’s terms, parasocial) relat...
https://chicagoreader.com/arts-culture/theater/theater-review/misanthrope-forest-park-theatre/
Chicago Children’s Theatre’s latest, Milo Imagines the World, is an absolute delight. But more than that, this world premiere of a musical based on the 2021 book by Matt de la Peña (illustra...
Theatre Above the Law’s seasonal production based on fairy tales by (or collected by, more accurately) the Brothers Grimm returns for a fourth time with the same narrative framework: the storie...
https://chicagoreader.com/arts-culture/theater/theater-review/grimm-2024-theatre-above-the-law/
A few years ago I was at the 21c Museum Hotel for the first of their annual Fashion’s Night Out event, which celebrates up-and-coming designers in Chicago’s fashion scene. I was there helping...
https://chicagoreader.com/arts-culture/craft-work-maker-art/sublime-remains-av-grannan/
“The condition of living is eventually leaving.” This refrain echoes across space and time in Remember You Will Die, a kaleidoscopic science fiction novel by Chicago author Eden Robins. Struc...
https://chicagoreader.com/arts-culture/book-review/remember-you-will-die-eden-robins/
The post The Reader’s cheat sheet to the 2024 Chicago school board elections appeared first on Chicago Reader .
https://chicagoreader.com/2024-school-board-elections-guide/
The Moviegoer is the diary of a local film buff, collecting the best of what Chicago’s independent and underground film scene has to offer. The most interesting fact about myself that I save fo...
https://chicagoreader.com/film/the-moviegoer/marriage-wener-herzog-fitzcarraldo/
Occult films often link their nefarious demonic forces to marginalized people—common tropes include Indigenous graveyards, witchy women consorting with devils, evil bloodsucking ambiguously Jew...
https://chicagoreader.com/film/movie-feature/chicago-occult-horror-films-race-blackness/
The sprawling arts initiative features dozens of free and low-cost exhibits and programs throughout the city and suburbs Chicago artists and designers are on the vanguard of the visual arts world...
I can’t say this millennial was aware they were seeing a modern adaptation of a Greek tragedy (Hippolytus), but it shouldn’t have been surprising, given the fates of many of our early 2000s p...
https://chicagoreader.com/arts-culture/theater/theater-review/love-object-story-theatre/
Subtext Studio Theatre Company’s production of Omar Vicente Fernandez’s Que Te Vaya Bien marks the reunion of two actors—Nelson A. Rodriguez and Adriel Irizarry—who delivered knockout per...
Two television universes have unexpectedly collided on Chopin Theatre’s mainstage with The Golden Girls Meet the Skooby Don’t Gang: The Mystery of the Haunted Bush—a funny and raunchy new i...
David Javerbaum’s comic one-act, about God and his mysterious ways, is a delightfully contradictory show, at once a send-up of shallow TV values, a parody of bad old-old-time religion (now, sad...
https://chicagoreader.com/arts-culture/theater/theater-review/act-of-god-paramount-theatre/
Fat Jesus’s grandma is recovering from knee surgery, so she won’t be making greens next week. Ma Ma, aka Rosemary Holloway, usually makes the greens for Von Harris’s pop-ups, but as she’s...
It’s Rough House Theater’s sixth year of making immersive haunted houses and they’ve really nailed the discerning horror lover’s ideal haunted zone with House of the Exquisite Corpse IV, ...
It’s serendipitous that our Occult Issue is out on the same day as the full moon. As you know, we always publish the new issue on Thursdays so we didn’t plan it that way. Whether through magi...
https://chicagoreader.com/columns-opinion/staff-notes/a-note-on-our-occult-issue/
For better or worse, a well-crafted work of historical fiction tends to overshadow the real people and events that inspired it. English monarchs such as Richard III and Henry V are nearly insepar...
The occult is so baked into hard rock and heavy metal that you can forget that the combination was once new, misunderstood, and even feared. Black Sabbath and Mercyful Fate are often credited wit...
https://chicagoreader.com/music/jinx-dawson-coven-witchcraft-hysteria-occult/
I’ve seen too many up-close magicians to count since the onset of Chicago’s magic renaissance. But I’ve never seen any as close as I was for the magicians of the seventh Destinos: Chicago I...
Nostalgia for the mixtape—its potential for randomness and its personal touch—is the structuring factor in Ruth on the Rocks, written and performed by Ruth Guerra, directed by Ricardo Gamboa,...
By Juan Gerardo Chavez The post Miquiztli and Sabedoria appeared first on Chicago Reader .
https://chicagoreader.com/reader-partners/poetry-foundation/miquiztli-and-sabedoria/
“That it?” I ask, stepping through the metal scrapyard on Chicago’s east side. An employee in a gray hoodie nods. It’s a hot, bright October day, the sun beating down on spandex-clad cy...
https://chicagoreader.com/news-politics/von-zirngibl-remains/
In the prologue to 1994’s Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts, author Anne Llewellyn Barstow observes, “The longer I have worked on these sixteenth- and seventeenth-century ...
The Reader is available free of charge at more than 1,100 Chicago area locations. Issues are dated Thursday, and distributed Wednesday morning through Thursday night of the issue date. Some locat...
Chicago Reader Volume 54, No. 3. October 17, 2024 The post Chicago Reader Volume 54, Number 3 appeared first on Chicago Reader .
There’s some famously scary stuff at Graceland Cemetery, most notably Lorado Taft’s hulking bronze statue, Eternal Silence. It’s been spooking cemetery visitors since it was erected there i...
https://chicagoreader.com/columns-opinion/on-culture/graceland-cemetery-chicago-architecture-center/
The first time Otoman Zar-Adusht Hanish caught significant press attention was in 1904, when Emma Reusse—or Eloise, as she was sometimes called—was seen running from his temple shrieking and ...
When I get disillusioned with the state of hip-hop, it often helps to remind myself that we still have artists like Vince Staples. Then I remember that Staples and I share a birthday. The zodiac ...
https://chicagoreader.com/music/concert-preview/vince-staples-riviera-theatre/
Iowa singer-songwriter William Elliott Whitmore self-released two albums in the late 90s and early 00s, but he really burst onto the scene with his 2003 Southern Records debut, Hymns for the Hope...
https://chicagoreader.com/music/concert-preview/william-elliott-whitmore-fitzgerald/
Guitarist-singer Daniel Brady and drummer-singer Rachael Boswell formed postpunk duo the Lipschitz in Savannah, Georgia, but right from the start you could hear an affinity for midwestern rock �...
https://chicagoreader.com/music/concert-preview/the-lipschitz-empty-bottle/
Like many musicians of her generation, twentysomething Peoria singer and guitarist Emily How (aka Emily Hough) grew up enamored with Taylor Swift—her first performances were restaurant cover se...
https://chicagoreader.com/music/concert-preview/emily-how-subterranean/
Lots of performers say they’re pursuing their own path in defiance of the crowd, but Dawn Richard makes a better claim than most. The singer and songwriter came into the spotlight in 2004, when...
https://chicagoreader.com/music/concert-preview/dawn-richard-spencer-zahn-old-town-school/
I’m not surprised that Closed Sessions landed a west-coast star as big as Cypress Hill’s DJ Muggs to headline its 15th-anniversary party. The Chicago label has done impressive work not only f...
https://chicagoreader.com/music/concert-preview/closed-sessions-anniversary-avondale/
TERRIFIER 3 in wide release in theaters The post Review: Terrifier 3 appeared first on Chicago Reader .
https://chicagoreader.com/film/movie-review/review-terrifier-3/
THE SILENT HOUR in limited release in theaters, in wide release on VOD The post Review: The Silent Hour appeared first on Chicago Reader .
https://chicagoreader.com/film/movie-review/review-the-silent-hour/
SATURDAY NIGHT in wide release in theaters The post Review: Saturday Night appeared first on Chicago Reader .
https://chicagoreader.com/film/movie-review/review-saturday-night/
JOKER: FOLIE À DEUX in wide release in theaters The post Review: Joker: Folie à Deux appeared first on Chicago Reader .
https://chicagoreader.com/film/movie-review/review-joker-folie-a-deux/
HOLD YOUR BREATH streaming on Hulu The post Review: Hold Your Breath appeared first on Chicago Reader .
https://chicagoreader.com/film/movie-review/review-hold-your-breath/
In the back of Simone’s Bar on 18th Street in Pilsen, beyond cozy booths and rustic wood, a red velvet curtain seals off the private area and conceals a hidden bacchanal. The relatively small...
https://chicagoreader.com/news-politics/obscura-house-of-whoreors-burlesque/
Greg Allen opened Evanston’s newest record shop in September—just barely. In a flush of optimism, he’d put a sign in the window at 624 Grove Street declaring that Animal Records would open ...
https://chicagoreader.com/music/gossip-wolf/animal-records-stalled-dust-dungeon-siege-sadness/
This story was published by The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in America. Sign up for its newsletters here. As Chicago’s ShotSpotter microphones come down following years of...
https://chicagoreader.com/news-politics/shotspotter-cta-zeroeyes/
The impact of incarceration can be calculated in lost years of freedom, time spent away from loved ones, and missed opportunities to earn degrees and build careers. But prisons in Illinois and ac...
https://chicagoreader.com/news-politics/blocked-from-ballot-incarcerated-voting/
When the sun rose over Chicago on the first day of the 2024 Democratic National Convention, out-of-towners were undoubtedly impressed by the city’s downtown high-rises, jibaritos, and hot dogs,...
Reader senior writer Ben Joravsky riffs on the day's stories with his celebrated humor, insight, and honesty, and interviews politicians, activists, journalists and other political know-it-alls...
https://chicagoreader.com/columns-opinion/podcasts/ben-joravsky-show-podcast-episodes/
In the project 60 wrd/min art critic, writer Lori Waxman explores how art writing can serve an expanded field of artists—including those incarcerated, trying to gain visas, working to establish...
https://chicagoreader.com/arts-culture/a-look-at-the-work-of-red-line-service-artists/
I’m no expert, but I’d bet that Philadelphia dungeon-punk outfit Poison Ruïn are having more fun screwing around with medieval fantasy tropes than anybody since Monty Python went searching f...
https://chicagoreader.com/music/concert-preview/poison-ruin-empty-bottle/
Plenty has changed in Rafael Toral’s music throughout his career, but cross-fertilization and collisions of disparate methodologies have been constants. In the 1990s, the Lisbon-born artist mad...
https://chicagoreader.com/music/concert-preview/rafael-toral-elastic-arts/
While writing his second album under the name Ulna, Chicago singer-guitarist Adam Schubert contemplated his upbringing in suburban Northbrook, but the romantic dreariness that hangs over Gazebo (...
https://chicagoreader.com/music/concert-preview/adam-schubert-ulna-empty-bottle/
William Parker, Hamid Drake, and Cooper-Moore are the Heart Trio. They’ve just released their self-titled debut album on Aum Fidelity, but they have decades of shared history. Drake and Parker,...
https://chicagoreader.com/music/concert-preview/heart-trio-hungry-brain/
Chicago country eccentrics Souled American were ahead of the curve when it came to reimagining country music in the language of alternative rock. So ahead of the curve, in fact, that they seemed ...
https://chicagoreader.com/music/concert-preview/souled-american-judson-moore/
Erica Dawn Lyle’s creativity has always been fluid. Many people first heard her when she joined the reunited Bikini Kill as a touring guitarist in 2019, but she’s a longtime mainstay of punk,...
https://chicagoreader.com/music/concert-preview/erica-dawn-lyle-elastic-arts/
As I was gearing up for the Reader coverage of this year’s Destinos: Chicago International Latino Theater Festival, I received news of the death of Juan Ramirez, longtime artistic director of L...
https://chicagoreader.com/arts-culture/theater/juan-ramirez-latino-chicago-theater-company/
I was served up RICE—an art collective and curated meal series celebrating South Asian cuisine—by the magic of the Instagram algorithm. After being gifted a copy of food columnist Meera Sodh...
https://chicagoreader.com/food-drink/food-drink-feature/rice-south-asian-meal-series-art-collective/
By Casey Cereceda The post As It Always Was appeared first on Chicago Reader .
https://chicagoreader.com/reader-partners/poetry-foundation/as-it-always-was/
Sometimes I have to play the long game to get an artist’s story for the Secret History of Chicago Music. In 2011, when I got the itch to write about generation-bridging folk singer Jo Mapes, I ...
The Mourner’s Bestiary, the debut memoir of Chicago-based author and musician Eiren Caffall, weaves a complex tapestry. It details Caffall’s harrowing experience with polycystic kidney diseas...
https://chicagoreader.com/arts-culture/eiren-caffall-on-crossing-artificial-barriers/
Jazz singer Somi Kakoma is a multihyphenate talent—she’s also a composer, actor, and writer—but she’s best known for her rich, soaring voice. Born in Champaign to parents who’d come to ...
https://chicagoreader.com/music/concert-preview/somi-promontory/
“Ambulance Chase,” set in the young Old Friends gallery in Roscoe Village, memorializes a world drowning in an infinity of recombined images and information. The works on view are monuments t...
https://chicagoreader.com/arts-culture/ambulance-chase-old-friends/
Pierogi are personal for Chelsea Pickard. Once, she made a spinach-potato-parm pierogi with sun-dried tomato, peas, and Alabama white barbecue sauce, inspired by the Geraldine Fibbers song “Lil...
Chicago Reader Volume 54, No. 2. October 10, 2024 The post Chicago Reader Volume 54, Number 2 appeared first on Chicago Reader .
The company’s pioneering sustainable vertical strawberry farm allows fruit to be grown to peak quality all year round. There’s nothing like the sensation of biting into a perfectly ripe, juic...
In Leasho Johnson’s The Sea Is Another Country, a figure is hunched over, mired in a collage of color and fluid shapes. In the painting, birthed in conversation with Dionne Brand’s book A Map...
https://chicagoreader.com/arts-culture/leasho-johnson-mariane-ibrahim/
“No cloud cover,” mumbles the man behind me. It’s a sweltering Saturday at the Evanston Farmers’ Market, and we’re deep in line, a line that’s growing before my eyes—28 people, then...
https://chicagoreader.com/food-drink/reader-bites/smoked-string-cheese-the-cheese-people/
Getting off doesn’t always have to include the first video that pops up on Pornhub. In fact, turning yourself on can be more curated and more refined—and it can include your favorite celebrit...
https://chicagoreader.com/film/movie-feature/mr-man-male-nudity-onscreen-website/
The Moviegoer is the diary of a local film buff, collecting the best of what Chicago’s independent and underground film scene has to offer. I wouldn’t say the films of Michael Powell and Emer...
https://chicagoreader.com/film/the-moviegoer/powell-pressburger-thelma-schoonmaker-martin-scorsese/
Chicago jazz saxophonist and composer Isaiah Collier began writing The World Is on Fire, his new album with the Chosen Few, before COVID-19 hit the States. His approach to the music took its shap...
https://chicagoreader.com/music/gossip-wolf/isaiah-collier-world-carlile-human-kaicrewsade-yvette/
The title of Teatro Tariakuri’s latest, El Piélago de las Calamidades, translates in English as “a sea of calamities.” Alejandro Licona’s comedy takes a page from Tom Stoppard’s Rosenc...
Raven Theatre is billing its current production of Martyna Majok’s Ironbound as a Chicago premiere, but some theater fans may remember the workshop production ten years ago in Steppenwolf Theat...
https://chicagoreader.com/arts-culture/theater/theater-review/ironbound-raven-theatre/
On a platform, a scaffold indicating two towers. In one stands a worker, Elvira (Alma Pauleth), looking straight ahead. In another, a dancer (Wannapa Pimtong-Eubanks) feathered in white, a bird o...
https://chicagoreader.com/arts-culture/theater/theater-review/elvira-colectivo-el-pozo/
Each piece in Cheri Lee Charlton’s solo exhibition, “Unseen and Underserved,” is paired with a quote from literature or professional medical publications about women’s reproductive, gener...
https://chicagoreader.com/arts-culture/cheri-lee-charlton-imss/
One year after the Illinois Supreme Court upheld the Pretrial Fairness Act, which ended the use of money bond across the state, advocates gathered to celebrate its impact and discuss the next ste...
https://chicagoreader.com/news-politics/money-bond-illinois-one-year/
The Hyde Park Jazz Festival, one of the most astutely curated and organized arts events on the Chicago cultural calendar, reached its 18th year the last weekend in September. Except for one brief...
https://chicagoreader.com/music/hyde-park-jazz-festival-photo-essay/
An overdose prevention center (OPC), also referred to as an overdose prevention site, safe injection site, or supervised consumption site, is a legally sanctioned space where people can use drugs...
https://chicagoreader.com/news-politics/overdose-prevention-site-illinois/
This week’s announcement of the MacArthur Fellows (aka the “genius grants”) didn’t include any Chicago (or former Chicago) theater artists as in past years with Mary Zimmerman and David C...
https://chicagoreader.com/arts-culture/ghost-light/jeff-awards-3arts-meier-dance-divas/
The seventh Destinos: Chicago International Latino Theater Festival, kicked off this past Monday, featuring an exciting lineup of national, international, and Chicago-based performances just in t...
https://chicagoreader.com/arts-culture/theater/theater-preview/destinos-2024-latin-standards-elvira/
MEGALOPOLIS in wide release in theaters The post Megalopolis overflows with ambition appeared first on Chicago Reader .
https://chicagoreader.com/film/movie-feature/megalopolis-film-review/
On Sunday, September 8, I went to the ninth annual ZineMercado. Dozens of zinesters sold their wares from tables spread out around the green space next to Comfort Station in Logan Square. I’ve ...
https://chicagoreader.com/music/zine-fest-portable-model-hallogallo-ignorant-people-tango/
The Moviegoer is the diary of a local film buff, collecting the best of what Chicago’s independent and underground film scene has to offer. Some of the most exciting programming happening now i...
By Casey Cereceda The post Boxing Amongst Chickens appeared first on Chicago Reader .
https://chicagoreader.com/reader-partners/poetry-foundation/boxing-amongst-chickens/
The idyllic Main Street is a classic image of American ephemera. Before expressways and Cybertrucks changed landscapes, these stretches of early suburbanization forged hubs for commerce, characte...
https://chicagoreader.com/film/movie-feature/chicagoland-movie-palaces-elmhurst-history-museum/
“Life for artists in Gaza has never been easy,” says Chicago-based Palestinian designer and visual artist Linda Abdullah. Illustrating this point is Abdullah’s latest curatorial endeavor, �...
https://chicagoreader.com/arts-culture/landscapes-from-under-the-rubble-palestine-2/
MJ Lenderman is back in Chicago again. These two Thalia Hall shows take place just months after the Asheville artist’s headlining set at the Logan Square Arts Festival (and Sleeping Village sho...
https://chicagoreader.com/music/concert-preview/mj-lenderman-the-wind-thalia-hall/
Chicago Reader Volume 54, No. 1. October 3, 2024 The post Chicago Reader Volume 54, Number 1 appeared first on Chicago Reader .
Autumn is the pumpkin bread at the Common Cup. Fresh out of the oven in the morning or wrapped in plastic and marked at half price the following afternoon, with chocolate chips or protestant plai...
https://chicagoreader.com/food-drink/reader-bites/pumpkin-bread-the-common-cup/
Gina Barge-Farmer and Lee Farmer are passionate music lovers. Barge-Farmer grew up with a musician as a parent, and her husband, Lee, has DJed since he was 12 years old. “ always had this dream...
https://chicagoreader.com/food-drink/food-drink-feature/wax-vinyl-bar-ramen-shop/
This four-piece from Wuhan, China, have never been particularly subtle about taking inspiration from midwest emo icons American Football. Unlike many of their peers in the subcultural space of me...
https://chicagoreader.com/music/concert-preview/chinese-football-subterranean/
Derya Yıldırım & Grup Şimşek are an Anatolian psych-pop band with a global point of view. Formed in 2014, they include German singer and bağlama player Derya Yıldırım; two French musicia...
https://chicagoreader.com/music/concert-preview/derya-yildirim-grup-simsek-sleeping-village/
Universal Light is a new trio with deep roots in shared history. Fiddler Mike Gangloff has been part of drone deans Pelt and old-time torchbearers Black Twig Pickers since the 1990s; 12-string gu...
https://chicagoreader.com/music/concert-preview/universal-light-hungry-brain/
Chicago R&B singer Ravyn Lenae has held me in a trance for close to a decade. She impressed me with the self-released 2015 EP Moonshoes when she was still a teenager, and even in an increasingly ...
https://chicagoreader.com/music/concert-preview/ravyn-lenae-vic-theatre/
Anohni was born a wandering spirit. The British daughter of Irish parents, she relocated with her family to California in 1981 following a brief stint in Amsterdam. After graduating high school, ...
https://chicagoreader.com/music/concert-preview/anohni-the-johnsons-orchestra-hall/
As the focus on old, reused, and recycled clothes grows in the mainstream, Wicker Park’s longtime vintage and consignment stores are seeing the change happen around them. And for better or wors...
https://chicagoreader.com/news-politics/vintage-stores-wicker-park/
REZ BALL streaming on Netflix The post Review: Rez Ball appeared first on Chicago Reader .
https://chicagoreader.com/film/movie-review/review-rez-ball/
DAAAAAAL! opening 10/11 at the Music Box Theatre The post Review: Daaaaaalí! appeared first on Chicago Reader .
https://chicagoreader.com/film/movie-review/review-daaaaaali/
Northwestern University president Michael Schill fared better than some of his predecessors when he went into the lion’s den of a hearing on anti-Semitism on college campuses by the House Commi...
https://chicagoreader.com/columns-opinion/on-culture/steven-thrasher-medill-northwestern-university/
Everything changed the day Jon Anleu first made pupusas with heirloom masa. “I brought my brother and sister over, and we all sat down and ate,” he says. “They just looked at each other lik...
“The Deep Element,” on view at Patron, is Alice Tippit’s second solo presentation with the gallery. Comprised of oil paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, it is a hopelessly pat exhibi...