Chicagoreader Com News Today

This week's featured gig poster was created for an outdoor food, drag, and music carnival by Paul Octavious and Aaron Lowell Denton.

Robert Ford and Trent Adkins shaped the bold, subversive, gossipy, funny, deeply engaged voice of Thing, felled by the AIDS pandemic in 1993. Sign up for our newsletters Subscribe Thing published ten issues between November 1989 and summer 1993. Zine cofounder Trent Adkins appears on the cover of the third issue, pictured here at lower left. Amber Huff In February 2021, dance-musi...

Last week the Chicago Philharmonic Society announced the appointment of a new executive director, Terell M. Johnson. A classically trained musician as well as an administrator, hell succeed another musician-turned-administrator, Donna Milanovich, whos retiring after ten years in that job—and more as a Chi Phil flutist and board member. They were both in the limited audience at the Harris Theater Saturday night for a revelatory recording session that combined the Chicago Philharmonic Orchestra...

Queer to the Left was active from the late 90s through 2005. courtesy Therese Quinn Heading into the 21st century, queer activism was at a crossroads. While the AIDS epidemic was far from over for the millions of people who lacked access to adequate health care and could not afford expensive antiretroviral therapy—which cost thousands of dollars a year even wit...

Photo by Fernando Rodriguez Born in Davao in the Philippines and raised in Des Plaines, Dee Alaba began dancing at the age of four. A graduate of Columbia College, she currently performs with the Seldoms, Loud Bodies, and Erin Kilmurray. She has also appeared in New Dances with Thodos Dance Chicago and DanceWorks Chicago, and with the Cambrians. Here, Alaba reflects on her experiences as a transfemme danc...

click to enlarge Neighbors worry that the sale of the Weiss Hospital parking lot would signal the closure of the hospital itself. Community members are sounding the alarm at Weiss Memorial Hospital’s plans to sell a surface parking lot, which they say could signal a plan to shutter the Uptown hospital that boasts a novel surgery center for transgender patients. Dallas-based real estate firm Lincoln Property Company has a deal to buy the parking lot at the corner of Wilson Ave...

The Chicago DJ and producer has used tens of thousands of dollars in grants to travel the world, exporting the city’s sounds and importing new influences.

Hide take their stark sounds to a far darker and more malevolent space. On the new Interior Terror, multi-instrumentalist Seth Sher (Coughs, Ga’an) and singer and visual artist Heather Gabel don’t attempt anything particularly complex or detailed, but they more than compensate with punishing volume and powerful messages—they use Gabel’s voice, field recordings, and a smokestack of electronic hardware (including a skipping Depeche Mode CD) to craft brutal social commentaries. The aim of...

In his tragically short life, he careened through rockabilly, monster magazines, pulp novels, and exploitation films—including Ray Dennis Steckler’s Rat Pfink a Boo Boo.

One McDonald’s chain in Chicago received half a million dollars in forgivable federal loans. Then came complaints of COVID-19 safety failures and a deadly outbreak.