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A former bank in Lincoln Park is housing an incredible exhibit about AIDS
“Art AIDS America Chicago” is a massive overview of artworks about the virus. A shuttered branch of MB Financial Bank sits on the northeast corner of Fullerton and Halsted. It's a bland, corporate,...
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Long Way North strikes a blow for 2-D animation in a 3-D marketplace
Rémi Chayé's French-Danish feature has height, width, and plenty of depth. Early in my tenure at this paper, a coworker told me, "Reader readers are seldom breeders." Like the opening words of a...
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Silence isn’t un-Scorsese—it’s very Scorsese
The director’s latest is cerebral, stoic, and tranquil, but it still shares much in common with his other films. Critics have compared Silence, Martin Scorsese's latest drama, to his spiritually...
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Anker is yet another compelling evolution of the Publican brand
The latest offshoot of the Publican is like the others in that it’s unlike the others. There's an arresting dish served at Publican Anker, the latest offshoot of One Off Hospitality's surging Publican...
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Creatures invade 1960s Chicago in My Favorite Thing Is Monsters
Emil Ferris’s new graphic novel depicts the spooky imagination of a ten-year-old girl. Local artist and author Emil Ferris's My Favorite Thing is Monsters is a knotty, richly drawn graphic novel that...
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There’s not a single WASP penis in the pants of Men on Boats
American Theater Company shoots the Colorado River in this drama set in 1869. In 1869 a one-armed Civil War veteran named John Wesley Powell led a party of explorers down the Green and Colorado...
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Western Exhibitions inaugurates a new space with an expansive show
The gallery’s biennial, “Underlying System Is Not Known,” is both a retrospective and an exciting glimpse of the venue’s future. Four West Loop galleries that all shared the same building on...
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Patriots Day soft-pedals the citywide lockdown that followed the Boston...
Mark Wahlberg stars as a Boston cop on the trail of two lone-wolf jihadists. Patriots Day, Peter Berg's new drama about the Boston Marathon bombing, arrives in theaters less than four years after the...
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Comedy group Preach proclaims the gospel of spoken word and improv
The comedy group Preach is hosting a fund-raiser to benefit the Metropolitan Tenants Organization. TJ Medel and Terrence "T-Baby" Carey first performed as the improv group Preach in March 2016. The...
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Hygge meets the midwest at Elske
Fine-dining power couple David and Anna Posey stake a claim on the lonely end of Randolph Street. The penultimate course among eight on the tasting menu at Elske is a forest-hued square of firm,...
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Salvation’s new Sore Loser is at just the right level of high-strung and heated
A combo of tortured and defiant, the hard-nasal wail of Salvation front man Jason Sipe is one that every angsty young punk who grew up on the streets of the 90s fantasized about. Like Cobain meets Yow...
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Moon Tooth take as many left turns as their wicked prog metal allows on...
This Long Island quartet threw down a gauntlet with their 2013 debut EP Freaks: 14 filler-free minutes of wickedly efficient prog metal. But on their debut self-released full-length, Chromaparagon,...
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Together Aisha Orazbayeva and Joe Houston play Cage, Feldman, and Wolff
Kazakhstan-born, London-based violinist Aisha Orazbayeva and British pianist Joe Houston have each found ways to reconcile contemporary classical music practice with traditional repertoire. Houston’s...
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On American Band, Drive-By Truckers dig through the country’s toxic mix of...
Few working bands embrace their southern heritage as proudly as Georgia’s Drive-By Truckers, which makes their decision to wade right through the country’s political divide all the more stunning. The...
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LA’s Tim Presley continues his collaboration with Welsh singer-songwriter...
Over the last couple of years LA underground rock fixture Tim Presley (aka White Fence) has been working regularly with beguiling Welsh singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon. In 2015 they released a...
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On Brokenlegged, Sinai Vessel front man Caleb Cordres wants a view from both...
In a recent interview with radio program cum music site the Alternative, Sinai Vessel founder and front man Caleb Cordes said his band’s brand-new full-length, Brokenlegged (Tiny Engines), is “about...
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With Get Better Lemuria helped us wipe away emo’s closed-minded pop era
During emo’s pop phase in the 2000s, pointed, unambiguous sexism was unfortunately welcome, but as the bands propagating that message began gasping their last breaths at the end of the decade, Buffalo...
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Acoustic guitarist Daniel Bachman is much more than a disciple of John Fahey
Daniel Bachman continues to see past the limitations of acoustic guitar music. He’s only 26, but he’s already waxed nearly a dozen albums (not counting side projects released under different names),...
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Though they play it safe, White Lies provide a gateway to Joy Division and...
On last October’s Friends (BMG) White Lies have almost all of the ingredients for greatness: the lean and direct rhythms of early U2, the airy synths of 154-era Wire, and the hopeful-albeit-dark...
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With his slick hooks and arrhythmic stutter, 24hrs is Atlanta to the bone
24hrs is waiting to receive plaudits like those collected by R&B-rap crossover acts Ty Dolla $ign—a frequent collaborator—and the also anonymously named Dvsn, if only because he’s as yet nowhere...
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