With the world’s sixth-largest freshwater lake at our fingertips, Chicago’s cup runneth over with bragging rights. Climate migration is predicted for the Second City, with hordes of people from out west tapping into our water privilege: our Great, and fragile, Lake. But currently, in Middle America, there’s a city running out of water. No, it’s […]
Author Archives: S. Nicole Lane
Posted inCity Life
Surviving rat poisoning, as a rat
When a beloved family pet finds poison intended for rodent invaders, a handful of local exotic animal hospitals can help save them.
Posted inArts & Culture
‘Black Light Cinema Project’ brings film to the forefront
“Black Light Cinema Project” opened July 7 at the South Side Community Art Center with a focus on belonging, home, archival materials, and the self. The topic of identity saturates both galleries, although with different content, allowing them to juxtapose one another while working in unison. The Center’s 1893 mansion, a former home in the […]
Posted inFilm
Review: H.I.M.
Anthony Bawn’s H.I.M. follows Damien (Brandon Karson), a heartbroken college student, and his cousin, Kendall (Rahim Brazil), who finds a romance with a church boy, rocking his relationship with his mother. The film opens with a harsh conversation between Kendall and his friend—two Black gay men in the closet—where Kendall challenges his sexuality and experience […]
Posted inFilm
South of Roosevelt screens films at south-side brewery
With a projector, a screen, chairs, and drinks, Whiner Beer Co.’s garden will turn into a moviegoing oasis for south-side filmmakers.
Posted inCity Life
Brick by brick
Will Quam found his love of bricks by accident. While working as an itinerant theater teacher in Chicago, he would travel around the city for work, and as he traveled, he started to notice Chicago’s bricks. “Before 2016 if you’d have asked me what a brick looks like, I would have said, ‘red,’ and I […]
Posted inFilm
Geoffrey Baer finds ‘gems all over Chicagoland’
Emmy Award-winning host and producer Geoffrey Baer takes folks on an adventure in a program premiering Tuesday, March 7, at 7 PM on WTTW called The Most Beautiful Places in Chicago.
Posted inFilm
Chicago’s 90-year-old film treasure
The nation’s oldest and longest-running college film society is located right under our noses on Chicago’s south side at the University of Chicago.
Posted inArts & Culture
Down the stairs and into “Dreams & Delusions”
“Not touching but joined in astonishment as two cuts lie parallel in the same flesh,” writes Anne Carson in the 1998 novel, Autobiography of Red. Breathing new life, ripping parts apart—it’s the painful, heart-wrenching reality of being alive, of being absolutely anything at all. This is the work of Finnish artist Kristoffer Ala-Ketola, whose first […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The body in focus
While living alone in the woods of northern California at the start of 2020, Lilli Carré started learning chess. Like many folks deep into the pandemic, she took up a new hobby. While trying to draw inspiration for her work, she incorporated her new vehicle for communication when all touch and connection were lost. Carré’s […]
Posted inFilm
The 17th annual porn film festival is back in person
The long-running porn festival HUMP! Fest (organized by Chicago Reader sex columnist Dan Savage) made its way to the Music Box last weekend after being canceled last year.
Posted inArts & Culture
Are neon signs really enough?
There’s a young person smiling, posing—hand on their hip—in front of a lit-up sign that reads: “EMPOWER WOMEN.” It intermittently flashes to include ED, making it “EMPOWERED.” The photo is snapped, the couple walks on. I’ve just entered Andrea Bowers’s retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Since the 90s, Bowers has been making […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Get on Your Knees is about more than your average blow job
There’s more to fellatio than just a climax. It’s absolutely frightening, holding something that fragile in between your teeth, and hoping, wishing, praying that you’re perfecting the act— the duty of the illustrious blow job. Comedian and author Jacqueline Novak dives right into those anxieties in her one-woman show, Get on Your Knees. The salaciousness, […]
Posted inArt Review
Between the flesh and the machine
Skin and stone, organic and sterile, hard and soft: juxtapositions aren’t new in art. This push-and-pull tactic has been done, and done again, but it’s not always executed well. New York-based artist Hannah Levy manages to push and pull her viewers in the right direction for her new solo exhibition, “Hannah Levy: Surplus Tension,” now […]