Mrs. Green is a 70-something Roseland grandma living with her weed-dealing nephew who keeps her well supplied with bud. Her children—a military vet with PTSD and a drinking problem, a pastor who has lost his spirit, and a lawyer with cancer—all disapprove of her habit. But that all changes after Christmas dinner when she accidentally spills cannabis oil into the collards and everybody’s problems drift away. Crowder had come across a 2014 study published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease that indicated small doses of THC could help promote the removal of the amyloid plaque deposits in the brain associated with the disease....

My mother is a nosy woman, especially about houses. She likes to peer into windows. When she spots a contractor’s sign in someone’s front yard or construction trucks in the driveway, she slows down so she can see what’s going on inside. Sometimes she’ll ring the doorbell and ask to come in. When I was a kid, it embarrassed the hell out of me, especially when she would drag me along to admire somebody’s half-destroyed, half-refinished kitchen....

If you play any kind of amplified music in Chicago, you’ve probably dealt with enough live sound engineers to know that you’d be lucky if the one working your gig was Patrick M. Kenneally. “Playing in bands, sound guys are often your first introductions to venues—seeing Pat made you feel a little more at home,” says Metro talent buyer and Lasers and Fast and Shit vocalist Joe Carsello. Kenneally, who died at age 43 on Wednesday, June 6, spent the past couple decades doing sound at clubs such as Darkroom, the Empty Bottle, and Lounge Ax....

When asked about the census, Babu Patel, manager of the grocery chain Patel Brothers, initially thought we were talking about India’s national anthem. Patel had confused the Hindi term for population count, jansankhya, for the anthem’s title, “Jana Gana Mana.” “Republic Day wala gaana,” he said, guessing that I wanted to discuss the song regularly blasted at parades on India’s Independence Day. For each person who doesn’t fill out the census, community organizations and public service providers lose $1,400 in federal funding from the state....

The Reader‘s archive is vast and varied, going back to 1971. Every day in Archive Dive, we’ll dig through and bring up some finds. Bettelheim spent many years breaking down my identity and self-image, telling me that I was crazy, that I couldn’t be trusted to handle even the simplest things, and that nobody would ever hire me or marry me when I grew up. My belief in myself didn’t come back after I left, got a degree, made a few friends, and found some work....

The Hotelier‘s recent third album, Goodness, has received universally positive reviews, though critics often seem to feel they need to apologize for liking it. Many appear uncomfortable using the word “emo” to describe the band, though that’s clearly the music they play. Pitchfork senior editor Jillian Mapes dodged the question expertly: “At this point, however, it might not even be accurate to call them emo, so let’s just have it out now: The Hotelier is a great rock band, however you classify them....

“I think the most important thing a woman can have—next to talent, of course—is her hairdresser,” once said Joan Crawford, the ultimate diva of old Hollywood. She would have been horrified by the bad wigs on the cast in this midwest premiere of Michael Leeds’s comedic whodunit, directed by John Nasca for Glitterati Productions. She would have been quite proud, though, of the cast of six men, dressed in drag versions of her most famous roles and personifying another Joanism, “I love playing bitches....

Named after a Mayan term that roughly translates to “place of fear,” Southern California trio Xibalba have been blending strains of metal and hardcore for nearly 14 years. They’ve increasingly leaned into their Latino heritage (they sing in both Spanish and English) and their death-metal influences, while expanding into new moods and song structures; on the 2015 album Tierra y Libertad they deviated from their relatively compact crushers for sprawling closer “El Vacio....

Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago. “For me to buy a colored piece, it has to be specific and bold,” says educator and photographer Rose Velez, a New York City transplant who typically wears black. But due to her current infatuation with the Crescent City—”I’m all about New Orleans,” she says—Velez has been adding more vibrant colors to her wardrobe....

The lesson for today is about taxes—property taxes, to be exact. Others are more willing to share for the common good, but they’re too broke to keep pace with the taxman—or tax person’s—ever-increasing demands. Cook County assessor Fritz Kaegi determines your assessment based on a computer calculation of sales of similar properties in your neighborhood. Obviously, Ricketts’s assessment should have increased, because Big Daddy is worth more than Baby Huey. Especially since Big Daddy’s a “5,000-square-foot North Shore home nestled on a meticulously landscape lot complete with a Japanese-style garden,” as the Tribune put it....

Don’t think of Chicago’s Loop art scene as just the city’s pretty face. Of course, Broadway/Times Square is hard to overlook. And those 28.4 million annual visitors? They include not just paying customers but also a guesstimate of how many folks are merely walking around, looking at public art. The research consists of information gathered from nonprofit, for-profit, and government bodies in the Loop area (including 72 arts institutions, 120 public art pieces, and more than 50 architecturally significant buildings), and the results of an online survey conducted between October 15, 2017, and January 15, 2018, that was completed by 12,161 people....

La Luz de un Cigarrillo (literally “the light of a cigarette”) is the Spanish title of Marco Antonio Rodriguez’s play about a troubled man’s return home for his estranged father’s funeral. It’s better than the awkward English title Rodriquez has chosen for the English-language version and more fitting for a play in which characters routinely tamp down their feelings with food and cigarettes. It promises the audience a story as moody, moving, and graceful as a plume of cigarette smoke, and Rodriguez delivers on that promise....

By manipulating the form, Trees’s sculptures look at abstraction and draw from the form of the human body. The bulbous, frothing pieces appear veiny and alive. The lumps hang on the walls of the gallery, bursting with life as the sculptures contract, bubble, and grow like organisms under a microscope. These orifices are detailed, yet I’m unsure of what they remind me of. I describe them as human forms, something removed from a body, but are they?...

Even if you buy into the idea that musicians should stay out of politics, how do you overlook the politics baked into everything around you? Take the COVID-19 pandemic: What’s more destructive, the virus or the leaders who don’t even try to get it under control? Preyer, the new album from D.C. six-piece Ilsa, was born in lockdown, and they use it to take the piss out of the corruption, inhumanity, and lust for power that helped drive society to this particular brink....

The instruments of some musical icons end up displayed in museum exhibits or auctioned off for charity at vast sums. Others get handed down to the younger generations to do with as they wish. In the case of Exotic Sin, the London-based duo of multi-instrumentalists Naima Karlsson and Kenichi Iwasa, that’s been a good thing. Karlsson is a grandchild of Don Cherry, who played pocket trumpet with Ornette Coleman as well as a variety of non-Western instruments on records that predicted the evolution of world music, and his wife Moki, who accompanied Cherry on tambura and executed the colorful and powerfully vibe-inducing artwork for their album covers and stage banners....

This weekend, just about the time when—minus the virus—we would have been plopping our posteriors into cushy new seats installed over the summer at the Lyric Opera House and settling in for a double bill of love gone tragically but so operatically wrong (Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci), Lyric is inviting us to boot up the laptop for something cheerier. For the Love of Lyric is a multigenre, online concert conceived and led by soprano Renée Fleming....

With President Trump primed to go after vulnerable Democratic senators in red states, it’s clear the country’s future hinges on the credibility of what political scientists call the Rich Miller Theorem. The Dems have to hold on to all of these seats to have any chance of taking the Senate from the Republicans in November. Miller concocted his theorem to explain why state rep Ken Dunkin, a Democrat, got whupped while state senator Sam McCann, a Republican, was reelected in the March 2016 primaries....

It would be a little dramatic to proclaim that jazz is back at the Pitchfork Music Festival, since it was at best a minor part of the lineup when it was included at all. This year’s roster features two jazz acts: rising-star LA saxophonist Kamasi Washington and venerable space-jazz collective the Sun Ra Arkestra (if you really want to stretch the genre’s borders, you could also include electric bassist Thunder­cat). That makes 2016 the third time Pitchfork has hosted jazz or improvised music—it’s also the first time since 2007, when Craig Taborn’s Junk Magic, Fred Lonberg-­Holm’s Lightbox Orchestra, the William Parker Quartet, and Ken Vandermark’s Powerhouse Sound performed....

Some of the practices Martin mentions wishing to reexamine dovetail with the BIPOC Demands for White American Theatre from We See You W.A.T., such as eliminating “10 out of 12” tech rehearsals (wherein actors work ten hours in a 12-hour day and designers and technical staff can go as long as 14 hours), and six-day rehearsal weeks. (As the BIPOC Demands describes it, “These are long-standing practices that are seeped in capitalist and white supremacist culture....

The southeast side of Chicago was once a bustling and flourishing neighborhood. With boutiques, bars, and blue-collar jobs, the community was thriving. Situated between waterways, Lake Michigan, and just a hop, skip, and a jump away from the Indiana border, the neighborhood once employed 40,000 workers. However, by the time filmmaker Steven J. Walsh grew up in the neighborhood, it was a totally different landscape. “Everyone I knew was struggling and now I’m seeing why....