This Monday, March 7, will mark the last show local weirdo-thrash unit Oozing Wound will play with founding drummer Kyle Reynolds. Oozing Wound was formed back in 2012 by Reynolds with former Cacaw bandmate Zack Weil on guitar and vocals and Unmanned Ship bassist Kevin Cribbin, and they’ve since been hammering out an intense, high-volume, off-kilter take on Big Four thrash-metal. With two Thrill Jockey-issued full-lengths under their belt, and a brand-new, as-of-yet-untitled third LP just in the can, the question that came to my mind when I learned about Reynolds’s departure was, “So what now?...

How do you launch an Olympic swimming team in a country that has just one public pool for a population of more than ten million people? Drowning is a leading cause of death in Haiti, according to the Haitian Federation of Aquatic Sports and Rescue. Despite it being an island nation, only 1 percent of its population knows how to swim. “That’s what this whole journey has been,” she says....

During the Iran-Iraq war, Baghdad-born oud master Rahim AlHaj was imprisoned and tortured by Saddam Hussein’s government for his political activism. He fled to Jordan and eventually found refuge in the U.S., settling in Albuquerque in 2000, and there he’s continued to preserve and develop the music of the oud—the pear-shaped, double-coursed string instrument at the heart of the roughly 5,000-year-old Arabic musical tradition. AlHaj became a U.S. citizen in 2008, and in 2015 he was awarded the prestigious NEA National Heritage Fellowship....

If Mayor Rahm loses next year’s election, we’ll have no need to worry about what he’ll do next—clearly, he has a great future in comedy. So if the mayor wants to keep voters from weighing in on a policy he opposes, all he has to do is command the City Council to cram the ballot with three questions he doesn’t care about. Quinn has enough obstacles trying to round up the 50,000 valid signatures by the August 6 deadline....

Album cover designed by Ron Mael! I’ve always thought of Todd Rundgren as an alternate-universe Brian Eno (not that you immediately think of Eno as being from this universe). Both Rundgren and Eno are brilliant and unusual musicians who are equally, if not more, famous for their production work and use of the recording studio as they are for their own music; both wore outlandish, colorful costumes that stood out even during the glam-rock era; and both embraced digital technology even while showing a great appreciation for classical music and doo-wop....

Bulgarian playwright Zachary Karabashliev’s 2008 play, about two entwined dysfunctional families and their messed-up lives, was written originally in English and then translated into Bulgarian by the author before being presented in his home country. (This is why it is only now receiving its English-language world premiere.) Sunday Evening is not perfect. Karabashliev favors a fragmented storytelling style that shatters expectations of a linear plotline—and at times leaves the audience scrambling to put together what is happening....

There are several confounding mysteries surrounding the case of Jeffrey Epstein, the 66-year-old “financier” who was arrested July 6 on a federal sex trafficking indictment that alleges he recruited and sexually abused dozens of minor girls, some as young as 14 years old, beginning at least in or about 2002. And for reasons I will discuss in a moment, don’t expect clarity anytime soon. According to Brown, the feds had the goods on Epstein more than a decade ago, identifying 36 underage victims of sexual abuse....

The food a restaurant serves its employees during a shift is usually called “family meal.” (In industry parlance, the article is always conspicuously absent; the typically casual, buffet-style spread isn’t “a family meal” or “the family meal”—it’s just “family meal.”) The phrase conjures the image of the restaurant staff as one big clan—from the marquee chef to the lowly dishwasher, the seasoned front-of-house manager on down to the humble cub busboy—all breaking bread together before they man their respective stations for the breakneck pace of dinner service....

Here are two ways of looking at Thursday’s Brexit vote, if you’re wondering what the British people’s unexpected decision to pull out of the European Union augurs for Donald Trump here in America. As the New Yorker‘s Anthony Lane wrote Friday: “The gods of disorder and upheaval, in short, enjoyed a busy night. But they were not yet done. In fact, they were just getting started.” Trump is counting on those gods, so the vote is good news for him....

From 1990 to 2014, Ted Frankel owned and operated Uncle Fun, a Lakeview shop that sold novelty items and gag gifts. The mild-mannered Frankel could often be seen casually sporting a jester’s cap or a wig composed of glow sticks, and his stock included such staples as bacon-flavored lip balm, glasses with googly eyes, hordes of rubber cockroaches, unicorn snow globes, and enough fake poop and vomit to fake a yearlong stomach bug....

Nikolas Cruz, the suspect charged in yesterday’s mass shooting at a Parkland, Florida, high school that left 17 dead, was reportedly armed with an AR-15 assault rifle, a category of weapon that should be—and once was—banned in the United States. In 2016, after a similar rifle was used in the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, we took a quick look at what had happened to the ban. All of the NRA-endorsed congressional representatives named in the resulting post are still in office: In April 2013, California senator Diane Feinstein introduced a proposal that would have brought back a national assault weapon ban....

Lower Dens emerged out of Baltimore’s fertile underground music scene in 2010, and they’ve since built a catalog of immersive, slow-boiling indie rock elevated by Jana Hunter’s inviting, resonant vocals. During the first half of the 2010s, they dropped three albums, which makes the four-year gap between 2015’s Escape From Evil and last year’s The Competition (Ribbon Music) feel like an eternity. Just before releasing Escape From Evil, Hunter wrote a Tumblr post identifying as genderfluid and discussing their history of struggling to fit into the gender binary; in the ensuing years, they underwent testosterone therapy, and Hunter now uses they/them and him/his pronouns....

Black History Month is coming to a close this weekend but there’s no reason to stop learning about and celebrating African American achievements. While Washington Park’s DuSable Museum of African American History is closed to visitors at the moment (they’re observing safety measures in regard to COVID-19 transmission) their website has free videos featuring Black thought leaders and historians in conversation, as well as lesson plans and other resources for teachers....

Cinder Well is the brainchild of Ireland-based, California-bred singer and multi-instrumentalist Amelia Baker. As part of the Santa Cruz anarchist folk-punk scene, she’s previously played with dusky folk trio the Gembrokers and metal- and Klezmer-influenced collective Blackbird Raum, among others; in 2015 she launched Cinder Well as a solo outlet where she could collaborate with a shifting cast of musicians. By the time she released Cinder Well’s 2018 debut full-length, The Unconscious Echo, she’d developed a sound that draws from haunting traditional English, Irish, and American folk, using to explore themes of generational and historic trauma tied to white supremacy and fascism....

One of the best local releases of 2016 was the debut self-titled tape from Dehd on the prolific Maximum Pelt Records. The trio of guitarist-vocalist Jason Balla (of Ne-Hi and Earring), bassist-vocalist Emily Kempf (of Heavy Dreams and Veil), and stand-up, cymbal-less drummer Eric McGrady explored dreamy, hazy postpunk with beautiful vocal interplay; simple, plunky guitar; and a dark, behind-the-beat throb. Earlier this year Dehd released a follow-up tape, Fire of Love, on Infinity Cat Recordings, which opened up their sonic palette with noisy guitar, upbeat tempos, complex arrangements, and a bit of sunny bounce....

The biopic has been a staple in filmmaking since the sound era began, though over the years literary figures seem to have gotten fewer screen treatments than other notables. On Friday, Gene Siskel Film Center opens Haifaa al-Mansou’s 2017 film Mary Shelley, starring Elle Fanning, and next Tuesday, Chicago Film Society screens Charles Vidor’s 1952 film Hans Christian Andersen, starring Danny Kaye. Taking a page from these, we’ve selected five additional biopics about writers, ones that don’t just rest on words but also offer up some visual artistry....

Nearly 23 years ago a jury decided that four Los Angeles police officers acted properly in using truncheons to beat the hell out of Rodney King. The riots that ensued killed 53 people. By comparison last summer’s protests over the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner were models of decorum. Yet LA 1992 and Ferguson 2014 are similar in all too many other ways, starting with the rock-bottom, essential fact that the perps then as now were cops, the victims unarmed black men....

In March, Ravinia Festival announced that it would open “a major addition to the park, the RaviniaMusicBox Experience Center, later this summer.” It presents Bernstein as composer, conductor, political liberal, teacher, and media darling: “the greatest and most important classical music figure in American history.” Exhibits include a Bernstein baton, broken by Venezuelan prodigy Gustavo Dudamel, who’s there on video to tell you how it happened; the upright piano the future maestro learned on; and the New York Times front page documenting his career-launching conducting debut with the New York Philharmonic, when he stepped in at the last minute after Bruno Walter fell ill....

I know back in February I insinuated there was only one issue left of the Chicago FoodCultura Clarion, the collaborative zine-Reader insert, launched by Barcelona born multidisciplinary food artist Antoni Miralda, University of Chicago anthropologist Stephan Palmié, and their posse of students, scholars, foodlums, and freaks. I’m glad to say I was wrong. The penultimate issue of the Clarion has been inserted in 2,700 copies of this week’s Reader print issue....

In the current edition of the Reader, I wrote on Jafar Panahi’s 3 Faces (which plays at the Gene Siskel Film Center through Thursday), focusing on how Panahi has incorporated himself into his work of the 2010s. Panahi recognizes that he’s a great subject for cinema: he’s a dissident artist who continues to make movies in Iran despite being banned from doing so until 2030. While the director’s story may be extraordinary, his use of filmmaking to regard himself belongs to a well-known tradition....