About three-quarters of the way through Rich Cohen’s new book The Chicago Cubs: Story of a Curse comes an epic clash of baseball philosophies and worldviews. It was not always thus, Cohen reminds us. In the beginning, the Cubs (previously the White Stockings, Colts, Spuds, and Microbes) were one of the best teams in Major League Baseball, winners of three consecutive National League pennants, possessors of a deadly efficient infield and a star pitcher who’d learned how to use his mangled left hand to throw a wicked curveball....

This week’s featured gig poster advertises this weekend’s Chicago Jazz String Summit, two evenings of streaming performances by string players working in jazz, improvisation, and experimental music. It’s the seventh year for this celebration of stringed instruments in nonclassical forms, founded by cellist, composer, and longtime Chicagoan Tomeka Reid. The poster and the summit’s logo were created by designer, illustrator, and musician Rei Alvarez, a Puerto Rican native who DJs as Rattan DJ and founded bolero-focused ensemble Miramar....

To help you keep track of the alfresco entertainment this summer, here’s a roundup of 32 free films playing this week: The Fugitive Tue 7/12, 8:15 PM, Lincoln Park, 500-5700 N. Lake Shore, 312-742-7726, chicagoparkdistrict.com. No Kids Argentine comedy in which a divorced father hides his 9-year-old daughter from his new child-free girlfriend. Wed 7/13, 8:30 PM, Piotrowski Park, 4247 W. 31st, 312-745-4801, chicagoparkdistrict.com. Le Chat Du Rabbin Animated French fantasy film in which rabbi and his talking cat go on an adventure....

When the pandemic forced Tone Deaf Records to shutter last March, proprietor Tony Assimos began delivering vinyl straight to his customers’ doors. He saw it as a practical response to what he thought would be a short-term crisis, and a way to extend into lockdown the sense of community he’d cultivated in his Portage Park store. As he told Block Club at the time, perhaps optimistically, “People are going to be bored for the next few weeks....

For the past 25 years, the Fourth of July weekend has meant one thing for house heads: the Chosen Few Picnic, a single-day celebration of house, disco, R&B, and other flavors of old-school dance music. It’s organized by the Chosen Few, a tight-knit crew of Chicago DJs who helped spread house throughout the south side after Wayne Williams founded it in 1977, when he was still in high school. The picnic has its roots in the Fourth of July family-reunion barbecues that Chosen Few DJs Tony and Andre Hatchett would attend behind the Museum of Science and Industry in the 80s; in 1990 the rest of the crew joined in to spin for the day....

College students are not stupid. So, back in mid-March, when it became clear that any campus could flame into a virus hot spot, and students across the country were sent home with instructions not to return from spring break, it didn’t take long for them to wonder why they should continue paying top dollar for a higher education experience that was playing out in their childhood bedrooms. After a few fascinating hours of online lectures, it occurred to some who’d already shelled out a full semester’s tuition that they might be entitled to a partial refund....

After the Dance This 1939 drawing-room drama by British writer Terence Rattigan (The Winslow Boy, The Browning Version, Separate Tables) concerns dissolute middle-aged socialites David and Joan Scott-Fowler, whose marriage seems to be a model of fashionable frivolity until David falls in love with his young cousin’s fiancee, with tragic results. Not one of Rattigan’s best works, the play is nonetheless an effective period piece—a portrait of carefree “bright young things” of the 1920s as they ungracefully age while their world slips inexorably toward another world war....

When I tell people Valentine’s Day is my favorite holiday, they expect me to be a hopeless romantic, or to say some bullshit like, “I just love my friends so much!” No. I love Valentine’s Day because I love myself. I think everyone should be a little more self-obsessed, and Valentine’s Day offers the perfect opportunity to celebrate that obsession. But I didn’t always feel this way. A decade later, I adhere to two strict Valentine’s rules....

Middle school can be a nightmare if you’re not one of the cool girls. Girls Like Us is the Chicago-produced podcast that explores just that, taking on Lisi Harrison’s monumental YA series The Clique. The series follows a group of popular middle-school girls, led by the mean and judgmental Massie Block. Maybe you recognize the plaid book covers, with images of middle school socialites glaring back at you. The series, which arrived at the dawn of the reality television era, was marketed as the younger sister to Gossip Girl....

In their nearly 15 years as a band, San Francisco’s Grayceon have reimagined the traditional shapes of metal with challenging song structures, thought-provoking lyrics, and a sound that often feels orchestral despite being largely produced by a trio of cello, guitar, and drums. On their fifth album, Mothers Weavers Vultures, the group make a plea for humanity to build a better future, no matter the hardships along the way—a fitting capstone for a year most of us are glad to leave behind....

It was easy to be homies with Alejandro Morales. You might have met him at one of his gigs—he drummed in noise-punk band Running and experimental duo Piss Piss Piss Moan Moan Moan, among other projects—but all you really had to do was stand anywhere near him in the crowd at somebody else’s show or lurk by the DJ booth when he was spinning records. Sooner or later his earnest, supportive attention would land on you like a ray of sunshine....

In the 13 years that the Boka Restaurant Group has opened as many restaurants, it’s been a rare event when it has launched one that’s not outstanding. Number two, the late Landmark, was a sophomore slump from which the company quickly recovered, but it hasn’t faltered since. The rest, from the flagship to Stephanie Izard’s Girl & the Goat to Perennial Virant to Balena and Momotaro, have been dependably delightful to eat at and write about, ideal syntheses of food, service, and design....

Michael Gebert Chicken and waffles at 5 Loaves The terrific-looking fried chicken and the entirely decent waffle you see above come from 5 Loaves Eatery, a south-side breakfast place that immediately charmed my kids and I when we visited after touring the Regal Theater during Open House Chicago. (You can tell how much I liked the chicken by its placement on this list of the best chicken and waffles.) I’d tell you to go eat there this weekend, except that you can’t; for the second time, according to DNAinfo, the restaurant has been forced to shut down because someone stole its outside electrical wiring to sell as scrap copper....

If like Gossip Wolf you’re a dedicated hater of Christmas music, this time of year can be an endless waking nightmare. Every public space is blanketed in treacly tunes celebrating fake holiday warmth. Bah! Humbug! Local label Eye Vybe Records has the right idea: its new cassette compilation, Alone in Logan on Christmas Eve, is refreshingly frank about how grim and miserable this supposedly merry season can be. The album’s eight acts include honky-tonkers Cat Mullins & Them Boys (who contribute the steel-guitar-saturated “Lonely Holiday”) and pop polymath Magic Ian (with the hilariously deadpan anti-gift-giving screed “Digital Friends”)....

Courtesy of Speakeasy PR The sophisticated gentlemen in Faith No More like to accessorize with a gimp. The Reader has never had much to say about Faith No More—in our admittedly patchy archives, the only reference I could find to these Bay Area alt-metal weirdos during their peak years was a dumb joke in a 1992 Bill Wyman column. “The imponderables of rock ‘n’ roll are many,” he wrote, clearly already pleased with his impending punch line, “from why does Billy Joel exist to why do so many current groups (Metallica, Faith No More, Soundgarden, to name just three) feature guitarists with funny facial hair....

Few styles of music lift my spirits more than the drum- and marimba-driven chants born along Colombia’s Pacific coast. These ancestral grooves survived the travails of 16th-century colonization to become the musical heritage of the region’s enslaved persons who’d escaped captivity—and to my ears, they distill freedom and joy in every note. The members of Bogotá trio Ghetto Kumbé are internationally recognized musicians who’ve each participated in projects that take the roots beats of Colombia into contemporary realms....

When Chevon Linear looked up at the sky as darkness descended over Wyoming’s Grand Teton National Park in August of 2020, she unwillingly began to cry. As her partner Kameron Stanton chuckled at her response, Linear tried to rationalize her reaction. As she sought to blame anything from light sensitivity to dust, she simply could not get past her shock at nature’s display. “I’ve never seen anything so vibrant, so beautiful....

Eighteen years ago, Superchunk drummer Jon Wurster called his friend Tom Scharpling, who had a radio show on New Jersey noncommercial station WFMU, and pretended to be an oblivious music critic named Ronald Thomas Clontle. Clontle had supposedly written a book called Rock, Rot & Rule: The Ultimate Argument Settler, and for the next 47 minutes, he and Scharpling—who was in on the joke—discussed which acts rocked, rotted, or ruled. Clontle’s criteria were so bizarre and confounding, and his knowledge of music so clearly impaired, that many listeners who didn’t realize what was happening called in to argue with him....

QMy 15-year-old son has been watching sadistic porn—and ONLY sadistic porn—for a couple of years. He also tells us (husband and me) that, though he’s not had sex (which he defines as penetration), he’s had oral sex, hand jobs, etc, and that he didn’t “flash on” violent images at those times. But he says he thinks about this type of porn all the time—all day, every day—and fantasizes about doing sadistic things to the girls he dates....

Michael Keaton and Michelle Monaghan in Blindsided Though it was completed in 2013 and premiered on cable TV a year and a half ago, the low-budget thriller Blindsided (originally titled Penthouse North) is just now available for rent at Redbox stands, presumably because it stars Michael Keaton and Keaton’s a hot property again thanks to Birdman. Alejandro González Iñáritu’s Oscar winner was, if nothing else, a reminder of what a fantastic actor Keaton is (in case anyone forgot)—it’s hard to separate the film’s barreling energy from that of his performance, which belies a commitment to character no less controlled than Emmanuel Lubezki’s celebrated camerawork....