Postrock, psych rock, western film scores, Krautrock, heavy dirges . . . there’s little Grails can’t deliver stylistically, and they always deliver their music well. For their most recent album, 2017’s Chalice Hymnal (Temporary Residence), the Portland band pare down to the core trio of Alex John Hall, Emil Amos, and William Zakary Riles and crawl deep into dusty post-Americana, library music, gnarly psychedelia, and Eastern motifs. With a few touring members in tow, the multi-instrumentalists hit Chicago as part of Lincoln Hall and Schubas’ Tomorrow Never Knows festival, and they’re joined by two other exceptional instrumental acts....

Pink Flamingos This week, the Logan Theatre is showing the musical comedy Hairspray, exploitation legend John Waters’s crossover hit. Waters, of course, is known for his ultratrashy, down and dirty comedies, shot guerilla-style on the streets of Baltimore and often featuring drag queens and miscreants in the cast. But he’s enjoyed as much if not more success in the mainstream, where his campy style jells perfectly with Hollywood gaudiness. I’m wouldn’t call myself a Waters devotee, but I’m drawn to the brazen and outright confrontational nature of his early films....

A studio, in its essence, is nothing more than an empty room. It acquires its magic by the people who gather there. Dancers are faithful. They go to the studio not only to hone their craft but to participate in the daily evolution of a living art. There, they sweat into the discovery of their bodies, then write their movements into its history. Whether they ever share a stage, dancers work together in the studio, a space of learning, experimentation, witness, and community....

After living in Edgewater for two years, they dreamt of finding a home that would provide both business and living space, room to accommodate the wedding photographers’ career dreams and the family they knew they wanted to create together. One day, out on a run together, they passed a unique building with a tall chain link fence blocking its 65ft concrete pull-in from the bustling Broadway sidewalk. Securing the property took almost nine months in total, but the moment the ink dried on the paperwork, the couple set to work on The Lytle House....

This week Chicagoans have the chance to see not one, but two four-hour-long movies on the big screen. Hu Bo’s Chinese feature An Elephant Sitting Still (2018) is in the middle of a weeklong run at the Gene Siskel Film Center, and Edward Yang’s masterpiece A Brighter Summer Day (1991) screens at Doc Films on Thursday at 5 PM. These works are superb—and very different—examples of what filmmakers can do with the four-hour running time....

The moon isn’t full right now, and Mercury is not in retrograde, but this has still been . . . a week. In the spirit of the list of self-care suggestions my colleagues came up with on Tuesday, here are some moments of Chicago-flavored happiness for you to take in this weekend, followed by some event listings. I’m concentrating this week on the life-changing properties of listening to music and saying hello to cute animals, and I invite you to join me on my pretend planet....

Oslo’s Aiming for Enrike accomplish a lot with a little: though they’re just a duo, armed with guitar, drums, and a small infantry of effects and loop pedals, they craft detailed, propulsive, dancy math-rock instrumentals. Their sound owes as much to dance punk as to prog rock, calling to mind complex, groove-based bands such as Battles, Trans Am, and Adebisi Shank. The two-piece are releasing their fourth LP, Music for Working Out, in January, and now they’re bringing their blistering dose of booty-moving beats to the U....

In 2001, Raws Schlesinger, a metal and punk drummer in Lincoln, Nebraska, embraced his leather-clad dance-music heart and founded Plack Blague—an industrial electronica project intended to unleash the rowdy gay headbanger inside every hard rocker. The project was initially something of a goof, but the audience for loud sexy gay disco proved to be bigger than anticipated. Nearly two decades later, Schlesinger continues to sweat and hump his way through albums and live shows with a never-failing barrage of floor-shaking single entendres....

It’s time again for one of the city’s best free gifts to us: SummerDance! For just over eight weeks this summer, you’ll be able to find free events each week at a variety of public locations celebrating dance styles from all around the world. Sir Nose d’Voidoffunk, Bob, Sheila, Chad, and everybody can get down with some semblance of grace thanks to the free dance lessons that each event starts with, courtesy of local professional dancers and dance studios....

Chicago has been frequently touted as a writer’s town; a place where writers can work on their craft and thrive. Of course writers are nothing without an audience to read them, and the bevy of bookstores in Chicagoland is one indication that we’re also a reader’s town—not just a place where people make books, but a place where people embrace books. Our stories as Chicagoans are as varied and complicated as they should be in a city our size, and the independent booksellers that make up our literary retail landscape follow suit....

Praised by Fyodor Dostoevsky as “sheer perfection as a work of art” and prompting Ivan Turgenev to write a letter from his deathbed petitioning its author to keep writing, Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina has captivated readers with its story of passion and adultery since it first appeared as a magazine serial in the 1870s. It has inspired countless adaptations for stage and screen—no fewer than 14 films, nine operas, at least two plays, several television miniseries, and five major ballets, dating from Bolshoi prima ballerina assoluta Maya Plisetskaya’s first choreographic effort in 1972 with a score composed by her husband, Rodion Shchedrin, to recent works by Boris Eifman (2005) and Alexei Ratmansky (2010)....

“Dancing for peace” may sound like a 1980s charity single, but it’s the fundamental idea behind Chicago Human Rhythm Project’s Stomping Grounds festival, which has been bringing percussive dance to communities around the city for four years to put on free or low-price performances. Organizing dance companies representing a variety of international cultures demands a level of collaboration that inspires and excites CHRP founder and director Lane Alexander. “Getting people to say ‘we’re for peace’ isn’t that difficult,” says Alexander....

Time was when the weeks leading up to the Chicago Blues Festival were nearly another festival in themselves. Those days are gone, but the city’s blues clubs will still be jumping all weekend. Underpublicized neighborhood joints will throw shows worth noting too, and museums, libraries, and nonprofits will host special events. On Saturday, After-Words Books sponsors a “Jazz, Blues, and Beyond Bus Tour” of musical landmarks famous and obscure. On Sunday, worthwhile shows include a performance by blues prodigy Jamiah Rogers at River Roast, the redoubtable Jimmy Johnson doing his regular gig at the Lagunitas taproom, and a Blues Fest satellite show (with Vince “Lefty” Johnson, David Herrero, and others) at what’s still being called the Maxwell Street Market but is actually several blocks east....

The sites in the list below let you talk to people without the interference of loud music, fake profiles, and war pigs. You will find singles in your area, complete with pictures, bios, and stats. The searches filter to people who match your preferences. Still, a lot of hookup and dating sites are purportedly fake. Learning this the hard way can be costly and time-consuming. Can you really get laid on the best totally free hookup websites?...

Chicago rapper Vic Mensa has had a career trajectory unlike many other Chicago artists the past decade. After rising to national prominence in the early 2010s as front man of Kids These Days, he became a solo star, delivering a sharp debut mixtape (2013’s Innanetape) and a career-making hip-house single (2014’s “Down On My Luck”) en route to signing with Jay-Z’s Roc Nation label in 2015. Since then, Mensa has bared his soul in a smattering of stylistically scattered EPs, dropped the lucid 2017 studio full-length The Autobiography, and swung for the fences with the 2019 agitprop pop-punk album 93Punx, produced by Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker—a memorable curiosity that feels destined to find a cult audience....

Rafael Esparza was a “weird kid” who hated spaghetti. Specifically he did not like his grandmother’s cheesy, chile-spiked pasta casserole, the SpaghettiOs of every Mexican American kid’s diet. It was discussions about this sort of undersung contribution to Mexican cuisine that inspired the partnership. AbouJamra, a former GM for the DMK Restaurants group (among many more varied hospitality gigs), used to deliver chai to Finom, where Esparza was making magical Hungarian dishes with little more than an induction burner....

[content-1] King said it was time to change the street—named for Mussolini’s air commander shortly after he lead a squadron of seaplanes to Chicago in 1933—for the former slave, journalist, anti-lynching activist, and woman’s suffrage advocate. The aldermen say this would be the first Chicago street renaming since 1968, when South Park Drive was renamed to honor Martin Luther King Jr., and the first downtown street named for a woman and a person of color....

Chicagoans is a first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. This week’s Chicagoan is Tazima Davis, sex and intimacy coach and orgasmic meditation teacher. “What do men get out of it? They become more sensitive to their own feelings and sensations. They are able to interact with women in a way that they couldn’t before, because they’re more confident about what’s going on for women....

Whether you’re thinking shared plates for the table or would prefer everyone fend for themselves, one thing is for certain when dining at Venteux: you are going to want to place an order for the Grand Marnier soufflé. Yes, soufflé is classic and every French restaurant has one on the dessert menu, but the soufflé at Venteux, Chicago’s newest Michigan Avenue restaurant and patio inside the Carbide & Carbon building, is something truly special....

Beau O’Reilly, 68, has been a fixture on Chicago’s fringe theater and music scenes for decades, most notably with the Curious Theatre Branch (coproducers of the annual Rhino Fest), Maestro Subgum & the Whole, and the Crooked Mouth. During the pandemic, O’Reilly recorded a new album, Thrifty (Uvulittle), that features 14 tracks created at a distance with collaborators around the country. He’s throwing a release party at Constellation on Saturday, May 15, at 8 PM....