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Al Podgorski /Sun-Times Media Chicago’s segregated black neighborhoods are suffering, Bill “Dock” Walls said Friday during a debate at the Sun-Times. Mayor Emanuel was not asked to respond. In the Reader this week, we focus on Chicago’s persistent racial segregation, and how that fundamental problem is once again being ignored in the mayor’s race. We sought to interview the mayoral candidates about racial segregation this year, as we had before the last election, when the issue was also being ignored....

QI think my husband is addicted to porn. I find porn in his browser history almost every single day. He says I’m the only one he wants, but I find that hard to believe knowing he watches nonstop porn before fucking me. He also parties every time he goes on a business trip. Needless to say, I also suspect he cheats. He says he would never cheat on me because he “doesn’t need to....

All Them Witches are a heavy blues-rock band from Nashville that recently pared down to a trio following some lineup hiccups on the keyboards late last year. The group are kicking off a long tour that’ll take them through the U.S. and Europe on the back of their powerful fifth album, last fall’s ATW (New West). Their sound leans heavily on the Black Sabbath/Blue Cheer/Hawkwind flavors of black-and-blue riff rock, which they pull off seamlessly: “Workhorse” has an irresistible low build and grind, and “1st vs....

The comedy of Sarah Sherman, alias Sarah Squirm, is a reclamation of the grotesque. Body functions play a key role in her act, which includes reenactments of bodily fluids—simulations concocted with ordinary groceries—emerging from various orifices. Her ambition is to make her audience cringe—but in a fun way. Her obsession with goo and gore stems from a desire to celebrate her body in all its gross and oozing glory. Growing up on Long Island, specifically in Great Neck, she saw her well-to-do classmates receive nose jobs and breast enhancements during their teenage years....

Few musicians have built as distinctive a sound world as guitarist Bill Frisell. Though he’s ostensibly a jazz guitarist, since the early 80s he’s funneled a wide variety of influences and ideas from country, rock, noise, and various international traditions into an aesthetic as American as anything forged by Sousa, Presley, or Copland. Though specific projects such as film scores or songbooks constantly shift his focus in the short term, a macrosweep of his oeuvre shows how earthy twang, melodic wanderlust, and humid atmospheres infused with the wide-open spirit of the plains meld in his recordings....

Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago. “I loved my dress the first time I laid eyes on it,” says Shatara Powell, (above, center) who was photographed at the AMC Dine-in Block 37 theater downtown. She celebrated her 34th birthday with dinner at TAO in River North, followed by a screening of Tyler Perry’s romantic comedy Nobody’s Fool....

To describe the driving ethos of Chicago’s drag house Maison Couleé, you need look no further than the Chicago Black Drag Council’s June 20 town hall on racism at Sidetrack specifically and in Boystown in general. It was here that Bambi Banks-Couleé, drag daughter of Maison Couleé’s founding mother Shea Couleé, let Sidetrack know she was done putting up with the racist bullshit that has long been baked into the culture of Chicago’s north side drag bars....

Ryley Walker closes his new album Deafman Glance (Dead Oceans) with a tune that nails the existential turbulence that ripples through most of his songs: “Whenever I do my best, I will spoil with the rest,” he sings, acknowledging a self-destructive impulse that bleeds into his affairs, romantic and otherwise. In most of the songs the narrator struggles with his decisions and fucks things up more often than not. It’s hard to miss the biting humor when Walker sings, “Tripped over your coat / Quick exit now ruined” in “Can’t Ask Why,” where he can’t even pull off a smooth departure after a breakup....

Massachusetts guitarist Wendy Eisenberg has only been releasing music under their own name for two years, but they have already amassed a discography so diverse that no genre can claim them. On their debut, Time Machine (HEC Tapes, reissued on LP by Feeding Tube), they sound like a bedroom-based singer-songwriter who honed their vocal chops singing along with Robert Wyatt and Caetano Veloso records. And on the instrumental power-trio recording The Machinic Unconscious (Tzadik), where they’re joined by drummer Ches Smith and bassist Trevor Dunn, they sound like Nels Cline mashing up the Melvins and harmolodic jazz....

It’s become all too easy to opt out of taking the CTA with the quick, convenient allure of Lyft and Uber just a couple smartphone clicks away. Recent studies have reported that it’s becoming common for those who can afford ride share to substitute it in place of transit, walking, or biking rather than just using it to replace private car trips. The outcome could be a less efficient, safe, environmentally friendly, and just city....

It was with great enthusiasm I went to see Jerry Seinfeld last night at the Chicago Theatre. I took a dozen photos of the marquee. I absolutely checked my coat. I ordered an $8 plastic chalice of chilled red wine. I wasn’t meeting my maker, but I was encountering a stand-up comic who has informed much of my everyday hack comedy, filled with quips and digs to which I’m often obliged to acknowledge, “That was a Seinfeld joke....

New York bassist Peter Brendler has been a rising figure in the city’s jazz mainstream for the past decade or so. He recently released Message in Motion (Posi-Tone), his second album as a leader (not counting a 2013 duo recording with guitarist John Abercrombie, The Angle Below). It’s another knockout, working solidly within postbop orthodoxy while pushing against its strictures, thanks largely to the strong players with whom the bassist surrounds himself— and none contribute more powerfully than trumpeter Peter Evans....

Black youth could be missing at higher rates because they are more vulnerable to sex trafficking than any other demographic. A 2013 study by the Crimes Against Children Research Center found that a disproportionate number of child sex-trafficking victims are African-American. Young women and girls are at particularly high risk for sex trafficking, according to the National Human Trafficking Resource Center. “We wanted to understand why there’s such a disparity [in media coverage],” says Natalie Wilson....

I felt sad about the crusts. Four of us ordered three pizzas at Bungalow, the brewpub recently opened by the formerly nomadic Middle Brow Beer Company. By the time we’d hit the wall, they sat discarded in front of us like a pile of firewood—if firewood was chewy and toasty with a dark, tangy interior structure that embodies the life-affirming powers of good bread. The pizza comes from Jess Galli, a baker returned to Chicago from San Francisco’s The Mill and Josey Baker Bread, and chef-about-town Mickey Neely (Scofflaw, the Moonlighter, Dusek’s, Longman & Eagle), who recruited Galli in the days when he and Middle Brow cofounder Pete Ternes were first plotting the direction the brewery’s food would take....

Julia Thiel Barrel-aged vodka, still in the barrel at Chicago Distilling Company Barrel-aged gin is having a moment. Barrel-aged cocktails are everywhere. Barrel-aged vodka, however—not so much. And that alone was enough reason for Two mixologist Graham Crowe and Chicago Distilling Company owner Jay DiPrizio to want to make one. “I had never had a barrel-aged vodka before,” Crowe says. “That intrigued us. Like, why haven’t we had this?”...

Imagine rappers trying to sound like Queen, and you’re pretty close to Chicago hip-hop group Bonelang. The band’s driving forces, rapper Samy.Language and producer-vocalist Matt Bones, have always had a fondness for experimentation and grand gestures, borrowing from indie rock, jazz, and outre electronic music to create densely layered songs with disparate sounds. Bonelang have supersized that approach on their new self-released album, Sunny, Sonny. They perform their proggy, ever-changing compositions with robotic exactness, shifting between breakneck raps and honeyed singing with whiplash-inducing swiftness—and their mini opuses sometimes feel like products of a marathon writing session for a musical theater production....

As Spectacular Diagnostics, Chicago producer Robert Krums specializes in hip-hop tracks that seem to circle the planet in low orbit, collecting cosmic dust that mixes with flecks of grit from our world. On his new album, Natural Mechanics (Group Bracil), he blends samples like he’s devising floral arrangements for a royal wedding—the glassy keyboard melody that strolls through “Molasses” picks up new colors as he throws on sparse, dubby percussion and a brief clip of springy sitar....

Chicago has no shortage of bands making metal or psychedelic rock (thank God), but relatively few operate in that sweet spot where the two genres overlap. If you’re into that kind of thing, you’re going to want to keep your eye on local four-piece Rezn. Over the past few years, they’ve released a couple of more-than-solid records that marry familiar stoner riffing with heady, thoughtful exploration; on last year’s sea-monster-themed Calm Black Water, they blanket their intrinsic heaviness and darkly mystical lyrics in calming cosmic atmospheres....

Cesar Almeida, aka DJ Antonio Cesar, says it’s impossible to create new music. “Something new is something old that has been reinvented,” says the 25-year-old house DJ and producer. And with his blends of traditional rhythms and contemporary production, he shows us exactly what he’s talking about. “When I’m in Chicago, I’m like, ‘Let me produce the Chicago stuff,’ ’cause I’m in that vibe. But when I’m in Ghana, it’s like, ‘Yo, I gotta produce some Afrobeats, Afro-house-type stuff, ’cause I’m in Ghana!...

Jacobson used the sauce, together with lime juice and olive oil, to dress a simple salad of celery and chrysanthemum. For extra brightness and spice, he also added some lemon kosho (like yuzu kosho but with different fruit), which he made by fermenting lemon rind and jalapeño with salt for about two weeks. Finally, he microplaned a little bit of dried scallop over the top of the salad. “Kind of like scallop two ways, but not enough to really say anything stupid like that,” he says....