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The goddess of queer punk Vaginal Davis burst onto the Los Angeles performance scene in the late 1970s as the front woman for the art-punk band Afro Sisters, then became an integral influence in drag performance and a matriarch for performance artists. Born intersex during a time when doctors performed medical interventions in order to assign gender, Davis’s mother refused. While her birth certificate stated male, her family used she/her pronouns....

Chocolate-covered foie gras tops the menu at the latest from the Fifty/50 Group, Steadfast, a restaurant with a broad mission that in some ways feels like a peak in the trajectory of this concern, which launched with its namesake Wicker Park bro bar and an obscure regional pizzeria but then branched into classy cocktail bars and downtown hotel partnerships that earned the burgeoning empire high regard. Until now the crown jewel has been Homestead on the Roof, the farm-to-table fine-dining outfit atop the Chicago Avenue doughplex that houses the original Roots Handmade Pizza (there’s a second in Lincoln Square) and West Town Bakery....

In 2016, a video of Ashley “Slim” Stevenson performing a goosebump-inducing cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide” on the Washington Blue Line platform went viral. Since then it’s racked up more than 25 million YouTube views, and until the pandemic stopped her, Stevenson continued to sing and strum her acoustic guitar for appreciative commuters. On April 16, she released a full-length of her own knockout songs, Freedom, recorded with local producer Prov Krivoshey....

This year’s New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival seemed beset by bad juju: the Rolling Stones begged off due to Mick Jagger’s heart surgery, and Bob Seger bowed out, blaming a scheduling conflict. But Diana Ross, fresh off her “Diamond Diana” residency in Vegas, showed up in a big way. In the first Jazz Fest performance of her six-decade career, she absolutely killed it, holding the audience in her thrall as she ran through 90 minutes of her hits....

Over the past few weeks I have found myself either in sweaters over pajamas or in long underwear and snow pants. Between packaging dried mushrooms and herbs and organizing my seed room, I have outdoor chores—there are the wild birds that I provide with oil-rich seeds and starchy corn cakes of lard and food. Water and straw go to the coveys of bobwhite quail kept in four large enclosures outside; once native to this region but now unseen in the local rural landscape due to habitat destruction....

Rhinofest, Curious Theatre Branch’s fringe theater festival, continues through Sunday, February 28, at Prop Theatr (3502 N. Elston). Now in its 27th year, the fest has departed from its usual anything-goes format; instead, participants were invited to create work inspired by Eugène Ionesco’s absurdist classic Rhinoceros, one of the three plays reviewed this week. For more reviews, see Reader senior theater critic Tony Adler’s Rhino roundup. For a complete schedule, see rhinofest....

The Chicago Latino Film Festival is one of the best festivals around, not just for its impressively extensive programming, but for the sense of discovery it affords. Each year I come away treasuring new films and new directors that I hadn’t previously known. This can happen at most festivals, but CLFF is one that consistently expands my horizons with movies that, were it not for the organization’s mission, I might not otherwise hear about....

We’ve been secretly distilling and nobody knew,” Adam Smith says. He’s mostly joking: Maplewood Brewery & Distillery hasn’t exactly been hiding the distilling side of its operation. (It’s right there in the name.) But in the nearly three years it has been making spirits, it hasn’t released a single one. Aside from festivals where Maplewood has poured tastes of its whiskey, rum, and gin, the public has never had a chance to taste any of them....

So you can’t go to the theater because (gestures weakly toward everything). Sure, there are streaming productions galore right now—even if they lack the communal experience of live performance. But there is also a special thrill to curling up with a great script and becoming a director in your own mind, imagining how this world on the page looks and feels in three dimensions. Mark Larson’s Ensemble: An Oral History of Chicago Theater (2019, Agate Midway Books) is an exhilarating, exhaustive (700 pages and 300 interview subjects) overview of the organisms that made Chicago theater world-class, from the 1950s on, focusing on artists and companies both legendary and overlooked....

John Sanchez reckons he downs 12 cases of bubbly a month. “I don’t drink pop, or juice, or anything diet, so I usually come here for the bubbly,” he shouted. “It’s cheaper.” We were struggling to hear each other in a sun-beaten Clearing parking lot on a recent morning while he loaded two-liter bottles of Poland Spring Sparkling Water into his trunk. Every few minutes a Southwest Airlines 737 roared up from Midway across South Cicero Avenue, but Sanchez made it as loud and clear as a mountain stream that he was a devoted regular at Continental Sales Lots-4-Less....

Ours is a time ripe for tall tales. So Pete Beatty’s yarn about two brothers’ adventures in an imaginary 1837 Cleveland fits the bill. Neither the archaic speech nor the dubious claims of its characters feel out of place in an era when the simplest fact is questioned and debated ad absurdum. Yet, unlike the daily inanities which plague the citizenry in 2020, Beatty’s Cuyahoga (Scribner) is a faithful attempt to make his readers feel better....

[content-7] The CTA says, on the contrary, that the schedules were actually devised to make sure the pilots succeed. Since north-siders are often viewed as squeaky wheels who get more than their fair share of resources, Pawar realized he’d had better luck achieving his goal if he joined forces with south-side advocates to lobby for an equitable restoration of bus service. (Lincoln Park alderman Michele Smith and Bridgeport alderman Patrick D....

There’s productivity, and then there’s what these five local labels accomplished in 2016—more than just pad their catalogs, they’ve established themselves as tastemaking powers outside the communities that birthed them. In no particular order: Not Normal Tapes Not Normal Tapes founder Ralph Rivera plays in writhing, noise-gnarled sociopolitical punk band the Bug, but even if you discount that group’s exploits, the label still had a very healthy year—of particular note are excellent releases from Oakland’s Baus (who mostly sound like the Monks being forced through a sausage grinder) and Kentucky’s Quailbones....

The pandemic has encouraged folks to be experimental in all forms of life. It doesn’t always have to be something monumental—some people are just trying a new spice in the kitchen. Nevertheless, that experimental flair that 2020 introduced is coming to fruition in 2021. There’s a freedom of letting go of our typical routines, especially right now when everything is so unpredictable. The artists in the series come from all types of backgrounds....

The title of Gavagai, an internationally coproduced art film playing this week at Facets Cinémathèque, refers to a word in a made-up language invented by American philosopher W.V. Quine in his thesis on the indeterminacy of translation. I won’t pretend to understand Quine, but thankfully he’s not discussed in the film, which in fact contains little dialogue. Rather, cowriter-director-cinematographer-editor Rob Tregenza employs the term as a clue to the movie’s opaque content....

If the members of infamous UK pop-rock band the 1975 had grown up in the U.S. and listened to more pop punk than emo, they’d probably sound a lot like Waterparks. The Houston three-piece have become poster boys for the sleek, sugary suburban pop-punk sound that will forever say “Warped Tour.” That style faded out of the zeitgeist a year or two before Fall Out Boy went on hiatus in 2010, which is perhaps why few outlets aside from Alternative Press (the magazine of record for the Warped tour set) have paid much attention to Waterparks....

Lookman Adekunle Salami cannot be contained. The British artist, who performs as L.A. Salami, maneuvers between blues, rock, and folk so effortlessly it seems almost ethereal. On “The City Nowadays,” a single from his 2016 studio debut, Dancing With Bad Grammar (Beat Records), his subtle use of electric riffs and drums to guide the listener in and out of his raplike verses and harmony-laden hooks is enough to settle one into his philosophical roller-coaster ride....

Kolkata blackened death-metal band Heathen Beast are atheist, antifascist, and pointedly anonymous, and their self-released album The Revolution Will Not Be Televised but It Will Be Heard is 35 minutes of vitriol aimed at the anti-Muslim bigotry of India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, and the Indian government’s turn toward authoritarianism and hate. The song titles are direct, pithy, and profane: “Fuck Modi-Shah,” “Fuck Your Police Brutality,” “Fuck the Economy (Modi Already Has),” and “Fuck the B....

Los Angeles garage-rock tape label Burger Records—which has showed some serious kindness to our fair city over the years, releasing music from the likes of White Mystery, the Cairo Gang, and the Yolks—is celebrating itself with the Burger Revolution, presenting 50 shows around the world on Sat 3/7. There will be plenty of rockin’ at clubs in Poland, New Zealand, Ireland, and even Carbondale, but Chicago won’t be left out—that night, Logan Square burger joint Parts and Labor hosts sets from White Mystery, the Yolks, the Lemons, and trashy power-pop group the Rubs....

This story was originally published in The Appeal. Typically, the city’s river bridges are only raised to allow high-masted boats to pass in and out of Lake Michigan. But that night, for apparently the first time since 1855, the bridges became weapons in Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s aggressive crowd-control arsenal, which also included strategic public transportation shutdowns and highway exit closures to prevent access to downtown. With scarcely a few minutes’ notice—in the form of cell phone emergency alerts—the city announced a 9 PM curfew while simultaneously making it nearly impossible for people who’d gathered in the Loop to leave....