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After Tyler, the Creator dropped his fourth solo record, Flower Boy (Columbia), in July it quickly became cliche to describe it as his “mature album.” Granted, Tyler and his pals in the Odd Future collective made an indelible impression on music culture when they broke out in 2011—and his presence as a violently foul-mouthed miscreant with a predilection for homophobic, misogynistic lyrics was partially responsible for their initial infamy. Imagine the challenge of trying to convince the public you have more to offer than that!...

Seth Perlman/Sun-Times Media The Trib and Governor Rauner are still in their honeymoon phase. I can’t look inside the heads of the members of the Tribune editorial board. If they write that Bruce Rauner impressed and excited them when he visited the board for an hour last week, then that must be what he did. But I wonder what reservations, if any, got swallowed as they approved his message....

Ages of Man Theatre Above the Law presents three Thornton Wilder one-acts about how children relate to grown-ups. Wizened babies struggle to express complex thoughts while their adult caretakers can’t share simple ones, children playact themselves into understanding how much they need their parents, and teenagers realize the impossibility of walking in another’s shoes. This superb production moves nimbly from humor to heartbreak with spartan means, and the excellent cast juggle multiple roles effortlessly....

“He may be a jerk, but he’s a great man.” The Beach Bum is somewhat looser in structure than most Hollywood movies, borrowing its look and rhythms about equally from indie film and music videos. Moondog wanders around Miami and the Keys in ragged beach wear, ingesting controlled substances, having casual heterosexual intercourse, and encountering outrageous characters played by recognizable performers like Snoop Dogg and Martin Lawrence. Moondog almost misses his daughter’s wedding; he goes to rehab; he beats a disabled man and steals his money....

Hermetically sealed inside the idyllic heartland like a Kraft Single, The Bridges of Madison County is the most delicious kind of cheese. Intimately staged in Theo Ubique’s new digs in Evanston, this fish-out-of-water musical follows homesick Italian immigrant Francesca as she wilts on the vine from the boredom of pleasant domesticity in Iowa. When her husband and two kids leave her home alone for a long weekend, hunky photographer Robert Kincaid conveniently shows up at her house to ask for directions....

Inside a snug, spartan room at the Harold Washington Library Center, Shimon Marcucci had fine-tuned what probably amounted to several albums’ worth of music before I’d ever played a note there. For four years, the middle-aged bureaucrat turned amateur composer had spent his lunch break on the eighth floor of Chicago’s mammoth central library, soprano saxophone in tow. Standing in one of the six first-come, first-served rehearsal rooms—each outfitted with an upright piano and available for an hour at a time to anyone with a library card—Marcucci had been dreaming up and polishing a range of world-jazz fusion material that would eventually become a self-released record....

Since the summer, my buddy Nick and I have convened weekly to watch movies through Squad, a chat app with a screen-share function. For months, Nick has evangelized for free streaming site Tubi: it’s got lots of forgettable 2000s comedies featuring famous actors who’ve scrubbed those jobs from their CVs, plus tons of the absolute trash we both love, including way too many movies produced by Full Moon, a churn-’em-out horror-film company that makes Roger Corman look like John Carpenter....

Ever since ÉSSO dropped a self-titled album of dance-floor fillers in 2015, the groove-tastic local band’s fusion of Latin music, Afrobeat, and psychedelic rock has set Gossip Wolf’s toes to tapping. As if in response to the despair of the pandemic, ÉSSO decided to release their next album one song per month, to spread out the fun—last spring and summer, they put out five singles and videos, including “Animal,” “Izquierda,” and “Chico Chango” (which features Latin soul crooner Lester Rey)....

In December 1997, Eric Williams opened the Silver Room at 1410 N. Milwaukee in Wicker Park, selling jewelry and hosting intimate music and art events. As the store evolved into a commercial and cultural hub, Williams became an important voice in the community—and while serving on the board for the neighborhood’s chamber of commerce, he voiced his frustration about its street festivals largely ignoring musicians of color. Silver Room Block Party Dozens of mostly local acts from a wide variety of genres perform on outdoor stages and in indoor venues in Hyde Park, including the parking lot of Harper Court (5235 S....

Akeelah and the Bee In Cheryl L. West’s adaptation of the 2006 inspirational film of the same name, Akeelah Anderson (La Shone T. Kelly) needs the help of her entire community if she’s going to win the Scripps National Spelling Bee. West transports the action from Los Angeles to Chicago and cuts down the size of Akeelah’s family, but otherwise the story is the same. Brandon Rivera’s gleefully over-the-top performance as Akeelah’s preppy friend Javier delights the children in the audience, and Aaron Quick’s projections add excitement to the spelling sequences as words form around the set....

Best use of food waste Best food writer (of “your mama” jokes) Best new cookbook from Chicago Best comeback(s) from disaster Best Hot Doug’s stand-in Best migration to the south side Best cheap fancy lunch Best $3 lunch Best burger no one’s talking about Best peanut butter and jelly sandwich Best sausage that brings the funk Best combination of pizza and liquors and jazz Best vegan deep-dish Best Polish food in a Korean restaurant Best Italian-Japanese fusion Best soup dumplings Best postconfessional tacos Best coffee roaster to include a cassingle with your caffeine boost Best new brewery to launch with only one beer Best IPA that doesn’t taste like another goddamn IPA Best frozen water Best classic cocktails Best local vodka for whiskey drinkers Best place to try whiskey before you buy Best pizza Best overall restaurant Best local brewery Best burger Best coffee shop Best breakfast/​brunch Best hot dog Best Mexican restaurant Best doughnuts Best BYOB Best farmers’ market or gourmet market Best brewpub Best barbecue Best cocktail list Best ice cream Best sushi Best bakery Best Thai restaurant Best liquor store Best local brew Best Italian restaurant Best chef Best late-night eats Best falafel Best sandwich Best vegetarian restaurant Best new food trend Best butcher shop Best waitstaff Best bagels Best local distillery Best local grocer Best Chinese restaurant Best vegan restaurant Best pub grub Best wine shop Best Indian restaurant Best alfresco dining Best desserts Best-looking waitstaff Best food truck Best steak house Best local spirit Best Middle Eastern restaurant Best seafood restaurant Best gay bar Best bartender/​mixologist Best Vietnamese restaurant Best barista Best sports bar Best up-​and-​coming chef Best food festival Best local food product Best wine list Best Korean restaurant Best new bar Best local farm

Last Thursday, the Music Box opened its latest 70-millimeter film series with Raoul Walsh’s The Big Trail, a 1930 Fox release made in the short-lived Grandeur process, an early iteration of 70-millimeter filmmaking. There are no surviving 70-millimeter prints of The Big Trail, so the Music Box screened it from 35-millimeter instead, but this more than sufficed in conveying the spectacle of Walsh’s production. The film’s high-definition imagery still impresses after 90 years; Walsh fills the widescreen frames brilliantly, often dividing one’s attention between highly populated backgrounds and naturalistic, low-stakes drama in the foreground....

If you went to an underground show in Chicago in the past ten years, you probably saw Ray Ellingsen. Any time a band played eccentric, noisy, outre rock in a basement, loft, apartment, or converted warehouse, more likely than not he’d be there: snapping photographs right up front, hovering over the merch table to check out cassettes and T-shirts, chatting with musicians between or even during their sets. He hummed with enthusiasm that seemed as tangible as the aura drawn around a comic-­book superhero....

The fish has rotted from the head all the way to the last scale on the tail. The rule of law feels like a joke. Cruelty is the point, as more than one observer has noted of the dominant ethos of the current administration. In light of that dark reality, how do we empathize and still keep ourselves safe? What does “safe” actually mean now? In How to Defend Yourself, a group of five young college women and two young men come together for self-defense classes after a sorority sister, Susannah, is sexually assaulted....

UPDATE Tuesday, March 17: this event has been suspended, though it may be remounted in the future. Refunds available at point of purchase. Normally, in a fantasy life, you obsess over your pets. Dog cloning figures largely in the mind anytime I think about how it would feel to be Barbra Streisand, personally. But there comes a point in any conversation with a decadent person—around hour two, perhaps—when you wonder if or when this fascinating individual will move on from dog talk and feed you dinner....

King Ripple, a 2015 psychedelic-horror short film starring Keith Stanfield (Short Term 12, Straight Outta Compton) and directed by DePaul University sophomore Luke Jaden, is one of several student-directed shorts boosted by the public television series Film School Shorts. The weekly half-hour program, which begins airing its fourth season on Chicago’s WTTW 11 this Sunday, is the exclusive online distributor of King Ripple and The Listing, another of Jaden’s shorts, as well as several other films that “push the boundaries of broadcast....

If the 30s are the new 20s, and the 20s are but an extended adolescence, then we may never have to grow up at all if we live long enough. Sam and Leo—”Team FatGay,” as they term themselves—are doing their darnedest to steer us to that brave new world. These thirtysomethings stay up all night eating Chinese takeout, popsicles, and cornflakes; watch Top Chef and Grey’s Anatomy; play Super Mario; and lip-synch their way through choreography from Sister Act II....

Chappie Last week I argued that the new live-action version of Cinderella deepens (or some might say stultifies) the classic fairy tale with lessons in European social history. I could have added that, in this regard, the film represents the inverse of two current mainstream hits, Matthew Vaughn’s Kingsman: The Secret Service and Neill Blomkamp’s Chappie, which employ fairy-tale narratives to consider real-life social issues. Kingsman is something of a modern-day Cinderella story, telling the tale of a working-class goon (Taron Egerton) who gets transformed into a dapper, world-traveling spy with the help of an older agent-cum-fairy godfather (Colin Firth)....

Though they were around for only a few years in the early 1980s, Naperville punk band Protagonists did a lot in that brief lifespan, recording a tape with legendary engineer Phil Bonnet, releasing a seven-inch on the label run by fellow suburban warriors Reaction Formation, and rocking venues across the city and suburbs—not bad for high school kids! On Friday, July 24, local reissue label Alona’s Dream will drop 1983-1985, which compiles buzzing, new-wave-inflected jams from both Protagonists releases as well as basement demos and live cuts....

On October 9, comedian Peter Kim left Second City’s E.T.C. revue show A Red Line Runs Through It. During the course of the evening, harmless heckling had turned into vitriolic hate speech directed at both the performers and the audience, and Kim had had enough. In a personal essay published by Chicago magazine he wrote: “Since September 2015, people in the audience have hurled increasingly racist, homophobic, and misogynistic comments at me and my castmates: comments demeaning my Asian ethnicity, using the f-word to degrade my homosexuality, and shouting ‘whores’ at the women....