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At Mister Kelly’s For more almost two decades, 1957 to 1975, Chicago’s Mister Kelly’s was a springboard for talent. From Barbra Streisand and Barry Manilow to Bette Midler and (trigger warning) Bill Cosby, the iconic Rush Street supper club and cabaret was a rotating door for emerging comedians and musicians. Time, taste, and technology have eroded these institutions, but in this immersive experience, created as a valentine to the era by Jason Paul Smith, with music and arrangements by Gary Gimmestad, you can put on your pinup best or Mad Men attire to enjoy a night within Three Cat Productions’ imaginative time capsule....

Best known for the cult psychodrama Possession (1981), writer-director Andrzej Żuławski made his feature debut ten years earlier with The Third Part of the Night, and it shows him already at the height of his powers. A sustained nightmare about societal and personal breakdown, it presents one man’s descent into madness during the Nazi occupation of Poland, though the story is hard to follow (perhaps by design). Żuławski divulges important information about the characters in short, unexpected bursts, and the plot moves sinuously between the hero’s present, past, and dream life....

The year 2018 was considered by many pundits the year of the woman. From congressional bids to local and state races across the country, women challenged and in many places won power at rates previously unseen in American life. But just when momentum seems to be building in national politics, Chicago seems poised for an abrupt turn back toward the masculine in our mayoral election. While headlines early in the mayoral race focused on the celebrity and youth support behind Amara Enyia or the supposed front-runner status of Cook County Board president Toni Preckwinkle, it seems that in truth Chicago may be on the brink of the reign of yet another Daley....

On two recent multidisc sets, Australian composer, improviser, and electroacoustic musician Anthony Pateras chronicles his compulsive drive to try new things and move on. In the booklet that accompanies Bern • Melbourne • Milan, a release by his trio with drummer Sean Baxter and guitarist David Brown, Baxter recalls that Pateras wowed him and Brown with a solo piano performance that combined classical and jazz gestures with grindcore intensity. When the two of them approached Pateras about forming a collaborative project in 2002, he agreed, but he told them that he was about to stop playing classical music entirely....

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Last month Resident Advisor spoke with Recording Industry Association of America vice president of communications Cara Duckworth Weiblinger about rumors that the organization would begin to track cassette sales. “It’s such a small number it doesn’t meet the threshold of sales requirements for us to report it,” Weiblinger said. I’ve been reading breathless think pieces about the cassette revival for five years or so, and the RA article appears to throw a blanket over that sort of enthusiasm, suggesting that it’s groundless....

The past few years have been bittersweet for local postpunk four-piece Deeper, who released their excellent second album, Auto-Pain, last March. When it came out, they were still recovering from the loss of guitarist Michael Clawson, who took his own life in fall 2019, just after the album was completed. Then COVID-19 forced the band to cancel what surely would’ve been successful tours of Europe and North America. Fans eager to see Auto-Pain‘s taut, danceable songs performed will finally get a chance on Saturday, March 27, at 7 PM, when Deeper stream a set from the Chicago Cultural Center via online venue Noonchorus....

Last time Gossip Wolf heard from jazz guitarist Dave Miller, in 2011, he was splitting town for New York City. In an interview with the Reader‘s Peter Margasak, Miller mentioned that he planned to continue working with local groups, and his new CD, Old Door Phantoms, due Friday, April 1, on Ears&Eyes Records, features a few familiar Chicago faces, among them keyboardist Ben Boye (also a sideman to Angel Olsen and Bonnie “Prince” Billy) and drummer Quin Kirchner (also of Wild Belle)....

On May 5, Harvey rapper Ty Money released the fifth and final entry in his career-defining mixtape series, Cinco de Money, which he launched in 2015. Each volume has showcased what makes Money stand out: his vivid narratives of street life, freighted with pathos, delivered in a rush of syllables that cuts through the instrumentals like a souped-up car racing through a mountain tunnel. Cinco de Money 5 (self-released via SBMG LLC) highlights Money’s grasp of pop music: he dabs his clean, straightforward hooks with Auto-Tune, and on “Whoa Whoa” he delineates the honeyed sung chorus from the burly rapped verses with a precision that confirms the enduring magic of the old-school industry approach to pop songwriting....

Chloe Riley Tim Meegan, 33rd Ward candidate, working at his campaign office in Albany Park If it were up to social studies teacher Tim Meegan, tax increment financing money would be a thing of the past. “Right now, TIF money is the new form of patronage,” Meegan says, pointing to the $5 million in TIF dollars that subsidized construction of the new Hyatt hotel in Hyde Park or Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s plan to allocate $55 million in TIF funds for the DePaul University basketball arena near McCormick Place....

When John Raymond assembled his lithe trio, Real Feels, he wanted to play tunes so familiar to both his bandmates and his listeners that everybody, onstage and off, could set aside the task of grasping their melodies and structures and just zero in on the interplay and improvisation. A Minnesota native based in New York, Raymond chose tunes for the band (with Israeli guitarist Gilad Hekselman and drummer Colin Stranahan) that evoked nostalgia and warmth for him—hence the name “Real Feels....

Metal has a reputation as an escapist genre. That could be because some bands indulge in the theatrics and fun of dragons, witchcraft, and swordplay, or because others traffic in gruesome or apocalyptic themes that feel too outsize and horrific to accept as real—even when they’re a staunch reaction to a specific place and time. All of that is to say that in 2020, some of the most compelling metal albums are hitting too close to home for even the most reality-averse fans to ignore—including Abscess Time, the new fourth album from New York avant-garde metal band Pyrrhon....

Q: I’m a straight man in a live-in relationship with a beautiful woman. There are no sparks in bed, and it’s been more than a year since we’ve had sex. She says, “I’m sorry, but I’m just not interested.” Sometimes she asks me if I’m disappointed, and I say something like “I miss sex.” And she says: “Maybe someday. But the important thing is we love each other, right?” Before my last birthday, she asked me what I wanted as a gift....

Part one of a two-part series. Read part two here. As the northwest side continues to gentrify, evictions in this part of town have become increasingly common, organizers say. And among those most vulnerable to eviction are immigrant renters who don’t have written leases. Then, in early October, “my landlord gave me [verbal] notice that if I didn’t leave in 24 hours they were going to throw out me and my belongings,” Hernandez says....

The country-music world has been slow to embrace its queer community, so it’s been refreshing to see a new generation of queer country artists and songwriters—among them Brandi Carlile, Ty Herndon, and Shane McAnally, who frequently writes for Kacey Musgraves—live out and open lives in the spotlight over the past decade or so without their identities damaging their careers. The songs of New York singer-songwriter James Wilson, who performs as Paisley Fields, have some of the spirit of this new wave of contemporary country rock and pop, but their sound owes more to what legendary out-and-proud Seattle group Lavender Country did in the 1970s than to anything that’s going on now in Nashville....

Q: My boyfriend and I were friends for a couple of years (we’re both 30-year-old gay men), then I stopped traveling around the world and pursued him. We’ve been boyfriends for a year and a half now. We were both happy and we had sex on a regular basis during the first year. I’m more into anal (as a top) but we mainly did oral because he isn’t into anal. We tried a few times early on but every time I mention it now he doesn’t seem keen, so I’ve left it alone....

The music of Stephen Malkmus can roughly be divided among his three main bands: Pavement, the Jicks, and Silver Jews. For better or for worse, Pavement tend to overshadow the other two—their rough, fuzzed-out music and enigmatic, humorous lyrics made them alt-rock darlings during the genre’s 90s heyday, and their stamp on indie rock has been felt ever since. But though Pavement were done with making music in 1999, Malkmus was not....

Speaking of all the great Japanese food in Arlington Heights, a new strip-mall spot opened last January, joining notable north suburban izakaya like Kurumaya and Sankyu in cementing the northwest suburbs’ rep as the place to be for Japanese drinking food (much as they are for Korean drinking food). In truth Yakitori Boogytori, from the folks behind Ramen Takeya and Wasabi, isn’t officially an izakaya—it’s a yakitori-ya, grilling skewered meats and a few vegetables over white-hot binchotan charcoal....

“Faux fur, snake skin, hooflike heels, and other abstract signifiers of animality have played a key role in my daily self-fashioning,” says Danielle Rosen. The 30-year-old visual artist, photographed at the Garfield Park Conservatory, is fascinated by the relationship between human and nonhuman animals, and has spent time working on an Icelandic sheep farm in Vermont. There she performed daily massages on three sheep—Luna, Aurora, and Juniper—to remove burrs from their wool....

Chicago Fringe Opera is presenting the local premiere of this compact 75-minute transgender coming-of-age story, which has had an unusual number of productions since its first appearance in 2014. That might be due to its economical structure—it requires only two singers and a string quartet—but also, no doubt, owes to its topical subject. As One is loosely based on the experience of colibrettist Kimberly Reed, whose 2008 documentary Prodigal Sons traced the story of her own transition from high school football hero (and class president) to adult woman and lesbian (who incidentally makes the surprising discovery that her brother is the grandson of Hollywood legends Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles)....