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Guitarists Bill MacKay and Ryley Walker have been playing together for years, and their lovely second collaborative album, SpiderBeetleBee (Drag City), beautifully bridges the gap between their backgrounds. MacKay, a Pittsburgh native, has musical roots in jazz, while Walker pursues a cosmic folk-rock sound indebted to experimental troubadours such as Tim Buckley, John Martyn, and Tim Hardin (even though he discovered left-field sounds through skateboard videos while growing up in Rockford)....

Dear Governor Rauner: Surely this has nothing to do with your ties to a federal nursing home trial from 2014, right? While you were still candidate Rauner, the private equity firm GTCR you retired from in 2012 was linked to shady nursing home chain Trans Healthcare, Inc. A federal bankruptcy judge accused your old company of orchestrating a “bust out” scheme to let the business die and evade liability for at least $1 billion in alleged wrongful death and abuse suits on behalf of the estates of elderly victims....

Every political movement needs a folk hero, a larger-than-life figure who accomplishes amazing deeds and inspires lesser mortals to speak up. Earlier Americans have had Sojourner Truth, Abraham Lincoln, and Thelma and Louise. Modern feminists, particularly millennials who spend most of their lives on the Internet, have Lindy West, who, for the past decade, armed with sharp wit, thick skin, and a penchant for WRITING IN ALL CAPS, has told truths and slain trolls for the Stranger, Jezebel, This American Life, and now the Guardian and GQ....

Jason Little A couple of months back I interviewed Paul McGee, now of Lost Lake, for the Reader‘s bar issue—he was one of six prominent mixologists we asked to name a favorite drink. We disposed of the assignment at hand in a couple of minutes, so I took the opportunity to ask him a question that’s long been on my mind. The cocktail revival was like a lot of food movements have been—all about improving quality by getting rid of crappy shortcuts that had invaded the P&L sheets of bars all over America....

The climax of last summer’s hit movie Crazy Rich Asians featured a tense exchange between two characters over a round of the Chinese tile game of mahjong. Mahjong games here in Chicago, though—at least those organized by Debbie Turner—are more congenial and less intense. Turner did find other women to teach her, though, and she had her moment when everything fell into sync. She realized that if the game had been explained in another way, she might have grasped it better, and it gave her the inspiration to teach....

Jon Tai is something of an antimagician. Tricking you, he says, isn’t exactly the point. So while yes, his interactive show Missed Connections can look like some sort of physics-defying, supernatural-forces-are-at-play experience, that’s not the most extraordinary thing. The most extraordinary thing, Tai says, is creating a one-of-a-kind, collectively intense connection between 20 people suddenly, simultaneously swept up in astonishment. “This might seem like a bit out of left field, but I feel like there were a lot of parallel concepts in Grey House, with the way it played a lot with expectations and preconceived notions....

Among his other skills, William Shakespeare was a most splendid ass kisser, and Richard III—offered now in an exhilaratingly subversive production from the Gift Theatre—is one of his greatest works in the lips-to-butt genre. As the 2012 discovery of his lost bones, buried under an English parking lot, confirmed, Richard suffered from scoliosis—curvature of the spine. It doesn’t seem to have been that big a deal in real life; researchers say that, although it reduced his height, the condition could be hidden with well-tailored clothes and didn’t prevent Richard from walking normally....

The pandemic allowed many to import workplace into living space, thereby reducing risk of illness and death. We talk about missing the experience of an office in addition to the other ways we used to socialize. But what about the commute? Some glorify that in-between time as an opportunity to read or “catch up” on phone-based tasks, but, for me, it was nothing more than an exhausting, obligatory, unpaid extension of the workday....

It’s one thing for a store owner to open a location in a new Chicago neighborhood, but it’s quite another to become so charmed with the area that you actually move there yourself. For Tiffany Paige and Mike Biersma, co-owners of the award-winning boutique Modern Cooperative, “where vintage modern meets handmade,” that’s exactly the seductive pull Hyde Park had on them, the community they’re now proud to call home. Originally Pilsen residents, the couple opened the Modern Cooperative Hyde Park location in November 2015....

This story is part of the Marshall Project’s “We Are Witnesses: Chicago” series. In 15 direct-to-camera testimonies, this collection of videos gives voice to Chicagoans affected by the justice system. Watch the videos at themarshallproject.org/chicago. I grew up on the northwest side of Chicago, Jefferson Park. During my childhood [it] was pretty much crime free except for a few very significant crimes, and one of them was a well-known case, the murder of three young boys—Tony and John Schuessler and another boy named [Robert] Peterson....

The 2021 Sundance Film Festival soldiered on in the shadow of COVID-19 with newly appointed festival director Tabitha Jackson testing the limits of virtual event planning on the grandest scale. The hybrid socially-distanced in-person and virtual festival highlighted only 73 feature films, significantly less than its typical 120. However, smaller did not mean less inclusive, as participants came from more than 120 countries around the world and all 50 U....

Not only is 2020 the Year of Chicago Music, it’s also the 35th year for the nonprofit Arts & Business Council of Chicago (A&BC), which provides business expertise and training to creatives and their organizations citywide. To celebrate, the A&BC has launched the #ChiMusic35 campaign at ChiMusic35.com. It includes a public poll to determine the consensus 35 greatest moments in Chicago music history (the Reader will publish the results on July 23) and a raffle to benefit the A&BC’s work supporting creative communities struggling with the impact of COVID-19 in the city’s disinvested neighborhoods....

Gloria Estefan’s got one. So do the Four Seasons. Carole King’s got a really good one. Even Motown’s got one, and that’s a record company. I guess Cher figured it was her turn for a biographical Broadway musical—though I don’t understand why, since she was never all that interesting or good, and she doesn’t qualify as a phenomenon except insofar as she’s been able to parlay her not-that-goodness into a remarkably durable career....

Paul Gulyas is one of those tireless contributors to Chicago music whose work largely goes unnoticed by the public. If you’ve gone to a show at Beat Kitchen or Subterranean in the past few years, you might’ve seen him behind the soundboard. He’s also a musician and producer, and he’s earned a modicum of fame in Chicago hip-hop under his stage name, Cutta—New Deal Crew dynamo Chris Crack regularly shouts him out in his songs....

Since Chicago footwork producer and Teklife member DJ Earl dropped his breakthrough 2016 debut, Open Your Eyes, he’s traveled far outside the city and branched out into different sounds. In 2017, Earl dropped a genre-splicing dance full-length called 50 Backwoods with in-demand Brooklyn producer Nick Hook, and this year his collaborations have included the hip-hop EPs Paintings on the Porch (with Detroit MC Sheefy McFly) and Black Dobson (with Chicago rapper and childhood friend Akem Eshu)....

The Guided by Voices camp is never a quiet one. About a month ago, GBV mastermind Robert Pollard announced the release of a brand-new solo LP, and shortly thereafter said he’d be pulling the band out of retirement (he’d put it on ice in 2014) for a new record and some live dates, including an appearance at Calgary’s Sled Island Festival. The one problem is that this isn’t going to be the Guided by Voices we all know and love: the new record will be performed entirely by Pollard, and the touring lineup includes no members from any of the band’s classic incarnations....

After the rush of winning the 2013 Moth GrandSlam storytelling competition faded, Lily Be (née Lydia Edith Lucio) noticed that her fellow storytellers were overwhelmingly white. “When I heard I was the first Latinx to win the Slam I was like, ‘Are you serious? How can that be?’” she says. “It’s not like we’re some out-of-the-way place. It’s Chicago.” Telling stories around the table, that was just a thing my family did....

Shame Parade I’ve been waiting patiently for local punks Split Feet to release their debut full-length since I caught them live last year (read more about it in this week’s Gossip Wolf), and yesterday they posted the entire thing online. The record, which will be out on tape via Accidental Guest Recordings sometime next month, is called Shame Parade, and it was well worth the wait. It’s a dark and moody postpunk record, full of pushy, aggressive tempos and eerie vibes....

Some people can’t get enough Christmas music, but others can’t run away from it fast enough. For more than ten years, Chicago free-jazz veteran Mars Williams (born in Elmhurst in 1955) has been refining a concept that can bring the two camps together under the same roof. Bringing things together is what he does: a prodigal multi-instrumentalist (his tools include most of the saxophone family, clarinets, Autoharp, and a tabletop full of small percussion instruments and toys), he’s played rock with the Psychedelic Furs and the Waitresses, free jazz with the likes of Hal Russell, Peter Brötzmann, and Paal Nilssen-Love, and a bit of everything in the long-running Liquid Soul, whose freewheeling fusion combines jazz, funk, dance music, hip-hop, and more....

Zoom work meetings are now a way of life. Those who used to frequent offices and conference rooms have had more than their fair share of coworkers with clever Zoom backgrounds, surprise appearances by pets, and “Sorry, can’t hear you, you’re muted” moments. Less frequent are enthusiastic descriptions of pornography, kitchens on fire, and views inside a coworker’s bathroom—and their unsavory bathroom habits. The characters of the web series In-Diana experience it all....