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We’d bet a Friday-night fish-fry dinner you’ve never heard of Clam Lake. Located in the thick of Wisconsin’s dense North Woods, it’s a town so small it’s more of a crossroads, hidden in the middle of the 858,000-acre Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest (it’s the only town within 725 square miles), making it one of the most remotely populated areas in the state. Imagine driving straight into the woods and happening upon a speck of civilization in the midst of a smattering of little lakes (Upper Clam Lake is the largest; Little Clam Lake is a close second)....

Via Facebook Bob McClory covered human decency for the Reader. He admired activists and reformers, and every couple of months he would tell a story about one or two of them in our pages. Older than other Reader writers, decades older than some, he described a Chicago that needed every ounce of reform it could get—no argument there—but got plenty. If sin thrived in our city, so did the coin’s other side—virtue....

You know how everybody’s Irish on Saint Patrick’s Day? It’s actually worse than that. The starkest failure of originality in Chicago drinking culture is the ubiquity of the ersatz Irish pub. And I’m not talking about watering holes with tangible ties to Mother Ireland or bars of actual character, such as Shinnick’s Pub in Bridgeport, owned by three generations of the same family since 1938. I’m talking about the kind of place whose idea of Irish pride is a shamrock-shaped apostrophe on the sign and Guinness urinal screens....

Q: I’m a 30-year-old straight woman in a three-year relationship with my live-in partner, who is also 30. I love him and he loves me and he wants to make a life with me. However, in this pandemic, the stress is so great that I have lost all desire to have sex. I don’t want anyone touching me right now, not even myself. I feel like I’m in survival mode. I lost the career I love and I’m working four different jobs to make up for it....

With state legislators trying to force the mayor to spend hundreds of millions of TIF dollars on the schools, it looks like the mayor’s taking a page from the George Bluth book of money management. The banana stand being—aw, forget it, just watch the show. That put Emanuel in a bind. It’s hard to ignore a bunch of kids who say they love the librarian who fostered their appreciation for reading....

Who knew a sleeveless button-down shirt could look fashionable? Granted, life coach Andrew Asuncion was covered in Helmut Lang while casually running errands, in an outfit he describes as the “suburbs-of-Tokyo minimalism”—a kind of look he often turns to. “I’ve always been intrigued by the costumes and color palettes in Wong Kar-wai films,” he says. “In his film 2046 [the character] Bai Ling [played by Zhang Ziyi] always had a perfectly cut dress on, but it was actually the same in every scene—just in different fabrics and material....

Chicago DJ and producer Rick Feltes, better known as DJ Rude One, just released a new solo album, Onederful, and a crowd of hip-hop heavies show up to sing his praises on the opening track: Common collaborator Twilight Tone, Gang Starr cofounder DJ Premier, and legendary New York MC Kool G Rap. Feltes, 42, hasn’t released a full-length in 12 years—that’s when he dropped From Now On with Single Minded Pros, his duo with producer Keino West (aka Doc West)....

In early 2016, Jimmy Amutavi had what he considered a happy life. More than a decade had passed since he first emigrated to the U.S. from Kenya with dreams of being a personal trainer. Amutavi had settled down with his wife and young son in Evanston and was renting space at a nearby gym where the lifelong fitness fanatic gave private lessons. But Amutavi’s ties to the gym went beyond business....

The Reader’s archive is vast and varied, going back to 1971. Every day in Archive Dive, we’ll dig through and bring up some finds. I was going to write about the @MayorEmanuel Twitter feed, which ended its glorious run almost exactly seven years ago this past weekend with the fictional Rahm getting sucked into a time vortex. And now all I can hear is that music, and suddenly everything just fucking…...

The city hopes the Loop Link bus rapid transit corridor, a bold reconfiguration of street space, will double the speed of buses crossing the central business district from the previous glacial rush-hour pace of 3 mph. The $41 million project was designed to provide an express route for buses traveling between Michigan Avenue and the West Loop. I overheard several commuters complaining about the new system. A couple of them strategized about different bus lines they could take to avoid the BRT corridor....

In retelling Charles Dickens’s perennial holiday classic, A Christmas Carol, playwright Maya Malan-Gonzalez performs the theatrical equivalent of completely gutting a building, keeping the foundation and outer walls, but changing everything else. Her A Xmas Cuento Remix, set in a contemporary urban area, concerns a sour Christmas-hating Scrooge of a woman, Dolores, successful in business but mean to her employees and estranged from the only family she has left, her niece’s family....

On a recent Monday afternoon, members of a group called Concerned Citizens of Riot Fest in Douglas Park guided a visitor around the west-side green space they say was disfigured by the three-day music festival last fall. Eight months after the fest, the south end of Douglas Park—bounded by Ogden, Albany, 19th, and California and occupied by soccer and baseball fields—still displays tire ruts and wide, muddy areas where heavy foot traffic from 135,000 festgoers tore up the turf....

Near the end of the first act of Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band, the cast delivers a blazing cover of the real-life Cambodian-American rock band Dengue Fever’s “One Thousand Tears of a Tarantula.” It’s the kind of music that makes your syn­apses light up like firecrackers sparking over a riptide of endorphins. It’s April 1974. We are in Cambodia. The band is called Cyclos, and its members know exactly how good they are....

Sebastian Vargo doesn’t want to come off like a snake oil salesman, but he is very much an evangelist for the power of pickling. Vargo received an early fermentation indoctrination growing up in suburban Detroit, where his mother led regular forays to the area’s classic Jewish delis. “It was too much meat for me as a kid,” he says. “It was these stacked high sandwiches and these half and full sours....

When former Reader staff writer Peter Margasak began programming the Frequency Series in 2013, he envisioned concerts that would expose audiences of different avant-garde musical disciplines to artists from other genres that they had not heard before but might well appreciate. Margasak left the Reader and Chicago in order to move to Rome in 2018, but he’s continued to program the series, (which usually takes place on Sunday nights at Constellation) as well as a semiannual festival....

Michael Gebert Robert Adams Sr. at Honey 1 BBQ Chicago has its own distinct barbecue heritage, shaped by the great migration from the Mississippi Delta to the north and by the proliferation of slaughterhouses in the mid-20th century. That heritage’s days are numbered anywhere north of Cermak and (roughly) east of Austin. The glass pits are fairly unique to Chicago, made by two plants here (Avenue Metal and Belvin J&F Sheet Metal), but the principles are the same as in any great barbecue region: you cook the meat over wood fire for many hours, slowly breaking down the collagen in cuts like pork ribs, pork shoulder, or beef brisket....

Logan Square venue-slash-restaurant Township is on the slow grind to reestablish its intimate concert hall after it abruptly shut down in late November—the venue went dark after MP Shows leader Brian Peterson wound up selling his stake in Township to co-owner Tamiz Haiderali and a then-unnamed new partner. It turns out Haiderali’s new partner is Mark “Max” Brumbach, the man behind Wicker Park BBQ spot Smoke Daddy who also fixed up Humboldt Park bar California Clipper in the late 90s....

Chicago’s musicians and venues were among the first affected by measures against the spread of COVID-19, but even before Governor J.B. Pritzker issued a shelter-in-place order on Friday, March 20, record stores had also started feeling the pain. Social-distancing practices caused an economic slowdown so quickly that on March 13, Record Store Day organizers postponed this year’s RSD, scheduled for Saturday, April 18 (it’s tentatively moved to June 20). The following day, 606 Records in Pilsen closed early for the day, posting on Instagram that the normally busy 18th Street strip was so quiet you could “hear the spray paint....

Since debuting in 2008, Ian’s Party has evolved from its humble suburban punk origins into an annual Wicker Park-based mini fest showcasing underground Chicago artists (though there are always a few acts from the greater midwest thrown in for good measure). Over the years it’s grown in ambition and in its commitment to inclusivity and artistic diversity. Even those who consider themselves particularly well-versed in the scene are all but guaranteed to be introduced to a local act that they didn’t know they were waiting to hear....

Last week Chicago music and TV historian, Chic-a-Go-Go cofounder, and Reader contributor Jake Austen announced that he’s rebooting his long-running zine Roctober—launched in 1992—after a six-year hiatus! Roctober covers music, comics, and whatever else Austen feels like, and he says it’ll come out once a year going forward. The 52nd issue drops on Halloween as a free PDF, and Austen is raising funds for a print run through Indiegogo. “You will read about the Shaggs, Perry Como, Samhain, Ozone (70s/80s spin-off of Max’s Kansas City pop-punk band the Fast), Holle Thee Maxwell, Blondie, 70s pub-punk band the Destroyers, and Jobriath meets Maude,” he says....