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Q: I’ve always been excited by BDSM but I’ve only minimally explored this side of myself until very recently. I’m a straight woman and it was difficult to find men who wanted more monogamish relationships on the traditional apps and a challenge to be honest about what I am looking for where kink is concerned. I’d often get through a month or so of seeing someone before finding out they wanted a completely monogamous relationship and that they were very vanilla in the bedroom to boot....

Ripe 4 Luv Toronto’s Ben Cook—former front man for tough-guy hardcore act No Warning and current guitarist in progressive punk rockers Fucked Up—has been cultivating an under-the-rader solo career since 2009, releasing a nonstop stream of seven-inches and EPs under a variety of different guises and team-ups, including the garage-punk Young Governor and the retro-electro dance duo Yacht Club. On 3/10, his new LP, Ripe 4 Luv is coming out on Slumberland Records—no doubt his biggest solo release yet—and today’s 12 O’Clock Track is a preview song off of it, “Crawling Back to You....

About 2,700 copies of the second issue of the Chicago FoodCultura Clarion have been randomly inserted into print issues of this week’s Reader. If you didn’t snag the inaugural issue in November, there’s a small chance to score a copy of this penultimate installment (or download the full PDF). It’s an easy-on-the-eyes journalistic collaboration between artist Antoni Miralda, University of Chicago anthropologist Stephan Palmié, and a posse of food writers dishing out stories on, among other things, Korean-style Chinese food, La Chaparrita, hot dogs, stockyard blood buttons, a racoon feast, and this fishy Chicago food history footnote by me:...

What are you doing for Banned Books Week this year? It’s not like you don’t have choices. First celebrated in 1982 and promoted now primarily by the American Library Association, Banned Books Week (September 24-30) highlights the year’s ten most challenged works—that is, the ones that have attracted the most complaints from people hoping to get them knocked off public library shelves (the latest figures are from 2016). Famous list alumni include the Harry Potter series and the Holy Bible....

When I heard that the lone surviving Bee Gee, Barry Gibb, was releasing a country album, I didn’t bat an eye. Though the band are best known for the falsetto-laden hits of their disco years, and secondarily for the baroque psychedelia they played in the 1960s (which music snobs like me love), Gibb’s musical life is peppered with precedents for this rootsy turn. Born in the UK and raised in Australia, the brothers Gibb grew up listening to the Everly Brothers and Buddy Holly, and they experimented with country music long before it was fashionable....

The THT Burger at Harding Tavern thehardingtavern.com Since it opened last spring, Logan Square’s Harding Tavern has become one of my favorite low-key neighborhood places to grab dinner and a beer. So it’s both a blessing and a curse that the unassuming sports bar from the owners of Cafe con Leche is quietly serving one of the best burgers in the city. Happens every time: I kid myself into thinking I can settle for a salad—and then I order the THT Burger instead....

T his is a book by a grown-ass woman written for other grown-ass women,” Brittney Cooper, aka Professor Crunk, writes at the beginning of her new book Eloquent Rage. “This is a book for women who expect to be taken seriously and for men who take grown women seriously. This is a book for women who know shit is fucked up. These women want to change things but don’t know where to begin....

Q: I keep running into the same issue with my best friend of five years. (She’s also my maid of honor at my upcoming wedding.) We’re both empaths—most of my friends are—and we’re both in therapy working on how to cope with that. I have severe anxiety that impacts my physical health, so one of the empath-related issues I’m working on is not following through with plans when I need to take time alone....

In July 2012, as Wicker Park Fest wound down, Chicago guitarist Ryley Walker was riding his bike south on Damen below Division when a hit-and-run driver clipped him from behind. He woke up in the hospital. “I cracked my skull, and I’m pretty much deaf in my left ear,” Walker, 25, says with equanimity. “Luckily, I was still on my parents’ health insurance.” As he recuperated at home after a couple days in Illinois Masonic, he made a decision: Though he’d been throwing himself into music since he was a teenager, his ravenous, equal-opportunity ears had made it tough for him to stick to any one sound, instead leading him by turns into punk rock, noise, folk, free jazz, and anything else that caught his interest....

Longtime readers know that Gossip Wolf is a big supporter of power-rock unit High Spirits, fronted by local hesher Chris Black (who also leads Superchrist and Dawnbringer). The band take inspiration from the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, and Reader critic Luca Cimarusti has described their music as “Halford­esque vocals over sharp, harmonized guitar shredding.” On the new LP Motivator, which German label High Roller Records releases on Friday, September 16, High Spirits stick to the playbook they’ve perfected: massively exuberant, diamond-­hard jammers such as “Flying High” and “Reach for the Glory” are beers-in-the-air classics in the making....

With their adaptation of Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio, Joseph Steakley and Ben Lobpries have fashioned a fable about Trump-era nationalism. It’s not subtle. At one point, a rabidly ignorant crowd condemns the titular wooden boy with percussive cries of “String him up!” His crime? Pinocchio (created by the Chicago Puppet Studio and voiced and manipulated by Sean Garratt) doesn’t come from town, he comes from the forest. And as the tiki-torch-wielding villagers loudly exclaim, nothing good comes from the forest....

Nearly eight years ago, Jordan Morris, now 32, and his friend Turner Wathen, 35, began planning a business to bring the best, purest rums they could find to the U.S. “We’re looking for rums that are unadulterated,” Wathen says. “No sugar, no caramels. We like the purity of rum.” They identified a 12-year-old rum from Trinidad that they loved, bought some, and had it shipped to a warehouse in Louisville where—due to a mistake—it got mixed with whiskey....

Two years ago, when Rick Bayless devoted the entire eighth season of his PBS series Mexico: One Plate at a Time to the syncretic food of Mexico’s Baja Peninsula, someone should’ve guessed that his long-gestating, closely guarded plan for Randolph Street—something he promised would be completely new to Chicago—would be somehow related. Fruits and vegetables sometimes feature prominently among this section of the menu. Avocado, coconut, hearts of palm, and pineapple all take center plate, the latter grilled and mounted atop dollops of goat cheese from Indiana’s Prairie Fruits Farm & Creamery, with a hazelnut-based salsa macha to approximate something like a 70s-era hors d’oeuvre as done south of the border....

Neon shades of violet—not rainbows—radiate from Tarell Alvin McCraney and Tina Landau’s world-premiere docu-party celebrating the true story of queer activist Terence Alan Smith, aka drag queen Joan Jett Blakk. That choice of color in David Zinn and Heather Gilbert’s euphoric and chaotic scenic and lighting design feels like more than just a chic and clubby aesthetic choice: staged at a time when mainstream American culture is advancing the rights of some queer communities while regressing them for others, Landau’s production recalls, via loudspeakers and bold-type signage, real-life historical rallying cries for the margins of the margins....

It’s a dubious honorific, but the press release for Nick Hart’s metatheatrical, deadpan, quirktastic retelling of the Battle of the Alamo contains, without a doubt, the most eyebrow-raising disclaimer I think I’ve ever come across reviewing theater in Chicago: “We recommend you do not sit in the front row or on an aisle if you want to remain in the theater to observe the entire production.” Sure enough, between Moth-style personal essays about identity, inscrutable bits of Western-themed absurdism, and metaphors about barbecued milk, ensemble members playing key Texas Revolution figures hand randomly-selected audience members a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon and an egg (?...

If you go to a comedy showcase, you will see a lot of dudes. Most of the people you see onstage, in fact, will be dudes. Some people may assume that this is because dudes are, in general, funnier. These people would be wrong. Kachel had done a similar study of five showcases in 2016, but she wanted to expand her data set. So between January and October, Kachel tabulated the acts in 19 comedy shows—including one of her own, Hoo Ha Comedy—in a spreadsheet....

In commercializing Jane Austen’s enduring appeal, playwrights Margot Melcon and Lauren Gunderson have found a surefire formula for feel-good, oft-produced holiday hits. Like 2016’s Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley, The Wickhams: Christmas at Pemberley checks all the right box-office boxes: clever dialogue that (sort of) gives women a voice, but without diminishing their ladylike demeanor, humor that gently addresses social justice issues without ever threatening the status quo, and—of course—the marquee value of the Austen name....

Well, look at that. The world is ending. Suddenly we’re all cooped up, we can’t see friends or loved ones, we can’t go out for pizza, and we can’t grab a beer at the bar. I don’t know about you, but even if people weren’t suffering and dying from coronavirus, I’d be starting to feel really down. I’m frustrated and anxious, I’m stir-crazy, and I’m sleeping terribly. Everything is canceled—tours included—but at least there are still new records coming out....

It’s a common misconception that true, filthy rock ’n’ roll died in the early 80s after being eclipsed by new wave, whose shiny commercial sound piled on the gated reverb, drum machines, keytars, and New Romantic vocals. In fact, noisy rock and garage punk flourished underground during that era, thanks to the likes of the Jesus and Mary Chain, Butthole Surfers, Loop, Dwarves, and Australian caveman thudders the Scientists, whose front man and guitarist, Kim Salmon, formed the noirish, blackened-earth postpunk band in 1978 and later put in a few stints in homicidally heavy alt-rock group Beasts of Bourbon....

The first time I heard bassist, guitarist, and singer Tonina Saputo, her voice stopped me in my tracks—her delicate phrasing and heart-wrenching poignancy brought Billie Holiday to mind, except that she was singing in Spanish as well as English. The song was a cover of “Historia de un Amor,” a torchy Panamanian bolero written in the 1950s by Carlos Almarán that’s beloved throughout Latin America, and I wasn’t the only one impressed by her version—Barack Obama listed it among his top songs of 2018....