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I was fortunate enough to be one of the 51 critics selected for the Sundance Press Inclusion Initiative, a program that provided free tickets to the ten-day Sundance Film Festival and cash for lodging and airfare to, as the festival notes, “critics, freelancers, and journalists from backgrounds underrepresented in the critical mainstream, with an emphasis on people of color, women, and people with disabilities.” Fifty-one participants in an inclusion program is extraordinary....

Drive-ins have emerged as a popular method for getting concert audiences out in the world to see their favorite acts, and this week’s gig poster advertises a show featuring some classic Chicago house-music artists. The singer, DJ, record producer, and Chicago native known as Green Velvet (born Curtis Alan Jones) did triple duty for this outdoor show at the newly configured Chicago Drive-In, in the parking lot of Bridgeview’s SeatGeek Stadium....

Update: Second City is not the only legendary Chicago comedy theater on the market. On Friday, October 9, Charna Halpern of iO, which ceased operations in June, announced that both the business and the Kingsbury Street building that has housed the company (including two main theaters and two cabaret spaces in addition to classrooms and a bar) since 2014 were for sale. A press release from iO said “After 40 years of success, Charna decided to put the business and property up for sale....

A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. Cleric, Retrocausal When this Philly four-piece released its previous full-length, 2010’s Regressions, I was so confounded by its collage of elastic noise and hypercube math-­metal that I wrote 1,200 words trying to explain it. Retrocausal came out in December, and I’ve had fun watching newer writers grapple with Cleric’s mix of bestial fury, jazzy sass, creepy ambience, and eight-dimensional convolution, which is so divorced from conventional structures that parsing it is like trying to memorize Finnegans Wake....

Update 4/5: This story has been updated to remove references to Marsha P. Johnson as the first Stonewall brick thrower and to add responses and information from Lurie Children’s Hospital and Pride in the Park. This year, Chicago is taking the anniversary of Stonewall to a new level: Pride in the Park boasts a “killer lineup” featuring Iggy Azalea and Steve Aoki. The Grant Park event on June 29 will cost attendees $50-$100 for access to the show of non-LGBTQ stars....

Sun-Times Media Columnist Phil Rosenthal circa ’96 Phil Rosenthal, a Tribune business columnist, is about a month into something new. He’s launched a column he calls Margin Call; it’s a string of snappy observations on the news, most of them tweet length. For instance, this from February 11: “The Pentagon, according to reports, spent $504,816 on Viagra last year. This lends new meaning to the phrase, ‘Straighten up and fly right....

When you were in high school, did you ever sneak into a girl’s house after school? And did her dad happen to come home, after being fired from work, in the midst of the action? So you hid in the bathroom, only for him to come in there and poop while you’re hiding behind the shower curtain? Well, Korporate has. “#BlackChicagoBeLike is meant to show life in Chicago on the other side of Michigan Avenue,” he says....

The dedication in Samantha Irby’s latest book, Wow, No Thank You., is made out to Wellbutrin. Fitting, then, that the pages that follow are an antidepressant in their own right. And it came just in time—the book dropped on March 31, 2020, right around the time we first lost all hope of ever leaving our homes. But who needs to go outside when inside is a list of more than 100 “sure, sex is fun, but have you ever ....

In 1970, a new local gay liberation organization, energized by the uprising at Stonewall, rented the annex of the Chicago Coliseum near 16th and Wabash for the first public queer dance in the city—two months before its first Pride parade. Almost 50 years later, that event has inspired Red Bull Presents: Renaissance One, a south-side dance party this Thursday organized in collaboration with local Black-femme-focused promoters Party Noire. Renaissance One featuring BbyMutha, TT the Artist, Kidd Kenn, and Blu Bone, plus DJ sets by Rae Chardonnay, Hijo Pródigo, and Professor-Wrecks Thu 6/27, 8 PM, the Promontory, 5311 S....

Last weekend, I watched Ryan Murphy’s Netflix production of The Boys in the Band, adapted from Mart Crowley’s groundbreaking 1968 off-Broadway play about a group of gay male friends at a birthday party who confront each other over drinks and struggle with the (pre-Stonewall) internalized hatred of living in a deeply homophobic society. It became the first commercially successful American play in which all the characters were gay men (though not all the actors in that first production were gay)....

Multigenerational improvising trio J@K@L is one of the more exciting ensembles to emerge in Chicago over the last few years. Fueled by the energy of the young drummer Julian Kirshner, the group benefits from the vast experience and disparate aesthetics of reedist Keefe Jackson and cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm. The latter left Chicago last year, and though the scene has weathered plenty of such departures over the years, it’s always heartening when players return and continue their work in local outfits....

Chicago rockers Case make wispy, folky, heart-on-sleeve songs well-suited for coffeehouses and 2000s indie bands. Their style isn’t exactly en vogue, but the five-piece are skilled enough to draw on disparate sounds that could appeal to listeners who typically find indie rock stuffy. On “So Much It Could Be; So Little Is,” off the 2018 EP Questions of Space, front man Cale Zepernick sings in a soft falsetto (he sounds a little like Mike Milosh of Rhye) that underlines the sumptuous R&B vibe of the shimmying acoustic guitars....

In 1989, I read an article in the New Yorker that changed my professional life—”The Journalist and the Murderer”—Janet Malcolm’s monumental takedown of journalists. After reading her article, I vowed to be upfront with my subjects—reading my article to them before it was printed, if that’s what they wanted. I made that offer throughout the 90s to profile subjects ranging from Bill Ayers to Norm Van Lier. Actually, Hersh and Caro are as different from each other as a hare from a tortoise....

Welcome to the Reader‘s weekday news briefing. Durbin bringing a local medical student “Dreamer” to the State of the Union address Senator Dick Durbin is bringing a Loyola University Chicago medical student who’s also a “Dreamer” to President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address. Cesar Montelongo Hernandez, a beneficiary of President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, will attend the speech with Durbin Monday evening. “This young person who is going to be my guest runs the risk of seeing an end to their medical education because of the end of DACA....

Soon after Michael Ferro took over the Sun-Times, the paper ran a full-page picture of his son, Trey, throwing out the first pitch at a Cubs game at Wrigley Field. A few pages away, the same edition carried a picture of the entire Ferro family hanging out with the owner of the Cubs behind the scoreboard. This e-mail is also worth quoting. It was sent to Ryan and to editor Davan Maharaj....

South- and west-siders are more likely to find news coverage of their neighborhoods lacking. North-siders, meanwhile, tend to think local news outlets are doing an OK job. That’s according to a recent survey that asked 900 Chicagoans about where they get their local news and about their attitudes toward the coverage. The study was conducted by the University of Texas at Austin’s Center for Media Engagement and funded by the Robert R....

Analogue | Logan Square Last summer Analogue, the craft cocktail bar that’s gotten as much love for its Cajun menu as its drinks, opened a 30-seat back patio that will be back in action as of May 31. Hanging planters and lights soften the stark concrete with metal tables a bit, and the seafoam-green chairs are a nice touch. 2523 N. Milwaukee, 773-904-8567, analoguechicago.com. Cindy’s | Loop The view of the lake from Cindy’s, the restaurant and bar on top of the Chicago Athletic Association Hotel, is hard to beat....

On his 1976 album Mother Earth’s Plantasia, composer Mort Garson captures some of the most inventive sounds and most radical notions of the mid-70s. Specifically, he made his goofy and endearing compositions solely on the relatively new Moog synthesizer, and he intended that they be played for plants to help them grow. Inspired by his wife’s houseplants, the work of Robert Moog, and a controversial 1973 book about plant sentience, Garson created a wholesome mix of sounds, including playful arpeggios, dainty melodies, and warm textures....

Today Billy Corgan’s Smashing Pumpkins announced that three-fourths of their original lineup would reunite for a summer tour, a moment that Corgan, drummer Jimmy Chamberlin, and guitarist James Iha have been moving toward for a couple years. Corgan resuscitated the Pumpkins brand in 2007, after roughly seven years of dormancy, and since then he and a revolving-door crew of musicians (including Chamberlin on occasion) have released four albums of new material and toured extensively....

Lorena Cupcake is an arts and culture writer, social media expert, and—­according to the Reader‘s Best of Chicago poll—one of the city’s top budtenders. Originally from California, Cupcake first got a look at the recreational cannabis industry through visits to their home state, and became familiar with medical marijuana dispensaries through their experiences as a patient. After doing some freelance work on the topic, they became interested in getting more involved....