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Amor is a normal dude living his life in Stockholm—a big brother, a cousin, a friend, a man in love, a university graduate. Amor is a chemistry nerd who memorizes the periodic table by assigning each element to a person he knows (he’s ununtrium himself, “a temporary name for an unconfirmed synthetic element”). Amor is either a romantic or a stalker, probably both, creepily obsessed for 19 or 20 years with his childhood neighbor Valeria....

Jimmy Johnson‘s keening tenor voice and supple, emotionally intense guitar lines are considered something of a miracle among blues lovers these days, emanating as they do from a man born more than 90 years ago in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Johnson’s 60-plus-year career has taken him from hardscrabble urban jukes to nightclubs, concert halls, and festivals around the world, and his influences include gospel, doo-wop, and deep soul as well as country music, jazz, and of course the venerable Delta-Memphis-Chicago blues lineage....

Solidarity Cinema is a casually organized group of determined leftists who explore subversive ideology through film—most members are legitimate activists who are often busy doing other things, but still find it important to make time for screenings when they can. The group started in Chicago at the beginning of quarantine and have met intermittently since. They operate outside the bounds of traditional distribution and exhibition, showcasing revolutionary cinema through their website, a digital archive, and at some (socially distanced) in-person events....

Links Hall founder Bob Eisen has always approached his work with a refreshingly honest, go-with-the-flow mentality. “I’m just not a big meaning guy in terms of making a dance,” the 69-year-old choreographer muses. “It’s not like I think it’s a bad thing, it just isn’t in my blood.” As a result, Eisen can come across as artfully coy. Asked about his latest artistic venture, he demurred: “It’s hard for me to say what this is about....

Leonard C. Goodman is a Chicago criminal defense attorney. Republicans pretend to care about traditional values; they pledge to fight the woke liberals trying to control our lives. Democrats pretend to fight for the poor and working class. But behind the scenes, both parties serve the interests of the investor class that funds them and demands, in return, a high rate of return on their investment capital. The public feuding between the two corporate parties depicted nightly on our cable news shows is as phony and staged as the 1970s-era wrestling matches between The Sheik and Dick the Bruiser....

I haven’t gone to many shows since the election in November—honestly, I’m doing great if I make it out of the house. And over the summer I missed Ghost, Inquisition, and Rotting Christ, all of which would’ve been great. But I still saw a metric fuckton of excellent metal in 2016—the top-shelf acts that didn’t make my final five include Vektor, Obituary, Tribulation, the Melvins, Behemoth, Babymetal, Grave Miasma, Pallbearer, Cloud Rat, and Gorguts....

Max Blumenthal is the editor of TheGrayzone.com and the author of several books including The Management of Savagery (Verso, 2019). During the early days of the crisis around Wuhan, Chinese authorities took some ham-fisted measures to suppress public discussion of the outbreak. Perhaps Beijing was in denial about the gravity of the epidemic, or terrified of its societal ramifications. It was not long, however, before the Chinese government made the genome of the virus public, shared detailed information about the virus with the international community, and provided intelligence to the WHO, which relayed it to the U....

Volta is Cirque du Soleil’s 41st production since 1983 and, like all the others before it, struggles mightily to be unique. The show’s imagineers (reportedly 16 in all under the guidance of “director of creation” Jean Guibert) have fabricated another Cirque wonder, bursting with gorgeous costumes, carefully crafted spectacles, and virtuosic displays of acrobatic prowess, all performed under a retro big top filled with perfectly calibrated state-of-the-art machines of joy....

The catalog for Shakespeare 400 Chicago is officially out now, both online and in print. As festival producer Doreen Sayegh promised when I talked to her the other day, it is, indeed, possible to experience Shakespeare in some form every day from now until December. Puck: The Beer. Enjoy this limited edition release by North Coast Brewing after your Culinary Complete Works meal. It’s described as “a sharp and spritzy petite saison, with a delicious flowery, spicy dry-hop aroma,” which is just how you’d imagine a beer inspired by A Midsummer Night’s Dream to be, right?...

Born in Austria, based in Spain, and inspired by Chicago footwork and UK instrumental grime, Zora Jones has been making music for a decade but only just released her debut album, Ten Billion Angels (Fractal Fantasy). Its music is glossy, sensual, and alluring in its artificiality, and it pairs nicely with the cover art—a digitally drawn woman whose naked body is immersed in translucent liquid in ropes and streamers that bind and strangle her....

The most immediately striking aspect of Antonio Sanchez’s music is its lush, cinematic feel, which the drummer also demonstrates in the percussion-only music he composed for the 2014 film Birdman. A native of Mexico City, Sanchez began playing drums at age five, and after performing professionally in rock, jazz, and Latin bands in his teens, he emigrated to the U.S. in 1994 to study at Boston’s Berklee College of Music. Since then, he’s put out a slew of records by his own projects and with the Pat Metheny Group, which he joined in 2002....

The Chicago comedy scene is filled with stories of men who abuse their power and use it to harass and assault their female colleagues and students. Brian Posen, the founder and creative director of Stage 773 and a former teacher at Columbia College and Second City, has figured in some of these stories and, more recently, a social media campaign instigated by a former assistant who cataloged his offensive comments and behavior under the hashtag #boycottstage773....

courtesy the candidate Amy Crawford Amy Crawford’s run for 46th Ward alderman has been a long time coming. A resident of the ward for nearly a decade, she has long been involved in community and advocacy groups supporting childhood education and LGBT rights. In 2008 she took time off from her clerkship with a federal judge to work on Obama’s campaign, which she says was an exciting and transformational time that ignited a political fire....

For years Jack Red and his distinctive voice have been the secret ingredient in Chicago’s new soul-infused, experimental hip-hop sound. His supporting vocals work their magic on the upbeat “Lovely Day” from Vic Mensa’s 2013 mixtape, Innanetape, and in 2015 he was part of the all-star cast that joined Donnie Trumpet and Chance the Rapper on the masterful album Surf. You can hear Red flex his range on “Wanna Be Cool” and “Sunday Candy,” the latter of which he performed with Chance on Saturday Night Live last year....

Eirik Aspaas Dødheimsgard Dødheimsgard began as a relatively orthodox black-metal band—Fenriz from Darkthrone plays bass on their first full-length, 1995’s Kronet til Konge—but by the end of the 90s this Oslo collective had plunged into the avant-garde like truants into a flooded quarry, undergoing the kind of transformation more commonly associated with mystics returned from wandering in the desert or anchorites immured for years in cells so small they couldn’t lie down....

Rob Karlic The Arts of Life Band Kenny Rasmussen’s matinee library punk shows have been bringing consistently great free music to the south side this year, and this weekend he hosts his third installment of the series, this time up in Rogers Park. Started in January as a way for people to catch ambitious local music without being out at a bar all night, the series has already hosted some of Chicago’s most interesting bands, such as Radar Eyes, Running, and Ono....

Born and raised in Chicago during the 1980s, Honey Dijon (aka Honey Redmond) became entrenched in house music during its original boom before moving to New York City, where she became a familiar presence in the club scene during the halcyon, pre-Giuliani days of dance music. She’s a mainstay of both the high-fashion and the dance-music cognoscenti, working with Louis Vuitton just as easily as she’ll jump on Beats in Space, but she’s spent her whole DJ career building on populist tradition....

Chicagoan Nellie “Tiger” Travis’s 2013 song “Mr. Sexy Man” has become a modern-day soul-blues classic with its earworm guitar pattern, propulsive beat, and vernacular chorus (“What yo’ name is? What yo’ name is?”), but despite its good-timey vibe, Travis shouldn’t be typecast as merely a party girl. As evidenced by outings like the searing “Don’t Talk to Me” from 2008’s I’m a Woman (CDS) and the soul-baring “Walking in the Rain in Memphis” on last year’s independently released Mr....

As I write this story Monday, Chicago waits with bated breath to see if Mayor Rahm Emanuel will muster the fortitude to dip into his precious TIF piggy bank and extract the few hundred million or so of your property tax dollars to give public school teachers a nominal raise and avoid another strike. Barring any late-breaking agreements, teachers have been told to strike come Tuesday morning at 6 AM....

It’s generally considered high praise to say that musicians have developed their own languages, but Audrey Chen and Phil Minton make nonpareil music by bypassing language altogether. Though their voices make all the sounds on the 2013 album By the Stream (Sub Rosa), there’s rarely a word to be heard. Instead they work with everything else a voice can do, wielding gasps, wheezes, coughs, belches, growls, gargles, gulps, snorts, and hums in wildly dynamic improvisations....