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Anyone who regularly takes the el or subway has seen them. But not everyone appreciates the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ presence at transit stations. Kevin Havener, an Edgewater resident who often commutes via the Red Line, contacted me to share a message he sent to the transit authority, to which he says he never got a response. He claimed that the Witnesses’ practice of offering literature inside el stations violated a guideline in the agency’s Rules of Conduct warning against the distribution of written materials on CTA property....

Let’s be real. Trap music, in all its glitzy mainstream flair, wouldn’t exist today without one of Atlanta’s most storied dope boys, Jeezy. Though T.I.’s Trap Musik (2003) made the phrase a household name, Jeezy gave the 808-driven subgenre several crossover assists on his 2005 debut, Let’s Get It: Thug Motivation 101, collaborating with Akon on “And Then What” and international hit “Soul Survivor.” Though Jeezy was already a solidified trap star, thanks to DJ Drama’s Gangsta Grillz stamp of approval on Tha Streets Iz Watchin and Trap or Die mixtapes, his career as a sought-after hitmaker soared even higher from there....

For the better part of two decades, virtuosic multi-instrumentalist Herbert Kinobe has composed exquisite Pan-African music from a Ugandan perspective. Born in 1983 in a small village outside Kampala near Lake Victoria, Kinobe (he performs under his last name) grew up hearing the music at the nearby Kanyange Nnamasole Tombs, a historic Buganda cultural site that regularly holds ceremonies and rituals, and at age nine he joined his school choir, which toured Europe....

UPDATE Thursday, March 12,4:30 PM: this event has been canceled. Refunds available at point of purchase. Kate Hendrickson directs the Chicago premiere of Krista Knight’s Lipstick Lobotomy, an arch but moving 2019 play about mental illness, conformity, and the search for understanding in World War ll-era America. When Ginny (Ann Sonneville) checks into an upper-crust sanitarium hoping to be cured of obsessive thinking and persistent depression, she immediately latches on to Rosemary (Abby Blankenship), an unruly fellow patient and the eldest daughter of kingmaker Joseph Kennedy....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, December 21, 2016. Report: Chicago violence surge is largely responsible for homicide rate increase in big cities The homicide rate for big cities in the U.S. is expected to increase by 14 percent in 2016, according to a report from the New York-based Brennan Center for Justice. The surge in murders in Chicago is responsible for 43.7 percent of the increase. “An increase in the murder rate is occurring in some cities even while other forms of crime remain relatively low,” notes the report....

This is the first of two columns that will examine the ideas of “cultural triage.” These are all things Loevner was thinking about before last March. “The impetus for this has been around for longer than the pandemic,” he says. “Over the last few years, I’ve been watching theater companies sort of explode or implode and leave the scene in really awful ways—deeply in debt or under, you know, significant scandal of some kind....

Over the last few years, guitarist Tashi Dorji (from Asheville, North Carolina) and drummer Tyler Damon (from Bloomington, Indiana) have forged an increasingly solid bond. They create harrowing improvisational duets that snarl and swagger like the most vicious storms, ebbing and flowing with passages of mayhem and temporary calm. After years of developing an appealingly jagged free-improvisation practice on acoustic guitar (something he still purveys) Dorji’s been refashioning his attack on electric, magnifying humid resonance, tangled harmonies, and viscous overtones within a rich, punishing world of sound....

In the category of closing the gate after the horse has bolted from the pasture, Mayor Rahm fired Ed Burke as chair of the all-important council finance committee after the feds indicted the 14th ward alderman on charges of shaking down a Burger King franchisee. In the aftermath of Burke’s indictment, Mayor Emanuel put on his sad and somber face—as though he were really hurt and surprised by what went down—and told the Tribune that public servants must have “a moral and ethical compass that informs your judgement of right from wrong [that] must be informed by a moral sense and an ethical sense of why we do what we do and what is our purpose in serving in public life....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Thursday, November 16, 2017. Chicago Police Department superintendent Eddie Johnson is expected to announce Thursday that Englewood shootings and homicides “are on pace to reach historic lows in 2017,” according to the Sun-Times. Recent data refutes Englewood’s reputation for being one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the city and even in the U.S. There were only 158 incidents of gun violence reported in the neighborhood as of October 31, compared to 302 during the same time period in 2016....

The premise of Meridith Friedman’s 2015 drama sounds all too familiar: Patrick, a popular white politician running for a high office and doing well in the polls, may be brought down by revelations of racist behavior in college. As part of a fraternity initiation, he and another white boy spray-painted “Go Home [N-word]” on the door of a black student’s dorm room. Now, Friedman invites us to believe, he is being forced to face the consequences of his actions....

This year’s edition of the Onion City Film Festival (formerly the Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival) holds together nicely. Several clear themes emerge from the four-day event: the experience of women and other underrepresented groups, revolutionary politics, the relationship between people and their environments, and the humorous possibilities of experimenting with the film form. Curator Emily Eddy has wisely spread these themes evenly across the nine programs, so attendees can get a sampling of each no matter what day they go....

Fences, in theaters now, is the first August Wilson play to be adapted into a feature film backed by a major film studio (The Piano Lesson, which was first produced in 1987, was made for TV in 1995). The sixth entry in Wilson’s ten-part “Pittsburgh Cycle”—which focuses on a former Negro League baseball star turned trash collector in 1950s Pittsburgh who takes his bitter frustrations out on his family—premiered on Broadway in 1987 and won the Pulitzer Prize for drama....

The sun was just starting to rise when I woke up in the front seat of my parents’ minivan. We were on our way back to Chicago from Nashville, traveling overnight through the flat and repetitive landscape of southern Illinois so my mom and I could sleep during the most boring stretch of the journey. And even though the town’s rural location and tiny population (around 6,500 people) are more reminiscent of Smallville, the farm town in Kansas where a young Superman first landed, the real Metropolis is trying its darnedest to mirror the bustling fictional metropolis of, um, Metropolis in every way possible....

While peering out the window at a procession of Greek Orthodox faithful on Good Friday, Katherine Ozment’s eight-year-old son wanted to know why their family didn’t partake in the ritual. He learned from his mother that the reason was because they weren’t Greek Orthodox. “Then what are we?” he asked. Ozment, a former senior editor at National Geographic, was stumped. She tried answering her son’s question and fumbled royally. “We’re nothing,” Ozment told her child....

As gatherings of the Democratic Party go, Wednesday’s meeting of the Cook County Central Committee was a lovefest. Paul Rosenfeld, committeeman of the 47th ward, had talked about mounting a challenge. But he wound up endorsing Preckwinkle. Without the soda pop tax, her opposition had no issue to run on, and Preckwinkle wound up clobbering Robert Fioretti in last month’s Democratic primary. One black committeeman—Niles Sherman of the 21st—got so excited at the prospect of Vrdolyak’s chairmanship that he proclaimed: “This is a coming together process to broaden the horizons for everybody so all can get to the rainbow and stick our hand in that pot of gold....

Chicagoan Mike Fox launched Arthhur a few years ago to explore any musical style he pleased. Multi-instrumentalist Matt Ciani, who plays with Fox in doom four-piece Flesh of the Stars, quickly joined the fold, and the two have since steered Arthhur through whimsical indie rock (2018’s come meet the opposite committee), somber ambient (2020’s Let’s Go Piss in the Lake), and more. The best version of Arthhur thus far appeared on the December 2018 album Lost in the Walled City, thanks in part to sharp contributions from the band’s newest member, bassist and percussionist Luke Dahlgren....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Tuesday, October 31, 2017. Happy Halloween! Gun violence is keeping the new chief of Chicago’s FBI field office awake at night Jeffrey Sallet, the new head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Chicago field office, is losing sleep at night over the city’s gun violence problem, and he doesn’t officially start the job until November 6. “I’m doing my homework and making sure that I am engaged on that issue from the moment I hit the ground in Chicago,” he told the Sun-Times....

Update 8/10: Chuck Prophet’s SPACE concert in August has been postponed till March 17, 2022. The FitzGerald’s show in October is still scheduled to proceed. If the best parts of your classic British Invasion, 50s country, 60s pop, and pure rock ’n’ roll records could be transformed into a person, they might look and sound a lot like Chuck Prophet. For almost 30 years, this Bay Area songwriter has reliably delivered albums so pleasingly familiar that, had he started a few decades earlier, it’d be easy to imagine him outshining the likes of Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen....

Cleveland native Galcher Lustwerk (who prefers to leave his birth name unknown) raps and produces deep-house instrumentals, but you can’t properly describe his music as some combination of house and hip-hop (and he absolutely does not make “hip-house”). Now based in New York, Lustwerk primarily appears interested in spellbinding grooves, in which he siphons trancelike qualities from laid-back sounds outside of electronic music. On last year’s 200% Galcher (Lustwerk Music) he works mellow jazz sax and modern funk bass into his cool house instrumentals....

Steven Dietz’s family drama lacks high stakes. Nothing is as it seems to be in How a Boy Falls, Steven Dietz’s family drama receiving its world premiere production here at Northlight, and that’s a problem. If one person had a dark secret, or hidden past, in this tale of a family shaken by the perhaps accidental death of a young boy, it might have made for a great drama—or at least an interesting one....