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The family of Archer (Jaq Seifert) still calls him Angela and considers him a daughter rather than a son when he moves back home to help care for his ailing Pops (Brian Parry). Mom (Jacqueline Grandt) is mostly focused on keeping the family’s life as it has always been, ignoring the seismic changes happening right under her nose, while Grandma (Kathleen Ruhl) just wants “Angela” to get married so “she” won’t end up alone....

When Aniello Fontano finished his MFA studies in dramatic writing from the University of New Mexico, COVID-19 was just getting started. The Chicago actor, director, and playwright had been away from the local theater community for three years but with the pandemic’s swift hit, now was not the time to go back. “[We are] boots on the ground workers, we cannot donate money, it’s not a thing we can do, and further, our main source of income is gone,” he says....

No matter where you’re from, you have a perception of the American south. You may associate New Orleans with jazz and alcohol, Florida with sunshine and retirement homes, or the entire region with the all-encompassing moral reckoning surrounding the horrific history of slavery and the confederacy that still reverberates today. In addition to what is taught about the south in history books or one’s own lived experiences, much of our associations with it, inadvertently or not, also stems from the media we consume....

Look, I get it. Aside from the usual Seasonal Affective Disorder challenges, there are plenty of other reasons for Chicagoans to be bummed about the coming of winter in the time of the coronavirus. We should also spare a thought for struggling Chicago hospitality employees and business owners. In a more civilized country like New Zealand, they’d be paid a fair stipend to close their establishments during the crisis. As for activities, I ran the following ideas by Dr....

Michael Gebert Flat breads at Xi’an Cuisine I visited a newish Chinatown spot called Xi’an Cuisine a couple of weeks ago, but neglected to mention it until I saw that Steve Dolinsky, a longtime and serious fan of Chinese food, had posted about it on his website. It’s entirely my failing, because I found it to be an exciting and pretty accessible new place that offers an unfamiliar side of Chinese cuisine: the kind that comes inside a bun....

The Elgin mural is not the Elgin Marbles. Those Greek sculptures were infamously taken from the Parthenon to the British Museum 200 years ago, sparking a debate that still rages. But the story of this 21st-century Illinois painting, American Nocturne, with its disputed motives and retrospectively outraged public, is at least as complicated. A decade ago, Beitler’s photograph also inspired Elgin artist David Powers, then working on the last in a series of murals the city had commissioned from the Outside Exhibition Group, a small arts organization that’s no longer active....

Mark Lanegan has made an album to satisfy the yuletide yearnings of those who find holly and hellfire equally enchanting. Even before his old band Screaming Trees hung it up in 2000, the singer-songwriter had begun his career as a serial collaborator—highlights over the past 20 years include his work with Queens of the Stone Age, his three albums with Belle & Sebastian’s Isobel Campbell, and his Gutter Twins project with Greg Dulli—but in 2012 he added to his equally impressive solo discography by self-releasing a six-track EP of holiday songs titled Dark Mark Does Christmas 2012....

Killer Queen at Logan Arcade 2410 W. Fullerton 872-206-2859 loganarcade.com Even drinking the beer with the highest alcohol content at one of Chicago’s ever-growing roster of arcade bars can’t mask how poorly 1980s arcade games have aged. Asteroids is dreadfully boring, and Donkey Kong now feels more like a Sisyphean exercise in frustration than a lighthearted pastime. But the genius of Killer Queen—created a couple years ago by a pair of Brooklynites—is that it borrows the lo-fi visuals and simple single-button mechanics of games of the Reagan years while introducing innovative new ways to play....

Detroit producer and rapper James Dewitt Yancey—better known as J Dilla—died in 2006 from complications of a rare blood disorder. His stature continues to grow, though, and on Friday, February 9, at Thalia Hall, a 15-piece band led by Sidewalk Chalk keyboardist Charlie Coffeen will re-create Dilla’s classic 2006 instrumental album Donuts in its entirety. Some of Coffeen’s Sidewalk Chalk bandmates are helping out: trombonist David Ben-Porat wrote the horn parts, and Sam Trump is one of three featured singers....

During the last presidential election, Latinos for Trump cofounder Marco Gutierrez warned that if the U.S. doesn’t do more to stop undocumented immigrants from entering the country, “you’re going to have taco trucks on every corner.” Chicago is already approaching that utopian scenario. Our city has hundreds, if not thousands, of Mexican restaurants where taqueros and taqueras expertly griddle chunks of marinated steak and carve ruby-colored al pastor from trompo rotisseries, then deposit the meats in warm corn tortillas and top them with chopped onions and cilantro....

On a May afternoon at the outdoor mall Chinatown Square, a group of Asian grandmas wave their arms and sway their hips in a production of guang chang wu (Chinese square dancing). A line of men begins to form into a dragon dance, and later, a singer wearing face paint performs traditional Chinese opera. Zhong has become an unofficial voice for the youth of Chinatown through his marketing agency Tian Represent, serving as a bridge between older and newer residents in Bridgeport and Armour Square....

Professional soccer and stadium-size concerts are both unwelcome along the North Branch of the Chicago River—at least according to the alderman whose ward would contain the controversial $6 billion, 54-acre Lincoln Yards project proposed by Chicago developer Sterling Bay. “The Entertainment District will be eliminated from a revised plan and replaced by restaurants, theaters, and smaller venues that will be scattered throughout the site,” Hopkins said in his e-mail. “Live Nation will have no ownership interest in any of these venues....

For decades, southwest-side Marquette Park was a national symbol of racial bigotry. It’s no longer that today, but neither is it an emblem of togetherness. Marquette Park instead is one of the best examples of the city’s failure to find a path to integration. In the 1980s, the Marquette Park neighborhood began to change racially. It changed in the customary way: blacks moved in and whites moved out. The area’s Latino and Arab populations also grew....

In a city full of distractions, we often find ourselves wanting to feel alone and surrounded by nothing but quiet. If you can’t quite afford to get to Bora Bora, here are some calmer-than-most spots closer afield where a person can think and just get a minute. While the South Shore Cultural Center is a must-see historical building and frequent pick of fabulous-on-a-budget brides, it’s also an active community center offering top-notch programming for the neighborhood and beyond....

Oui Ennui, aka Jonn Wallen, is one of this wolf’s favorite Chicago artists to emerge during the pandemic—he’s been recording under that name for years, but after fearing for his life during a harrowing bout with COVID-19 in April 2020, he shifted into hyperdrive. He challenged himself to put out a record every month, and since then he’s released 17 albums and EPs of beautiful and delirious synth-based music. His latest full-length, May’s Occupe​-​toi de Tes Oignons, is a trippy house jamboree bustling with uplifting vocal samples and insistent, driving beats—the joyful “Faim de Peau” could set off any party....

Gossip Wolf was immediately smitten with New Canyons, aka Adam Stilson and Andrew Marrah, when they released their excellent sophomore LP, Everyone Is Dark, on BLVD Records in 2013. The duo’s deft, genre-bending songs swirl together synth-pop hooks and industrial rhythms and coat everything with a syrupy glaze of shoegaze-style atmospherics. In the years since, New Canyons have been pretty quiet when it comes to new recordings—the most they’ve managed was a brief burst of activity in 2017, which resulted in a single (with three remixes) and a stand-alone cover of Nirvana’s “Drain You....

The release of a new Quentin Tarantino movie is usually accompanied by press that invariably addresses whatever the provocative premise or subject matter of the film is, whether it’s the writer-director’s casual use of racial epithets (Jackie Brown) or his flippant treatment of World War II (Inglourious Basterds) and slavery (Django Unchained). But with the release of The Hateful Eight—like Django, a political western—most of the hubbub isn’t about the film, it’s about Tarantino....

A couple days ago, Reader culture editor Tal Rosenberg tweeted about noticing that the Meat Puppets had played the house band in the 1990 pilot for Beverly Hills 90210. I’ve never seen that show, but at that time the Arizona trio were in transition—they’d released their final album for SST, Monsters, the year before, and would drop their major-label debut, Forbidden Places (London), a year later. I haven’t listened to the three albums the Meat Puppets made for London in a very long time, but I remember liking them—including 1994’s Too High to Die, which went gold....

Guitar gods don’t come much more sagelike, subversive, and utterly distinctive than James Blood Ulmer. Born Willie James Ulmer in North Carolina, this towering figure of free blues guitar, now 79 years old, started off in 1960s soul-jazz combos in Pittsburgh and Columbus, Ohio, before settling in New York in 1971. In the Big Apple he hooked up with progressive jazzers such as Art Blakey, Rashied Ali, and Larry Young, but his best-known association is with one of the godfathers of avant-garde jazz, Ornette Coleman....

On the last day of Riot Fest, the B-52s played what was billed as their final Chicago show. Founding members Cindy Wilson, Fred Schneider, and Kate Pierson rocked out with their touring band, opening with “Planet Claire” and running through a set of the best-known tunes from their 41-year discography. Schneider bounced around in a hoodie and T-shirt, while Wilson and Pierson wore shimmering spangled dresses and their signature beehive hairdos....