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This past week, Theatre Communications Group (TCG) announced that its job search engine, ARTSEARCH, would not only be free of cost to all users, but would additionally require all prospective employers to list a salary range for all postings. This announcement comes on the heels of seismic changes within the theater industry aimed at dismantling inequity and financial exploitation. “So much of the arts coverage focuses on the product and not the process,” says Hiltner, who knew she wanted to be a costume designer beginning in high school....

A lot of journalists awoke November 9 to the same grim revelation: I don’t know the country I’m living in! We looked for culprits and found them in ourselves. We in the media had somehow failed to adequately inform them, the nation’s Trump supporters, of their candidate’s utter unsuitability to be president. And equally, we failed to inform ourselves. Out of a delusional belief in polls as the best way to reveal the American mind, we reached election day having no idea of what the electorate was about to do....

Hollywood’s annual release calendar is divided roughly into thirds: the summer-action season (which actually starts in the spring); awards season, which begins in earnest in September; and the rest of the year, the postholiday winter months when some scrappy genre movies get to fight for screen time against prestige, Oscar-buzz holdovers. We’re currently in the third period, and during the past month a number of horror movies have made it to local theaters....

R NAmerican Factory The first title to debut from Higher Ground Productions, Barack and Michelle Obama’s partnership with Netflix, could not have been more timely. This pellucid documentary by longtime collaborators and Dayton residents Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert frames larger questions about the future of postindustrial America by focusing on one way their Ohio rust belt town is navigating the economic realities of globalization. The film opens with a clip from the directors’ Oscar-nominated nonfiction short, The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant, about the final operating days in 2008 of a factory based in Moraine, Ohio, that had employed 2,400 locals....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Thursday, October 27, 2016. Kirk and Duckworth are both courting the black community in heated Senate race A few black aldermen skipped a breakfast with Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Tammy Duckworth in Bronzeville after she won the primary, because they believe she “ignored black communities during the primary and didn’t deserve their support in the general election,” according to WBEZ. Duckworth, who had two black opponents in the primary, Andrea Zopp and state senator Napoleon Harris, has worked to improve her relationship with the black community, but incumbent GOP senator Mark Kirk still sees an opportunity to win votes....

On August 28, Mayor Emanuel had one of his infamous “Oh happy day” press conferences, proclaiming great news for the south side. Or as the Chicago Tribune—in a burst of goodwill for the mayor—put it: “For Emanuel, the move fits into a broader strategy of trying to leverage valuable real estate assets to create economic development in some of the city’s struggling neighborhoods.” The motor vehicle facility—which stores most of the city’s garbage trucks—is squeezed between Wicker Park and Lincoln Park on the banks of the Chicago River....

Classically trained vocalist and masterful banjo and fiddle player Rhiannon Giddens is celebrated as one of the leading proponents of what’s variously called Americana or roots music. Though her aesthetic has wide appeal, she toughens it with her uncompromising determination to bear witness to the ongoing (and too often neglected) Africanist voice and history in the Western “folk” and vernacular traditions. Giddens was cofounder of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, a contemporary string band whose deft musicianship and gift for updating traditional themes and ideas earned them a Grammy for the 2010 album Genuine Negro Jig (Nonesuch)....

It doesn’t get much more local than jeans from Dearborn Denim & Apparel—sewn by an all-Chicago staff in a Garfield Park former laundry turned factory, and sold in the company’s flagship store in Hyde Park. And once you visit the store and start talking to Kaleb Sullivan, Dearborn’s head of retail, it’s very likely you’ll be leaving with your own pair, hemmed while you wait. The jump from Chicago Board of Trade bond trader to local clothing manufacturer is not a typical career path, but that didn’t dissuade Rob McMillan, owner of Dearborn Denim & Apparel and West Loop resident....

Merging elements of funk, jazz fusion, rock, international music, and jam-band fare—plus undeniable groove and melody—Snarky Puppy has emerged as an eminent name in crossover jazz. Formed in 2003 and led by bassist Michael League, the large-scale ensemble is on the road this spring in support of its 12th album, the new Immigrance (GroundUp Music). A sprawling studio production full of trumpet, sax, synths, flutes, strings, electric organ and piano, and funky rock instrumentation, it displays just as much eclecticism and proficiency as any of its predecessors, but this time the band takes a more direct approach, curtailing some of its impulses toward intricacy....

Chicago magazine political writer Carol Felsenthal interviewed Susana Mendoza in 2011 and came away “convinced”—as she would later write—that Mendoza “saw herself moving up from [city] clerk to mayor.” She’s since moved on to state comptroller, but that’s another stepping-stone position. Kass touted McQueary’s piece on Facebook. “I love it when machine Democrats pretend independence & carry Boss Madigan’s water,” he applauded. “Great column here by my colleague and friend. ....

A few years ago I was walking past Tastee-­Freez, a fast-food joint on Armitage near California, when I saw workers boarding up the shacklike shop’s windows. I couldn’t help myself—I shouted “No!,” almost like Darth Vader at the end of Revenge of the Sith. I understood that Tastee-Freez had to close for the season—it was the dead of winter, and snow was accumulating around my ankles at that very moment. Few people crave Oreo milk shakes when the temperature’s in the single digits....

Just over a year ago, punishing local powerviolence unit Weekend Nachos celebrated their tenth anniversary with a packed gig at Beat Kitchen, but they enter 2016 with some very different news—they’re breaking up. On New Year’s Day, they posted to Facebook: “We would like to announce with both sadness and excitement that 2016 will be the final year as a band for Weekend Nachos. It’s been almost 12 years and we have decided to hang it up....

Experimental music often pushes at the edges of the unlistenable: the assaultive skronk of free jazz, the relentless, undifferentiated roar of harsh noise wall, the breakneck ceiling-fan-to-the-face tempos of death metal. Across genres and traditions, artists work toward the same goal: creating sound worlds so intolerably loud and dissonant that listeners collapse with their brains oozing from every orifice in their skulls. “A really important part of this project is this idea of sensory overload,” Kaplan says....

The Auditorium Theatre—that massive, stony hunk of Chicago history—celebrated the anniversary of a rebirth earlier this month with an evening of spectacular dance by members of 14 top national and international companies, including Alvin Ailey, Berlin State Ballet, and American Ballet Theatre. Also on the bill were some familiar pleas for financial support. The celebration came on the heels of some unexpected news, however. The Joffrey Ballet, which has been the Auditorium Theatre’s prestigious resident company for 22 years (in what seemed like a perfect pairing), will dump the Auditorium at the start of the 2020-’21 season and move in with Lyric Opera....

Roughly 15 or so years ago, the Jeff Committee called in a trio of cis-male set/light/sound designers to give members an overview of their work. As the presentation wound down, the men took questions. The question I remember (because as a then-member of the committee, I asked it) was whether women were represented to any significant degree among designers and if not, why not. The answer—a slightly awkward and quite vague “Well, not really ....

Chicagoan Angel Marcloid has been making experimental tunes under more than a dozen pseudonyms since the 90s. As Fire-Toolz she conjures sounds that align with experiencing music during the current streaming era, where it’s possible to leapfrog between disparate artists, genres, and generations of music with the same dizzying speed and apathetic carelessness with which couch potatoes channel surf through thousands of networks. But unlike a TV zombie’s viewing habits, Marcloid’s work is always purposeful, even when it’s hard to figure out where she’s going; part of the fun of relistening to February’s Drip Mental (Hausu Mountain) and the brand-new Interbeing (Bedlam Tapes) is retracing her path through a ten-car pileup of retouched elevator music, unflinchingly harsh noise, industrialized and sugary pop, crunchy metalcore, and samples of computer technology and sputtering music gear....

Chicago Fringe Opera is presenting the local premiere of this compact 75-minute transgender coming-of-age story, which has had an unusual number of productions since its first appearance in 2014. That might be due to its economical structure—it requires only two singers and a string quartet—but also, no doubt, owes to its topical subject. As One is loosely based on the experience of colibrettist Kimberly Reed, whose 2008 documentary Prodigal Sons traced the story of her own transition from high school football hero (and class president) to adult woman and lesbian (who incidentally makes the surprising discovery that her brother is the grandson of Hollywood legends Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles)....

When you think of the staggering levels of violence that members of the LGBTQIA+ community continue to endure (or, even more tragically, don’t survive), the title of Terry Guest’s 90-minute two-hander, produced by Story Theatre, feels like a blow. Guest explores the impact of trauma survived not just once or twice, but as a regular occurrence over decades, passed down through generations and carried in the very genetic makeup of African Americans....

I’m certain that no matter how you feel about the food at Ukrainian Village’s Boeufhaus you’ll find it hard to resist repeatedly blurting out to your friends, family, and pets the satisfying portmanteau of the French word for “beef” and the German for “house.” Truthfully, I’m certain I know how you’ll feel about the food too. Bar snacks like the goat-cheese-stuffed onions, which are fried in bread crumbs and sauced with a savory acidic duo of black olive tapenade and salsa verde, are as sophisticated as the Alsatian sausage and pasta roulades fleischnacka are irreverent....

Over the course of her decades-long career, Carrie Mae Weems has repeatedly demonstrated how adept she is at navigating the human experience. Yet she does so while making her audiences consider uncomfortable questions. Her early photo series “Colored People” consists of black-and-white portraits of African-American children tinted with shades whose names, coined by Weems, double as descriptions of their skin tones—Blue Black Boy and Golden Yella Girl, for example—which historically have played a role in determining the social hierarchies of black communities....