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On June 19, 1865, news of the Emancipation Proclamation freeing American slaves finally reached Galveston, Texas—a full two and a half years after it was signed. Accounts differ as to why it took so long for the slaves of Texas to be told of their freedom, but they didn’t hesitate to celebrate, dubbing the day Juneteenth. For decades, Juneteenth celebrations were common in Black communities, but the holiday gradually faded into obscurity as it was written out of history....

Guitarist Joel Paterson is a devoted student of American roots and early jazz guitar who pointedly ignores the lines between the once racially defined genres. Although he’s recorded only a few albums under his own name, his technical ease and versatility have made him a ubiquitous presence on the local scene, where he’s collaborated with Devil in a Woodpile, Jimmy Sutton’s Four Charms, and Cash Box Kings, and he’s done session work with national acts like JD McPherson, the Cactus Blossoms, and Pokey LaFarge, among others....

Whatever your history with Moby-Dick—even if you were a disgruntled teenager on a forced English-class march through Herman Melville’s dense, digressive, and interminable 19th-century novel—I’m recommending Chicago Opera Theater’s current production of the 2010 opera version of this American classic. It’s a powerful experience, well worth chasing down. Composer Jake Heggie has found the musical equivalent of Melville’s rich prose in his roiling and sparkling orchestral score, while librettist Gene Scheer perfectly captures the book’s original tone and language, even as he drops the first-person narration....

Steve Gunn’s new album, The Unseen In Between (Matador), contains the most assertively outgoing music of the Brooklyn-based guitarist’s career. It grabs the listener right out of the gate with the soaring strings, reverberant electric guitar, and swinging upright bass (played by Bob Dylan bandleader Tony Garnier) of “New Moon.” Gunn has never sounded as confident as he does singing the album’s sequence of gracefully winding melodies, and its gorgeous production (from Chicago-based multi-instrumentalist James Elkington, who’s worked with the likes of Jeff Tweedy, Richard Thompson, and Brokeback) delivers one perfectly placed detail after another....

The Yunahon Mixtape, the second full-length by Long Island punk lifer Jade Lilitri, who records and performs as Oso Oso, is about the denizens of a fictional town called Yunahon. It’s also the story of frustration—not necessarily in the creative process, but during the final stages of its birth. After an unsuccessful search for a label, Lilitri uploaded the album to Bandcamp last January as a pay-what-you-want release. Despite its beginnings, the album set a high bar for emo and indie rock that few other 2017 albums have surpassed....

The Book of Will The Bard’s passing is prologue in this quasi-historical drama by Lauren Gunderson about the messy posthumous rush on the part of the surviving King’s Men to secure Shakespeare’s literary legacy. Jacobean-era book publishing and its associated roadblocks—funding, contested rights, diverging editorial visions, piecemeal scripts—aren’t easy bedfellows with compelling stage drama, and Gunderson’s efforts to inflate the stakes with romance and rivalries feel more perfunctory than persuasive. But even if it spends too much time in mourning (four separate characters in two short hours!...

Chicago guitarist-vocalist Kathy Patino launched indie-pop group Girl K as a solo project about two years ago. By the fall of 2017, she’d built a full-fledged band, recruiting drummer Ajay Raghuraman, bassist Alex Pieczynski, and lead guitarist Kevin Sheppard, and they released their debut album, Sunflower Court, that October. In the band’s short lifetime, they’ve found a home among local rockers: Patino told Melted Magazine last year that Varsity showed her there’s a place here for sweetly inviting but solemn rock songs peppered with power-pop hooks....

The city’s Civilian Office of Police Accountability on Thursday released multiple videos detailing the police shooting death of 13-year-old Adam Toledo, offering for the first time a complete look at the Little Village teen’s final moments and confirming that Toledo had his hands raised, without a weapon, when he was killed. As the city prepares for protests in the aftermath of the video’s release, Lightfoot again stands on the side of police, instead of the members of her own communities calling for justice and accountability....

We poke fun at Chicago’s desperate thirst for a celebrity culture, so desperate that anyone remotely notable who was born in the city or started a career here or graduated from an area university is forever celebrated as a local hero. Hannibal Buress, meanwhile, has a legitimate claim to local-boy-done-good status. The 34-year-old comedian, a regular on Comedy Central’s Broad City, previously lived in New York but returned earlier this year to the city of his birth....

Film changed the world with its power to conquer time, but time always gets its revenge. According to a comprehensive survey released by the Library of Congress in 2013, 70 percent of the silent features made in America are completely lost, and of the remaining 30 percent, only about half survive in their original format. Nitrate film, the industry norm for the cinema’s first half century, was highly flammable and, as it decayed, subject to spontaneous combustion, which led to numerous fires at storage facilities....

Anyone who’s ever reported a news story knows that the line between reporter and subject is harder to perceive the closer you get to it, and at some point you may realize that you’ve crossed it without even noticing. True Story, an engrossing drama adapted from a nonfiction book by Michael Finkel, recounts Finkel’s professional relationship with Christian Longo, an Oregon man charged with murdering his wife and three children. Finkel was trying to salvage his reputation after being fired by the New York Times Magazine (he had created a composite character from multiple people for dramatic effect); Longo was trying to con Finkel into publishing his version of events and granted him exclusive interviews for a book project on the condition that he maintain confidentiality until after the verdict was announced....

Among the great pleasures of 19th-century novels are their length, their breadth, the deep dives into characters’ lives and into the social fabric of the time. It’s almost suicidal to try to stage these stories in just over two hours. Yet that’s what British choreographer Cathy Marston did with Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 Jane Eyre, in a 2016 evening-length ballet now remounted by the Joffrey at the Auditorium Theatre. It’s an act of love, and of daring—for good and bad, a contemporary feminist take on the story....

In 1876, the Canadian parliament passed the Indian Act, a sweeping piece of legislation that still dictates how the government interacts with the First Nations bands indigenous to the country and legally defines Indian status and band membership. Though heavily amended over the years, the Indian Act initially included policies that disenfranchised Indigenous women who married outside their band, stripping them and their children of Indian status and restricting their access to native communities and traditional land....

Bridgeport didn’t take kindly to Maria Marszewski when she took over Kaplan’s Liquors in 1987. The wives of some of her earliest customers at the then 48-year-old tavern and packaged-goods store weren’t pleased to hear reports of the lovely new lady tending bar. Her Christlike approach won over Bridgeport gangbangers—some of them not of drinking age—who would regularly boost whole cases of beer under her nose. “Next time he come, I hugging him....

Japanese sound artist Masami Akita has been revolutionizing noise with his project Merzbow since 1979—he’s put out somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 albums, singles, and live recordings under that name, but who’s counting? Akita has bounced between electronics, tape manipulations, and scrap metal and contact mikes, both in his solo work and his collaborations with artists such as Boris and Mike Patton, and he’s consistently remained at the forefront of the harsh-noise world....

Q: My husband recently passed away. He was a wonderful person and we had 12 great years together. He was also very, very organized. His death was an accident but everything was in order. He even left a note in a sealed envelope for his lawyer to present to me. It was one last love letter, Dan. Our relationship wasn’t perfect, no relationship is, but that’s who he was. Or that’s who I thought he was....

In startling news today, doctors in Missouri are reporting another confirmed pregnancy in a genetically male human—the latest in a small but growing cluster. In other words, as I’ve said here before, if men had to go through nine months of pregnancy, an excruciating and sometimes deadly birth, and then be responsible for another person 24/7 for the foreseeable future, there’d be no question about their right to opt out. And no qualms about it either....

More than 17,000 Chicago renters wound up in eviction court last year according to 2019 court data obtained by the Reader from the Clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County. The number of cases filed remains on par with city eviction filings since 2016, though the data provided by the clerk excludes sealed eviction cases. Pangea Real Estate remains Chicago’s most prolific filer of eviction cases, as the company has been since 2012....

Police misconduct has cost Chicago taxpayers more than half a billion dollars since 2004—and that’s just for legal settlements and fees. The toll that cops’ bad behavior exacts on our city isn’t measured only in dollars, although the city has paid out $100 million for misconduct cases in the last two months alone. It’s also a moral drag, a broad, ugly banner communicating to the country and the world that in Chicago, black lives don’t matter....

I’ve been down at my parents’ place combing through piles of things I’ve accumulated since I was a child—yarmulkes, foreign coins, and lots of doodles and scribbles I’m pretty sure I thought were worthy of Marvel back then. I didn’t expect these crayon-smudged pieces of lined paper to inspire as much reflection as they have, and even though I couldn’t quite recall what inspired my barely baked superhero ideas, the process of peering at these old creations offered plenty of opportunities to reminisce....