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This weekend, as part of the Cinepocalypse festival of genre films, Ernest Dickerson will appear at the Music Box Theatre to introduce revival screenings of two movies he directed, the horror comedy Tales From the Crypt: Demon Knight (1995) on Saturday at 5 PM, and the adolescent crime drama Juice (1992) on Sunday at 2:15 PM. Dickerson has enjoyed a long career in both film and television. He began as a cinematographer in the early 1980s and shot over two dozen films, the most famous being Spike Lee’s first six features (among them She’s Gotta Have It and Do the Right Thing)....

On Tuesday, October 22, more than four months after installation of court recording equipment began in all five of the eviction courtrooms at the Daley Center, green lights were shining on the mikes but no recordings were being made. It took years of lobbying by the Chicago Appleseed Fund for Justice and other groups to convince the Administrative Office of the Illinois Courts to allocate some $370,000 to supply Chicago’s eviction courtrooms—which process about 20,000 cases every year—with microphones for creating transcripts of court hearings....

With the Chicago Blues Festival right around the corner, the two owners of Taylor Street Tap saw no better time to bring their dreams of opening their own blues bar to fruition. The doors to the club—which owner Brian Fadden says will play “host to the best blues talent in the city”—officially opened on May 15. A statement like that might make Fadden sound like a greenhorn business owner suffering from delusions of grandeur—this is in fact his first business—but he and co-owner Dylan MacWilliams have the resumés to make this work....

Over the past few years, futuristic Chicago producer Jamal Moss, aka Hieroglyphic Being, has built a healthy Bandcamp catalog: between 2016 and the end of 2019, he released 17 full-lengths of previously unreleased compositions, demos, and archival tracks. But since the COVID-19 pandemic hit the U.S. this spring, Moss has kicked his Bandcamp release schedule into an even higher gear. Between mid-March and early August, he dropped a dozen digital albums—it wouldn’t surprise me if he puts out at least one more by the time this piece is published....

Chicago experimental electronic-pop duo Hobbyist are well suited to capture the anxiety that’s been our constant companion since the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic upended the world. Producer Marc Mozga creates a stark, austere sound from programmed percussion and synth licks, and his prickly, spacious beats and sparse melodies feel like they could raise the undead. Meanwhile the restrained vocals of front woman Holly Prindle split the difference between sinister and sultry, making her sound like a possessed lounge singer....

The Reader‘s archive is vast and varied, going back to 1971. Every day in Archive Dive, we’ll dig through and bring up some finds. By the time the Reader caught up to Campbell again in 2000, he’d moved to L.A. to pursue a career in show business and had just appeared as himself in the documentary American Pimp; he’d returned to Chicago for his 49th birthday party, which turned into an epic all-nighter attended by players, pimps, DJs, and rappers....

In March 2020, the Joel Hall Dancers were preparing for a concert celebrating the work of cofounder and artistic director emeritus Joel Hall, with dances spanning each decade of his choreography, from the company’s origins in the 1970s to the present day. LEGACY: Phoenix^5 was originally intended to be a sequel to The Life and Legacy of Joel Hall—in the words of current artistic director Jacqueline Sinclair, “a glimpse into the future by those of us who are carrying the organization into the future....

Kimberly Dowdell looks down at her iPhone, which blasts red app badges and notifications from a cluttered screen. She has thousands of messages, e-mails, and calls that beg her attention, but she merely smiles at them and closes her phone case. The 36-year-old architect and director is used to it by now. “We really need to create greater pathways into the profession and greater access to our K through 12 students, our college and graduate students, our licensure candidates, [and] support them through that process,” she says....

courtesy of the artist Anna Webber Last summer I wrote about Simple (Skirl), a trio recording by New York-based, British Columbia-born winds player Anna Webber. Flanked by drummer John Hollenbeck and pianist Matt Mitchell, Webber maintained the tricky complexity of the writing on her 2013 album Percussive Mechanics, but she also gave herself space to showcase her improvisational prowess. Her compositions are dense and multipartite, with loads of interlocking parts and shifts in tempo and mood....

In ye olde late 90s, American Primitive fingerstyle guitar by the likes of Robbie Basho, Sandy Bull, and Peter Walker seemed to come back into fashion, possibly because the founder and overlord of the genre, John Fahey, was making some very cool new experimental records. After Fahey died in 2001, adept pickers such as Jack Rose, Kevin Barker (of Currituck Co.), and James Blackshaw appeared to pick up the torch and run with it....

If I were a state House Dem, I like to think I’d join the crew urging Michael Madigan to step down as speaker—what with the Commonwealth Edison scandal endangering the Democratic Party. And even if I miraculously survived Kasper’s challenge, Madigan would order some aide to dig through my past, looking for dirt to use against me. And he’d be as sweet as Tupelo honey . . . And, two, they know how tough he can be....

If you don’t leave this show furious you have no heart. The story alone should make you furious: a group of young women, full of life and hope, take the only jobs available to them and earn early deaths for their pains. That the story is based on fact—the young women in question worked at the Radium Dial Company, in Ottawa, Illinois, in the 1920s, painting the faces of clocks and watches with radioactive paint, ingesting lots of radium in the process and contracting deadly illnesses as a result of their exposure—makes it all the more infuriating....

The contemporary dance-music scene and the underground arts community have been in mourning since Friday night, when a fire destroyed Oakland underground arts space the Ghost Ship during a show, killing dozens—as I write, the official death toll is 36, though that number is expected to rise. The tragedy has forced a conversation about Oakland’s housing crisis into the national press, and it’s brought the issue of unlicensed venues to the attention of people who may not have even known they existed....

I’m a live-music addict, and it sometimes feels completely unreal that I haven’t been to a concert in almost a year. But one of the pandemic’s few silver linings is that some musicians are digging into their archives and issuing old live material that might otherwise have stayed on the shelf. Such is the case with reedist and composer Roscoe Mitchell and drummer Mike Reed. They’ve both contributed hugely to Chicago’s jazz scene, though Mitchell hasn’t lived here in many years (he’s now based in Fitchburg, Wisconsin), and I’ve seen both of them play many times....

Italian reedist Alberto Pinton, who built his career in Stockholm after studying in Boston and New York, has long been a crucial figure in Sweden’s jazz and improvised-music scene, but he remains largely unknown in the U.S. He’s a workhorse: though he’s produced only nine albums as a leader or coleader since 2001, he’s appeared as a sideman on more than five dozen more. He contributes not only written charts but also a strong musical personality, most notably on great efforts by bassist Torbjörn Zetterberg and fellow reedist Fredrik Nordström....

My youngest sister moved to Chicago two years ago to study painting at Columbia College. As she develops her aesthetic, she’s been looking to both art history and contemporary pieces for inspiration. She’s only 20 years old, and she’s already discouraged: In her classes, she tells me, the students mostly read about male artists—it’s only in discussions about feminist art that women are mentioned. During her critiques, she says, anything she creates relevant to her feminine identity is scrutinized by her professors in a way that none of her male peers experience....

Q: In a frank exchange early in our courtship, I told my girlfriend that I have no kinks. As a faithful reader of Savage Love, I’m obviously not opposed to kinks—but I’ve never had any inclinations in that direction and am probably a typical hetero vanilla. As a result, I’m damn near clueless in that area. Last night, my girlfriend placed my hands around her neck and asked me to choke her....

The gulags in Meghan Brown’s world-premiere dystopian fable, The Tasters, resemble plenty of real-world hellholes that confine political prisoners, save for their spectacular dining options. Chained to metal desks, three captives (Daniella Pereira, Paula Ramirez, Shariba Rivers) sample extravagant meals prepared for the upper echelon of a loathed authoritarian regime, who’ve become popular targets for poisonings by famine-ravaged dissidents. When a captured revolutionary figurehead initiates a hunger strike, Brown takes her metaphorically-rich premise to some unexpected heights that speak to the current global political climate, and more provocatively, gender dynamics at large....

Editor’s note: Chef John Asbaty left in August 2015. At a glance his menu doesn’t seem much more inspired than those at the dozens of newer middling restaurants trafficking in the standard charcuterie, burgers, roasted chicken, and house-made pasta, but the kitchen is operating on a different level. Take a seasonal vegetable tartare: a sizable deposit of finely brunoised multicolored root vegetables (someone got an A in Knife Skills) crowned with a golden sous-vide duck yolk and piled atop of a slice of fried bread schmeared with cool, creamy quark cheese....

Any media outlet referencing west-side native Mykele Deville should be required to include a brief of his CV, partially because he’s established himself as proficient in several roles: poet, actor, educator, and rapper. And with the remarkable growth he shows on his new seven-song album, Maintain (on local DIY label No Trend), I imagine Deville’s name will be on even more people’s lips soon. He sounds so confident on the mike it’s as if he’d dropped his debut mixtape, 2016’s Super Predator, three decades ago instead of barely three years ago....