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Daryl Cameron believes the time is right for his cape. Musically, The Whole 9 connects to The Adventures of Captain Sky and the two albums that followed. Cameron’s overarching mood is as resolutely positive now as it was then. Classic funk guitars, scratchy yet precise, engage with bass and keyboard vamps while horns sneak in brief solos. Cameron, who’s about to turn 63, still prefers live instruments over samples, and he shuns Auto-Tune in favor of his natural voice....

Warning: This post contains spoilers. There are some nice interactions here and there. Ezra Miller, playing Barry Allen (aka the Flash), expresses some juvenile anxiety toward his superpowers, and he bonds with Cyborg (Ray Fisher) over their mutual feeling of being outsiders. Batman (Ben Affleck) has a nice rapport with his butler, Alfred (Jeremy Irons), who assists with his crime-fighting from a top-secret lair. Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) and Aquaman (Jason Momoa) seem to have little to do but bask in their godlike powers, yet they establish a certain chemistry with each other and the other stars....

Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place. They got encouragement from Mantegna’s mentor and drama teacher at Morton East, Jack Leckel, who also ran the theater departments at Morton West in Berwyn and a nearby junior college. Leckel came up with the name “the Apocryphals” (the band didn’t even know what it meant at first) and helped them buy their first sound equipment....

Before clarinetist James Falzone relocated from Chicago to Seattle last fall to pursue a teaching position, he cemented Wayfaring, his duo with bassist and singer Katie Ernst, with a performance at the Hyde Park Jazz Festival. The musicians also recorded a stunning record, I Move, You Move, which was recently released by Allos Documents. Modern jazz history is rife with strong duos, but Wayfaring stands out by, channeling ideas from American folk tradition or the church (where both musicians have spent significant time performing) into music that extends well beyond the language of jazz....

At first blush, it may seem like mayoral hopefuls Toni Preckwinkle and Lori Lightfoot have nearly identical transportation platforms. After all, both Preckwinkle and Lightfoot said they’re on board with multiple policy ideas floated by the Active Transportation Alliance in its candidate questionnaire. These include reduced transit fares for low-income Chicagoans; adding 50 miles of bus lanes; installing 100 miles of bikeways; building a continuous Chicago River trail; developing a transportation and infrastructure equity plan; implementing ride-sharing policies that encourage multipassenger trips; upgrading the Metra Electric line; and “prioritizing safety, equity, public health, and the environment above [motor vehicle] travel times when designing city streets....

In the center of an empty stage, in an empty room backlit in red and blue, west-side artist, organizer, and prison abolitionist Bella Bahhs spoke into the camera. Her first in-person performance of this poem, which was commissioned by WJI, was for a small group of women at Logan Correctional Center, a women’s prison about 30 miles north of Springfield, in mid-March. Bahhs and two of her WJI colleagues, Melissa Hernandez and Alexis Mansfield, drove down to the prison to perform the poem and talk about the impact of the census with the women, who were set to be released within the next 30 days....

Ballet is an art form steeped in discipline and tradition—a stereotypically tall and slender ballerina floats across the stage in pointe shoes, dancing through a fairy tale accompanied by a classical score. Yet when Robert Joffrey started the Joffrey Ballet in 1956 with cofounder Gerald Arpino, he set out to build a new type of ballet company that broke free of convention. Joffrey opted for dancers of different body types rather than filling his company with cookie-cutter performers....

Prolific Chicago music photographer Bobby Talamine, whose work has frequently graced the Reader (you might remember his vibrant shots of Cheap Trick, Gary Numan, or Donnie Trumpet & the Social Experiment with Chance the Rapper), was assaulted after Radiohead’s set at Lollapalooza—and the bastards made off with his camera too. Talamine’s buddy Brett Widmann has set up a GoFundMe campaign to raise money to cover the cost of new gear, which quickly met its initial goal....

If you’re going to put out your first solo album in 13 years, you’ll probably want to make sure it includes a few songs that will appeal to your longtime fans. What country audiences want is obviously a moving target—country has been shifting toward including independently minded crossover pop artists such as Kacey Musgraves, so that it’s harder to define what a “true” country star should sound like—but Pam Tillis has a long history of gently pushing the envelope without alienating mainstream listeners....

Crazy Doberman are an Indiana free-improvisation and jazz collective created in 2016 as an offshoot of the group Doberman, started three years before. Core members, including Tim Gick and Doberman cofounder Drew Davis, appear on many recordings, but Crazy Doberman’s lineup is loose—it varies on each of the band’s 40-plus albums and has featured dozens of musicians, among them Wolf Eyes’ John Olson and percussionist Tyler Damon. While different albums have different flavors—This Land God Has Abandoned is all brooding mystique, while — / Haunted, Non / Haunted features some of their most acerbic electronics—there’s a tightness and sustained energy on every recording....

A woman’s search for her missing sister becomes a twisted fable of money, violence, sex, death, and Dungeons and Dragons in Alistair McDowall’s creepy Pomona. Once a Victorian rural retreat lush with apple orchards and wildflowers that was developed into the Royal Pomona Palace—a concert hall four times the size of London’s Royal Albert Hall, surrounded by magnificent gardens—the island of Pomona declined after an 1887 factory explosion into a wasteland of ruins, weeds, and deserted docks in the Manchester Ship Canal....

Comedian Kayla Pulley is tired of the open mike scene in Chicago. As a black woman, she doesn’t always feel very welcome or even safe in the predominantly white, male environment. Even after years of proving herself on stages around the city, she would too often find herself walking into a room and being completely ignored by comedians she saw every day. She would call out the problems with open mikes in the city on stage to zero response....

Welsh producer Kelly Lee Owens arrived at techno from the world of indie: she started the decade playing bass for London dream-pop outfit the History of Apple Pie, and before that she spent time running small music festivals in Manchester, where she’d trained to be a nurse. Her 2017 self-titled solo album (Smalltown Sound) contains all the fixin’s that practically any discerning indie-rock fan would want out of music, regardless of genre; her sounds are warm, and each track contains small details that reveal themselves upon repeated listens—whole chunks of the record can nestle into the back of your mind and emerge in your consciousness during moments of solitude....

One of the best things about Chicago is the city’s magical history, that is, its history as a hub for magicians. For many years, these performance artists have provided Chicagoans a unique and compelling form of entertainment. Rooted in the close-up variety that magicians often performed in bars across the city, the scene has since evolved to include acts that continue to impress. Even in a year when attending a magic show in person wasn’t an option, Chicago’s magicians managed to adapt by adopting a “the-show-must-go-on” attitude....

South Shore senior citizen Josie Conley takes walks regularly to stay healthy during the COVID-19 quarantine. But narrow sidewalks mean that maintaining the recommended six-foot “social distance” from others is kind of like a game of Dodge ‘Em. “My mother doesn’t want to take any chances,” explained her son Shawn Conley, who joins her during his lunch break from his job with the Illinois State Board of Education. He also helps lead the Major Taylor Cycling Club of Chicago, a predominantly Black organization with about 120 members....

You know the story of the brilliant chemist Percy Julian, right? The Alabama-born grandson of a man who’d had fingers amputated as punishment for learning to read and write while enslaved, his discoveries led to everything from water-based paint and a treatment for glaucoma, to firefighting foam that saved numerous lives in World War II. If you’ve used a birth control pill for family planning, you’ve benefited from his work. There’s a high school named for him in Chicago, and a middle school in Oak Park, so his remarkable life should be familiar, but on the chance that it’s not—as it wasn’t for me or most folks I asked—PBS is offering a free stream of Forgotten Genius, its 2007 Nova documentary about Julian, through the month of February....

Last year around this time, hundreds of gallons of Goose Island’s Bourbon County Brand Stout were being distilled at Rhine Hall to make bierschnaps. The spirit originated in Bavaria, where small brewers who owned a still would often distill leftover beer. Despite increasing interest, it’s never really become popular in the U.S. (though several local distilleries, including Koval, Chicago Distilling Company, and CH Distillery, have made spirits from beer). Turning unwanted beer into spirits is a no-brainer; the first step to making whiskey is essentially to make beer, minus the hops....

First off, let me concede that you gotta like Pat Hughes. Hate the Rickettses and what they’ve done to Rickettsville, hate the Cubs and what they did to themselves, you gotta like Pat Hughes. But remember, friends, the category is best sportscaster, not best toastmaster. And that is Jason Benetti, television play-by-play man for the other baseball team in town with a 21st-century World Series title, the Chicago White Sox. After the retirement of Ken “Hawk” Harrelson—a childhood hero of Benetti’s, who grew up a Sox fan with dreams of being Harry Caray “as long as I don’t look like Harry Caray”—this was his first season full-time in the role and his fourth with the team, side by side with none other than Steve Stone, Harry Caray’s broadcasting partner during the Cubs’ mid-80s glory days....

The artist Yvette Mayorga, clad in a black sports bra and leggings, stands arms akimbo behind a barbed wire fence near the U.S.-Mexico border. The fence is laced with tiny American flags. Mayorga’s image blinks and then disappears. This scene is quickly replaced by an ornate domestic space displaying religious figurines. That gives way to a shot of street vendors selling food and luchador masks under a bright sun. Miniaturized migrants, weathered and dirty and carrying backpacks, walk past the merchandise laid out on the ground....

“Asian American” is a difficult identity to define. Culturally speaking, the term “Asian American” is tasked with the near-impossible job of representing people with origins in nations as disparate as India and South Korea, who speak languages ranging from Japanese to Tagalog. Routes of immigration to the U.S. vary widely among Asian Americans: some came to this country as refugees of the Vietnam war, while others can trace their history back to the building of the Central Pacific Railroad in the 1860s....