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Since ten women came forward last month to accuse Northwestern journalism professor Alec Klein of misconduct ranging from sexual comments to unwanted kissing, 19 more women have reached out to them with their stories. In a new open letter released Thursday, the Medill Me Too group has published new allegations about Klein from the new accusers, including diary entries some of the women provided. “We’re encouraged thus far by Northwestern’s broad investigation into Alec Klein’s behavior,” Flowers says....

“House music has always been New York, Chicago, and Detroit, maybe as far as D.C. and Philadelphia,” Atlanta producer Kai Alcé told Red Bull Music Academy in 2016. “Under what we could call the Mason-Dixon line, house music hasn’t had that history.” Alcé, who was born in New York and raised in Detroit, has helped foster a house community in Atlanta since he moved there in the early 90s. In 2005 he cofounded the annual outdoor party House in the Park, which now draws between 10,000 and 20,000 attendees....

Glitter Creeps “I would have killed for a rock ‘n’ roll-themed gay night when I was 21!” says Donnie Moore, front man of local punk band Absolutely Not and founder of Glitter Creeps, a monthly LGBTQ night at the Empty Bottle that hosts some of Chicago’s best underground acts. Taking place on the third Wednesday of every month, Glitter Creeps has a simple concept, according to Moore: “I try to feature at least one band per bill with an LGBTQ member, and then find other bands that sonically match said band, and are also at least supportive of the LGBTQ community....

Before I came to Chicago, I knew about the Commercial Club’s 1909 Plan of Chicago. I picked up a reprinted edition at the Seattle Public Library and pored over its luminous illustrations by Jules Guérin and magisterial prose by architects Daniel H. Burnham and Edward H. Bennett promising a greatly improved system of parks and highways, and a grand civic center where all governmental matters would be addressed efficiently and professionally....

Carol Barreto comes from a country that is supposedly a “racial democracy”, but anyone who’s spent a considerable amount of time in Brazil realizes this reputation is just a facade. I was born there, and I know how little social and economic mobility people of darker skin color have in Brazilian society. And it’s all about appearances, since most Brazilians carry African and Native American genes. Last year Barreto—who is a gender studies professor, a women’s studies researcher, and a culture and society PhD student at the Federal University of Bahia—presented her “Vozes” collection at Black Fashion Week in Paris....

Gossip Wolf has seen Chicago band Rash play at least half a dozen times, and they never disappoint. Their brutal mix of noise, punk, and hardcore would’ve sounded right at home on Amphetamine Reptile or Touch and Go back in the 90s! On Friday, December 2, Rash will release their debut LP, Skinner Box, on local DIY label High Fashion Industries, and this wolf can’t stop listening—it sounds the way repeatedly bashing your head into a block of concrete feels....

It was a long time coming when Logan Arcade owner Jim Zespy followed music producer Steve Albini onstage to introduce the arcade cabinet he’d constructed for a video game starring his friend’s famous cat. “I’ve known Mike for a long time. I never thought I’d be running an arcade and he’d have a world-famous cat,” Zespy said to a crowd of several hundred fans who’d crowded into his arcade bar in Logan Square last Friday night for the game’s premiere party....

Greg MacAyeal first encountered John Cage while studying music composition in the late 80s as an undergraduate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Arguably America’s most influential experimental composer, Cage is famous for his 1952 “silent piece” 4’33”, and in the 1950s and ’60s he’d pushed the envelope musically by composing works incorporating silence, indeterminacy, and electronics. He’d taught and researched at UIUC two decades before, from 1967 until ’69, spending most of his time cocreating a mammoth computer-music piece called HPSCHD that premiered in May 1969....

From the late 1960s until the very end of the ’80s, the artist Lee Godie staked her claim on the Art Institute’s steps. She hawked her paintings, drawings, and photographs to museum patrons, students, and passersby on Michigan Avenue. Living on the street by choice, Godie, who passed away in 1994, kept her wardrobe and art supplies in department-store lockers and frequented bus-station photo booths to take self-portraits—an idiosyncratic aspect of her diverse and public practice....

When New Zealand singer-songwriter Jonathan Bree began his solo career in 2013, his creations were almost diametrically opposed to the poppy, upbeat material that he’d crafted in the Brunettes, his longtime project with Heather Mansfield. His first two LPs were melancholy and dour, casting his deep, gloomy, discontented croon in a dark light. But on his 2018 breakthrough and third LP, Sleepwalking (Lil’ Chief), Bree gives his chamber pop a brighter, dreamier, and more intoxicating tone, with nods to 1960s lounge, mod, and French pop....

This time last year, the film-loving farceur behind the Music Box Theatre’s beloved Twitter account—now restored to its former glory after a bogus several-week suspension due to supposed copyright infringement—replied to a tweet from a film fan in a conversation about Christopher Nolan: “Keep your fingers crossed that this is all over in time for TENET in July!” This progress comes after a hellish year for exhibitors who rely on in-person screenings for most or all of their revenue....

Nearly a decade ago, Chicago singer-songwriter Owen Ashworth launched Orindal Records, partly as an outlet for the intimate, cozy indie-pop recordings he makes under the name Advance Base. He’s since transformed the label into a hub for musicians who take a similarly measured, contemplative approach, even when they’re exploring entirely different genres. Orindal’s latest Hideout showcase skews toward folk and rock, and features several of my label favorites, including Philadelphia band Friendship, whose lithe, unhurried folk-rock songs are sometimes so gentle they border on ambient....

Working a traditional office job doesn’t deter Mandy Sears from making a bold fashion statement. Sporting an outfit she described as “punk rock meets business casual,” the 23-year-old appraisal coordinator managed to look both polished and rebellious by pairing classic pieces with edgier ones: a houndstooth duster coat with a black pair of Dr. Martens boots. Another way Sears stands out from the nine-to-five crowd is by not shying away from bright colors, which are amplified by her fiery red strands....

One of Chicago’s most accessibly bizarre musical collaborations of 2019 began at a Burger King in Evanston. A couple years ago Maxwell Allison, who makes experimental music as Mukqs and helps run the eclectic Hausu Mountain label, was walking past the fast-food joint when he spotted rapper Brian Wharton, better known as Sharkula, sitting inside. Wharton has stayed underground for decades, and though he might like to be more popular, he’s definitely not willing to change his scattered, unconventional, sometimes off-the-beat flow, his anachronistic love for a grimy boom-bap sound redolent of 90s hip-hop, or his fascination with lyrics about bodily functions....

The crowd started gathering around Wrigley Field midafternoon on Sunday, approximately four hours before the Cubs were scheduled to face off against the Dodgers in game two of the National League Championship Series. And on the corner of Addison and Sheffield, amid the stream of fans, vendors, drinkers, gawkers, and wanderers all clad in blue, stood one lone stout, white-haired figure in red with a hands-free microphone over his ear and Bible in his back pocket....

This week’s gig poster brings us back to the world of online concerts. The staff at West Edgewater’s Experimental Sound Studio (ESS) have been working hard to bring a full calendar of collaborative programming from all over the world to our Internet “airwaves” since March. Saturday’s free concert was coordinated by online publication Tone Glow (edited by Reader contributor Joshua Minsoo Kim) and delivers experimental, noise, and improvised music from Sunik Kim, Wendy Eisenberg (both based in New York), Philadelphia’s Lucy Liyou, and Glasgow/South London collective Still House Plants....

T he story of Chicago’s street murals isn’t exactly untold. Much of it has been documented in the Reader, as a matter of fact, primarily through articles by the estimable Jeff Huebner. But it’s seldom if ever been mined as a subject for theatrical exploration. The nearest attempt, as far as I know, was This Is Modern Art by Kevin Coval and Idris Goodwin, which is about tagging-a genre that’s been known to serve as the apprenticeship program for mural making as well as its outlaw wing, but isn’t the thing itself....

By now, thanks to the movie Kinsey (2004) and Showtime’s Masters of Sex, most people are well versed in the story of Alfred Kinsey, the Indiana University professor who collected Americans’ individual accounts of their sexual histories in the late 1930s and early ’40s. Within three years of beginning the project he had collected more than 2,000 personal sexual histories, and by 1947 he had founded the Institute for Sex Research....

It took me nine years to get out to the House Theatre’s annual nonballetic staging of The Nutcracker, but after finally seeing it last year, I was eager to make a return trip. Created by Jake Minton, Phillip Klapperich, Kevin O’Donnell, and Tommy Rapley, the House version imagines a family broken apart by grief and finding their way back to a different kind of normal. The twist this year is that the family is headed by two dads—Benjamin Sprunger’s Marty and Nicholas Bailey’s David....

Most band reunions don’t live up to the hype, but most bands aren’t Sleep. In the early 90s, the Northern California trio—bassist and vocalist Al Cisneros, guitarist Matt Pike, and drummer Chris Hakius—laid down a guttural strain of Sabbath-worshipping blues metal, filtered through a crusty psychedelic lens. They broke up in 1998 following a years-long struggle surrounding their third full-length, Dopesmoker—their label balked at releasing a single hour-long song centered on a bong-toting desert caravan, and the band refused to compromise their vision....