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WE TV Brandon and Elle, post-sex box It’s impossible to fathom the number of relationships that have dissolved because a couple’s sex life wasn’t mutually gratifying. I won’t say it’s definitely the reason your parents got divorced—but the chances are pretty good, bud. The good news/bad news is that the solution has been right in front of our stupid idiot faces the whole time: all couples have to do, see, is fuck in a box on a stage....

Chicago is a lucky spot for people who like emerging and otherwise overlooked visual art. We have a bunch of college programs in the area that recruit and keep globally savvy artists in our midst, and a bevy of nonprofit institutions that work hard to support both challenging art and the artists who make it. While you can still find groupings of galleries clustered together in some neighborhoods, the global economy doesn’t sustain the “gallery scene” mythology that used to dominate the art world discourse in major cities....

Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago. From all appearances, Andrew and Jon Landan spend hours planning their outfits. But outside of more formal engagements the social butterflies known as the Landan Twins aren’t so perfectly matched. “Some days one of us will wear lots of color while the other will wear all black. It really matters how each of us feels,” says Andrew, pictured with his brother during the opening of the Richard H....

A century ago, Krikor Sarkees‘s grandparents fled the Armenian genocide and settled in Baghdad, Iraq, where Krikor would eventually be born. A few decades later Sita Sarkees‘s father, also of Armenian Christian background, was taken by his parents from Iran to Iraq; she too would grow up in Baghdad. Six years ago, when other people their age would be thinking of retirement, Sita and Krikor left a war-torn Iraq to settle in Chicago, where Sita’s brother already lived—and earlier this year, the couple (he’s 63 and she’s 55) were naturalized as American citizens....

O’Connell’s performance under Les Waters’s direction embodies both the doubt and the resilience in Dana as she fiddles with her glasses, twists a water bottle in her hands, and occasionally refers to her own written version of events, apologizing for the fuzziness of the time line she’s recounting. It’s not uncommon for victims of trauma to disconnect physically and feel as if their story is happening to someone else. Centering Dana’s actual voice while using another woman’s physical presence is a way for Hnath to both honor his mother’s experience in her own words (crucial when women’s accounts of violence and abuse are routinely discounted) and embody that disconnect....

Dinosaur Jr.’s second act is a feel-good gift that keeps on giving. These unwavering indie-rock lifers seem to have access to a bottomless well of arena-ready solos and riffs, brain-sticking melodies, and hurricane-force noise. In the late 1980s, the powerhouse trio—guitarist and singer J Mascis, bassist and singer Lou Barlow, and drummer Murph—became a revolutionary force in the American rock ’n’ roll underground. Then in 1989, Dinosaur Jr. went through an acrimonious breakup with Barlow, who shifted focus to his indie-rock project Sebadoh, and in 1997, after a couple more lineup changes, the band dissolved....

A few times each year Chicagoans can make the most of living in a city with two major-league baseball teams by catching both clubs in one day—what longtime Reader production director Dave Jones called a “Doubleday,” in honor of baseball’s supposed inventor, Abner Doubleday. This season’s remaining chances fall on Friday and Saturday, August 23 and 24, so if nothing else you’ll avoid having to pay $10 for a cup of hot chocolate at Wrigley....

This year has already seen the release of three superior films for children—The Breadwinner, Paddington 2, and Mary and the Witch’s Flower. These movies teem with visual and narrative imagination, alerting young viewers to the medium’s rich potential. They also refuse to condescend to their viewers: the films are free of the sort of infantile humor and emotional underscoring one finds in less-inspired children’s fare; moreover, they achieve a complexity of detail that requires a certain amount of visual literacy....

As any CryptoParty attendee will attest, you can only ensure a reasonably private communication by using “strong, end-to-end encryption,” “strong” here meaning nearly impossible to break, even with supercomputers, and “end-to-end” referring to only the intended parties being able to interpret the communications. Because the users store the keys on their devices, no one in the middle can unlock the messages. Almost all the following tools are free to download and use....

Beverly, a graphic novel by Chicago cartoonist and illustrator Nick Drnaso, consists of six overlapping stories of suburban life. The bleak tales are told mainly from teenagers’ perspectives. The characters, though shapeless and rarely expressive, are recognizable, and their situations are unenviable. The settings verge on the mundane: an after-school job, a house party, a pizza place, soccer practice, the playground where kids smoke. But in this world, the slightest aberration resounds like a shot....

UPDATE Wednesday, March 18: this event has been canceled. Refunds available at point of purchase. This cabaret by singer-actors Nancy Hays and Alexa Castelvecchi pays homage to two of the greatest performers of the 20th century: Judy Garland and her daughter Liza Minnelli, who teamed up in November 1964 for a pair of concerts at the historic London Palladium, one of which was televised. At the time, Judy was a 42-year-old veteran of movies, TV, and vaudeville, while Minnelli was an 18-year-old fledgling on the brink of a promising career....

For about a decade, Tim Presley has worked to combine aspects of pop, punk, and lo-fi psychedelia under the name White Fence. On the recent I Have to Feed Larry’s Hawk (Drag City), the guitarist and songwriter delivers what might be his best amalgamation of those musical interests yet. After leading Los Angeles psych band Darker My Love from the mid- to late 00s, Presley launched White Fence in 2010 to focus on stripped-down garage....

This review contains spoilers. A playwright originally, Lonergan understands that people rarely say what they mean, especially if their feelings are raw, and both Lee and Patrick protect themselves with tough talk. This posturing keeps their feelings in check, and when this pretense fails, their encounters are more clumsy than cathartic. In a humorous scene, Patrick breaks down over a piece of meat in the freezer that reminds him of his father’s refrigerated corpse, and Lee kicks in Patrick’s bedroom door to offer awkward consolation....

This weekend saw the passing of Milos Stehlik, cofounder of Facets Multimedia. I don’t have the space in this post to enumerate all the ways that Stehlik influenced Chicago film culture—such as his championing of films and filmmakers from around the world (especially eastern Europe), his role in establishing the International Children’s Film Festival, and his contributions to WBEZ—so instead I’ll briefly note how Facets Multimedia has influenced me. Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator An early (1967) film by Dušan Makavejev, the master of the eastern European dirty joke (WR: Mysteries of the Organism, Montenegro)....

On its 1981 album, Points, San Francisco-born experimental-music group Negativland doesn’t care to jive with traditional songwriting. Shocking, I know. Instead much of the record represents a crash course in sound art, via, among other examples, the layering of chilling, ambient soundscapes or the distortion and warping of crowd noise till certain voices possess themselves (basically). Still, my favorite track from the outfit’s sophomore effort is the one that features the most distinct structure....

It would have been easy to begin this letter by writing “Chicago is a theater town,” but also stupid because everybody knows that, even people who don’t live here: Steppenwolf, Second City, City Hall, blah blah blah. We respect you, dear readers, and so we’re not going to insult you by filling this special Spring Theater and Dance Issue with stuff you already know about and have probably seen. Instead, we asked our writers and one photographer to go out and learn more about places and performers that fascinated them....

On his energetic new album Three Letters From Sarajevo (Wrasse), Bosnian composer and guitarist Goran Bregović displays his broad-minded ability to express the full splendor of vintage eastern European traditional and folk music. He’s been charged with brazen acts of cultural theft in the past, such as translating the gritty sounds of a singer like Šaban Bajramović, known as the King of the Romany, for a mainstream listenership. While that remains debatable, there’s no doubt that he’s popularized music from the region, notably scoring films by Serbian director Emir Kusturica and touring the world with his Wedding and Funeral Orchestra....

Manhunter Somewhat hidden among the slate of lackluster January studio releases is Blackhat, the latest film by the mighty Michael Mann, America’s finest purveyor of machismo ennui, neon expressionism, ebullient firefights, and dynamic shots of zooming speedboats. I wouldn’t necessarily count myself among the cult of Mann—next to Paul W.S. Anderson, he’s probably the most revered and obsessed-over filmmaker among auteur fetishists—but I’m far from a skeptic. I suppose I’m still getting used to his digital phase....

When Chuy Garcia forced a mayoral runoff with Rahm Emanuel, one of the first things I wondered was whether this meant Stump Connolly would stay out in the field for six weeks longer. “Stump Connolly” is the nom de precinct of Scott Jacobs, whom I’ve known since we were reporters at the Sun-Times. Full disclosure—we once wrote a play together. He wrote a scene; I wrote the next scene; audiences remarked that they seemed to be watching two different plays—though both had something to do with Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur....

For most of my life I’ve steered clear of choral music—I assumed it was antiquated, and my tastes in classical music leaned toward the contemporary (which usually means dissonance, unusual timbres, and odd structures). Of course, that assumption arose almost entirely out of ignorance. I’m still a novice when it comes to classical vocal music, but I’m coming around—not just because I’ve discovered the work of Baroque composers such as Henry Purcell but also because I’ve been programming contemporary music every week for nearly five years for my Frequency Series....