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Through 10/22: What is it to be a black, masculine body? Zimbabwe-born performance artist Nora Chipaumire grapples with this question in the piece Portrait of Myself as My Father at the Dance Center of Columbia College (1306 S. Michigan). In an interview with the Reader‘s Matt de la Peña, she says ”reconciling my relationship with my father means reconciling my relationship with a black man. And that’s a minefield.” 7:30 PM Sat 10/22: If you’ve been wishing that your vote had the power to put a labradoodle in the White House, the Mutt Strutt (Southport and Newport) is the thing for you....

It’s Tuesday, the day Tenth Ward alderman Sue Sadlowski Garza sets aside for constituents to drop in and tell her what’s on their minds. Garza sits in her swivel chair in the back room of her southeast-side ward office, preparing to meet her people. As a joke, I tell her she’s the new Eddie Vrdolyak, ready to hold court. That draws a laugh. Vrdolyak and Garza have virtually nothing in common, other than the fact they both got elected alderman of the Tenth Ward....

During the first week of isolation, I decided now was as good a time as any to finally watch The Sopranos. Then something strange happened. My social media feeds were overflowing with others doing the same thing—all Chicago-based millennials who were diving into the world of Tony Soprano and Dr. Melfi and the Bada Bing! for the very first time. It’s a prestige show often cited as the greatest of all time, a road map for all prestige dramas and other beloved series since....

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. Sophia Danenberg reached the top of Mount Everest on May 19, 2006, at 7 AM. She was the first African-American—and the first black woman— to make the summit. And she’d grown up in Homewood, though as an adult she lived in Connecticut. But it was a stealth operation—or as much of a stealth operation as climbing the world’s tallest mountain can get....

Autopilot/Wikimedia Commons If you see this on the street, just keep walking. Last week a mysterious Soundcloud account operated by “user48736353001” slowly posted, for a couple days, more than a 100 songs that sound uncannily like Aphex Twin. After some confirmation from close friends of the artist formally known as Richard D. James, it was revealed that the tracks are likely unreleased Aphex Twin material from the 90s. Expertly detailed by Philip Sherburne in this Pitchfork article, the tracks bear keyboard sounds and drum programming that identify them with certain eras....

In the months leading up to an election, many faithful CTA riders regularly encounter this sight at their stops: a volunteer clutching a clipboard, calling out to passengers on the platform, “Register to vote. Change your address.” Rauner claims he’s earnest about increasing voter participation. So why the additional hassle? Is it really about so-called voter fraud—or do partisan politics threaten access to this basic civil right yet again? “We’re hiring a lot of people....

At one point in our e-mail back-and-forth, Ganser bassist and vocalist Alicia Gaines says, “I miss green-room conversations.” We’ve been talking not just by e-mail but also over Zoom and via Twitter DMs. In any other year this might feel an excessive number of channels to use with just one person, but the pandemic has made communicating like this feel normal. Look At The Sun by Ganser Services like Twitter are designed as platforms for conversation, and when musicians use such spaces that way, they can develop relationships and collaborations naturally—relying not on record-label machinations but rather on deeper personal bonds....

This Thursday after sundown, the streets of West Rogers Park will be perfumed with the aroma of hot oil. Nowadays West Rogers Park’s strict Orthodox community is primarily located between Peterson Avenue and Howard Street, and concentrated west of California Avenue. That boundary gave its name to native son Adam Langer‘s 2004 memoir Crossing California. The CDOT staffers were fuzzy on exactly who requested the arch, as well as the function of the eruv, so I reached out to Silverstein for more info....

As protesters hit the streets to demand justice and action over George Floyd’s murder and the mistreatment of Black Americans, many folks are looking for alternative ways to support the fight, especially while still living in a pandemic. Brave Space AllianceThis alliance is the first Black-led, trans-led, LGBTQ center located on the south side of Chicago. They have been assisting with jail support and feeding folks in the community. You can find their daily drop-offs and locations on their Instagram....

One of the art world’s most bizarre cases has been quietly playing out this month in district court judge Gary Feinerman’s courtroom, located in the Dirksen Federal Building in the Loop. According to expert testimony heard in court last week, if Doig owned up to this one, it would go for $6 to $8 million. Bartlow agreed that the painting did look like the work of Peter Doig (mostly because of some similar shapes), and Fletcher thought pictures he saw of the famous artist resembled the Doige he’d known....

Rage, a new thriller playing at this year’s Polish Film Festival in America, feels like a throwback to the cinema of moral anxiety, a movement of the late 1970s and early ’80s that used interpersonal stories to examine social codes and political forces inside Communist Poland. The film centers on an amoral journalist for an ultraconservative cable news network who suffers an attack of conscience over various personal and professional concerns, and Michał Węgrzyn, directing a script he wrote with Marcin Roykiewicz, shows how the journalist’s treatment of people at home and at work mirrors his engagement with the public....

Last month Moaning front man Sean Solomon told the record club Vinyl Me, Please, “I think we take a lot of influence from Abe Vigoda and No Age, but I don’t think it’s something people will necessarily notice.” He’s right in the sense that the LA postpunk trio sound like they could have emerged from any contemporary underground rock scene; their style befits any guitar-based genre that’s vaguely sad, or sharply employs effects pedals, or is something that people with little frame of reference for music might incorrectly describe as “goth” or “emo....

It may be a while before the sort of all-out raging rock show that’s so hot and packed you leave smelling like other people’s sweat is once again part of human existence, but Newcastle Upon Tyne five-piece Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs (or, more concisely, Pigs x 7) won’t let that feeling fade into memory without a fight. Formed in 2013, they mix heavy rock, metallic riffs, and a little spacey psych with ample amounts of weirdness and fun—they’re the sort of band you wish were a regular presence on your local circuit, whether you ordinarily listen to their style of music or not....

The loss of confrontational front man and artist Alan Vega in July 2016 could’ve spelled the end of all performances related to transgressive duo Suicide, but Martin Rev, the remaining half of the synth-punk pioneers, has seemingly been on a musical pilgrimage, playing solo shows and making festival appearances across the U.S. and Europe. I was lucky enough to open for him at the Owl in Logan Square in September 2015....

It’s instructive to observe how most local news outlets covered Ken Griffin’s $10 million handout to Chicago law enforcement. CPD officials partly credit a recent decline in gun violence to the support centers (through March, the number of homicides in Chicago was down 17 percent) but the truth is no one knows for sure why Chicago’s homicide rate spiked two years ago and has dropped to pre-2016 levels in the past year....

Eric Garneau keeps playing Pandemic Legacy. And as the director of games and retail at the Chicago Board Game Cafe, he has access to more games than most. “I know it sounds kind of morbid, but it feels like a way to have some sort of modicum of control over everything.” While we can’t yet gather inside the cafe, Garneau passed along suggestions for game and food and drink pairings to recreate the magic in your own living room, dining room, kitchen, or wherever you choose to settle these days....

In January 2009, a US Airways flight that had just lifted off from LaGuardia collided with a flock of geese that took out both its engines, and the plane began losing altitude over the Bronx. The veteran pilot, Captain Chesley Sullenberger, decided that the plane would never reach an airport runway in time and instead staged a perfect water landing on the Hudson River, from which the passengers and crew were rescued....

Since hip-hop seized control of pop music, artists such as Juice Wrld, Lil Nas X, and Lil Tecca have rocketed to fame with little industry experience. Even among this wave of fast-breaking acts, 22-year-old Cordae Dunston—aka YBN Cordae—has cut a distinctive path. While growing up in Prince George’s County, Maryland, in the mid-2010s, Cordae released a few mixtapes as Entendre, which he’d later call “the worst rap name in history.” He enrolled at Towson University in 2015, got a job at a nearby TGI Friday’s, and numbed himself on Xanax—until three years later, when he dropped out, quit the restaurant, and embraced some rappers from the YBN collective whom he’d befriended through social media....

What’s a resilient auteur to do when their movie flops? After her 1966 film Les Créatures—now finally available for home viewing in a new Criterion Collection box set—failed to engage critics and audiences alike, Agnès Varda took the proverbial lemons and made lemonade: she later used 35mm release prints of the film to create an installation called Ma Cabane de L’Echec (My Shack of Failure), a rough-hewn hut with translucent walls made out of the salvaged film strips....

Q: I know you and other sexperts say that kinks are ingrained and not something you can get rid of, but mine have all vanished! Ever since I started on antidepressants my relationship with my body and how it reacts to pain, both physical and mental, has completely changed. I used to love getting bit and spanked and beat black and blue, but now all that just hurts. I used to love getting humiliated and spit on, commanded to do dirty things, but none of that holds much appeal anywhere....