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Fingerstyle guitar is a peculiar thing—it’s a practice that often sucks its practitioners into a rabbit hole at the expense of other approaches. That’s certainly not the case with Sarah Louise (née Sarah Louise Henson), the North Carolinian who made her mark with a couple of dazzling solo instrumental albums before demonstrating a larger sonic palette with her Appalachian-flavored folk duo House & Land. Last month she pivoted even more dramatically on her new album, Deeper Woods (Thrill Jockey), a thoughtful, often psychedelic meditation on nature, particularly the verdant hills of her native Asheville....

I have to admit, when I learn about a new band with a name like “Mr. Something & the Silly Somethings,” I tend to want to run away. More often than not, they’re a one-dimensional garage or punk rock group, and even if they find a home on a Burger Records cassette, they’ll never be heard from again. Even Tommy James & the Shondells, as commercially oriented as they were, did better than that back in the 60s: they tackled garage, frat rock, psychedelia, dreamy folk, and pure pop....

While it took me almost six months to get to it, Chicago stubbornly avoided the modern Israeli cuisine movement in the United States for more than a decade after its primary domestic proponent, Michael Solomonov, opened Zahav in Philadelphia in 2008. It’s even better at Galit. Just as at Shaya, the first role of the pita is performative: the sight of these steaming, charred ovoids is preceded by their fresh, yeasty smell wafting across the dining room....

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. Fernando, unfortunately, was unavailable. Katy recruited another friend known as Doc to fill the role. Doc was Swedish. If anyone asked, Katy decided they would say he was named Fernando after the Abba song. But no one asked. Logic had no place in the world of Jerry Springer....

Chicago native Maura Walsh is a visual artist and concert enthusiast. This year she raised $37,000 for local music venues battling the financial hardships of the pandemic with Our Tiny Guide to Chicago’s Best Music Culture Spots, which she created in 2019. She’s also working with nonprofit fundraising initiative Support Chicago Arts to launch Tiny Guide to Chicago Arts, which will help an even wider range of local performance spaces....

In July 2008, at the second annual AleFest Chicago at Soldier Field, I came across a bearded man serving beer from a jockey box made from a double-decker Craftsman toolbox. Bearded men weren’t in short supply at the event, but the Craftsman box was new to me, and so was the beer. In fact, it was new to everyone: Metropolitan Brewing, owned and run by Doug (the bearded man) and Tracy Hurst, didn’t even technically exist yet....

Julia Thiel The brewing equipment, with ghostly reflections from the dining-room chandeliers University Village’s Moxee Restaurant has included Mad Mouse Brewery since it first opened last May—and the restaurant is named for Moxee City, Washington, the “hops capital of the world”—but until recently the house beers have been brewed in collaboration with Michigan’s Saugatuck Brewing up at the Saugatuck facility. In December, though, Mad Mouse finally got its license, and the shiny brewing equipment that sits behind large windows on one wall of the restaurant became more than just decoration....

I’ve been observing the artistic growth of Haley Fohr since she moved to Chicago in 2012 from Bloomington, Indiana. She’s matured in leaps and bounds since the release of her breakthrough album, In Plain Speech (Thrill Jockey), in 2015, but nothing could have prepared me for her achievements on the remarkable new Reaching for Indigo (Drag City)—which might be the best album I’ve heard in 2017. Early on, Fohr convinced me that she possessed lots of ideas, but at the time she seemed to struggle to sort through them....

When you hear the word community, what do you think about? A group of like-minded individuals? A decent comedy show that put Donald Glover’s acting career on the map? Maybe the word reminds you of a local community center focused around the betterment of human life? All valid answers connected to the word. When I, a born and raised northsider, think about “community,” I think of the numerous neighborhoods I grew up in while moving from apartment to apartment with my mom through the majority of my childhood....

Michael Gebert Pork soda display from Fresco 21 Until this weekend, I hadn’t attended Baconfest since 2009, when I gave a talk on bacon making (which owed liberally to Michael Ruhlman’s Charcuterie). Chicago’s annual salute to cured pork belly draws over 100 chefs, thousands of attendees over the course of three sessions, and raises tens of thousands of dollars for the Greater Chicago Food Depository. It also sells out in about 12 minutes, so when coorganizer/old pal Seth Zurer invited me to go inside the belly of the beast—that is, to be a judge for the Friday night session—I grabbed my older son and jumped at the chance....

Astrophysicist Carl Sagan once speculated that cannabis might be the first crop ever cultivated by human hands, leading to the invention of agriculture—which, in turn, led to the development of civilization itself. While it’s impossible to know definitively if cannabis was the very first cultivated plant, we do know it was among the first, with records of human use of the plant reaching back over 10,000 years. For millennia, cannabis and agriculture have been inextricably linked, with innovation and human ingenuity continually working towards a better way to grow....

[UPDATED] Despite a dispute over a contract that threatened to cancel this weekend’s shows, the Admiral Theater and Stormy Daniels rode the storm out and have agreed that the porn star’s run of shows in Chicago wouldn’t just be a one-night stand. The porn star walked out of her highly anticipated Thursday-night show at the Admiral Theatre early due to a contract dispute with the management of the northwest-side strip club....

Arthur Le Fol The Dø, moments before testing that engine’s bird-strike countermeasures If you pay any attention at all to bylines around here, you know I tend to write about metal. Even my beer column is, at least nominally, partly about metal. But if anything, that should lend more weight to my recommendation of Franco-Finnish electro-pop duo the Dø, right? If music this shiny, bouncy, and accessible can win over a head-banging heathen like me, it must be really special....

Ravenswood’s Fountainhead is one of the best craft beer and whiskey bars in the city, with dizzyingly long lists that are a pleasure to lose oneself in. When it was announced more than two years ago that its principals were to take over the former Jury’s in nearby North Center and open a cider-focused bar, hopes were widely pinned on the group taking the same careful and comprehensive approach to apple fermentation....

Originally conceived as a play, Thoroughbreds (which is now playing in general release) still feels plenty theatrical. The developments are primarily internal, the action dialogue driven. Writer-director Cory Finley displays a nice use of the wide-screen frame to heighten the drama, exaggerating the emotional distance between characters or using negative space to draw attention to secrets left unspoken. It’s a handsome movie about awful people—the slender narrative revolves around the plotting of a murder, and the character positioned as the film’s voice of reason claims early on that she has no emotions....

This winter the University of Chicago Film Studies Center presents a series of programs celebrating the 50th anniversary of Canyon Cinema, the experimental-film distributor founded by filmmaker Bruce Baillie and still going strong in San Francisco. This Friday’s installment, “Decodings,” offers plenty of exciting stuff: Jodie Mack’s Point de Gaze (2012), a dazzling high-speed montage of the patterns in fine Belgian lacework; Naomi Uman’s Removed (1999), in which the figure of a woman has been scraped away from 16-millimeter footage of an old 1970s soft-core feature, just as her perspective has been overlooked in the original; and JoAnn Elam’s Lie Back and Enjoy It (1982), whose soundtrack consists of a woman interrogating a male filmmaker about the power relationship he creates when he trains his lens on her....

Based on true events, Twiceborn tells the story of Satoru Ichijo, a highly successful businessman who relinquishes everything to pursue his true, higher calling. The film begins in July 1991 with Ichijo lecturing to a massive crowd of more than 50,000 people in Tokyo Dome. The story then flashes back to scenes from his formative years, including the months during his senior year in college when Ichijo, a top scholar and athlete, begins receiving messages from the spiritual world....

In 2018, William Thomas C. was caught with 18 pounds of cannabis a few days after returning home from vacation with his grandchildren. He was charged with cannabis trafficking and manufacturing or delivering more than 5,000 grams of cannabis, according to court records. Before then, William, better known as Tom, ran a family farm and a lawn care business in Bloomington, Illinois. Since Tom has been serving a nine-year sentence at Centralia Correctional Center, his sister Tara C....

How does the Reader cover the coronavirus? It’s a question we started asking ourselves late last week as the city and state stepped up their responses—and the cancellation, postponement, and closure notices started pouring in from the entities we love most. What would signature Reader coverage of a global pandemic look like? And what role could we play in ensuring the survival of the businesses, organizations, and nonprofits that make Chicago second to none?...

If you’re a fan of “The Yellow Wallpaper”—and by the light of All the Queens of Horror, there is no better time than right now to re/acquaint yourself with Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 proto-feminist classic—you will find yourself positively geeking out with seasonally malevolent glee at the first act of Books of Blood. Perhaps it is coincidence, but director Brannon Braga’s choice in both bedroom décor color palette and mentally disturbed (according to other people) heroine is enough to send shivers of joy up the spines of English majors of a certain era....