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Q: Oh master, how did the terms nuts and bananas come to refer to something or someone crazy? —Shane Adams Cecil responds: How did any word ever come by a new meaning? It’s not like Noah Webster just announced it in the newsletter one week. No, someone tried using an existing word in some novel way, and it stuck. That’s how language evolves, much as it may bug those weirdos who insist that decimate can only mean “kill a tenth of....

Ajamu Baraka is tired of the “lesser of two evils” argument frequently invoked during this presidential election to encourage support for Hillary Clinton as the only true alternative to Donald Trump. The Green Party vice presidential nominee sees the Democratic presidential nominee not as an antidote to Trumpism, but as a partial cause of it—a warmongering, corporate, right-winger who serves the “liberal bourgeoisie” instead of ordinary working people. He saves his harshest words, however, for Barack Obama, whom he calls a “political hack” and a “moral disaster....

Since its 1841 premiere, Giselle has been an exemplar of romanticism, with its depictions of frolicking country folk, feminine virtue, and ghosts. The innocent peasant girl Giselle dies of heartbreak when her lover, Albrecht, turns out to be an aristocrat in disguise with a well-to-do fiancee. Like other maidens who perish before their wedding day, Giselle joins the wilis, spirits dressed like brides who lurk in the woods, luring men into furious, fatal dances....

As soon as I read about Bill Daley’s call for a referendum on reducing the City Council from 50 to 15 aldermen, I had three questions: Would it pass? Would I vote for it? And what does this have to do with Ratgate? Chicagoans have a schizophrenic attitude toward aldermen. By and large, we despise the full council but like our individual alderman. How else to explain why we bitch and moan about every dumb, rubber-stamping thing the City Council does, then turn right around and reelect the aldermen who, you know, voted for those dumb, rubber-stamped projects....

Laurie’s Planet of Sound’s Sharkula section lauriesplanetofsound.blogspot.com These days a portion of the music-consuming public talks about CDs as if they’re the child kept in a crawl space beneath the stairs and fed an unsteady diet of fish heads. When it comes to music media, even the eight-track tape has more cool cachet. But CDs still move, albeit in fewer quantities than in decades past: Nielsen Music reported that in 2014, U....

“Sadly, I’m the 100th white guy standing up here tonight,” remarked Nick Bowling at the Jeff Awards ceremony last October as he accepted his trophy for best director of a musical. Then he pointed to his corecipient, Lili-Anne Brown, and said, “It’s time to change, and this is where it starts, right here.” The audience responded with the night’s only standing ovation. Recently, these four freelance directors—and friends, judging from their easy laughter and off-the-record banter—sat down at Chez Moi, a French restaurant in Lincoln Park....

John Ross Bowie’s 90-minute drama purports to be about the creation of the Ramones’ album End of the Century, but it’s actually about a quartet of posturing man-children whose most memorable characteristics are homophobia, misogyny, and surliness. In addition to the four Ramones (Justin Goodhand as Joey, Cyrus Lane as Johnny, Paolo Santalucia as Dee Dee, and James Smith as Marky), Bowie gives us a camped-up version of record producer Phil Spector (Ron Pederson), seen here as a pistol-packing cross between Liberace and the drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket....

In January the DKV Trio released The Fire Each Time (Not Two), a six-CD box set documenting a string of gigs that percussionist Hamid Drake, bassist Kent Kessler, and reedist Ken Vandermark played with multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee in four different countries during the last two months of 2017. This set—and previous DKV recordings featuring the likes of Fred Anderson, Joe Morris, and Mats Gustafsson—testify to the trio’s willingness to collaborate with other improvisers, but the essence of the group’s art is the music they make on their own....

Tomorrow night local rock four-piece Torture Love celebrate the arrival of the cassette version of their first long-player, They Came Crawling. Torture Love have been grinding around town for a few years now, hammering out dark, driving, high-energy punk that throbs with negativity and bad vibes. They’re still waiting on the LP version, but on Saturday they play a release party at the Mousetrap with Australian punks Helta Skelta, Minneapolis band Color TV, and two more locals, Canadian Rifle and Rash—it’s a DIY venue, so if you’re looking for the venue’s address here, you’re out of luck....

This week’s gig poster was created for a livestream concert by a famous Chicago-born jazz musician who’s recently returned home. Singer Kurt Elling and his family lived for 12 years in New York City but moved back to Chicago over the summer (as he told the Tribune’s Howard Reich, his family had long thought about taking that step, but the timing worked out this year). Earlier this fall, Elling played a run of livestream dates at the Green Mill, a home away from home for him for many years, and this week he followed it up with a holiday-themed show broadcast live from the club....

When Ellenor Riley-Condit was in fifth grade, she learned about the legend of Bloody Mary. At a sleepover, she and two friends looked into the bathroom mirror and said “Bloody Mary” three times, and even though nothing happened they were all too scared to sleep. It wasn’t until much later that Riley-Condit researched the real story behind the conjuring of the spirit who can supposedly tell you your future and thought more about why these stories make us so scared....

Based on his groundbreaking hit play, playwright Florian Zeller writes and directs the big-screen adaptation of The Father, which made its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on January 27, 2020 and after a year of pandemic-induced rescheduling is finally available for everyone to watch via VOD. Starring Academy Award-winners Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman, it is the story of a man suffering the effects of dementia and his daughter trying to manage the changes....

Riff, iO’s new late night musical improv show, plays in the theater’s private event space. It’s the only room configured to accommodate a live band, but nevertheless this choice gives off the impression Riff is a red-headed stepchild. The space has no raised stage, and this configuration shatters any physical or mental barrier between performers and audience and invites interaction and provides glimpses of the cast’s camaraderie. Like Whose Line is It Anyway?...

I recently watched a twentysomething man in a Cubs jersey pose for a picture at the northeast corner of Upper Wacker Drive and Wabash. He instructed his companion with the camera to make sure she framed the Trump International Hotel & Tower just so in the background as he, wearing a smirk, flipped the bird in the direction of the skyscraper. Shortly thereafter, a young couple who’d been waiting in the wings staged the same scene for a selfie....

Afro-Futurism The seven members of Afro-Futurism may perform at Second City, but they don’t deal in sketch revues. In fact, they’re less a company than a collection of black comics—performing solo stand-up routines, for the most part, punctuated with rap segments fronted by Marcel “Mr. Greenweedz” Wilks. There were a couple misfirings on the night I attended, as when an overly zealous Shantira Jackson tried to make a political point by getting the audience to yell out “No!...

Tatiana Hazel’s musical career put down its first root a decade ago, when the Chicago Latinx artist taught herself to play guitar at age 11. Two years later, she started uploading acoustic, heart-on-sleeve originals to YouTube—some of which have since been viewed more than 40,000 times. Hazel has evolved her sound over time, and a few years ago she began rolling out glossy pop material that brings together swooning R&B melodies, Caribbean riddims, and silken electronic production....

What’s important about Natalie Y. Moore‘s new book is less that it’s about Chicago’s south side, and more that it’s of the south side, deeply and lovingly, in a way journalism about the area rarely is. That’s partly due to Moore’s day job: she’s WBEZ’s south-side bureau reporter. Yet it’s also because The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation isn’t simply a work of journalism, but a combination of reporting with policy analysis and prescription and, most compellingly, memoir....

Since debuting in 2015, local electronic duo Grün Wasser—aka vocalist Keely Dowd and producer Essej Pollock—have steadily broadened their apocalyptic EBM by adding new sounds. On Friday, October 4, they drop the new album Not OK With Things (on vinyl and cassette via Texas label Holodeck Records), and it’s easily their most diverse work yet. Advance tracks “Stranger’s Mouth” and “Driving” bristle with nervous energy, suspended between subtle pop hooks, chilly synth tones, and scattered drum patterns....

A young adult novelist puzzles through fame, nostalgia, and the tedium of the everyday in Chicago playwright Will Coleman’s crisp show for Death & Pretzels Theater. Helvetica Burke has been making up stories since she was little. Now that she’s a professional author of fairy tale-like stories, her interactions with jaded grown-ups like her husband, who think of the imagination as a means of coping with life’s ordinary dull tasks, become strained....

Gossip Wolf has known Sullivan Davis since he started working at dearly departed local record store Logan Hardware almost a decade ago. When Davis replaced Seth Dodson as the Hideout’s talent buyer in 2015, this wolf was sure that the storied dive’s bookings were in good hands—and all the amazing shows since then have more than justified that confidence! Alas, all good things come to an end. In a bittersweet Instagram post last week, Davis announced that he’ll be leaving his job at the Hideout in a few weeks....