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Like its New York predecessor in the late 70s, Chicago’s mid- and late-90s no-wave scene scrambled the accepted precepts of rock and jazz to create addictively noisy, thoughtfully bent, and crassly hilarious music. Its bands included the Flying Luttenbachers, the Scissor Girls, Math, Duotron, Lake of Dracula, and Dot Dot Dot, many of whom shared members. They gigged at long-gone venues such as Czar Bar, Milk of Burgundy, and the Magnatroid, but within a few years most had fallen apart....

Cook County is attempting to collect hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes from several small Chicago music venues, claiming that the establishments should not have been exempt from a county amusement tax because the shows they book do not constitute “live cultural performances.” More than a decade ago, the City of Chicago attempted to collect an 8 percent amusement tax on DJ performances from multiple music venues, claiming that such performances didn’t fall under a similar city exemption....

None of these flaws really matter, though, because at the center of the production is Diana Coates, an actor so strong and so perfectly cast as Henry that she makes up for the production’s missteps. From the moment she enters the play, she dominates, standing with regal bearing, stalking the stage like a true warrior-king, confident of her strength, always poised for action. And when she speaks, she reveals in every word and pause the full power and poetry in Shakespeare’s lines....

Since it opened in 1957, the Old Town School of Folk Music has survived economic downturns, social upheavals, and disco. But in 2020 it faces perhaps its biggest challenge yet. After years of internal strife that have pitted the faculty against the administration and board—they’ve fought over transparency, unfair pay structures, and management decisions, among other things—the teachers are attempting to secure their first-ever union contract. One teaching artist, who asked not to be identified, calls the administration’s behavior “bullying” and says that unionization “brought about all this corporate-defense shit into the equation, which is something we never had to deal with before....

About a year ago, Meghann Mossell and a friend were watching a show at the Empty Bottle, sitting side by side at the bar. A man they didn’t know kept walking by, and each time he passed, he’d rub their backsides with his hand. “I thought he must have been high,” Mossell recalls. “Why would someone do something like that?” She says she talked to one of the bartenders, who immediately found the man and kicked him out....

Goodbye Christopher Robin, Simon Curtis’s biopic of Winnie-the-Pooh author A.A. Milne and his only child, Christopher Robin, is stuffed with weighty topics: war and PTSD, the writing life, the crippling emotional reserve of the British. But the movie’s focus on the caustic effects of celebrity make this narrative set in the first half of the 20th century particularly relevant for the media-frenzied 21st—especially in the wake of nonstop news stories about camera-mad parents and their needy offspring....

Sun-Times Media Martin Luther King Jr. speaking at Soldier Field in 1966, the year he and his family took up residence in North Lawndale If Chicago truly were a meritocracy—where planning decisions were based on an idea’s virtues as opposed to clout—Mayor Emanuel would be steering the Obama Presidential Library to North Lawndale. So in the name of gaining a library, we lose some parkland. Maybe that will convince a black voter or two—other than your faithful City Council factotums—to actually vote for you in the coming mayoral election....

I was honored to appear with Esther Perel at the Orpheum Theater in Vancouver, BC, a few weeks ago to discuss her new book, The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity. Questions were submitted on cards before the show—some for me, some for Esther, some for both of us—and we got to as many as we could during the event. Here are some of the questions (mostly for me) that we didn’t get to....

Q: I’m a 67-year-old gay man. After a breakup 15 years ago, I believed the possibility of emotional and sexual intimacy with a partner was over for me. Then, a couple of months ago, my desire for sexual contact increased dramatically. For the first time, I began using apps, and I felt like the proverbial kid in a candy store; it seemed strangely similar to when I first came out in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood in the early 1970s....

Unhelpfully prolific American playwright Steven Dietz never met a promising idea he couldn’t muddle. In this 2013 play, which Promethean Theatre Ensemble is now giving only its second production, he offers up teen buddies Danny (Pat King) and Rich (Michael Vizzi), dawdling about Kimball, Nebraska, in 1949. They’re meant to be swept up in the yearning, freewheeling energy of the nascent Beat Generation, personified in Honey (Hilary Williams), a young woman pausing in Kimball on her way westward in search of her dead mother’s spirit and the Bop....

It’s no small feat that Norwegian drummer Paal Nilssen-Love has maintained his sprawling, heavily improvised big band—the dubiously named Large Unit—for half a decade in an era where economic realities are at odds with keeping an actively recording and touring group of international players together. But he’s done just that with a largely unchanging cast of first-rate musicians from Scandinavia that’s toured on four continents. While the leader clearly relishes the feverish interplay of a dozen players, his writing for the group has grown more sophisticated and ambitious, with pieces that often develop from riff-oriented frameworks for blowing into more involved vehicles that explore unusual rhythms and the occasional lovely harmony....

When Boleo bartender Mony Bunni competed in Speed Rack Midwest in 2015, she failed miserably. She was in the process of opening the bar Queen Mary at the time, and the annual all-female speed-bartending competition took place the day before the bar officially opened. “My head was all over the place, and I ended up forgetting citrus in two of my cocktails onstage, failing in front of everyone,” she says. “It just broke my soul a little....

Marco Ugarte/AP Photos Mexican federal authorities arrested drug lord El Chapo Guzman in February 2014. Starting Friday the Patio Theater will present a weeklong run of Es el Chapo?, a documentary feature about Mexican drug lord El Chapo Guzman and, more generally, the ineffectiveness of the war on drugs. The movie centers around widespread rumors that it wasn’t Guzman who was arrested last year by Mexican authorities and members of the DEA, but rather a double....

Greg Puciato is a busy man. Even before his main gig as front man of long-running technical metalcore outfit the Dillinger Escape Plan ended in 2017, he was already in two other bands: metal supergroup Killer Be Killed (with Soulfly’s Max Cavalera and Mastodon’s Troy Sanders) and the Black Queen, a dark electronic act he founded in 2015 with Telefon Tel Aviv’s Joshua Eustis and guitar tech Steven Alexander. He’s also an author who recently self-published his debut book of poetry and photography, Separate the Dawn....

For the past year and a half, I’ve been enrolled in a graduate program in special education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The classes have been challenging and eye-opening, in part because my professors routinely ask me to reflect on my prejudices as a person without disabilities. In the first class I took for the program, an overview of the history of special education in the U.S., I learned about person-first language, and this shaped how I’ve approached the course material ever since....

For the past year, I’ve been making the same (extremely bad) joke, paraphrasing the hard-boiled koan delivered by Matthew McConaughey‘s Rust Cohle from the first season of True Detective. “Time is a flat tire.” Constellations is definitely the more downbeat of the two, but seeing them within a couple nights of each other, as I did, reinforced that even if the existence of multiverses can never be proven (we’ll file that under “Things That Are WAY Above My Paygrade”), they’re undeniably fun to ponder....

Though reckless garage-rock foursome Heavy Times weathered several mutations, one consistent component of the band was the subtle, yet heady hooks in underrated frontman Bo Hansen’s songwriting. A second was his charming, cynical onstage banter. Luckily, with his newest venture, Ethers, both of these qualities remain firmly intact. More solemn and dare I say reflective than Hansen’s previous projects, Ethers is filled out by organ and backing vocals from Mary McKane (Outer Minds, Runnies) and steady bass courtesy of Russ Calderwood (Heavy Times, Runnies, and also McKane’s husband)....

Q: I’ve been with my boyfriend for two and a half years and we have a great relationship—or so I thought. Last week, I snooped on my boyfriend’s browser history and I don’t know what to do with what I found. I’m a longtime reader and Savage Lovecast listener SO I KNOW WHAT I DID WAS WRONG. I believe my actions were driven by 1. lingering trust issues (a while ago, I found out my boyfriend had been looking at Tinder since we’d been together, though I don’t believe he ever messaged or intended to meet anyone) and 2....

Last July I told myself I was done with Abe Conlon. But here I go again. But what comes across strongest is the picture of Conlon as arrogant and dismissive; a belittler and a berater prone to unpredictable explosions of rage; exhibit A in the case against culinary toxicity. Conlon had served cannabis-infused dinners with his underground supper club X-Marx before he opened Fat Rice, and I knew he loved to smoke weed, so of course I wanted to feature him in Kitchen Toke....

When William Nathaniel Jackson arrived in Philadelphia in the early 1900s, he became a new man. He was fleeing from somewhere near the Carolinas when he traveled north. There, he took a new name, made a new family, and built a new life. Today, a century after Jackson’s move, Young’s exploration of time feels eerily more relevant than ever—a blending of the past and present. The combination of a global pandemic that disproportionately affects Black communities and widespread protests against racism-driven police violence feels both unprecedented and reminiscent of past struggles....