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When you want to put together an improvising ensemble whose interactions will be unpredictable as well as satisfying, it helps to recruit someone who has your back and someone else who isn’t afraid to push the music somewhere you didn’t think it would go. For one night in December 2018, Chicago alto, tenor, and baritone saxophonist Dave Rempis convened a personal dream team, full of musicians who can play both roles: Norwegian drummer Paal Nilssen-Love is Rempis’s long-standing collaborator in the ferociously aggressive trio Ballister, but his attention to detail and textural variety comes in just as handy for nurturing slow-building tension....

Mike Sula Machete de cochinita pibil, Machetes The last time I wrote about a restaurant’s quesadillas, it was because they caught my eye for their impressive size. But as large as they are, I suspect the ones at Little Village’s Las Quecas might have just been the forerunners of a coming quesadilla arms race. Enter Machetes Big Quesadillas, a bare-bones Archer Heights storefront run by two sisters who brought a very particular expression of the quesadilla gigante from their hometown, Mexico City....

Benjamin Dickinson’s indie comedy Creative Control uses luminous black-and-white cinematography to tell a New York story of two young, white advertising hipsters and the women they cheat on. David, an account executive at a Brooklyn ad agency, feels himself pulling away from his yoga-instructor wife, Juliette, and falling in love with Sophie, the 18-year-old costumer who’s currently sleeping with his randy photographer pal, Wim. There’s also a trendy tech angle: as the movie opens, David lands his company the launch campaign for Augmenta, a new brand of “augmented reality” smart glasses, and in testing out the product, he learns how to incorporate his video capture of Sophie into a lifelike avatar that crawls right onto his lap....

This story was originally published by City Bureau on August 6, 2020. “The communities I represent desperately need relief and the HEROES Act commits over $3 trillion to meet those needs and addresses the serious inequities in previous relief packages,” García said in a statement. BPNC and other local groups like Increase the Peace and Gage Park Latinx Council have found themselves in the business of resource redistribution: accepting cash donations, food donations, baby supplies, bicycles and handing them out to undocumented families, no questions asked....

Theater & Performance The Drawer Boy The three-person cast of this Redtwist production spend two hours swimming upstream. They’ve all delivered convincing performances with the company before, so the problem likely lies in Michael Healey’s belabored script. It starts implausibly: a young actor wandering the Canadian countryside asks a pair of random, reclusive fiftysomething farmers if he can live with them for a while because he’s, um, writing a play about farmers, and they let him right in....

For improvisers, familiarity is a double-edged sword; if musicians get too comfortable with each other, inspiration can turn into habit. But there’s nothing quite so thrilling as the near-telepathic rapport of a group whose players know each other’s strengths and try to push each other to greater heights. The members of Extraordinary Popular Delusions have had plenty of time to get to know one another. The quartet, which consists of Jim Baker (electric piano, synthesizer, viola), Mars Williams (reeds, percussion, zither, toys), Brian Sandstrom (double bass, electric guitar, trumpet), and Steve Hunt (drums, percussion, waterphone) have sustained a weekly gig at either Hotti Biscotti or the second floor of the Beat Kitchen since 2005, and everyone except Baker played together in the NRG Ensemble in 1980s and 1990s....

Eugène Ionesco’s loud, absurdist farce about an everyman desperately attempting to escape his gray existence while tracking a mysterious killer gets a spirited, fully committed treatment at Trap Door. Bérenger (a sweaty, desperate Dennis Bisto) blunders upon a beautiful neighborhood he’s never seen before. The area is overseen by a sinister, leering architect (Michael Mejia), who gives Bérenger a tour but keeps disappearing to put out bureaucratic fires. All is not as rosy as it seems here, but Bérenger is convinced that a move to this district will cure all that ails him....

Professional baker Della, a southern evangelical trapped in a sterile, repressive marriage, puts all her passion into making cakes according to traditional, gospellike recipes. When long-absent Jen, the grown daughter of her deceased best friend, shows up unannounced in her North Carolina bakery, Della gushes with affection—until Jen asks if she’ll provide the cake for her upcoming marriage to a woman. Despite the predictable ripped-from-the-headlines setup, playwright Bekah Brunstetter gets the two lead characters in this 2017 drama to exquisitely complicated places....

After dropping three albums in little more than a year with the terrific psych-rock band Wand, Cory Hanson has been uncharacteristically quiet in 2016—but that silence ends November 11, when he releases his first solo record, The Unborn Capitalist From Limbo (Drag City). With Wand Hanson has displayed an expansive vision, balancing warped psychedelic impulses with a strong pop sensibility and using his nasal singing, often pushed into a quavering falsetto, to provide a common thread even as the general sound of the group changes significantly from record to record....

Casimir Pulaski is getting a coming-out party almost three centuries late. The Polish nobleman and Revolutionary War hero who saved George Washington’s life was intersex, according to a soon-to-air documentary. Although CAH is among the most common causes of intersex variations, it’s not the sole determinant of whether a child will be born intersex. Overall, estimates suggest there are up to 5.5 million intersex people in the United States today—a population that’s roughly the size of Minnesota’s....

If a 12-year-old version of myself were given free reign over the Marvel creative team, the outcome would absolutely be something along the lines of the brand-new series Weapon H. Not that I’m saying a pre-teen boy has the talent of the brilliant writer Greg Pak or anything, but Weapon H is the type of over-the-top, absurd-as-hell wild ride that makes the comic format so engaging and fun. It completely takes advantage of its limitless disconnect from reality....

With a metropolitan population of 21 million, the largest of any city in the western hemisphere, Mexico City is often associated with overcrowding, air pollution, and traffic jams. But when I visited for the first time last month, I found it to be a place of beautiful Spanish colonial and art deco architecture, intriguing museums, tasty chow, and warmhearted people. The road to full-fledged BRT in Chicago has been anything but smooth....

Since 1985, the Sundance Film Festival has fostered independent voices, and 2020 is notable for having a large number of films celebrating diversity and inclusion, a few with a Chicago connection. This year featured films showcasing a wide range of topics including disability rights, sex work, LGBTQ+ themes, mid-life crisis, politics, #MeToo, artificial intelligence, and murder. Coded Bias While not a horror movie, Coded Bias might be the most terrifying film on this list....

The troubling thing about much of David Hockney’s work is its seeming lack of trouble. Especially in his drawings, his undeniable facility can lead him into images that are trite. Yet there’s no denying the man’s skill and, in his best work, his ability to evoke the grace, character, and beauty of his subjects. Hockney himself is the subject of an adoring new documentary by Randall Wright, and, watching it, I wondered if the director were trying to replicate the ease captured in so many Hockney canvases....

November 8 is the day that American voters have all been waiting for. Scratch that: exit polling Tuesday night says we just want this campaign season to be over. But most of us at least had the catharsis of casting a ballot. Millions of people living in the U.S., however, didn’t have that option. Whether they’re formerly incarcerated, immigrants, citizens in U.S. territories, or too young, millions of people here don’t have the right to vote....

To celebrate the 35th anniversary of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s MacArthur Fellowships, commonly referred to as “genius grants,” the Harris Theater will open its doors Friday for An Evening of Dance With MacArthur Fellows, a free performance that features work from a handful of dance-world geniuses: Merce Cunningham, Mark Morris, Susan Marshall, Kyle Abraham, and Michelle Dorrance. The marquee lineup comprises five pieces, two more recent of which should have your attention....

Will Snider’s 2016 play is an intriguing, thought-provoking study of the unlikely friendship that develops between two men working in a restaurant in Lower Manhattan’s financial district. George, the eatery’s new executive chef, is a foul-mouthed, middle-aged, white guy with anger and guilt issues: he’s a recovering alcoholic and drug addict trying to get his life and career back on track. Steve, the dishwasher, is a quiet black man from East Africa who keeps to himself, focuses on his job, and speaks no English—or so it appears at first....

Since forming in 2005, the Velcro Lewis Group have played apocalyptic party music that melds funk, soul, psychedelic rock, garage punk, metal, and more. Their lyrics have occasionally incorporated a social or political message, but it’s usually been veiled or coded in an attempt to prevent it from becoming instantly dated—that is, until their new album, Amnesia Haze. “There’s a time where you feel like you need to preach and lay it all out,” says synth player and occasional vocalist Andy Slater (formerly known as Velcro Lewis), who cofounded the seven-piece group....

Lady Sophia Chase has never been so ravenous for BDSM. The local sex worker and professional dominatrix has been clientless for more than two months and is hungry to get her hands on someone again. Chase went years without advertising herself because she is established in the industry, but in April, she started doing sex phone calls, webcamming, and selling fetish items online, though it’s not as lucrative as in-person work....

At the heart of It Follows, a low-budget horror film by David Robert Mitchell, lies a tantalizing open-ended metaphor—a deadly curse passed from one person to another through sexual intercourse. Once cursed, the victim is pursued by a creeping, shape-shifting demon that kills anyone it touches; the demon moves so slowly, however, that you can easily avoid it if you keep moving. Nonetheless, the cursed must remain vigilant because the demon can blend into any environment and almost always takes the form of an ordinary-looking person....