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Though it came out in mid-December, too late to make most “best of 2020” lists, Megalophobe’s Music for Resistance Fantasies (Nefarious Industries) deserves to be remembered as one of the most iconic and painfully lovely summations of the year. Megalophobe is the New York-based solo project of Benjamin Levitt, and he recorded the album to accompany a dance performance choreographed by Marion Storm for the 2019 Brooklyn Exponential Festival. But released on its own more than a year later—without the dancers’ bodies to watch, and with many more bodies buried—Music for Resistance Fantasies feels like an overwhelming, droning eulogy....

When the present is a slog at best and the future seems aimed off the edge of a cliff, a pair of rose-colored glasses turned toward the past can be irresistible—at any rate, that’s how Brooklyn trio Nation of Language approached their debut album, Introduction, Presence. Powered by chockablock synths, hypnotic bass grooves, and the shadowy croon of bandleader Ian Devaney (imagine Frank Sinatra at golden-era Neo), the record exhumes all the 80s new-wave hallmarks worth reviving....

John Waters aptly expressed both his and my feelings about Pedro Almodóvar‘s latest film, Pain and Glory—among my favorites of the year and one of the Spanish iconoclast’s best works—when, in his annual top ten list for Artforum, the filth maestro himself declared it the “first Almodóvar movie to shock me.” Anyone familiar with Almodóvar’s work who’s not yet seen the film, now awash in award season buzz, can only wonder what Waters means....

What is it with brunch? What’s so special about pancakes and eggs that we’re willing to suffer the indignity of hour-long waits, often with hangovers or small children in tow? Why are we willing to pack cheek to jowl inside a freezing vestibule, bleary-eyed and undercaffeinated when, as my mother likes to say, we could’ve just eaten at home? Brunch is one of those odd cultural phenomena that defy explanation. There’s just something about a steaming mug of coffee, the mercy of a Bloody Mary, the cheerful din of brunching humanity; certain intangible qualities that simply can’t be reproduced at home....

Brian Jackson/Sun-Times Media Rahm’s got the Chicago Firefighters Union behind him. It seems like only yesterday that Mayor Rahm—backed by his mayoral body guards, of course—was marching into firehouses to tell the rank and file he was cutting their pensions. In so many words, of course. And you can’t achieve that goal by gutting the ranks, and cutting their salaries and benefits. Moreover, in the matter of pensions—which the mayor has conveniently put off until after the election—Ryan remains confident that the mayor has backed off from his old hard-line stance....

Theatre Y presents the four András Visky plays that make up Stories of the Body on a set that looks like a bathroom—both a public one with urinals side by side on and a private one with a footed bathtub center stage. Designed by Luminaxis Studio, it’s an ideal locale for stories that plumb the depths of female experience: intimate to the point of unfamiliarity, walled with surfaces that reflect to various degrees of opacity (mirror, glass, tile), implying exterior dirt and interior excrement, offering opportunities to expel, rinse, cleanse, submerge, all within an enclosed acoustic chamber for expression and confession that, with the urinals, never releases its subjects from the tacit menace of masculine presence....

Liz Lauren A scene from the Goodman’s production of Two Trains Running This spring, the Goodman Theatre is paying tribute to the playwright August Wilson, who died ten years ago when he was just 60, with a citywide celebration, including discussions, symposia, readings of his poetry, and, most of all, performances or staged readings of all ten plays in his 20th Century Cycle, one for each decade of the century....

The Katydids first performed together eight years ago for a simple reason: all six women had variations on the same first name. Caitlin Barlow, Katy Colloton, Cate Freedman, Kate Lambert, Katie O’Brien, and Kathryn Renée Thomas started out as an improv group, then moved to sketch, then created the webseries Teachers, now a TV Land sitcom produced by Alison Brie (Community, Mad Men). Colloton: iO is our home, but we have a relationship with almost every theater in Chicago....

Flood’s Hall is a nondescript building in Hyde Park, next to the back patio of Mellow Yellow restaurant, that houses nonprofit offices. I visited on a hot day in August, sweating under my cloth mask. There was a sticky note plastered to the front door, instructing people to bring donations to the third floor. Bags of groceries, tampons, soap, hand sanitizer, baby supplies, and other essential items were stacked on shelves and floors....

This lifestyle of always looking forward isn’t meant to be dramatic or radical. It’s a grounding practice rooted in Kaba’s identity and is why her passion for collaboration and growth flows so easily from one cup to the next. And yet, her newest book looks backward to the abolitionist’s decades-long fight for justice to meet the present moment. “[Kaba] is one of the most brilliant, incisive visionary leaders of my generation, of this moment, and also one of the funniest, most practical and kind, even though she likes to hide it,” Ritchie says with a laugh....

Ad Hoc [Home] Thirteen members of the About Face Youth Theatre Ensemble, aged 14-24, present an hour-long theatrical collage of autobiographical reflections about growing up queer. Developed by the ensemble members themselves through improvisation and writing workshops, the devised performance piece employs monologues, scenes, and choral speaking passages addressing the challenges and triumphs of being gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and genderqueer. Some of the coming-out/coming-of-age stories have a familiar ring—parents who tell their kids that their discomfort with gender norms is “just a phase,” for example....

Decades ago, Bryan Ferry succumbed to an ailment that I’ve dubbed “Cheap Trick Syndrome”: that is, when young, hungry artists winkingly dive into a genre with tongue planted firmly in cheek but eventually become the very thing they were once all but parodying. Cheap Trick’s gleeful, over-the-top late-70s take on arena rock devolved by the 80s into soggy, irony-free, lighters-aloft anthems such as “The Flame” (they share the category “bands who’ve gone from fun to flaccid” with Van Halen)....

Australian singer Courtney Barnett crafts a wonderfully lived-in, warm, and hooky melodic world on her second proper album, Tell Me How You Really Feel (Mom + Pop). Her singing has grown from the half-spoken delivery that marked her first EPs, elevating her conversational drawl into something far more indelible and inviting. With the exception of the biting postpunk snarl of “I’m Not Your Mother, I’m Not Your Bitch,” she rarely raises her voice, so most of the time it almost seems as if she’s sitting beside you, nodding along to the scrappy guitar-driven jams that her voice glides into with preternatural ease....

On their debut album, Cliff, Chicago duo Big Branch combine warm vocal melodies with kitchen-sink instrumentals inspired by the dusty samples of underground rap. The record’s ramshackle sound recalls Beck circa “Loser” or Dubya-era TV on the Radio, a hybrid style the group calls “hop ’n’ roll.” Vocalist Jamal Semaan and guitarist and producer Rob Lorts originally went by the name Grimms & Blacknight, and they wrote the songs on Cliff during a 2016 DIY tour....

Q: I was a very experienced woman (five years as a swinger and partners numbering in the high double digits) when I first met the man who would become my husband. My husband-to-be was a virgin. Sex was barely OK and very infrequent. But we were both in our early 40s and ready to settle down. We also had an amazing friendship, and we were never as happy apart as we were together....

A History of Violence In this week’s paper, J.R. Jones has a long review of Maps to the Stars, the new film by Canadian master David Cronenberg. The director’s long, varied career has yielded some of the most exciting and rigorous films in recent memory, from his early body-horror chillers to his recent psychological surveys of the social world. His style isn’t readily defined, and he always seems to have one foot in the mainstream and another in the underground....

Esquire caught some hell for its recent cover story on the plight of straight white male suburban teens. But it’s possible to center that demographic with smarts and heart. Grief—or a simulacrum thereof—goes viral in Dear Evan Hansen, the 2017 Tony Award-winning musical about the anxious title character, now in a stellar touring production. Evan (Ben Levi Ross) writes atta-boy letters to himself on the advice of his therapist. When one ends up in the pocket of Connor (Marrick Smith), a sullen classmate who commits suicide, Evan invents a friendship with Connor, both as a way to assuage the pain of Connor’s family and to build his own social profile....

When the journalism industry now talks about deceptive practices it’s talking about fake news that spreads online and the vast credulous public that laps it up. Advertorials—that is, advertising done up to look like it might have come from the editorial department—are a last-century vexation made more palatable by journalism’s crescendoing need to sell any kind of advertising at all. These profiles are brief and anonymously written, and most are squeezed in two per page....

Iowa singer-songwriter Elizabeth Moen started performing only about four years ago, but she hardly sounds like a beginner. The 25-year-old has a soul-deep voice with a ragged, sensual edge that’s poised between bluesy world-weariness and folky innocence. The first tune Moen wrote, “Songbird,” is an achingly wistful love song to song, and it’s fully realized perfection. “I wish I could swoop you into my wings / But I’m just a songbird outside your window,” she sings as she strums on an acoustic guitar, capturing the hope of an aspiring performer with a rare, sweet clarity....

Chicago singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Emily Jane Powers has been crafting intimate, literate pop since the early 2000s—Gossip Wolf was especially taken with her 2014 book and download, Part of Me, which felt as much like a collection of poignant short-story-style character studies as it did a series of songs. For the past three years, she’s been writing, arranging, and rearranging its follow-up, Restless (recorded with Erik Hall of In Tall Bulldings behind the boards), and it expands Powers’s musical palette considerably....