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The Music Box‘s 70-millimeter film festival (this year subtitled “The Ultimate Edition”) begins tonight, right on the heels of the theater’s installment of a new 41-foot screen and 7.1 channel sound system. These technological augmentations, which debuted right before the Music Box screened the “Special Roadshow Engagement” of Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight, don’t register as significant improvements (speaking as someone who regularly sees movies at the venue). For one, the sound still bounced around the main theater in a tinny, movie-palace way....

“Little one, I have dreams to sell,” begins one of a parcel of two-part choral songs by Alfred H. Hyatt and E. Markham Lee “especially suited for ladies’ schools, the higher classes in girls’ schools, and well-trained boys’ voices,” purveyed at six for a shilling. “There is tender and genuine feeling in these pieces, and they are calculated to raise the musical taste of all who sing them,” reads the advertisement in the Musical Herald on July 1, 1904....

Lockdown has been hard on Laura Jane Grace. The front woman of Against Me! and Devouring Mothers is a natural performer with a strong social-media presence, but lately her Twitter account has been full of laments for the pre-pandemic live-music experience. On October 1, she surprised her fans with Stay Alive, a raw, stripped-down acoustic solo album. Recorded live (and strictly analog) over four days with Steve Albini at Electrical Audio, it features only Grace’s voice and guitar and occasionally a drum machine....

As part of his campaign to convince the public that the mayor really cares about neighborhoods other than downtown Chicago, planning commissioner David Reifman came to the City Club Thursday to unveil a plan for “equity and balance” in development. TIF, of course, is the city’s Tax Increment Financing program, in which the mayor slaps a surcharge on your property tax bill and uses the money to fund just about anything he wants....

Shadow and light. Wood and paper. Dust and clay. Alchemy. These are the tools of Chicago’s master puppeteers. Within the implacable constraints of quarantine, they remain—as ever—monarchs of infinite space, conjuring sentience where none exists and creating vast worlds even as a pandemic walls us away in spaces that often feel small enough to be bound by a nutshell. Of all the live art forms, puppetry is arguably the one most readily adapted to the privations of lockdown....

West Virginia gave me the opportunity to make a home, make a claim to some land, choose my tribe,” says photographer Nancy Abrams. She tells the story of her life there in the 70s and 80s in her lively new book, The Climb From Salt Lick: A Memoir of Appalachia (West Virginia University Press), in which she paints a vivid picture of what it was like to make her way in an unfamiliar territory during a turbulent time in the nation’s history....

To help celebrate the return of The Best Show, the Reader asked Tom Scharpling and Jon Wurster to revisit their first collaboration, the famous “Rock, Rot & Rule” sketch, which predated the show by several years—and still stands as one of the great moments in the history of trolling. Wurster played fictional blowhard Ronald Thomas Clontle, whose opinions on music—who rocks, who rots, and who rules, according to his own impenetrable criteria—were engineered to confuse or enrage hapless listeners....

Taste Talks, a food-centered conference that launched in Brooklyn in 2013, returns to Chicago this weekend for its third year. A day full of panel discussions and chef demos is bookended by several events dedicated to eating food rather than talking about it—most notably the All-Star Barbecue on Sunday, with chefs including Jason Hammel (Lula Cafe), Brian and Jennifer Enyart (Dos Urban Cantina), Jared Van Camp (Leghorn Chicken), and Chris Pandel (Swift & Sons)....

On November 13, 1992, Joanna Brown and Mark Freitas launched the Homocore Chicago series with a show by Toronto band Fifth Column—their drummer and guitarist, G.B. Jones, is also a filmmaker, and in 1985 founded influential queer punk zine J.D.s with director Bruce LaBruce. The series booked the likes of Bikini Kill, Los Crudos, Sleater-Kinney, Pansy Division, Tribe 8, and God Is My Co-Pilot, and its May 2000 swan song was Le Tigre’s local debut....

In 1994, when major labels were still snapping up Chicago “alternative” bands in hopes of manufacturing another Seattle, music publicist Nan Warshaw, house painter and occasional drummer Rob Miller, and Flying Fish Records veteran Eric Babcock launched Bloodshot Records—which quickly became a rallying point for the burgeoning alt-­country scene. Bloodshot’s debut, the compilation For a Life of Sin, collected 17 tracks from acts including the Old 97’s, the Handsome Family, and Robbie Fulks....

When avant-garde jazz drummer Frank Rosaly moved from Chicago to Amsterdam in 2016, he did it for love, not to further his musical career. But on the professional front, Europe has always treated him well. He entered Chicago’s improvised-music scene in 2001 and watched the rise and growth of new concert series here, but it wasn’t until he started touring Europe in 2003 that he began performing for larger audiences....

Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago. “You will never catch me in an all-black outfit, let’s be honest,” says CouponCabin.com writer Heather Thorgaard, 31, who was sporting a vivid mix of pastel and neon hues that included a striped faux-fur coat that she says reminds her of cotton candy. “I believe that rainbows and sparkles are a neutral,” she says....

In the dicey business of bringing historic opera to contemporary audiences, Lyric Opera’s current production of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky‘s The Queen of Spades is a winner. Three hours and 45 minutes long? Sung in Russian? No problem; deal me in. This exploration of obsession is compulsively watchable. Musically, it’s an embarrassment of riches, starting with the trio of men who launch the action: tenor Kyle van Schoonhoven and bass-baritone David Weigel as Gherman’s associates, and bass-baritone Samuel Youn—Alberich in Lyric’s Ring—in another neatly executed nasty turn as Gherman’s pernicious friend Count Tomsky....

Chicagoan Angel Marcloid has been making experimental tunes under more than a dozen pseudonyms since the 90s. As Fire-Toolz she conjures sounds that align with experiencing music during the current streaming era, where it’s possible to leapfrog between disparate artists, genres, and generations of music with the same dizzying speed and apathetic carelessness with which couch potatoes channel surf through thousands of networks. But unlike a TV zombie’s viewing habits, Marcloid’s work is always purposeful, even when it’s hard to figure out where she’s going; part of the fun of relistening to February’s Drip Mental (Hausu Mountain) and the brand-new Interbeing (Bedlam Tapes) is retracing her path through a ten-car pileup of retouched elevator music, unflinchingly harsh noise, industrialized and sugary pop, crunchy metalcore, and samples of computer technology and sputtering music gear....

The Promontory 5311 S. Lake Park 312-801-2100 promontorychicago.com Whatever your feelings are about the food and drink at Hyde Park’s the Promontory, you’d be hard-pressed to find much wrong with the venue’s performance space, a gorgeous room with atom-shaped chandeliers, a great bar, and clean acoustics. But what distinguishes the Promontory are the acts it draws, atypical groups and artists from various realms of underground hip-hop, jazz, soul, blues, R&B, and funk....

Gossip Wolf has seen the remarkable duo of guitarist Bill MacKay and cellist Katinka Kleijn play all over town since 2012, and they never disappoint. Using rigorous classical phrasing, precise pizzicato, chunky noise, swooping drones, and much more, they make every set feel like an alchemical adventure—and last month they finally dropped their debut LP, Stir, on Drag City. “It’s the result of our seven-year duo voyage: the two-headed flame of theme and improvisation,” says MacKay....

Michael Gebert Bruce Sherman at North Pond North Pond and Green City Market are a natural pairing. They have been since 1999 when Bruce Sherman first arrived at the restaurant, which overlooks the pond at the northern end of Lincoln Park, and the market, now the city’s highest-profile, was just a year old. Sherman’s been a member of the market’s board for years and a familiar presence, which makes him doubly influential over what you see at the farmer’s market: he’s a buyer and he helps select the farmers and products you’ll find there....

Q: I am a 24-year-old straight guy who recently broke up with my girlfriend of more than four years. One of the reasons we broke up was a general lack of sexual compatibility. She had a particular aversion to oral sex—both giving and receiving. I didn’t get a blow job the whole time we were together. Which brings me to why I am writing: One of my closest friends, “Sam,” is a gay guy....

Chicago feminist punk two-piece the Ovens debuted a decade ago with a charming, rowdy self-titled album that put heteronormativity in its crosshairs. In 2012 they released a second full-length (Settings) and an EP (Try), but since then they’ve been fairly quiet—probably because guitarist-vocalist Heather now lives in Brooklyn, while drummer-vocalist LB remains in Chicago. This summer the Ovens began working on their first EP in eight years, Distance, even though the pandemic interfered with their ability to meet in person....

In 2018 Chicagoan Eric Christopher launched Hospital Bracelet as a solo act: they began by releasing a couple of loose singles, whose disarming mix of overcaffeinated, looping acoustic guitars and tender, showstopping vocals bore fruit with 2019’s Neutrality Acoustic EP. They’ve since recruited bassist Arya Woody and drummer Manae Hammond (of synth-pop duo Oux) to turn Hospital Bracelet into a full band. The trio’s new debut full-length, South Loop Summer (Counter Intuitive), draws even more deeply on the supercharged energy Christopher brought to their solo acoustic material, most obviously on new versions of two songs from Neutrality Acoustic....