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“I think I’m the cutest rapper,” Dev Bee told UMass Amherst radio show Hip-Hop Made Me Do It last year. Bee, a Boston musician who uses “them” and “they” pronouns, came up playing in punk and emo bands, and I’m quite tickled by their “burrito emo” group, the Baja Blasters. Under the guise of Pink Navel, Bee has built up a small library of DIY raps that sometimes concern sweet cultural froufrou—which they translate into hard, staccato lines and deliver with loopy aplomb....

The ads are on el platforms and 15 Brown Line cars. They’re on social media, in downtown health clubs, and on beer coasters in local bars. A typical placard juxtaposes dejected-looking young straphangers with shiny, happy people drinking beer on a terrace above Madison’s Lake Monona, playing Frisbee golf or competing in beach volleyball. The accompanying texts pose dilemmas such as “Rush hour or happy hour?,” “An hour commute or an hour with friends?...

Last fall, in the vein of its long-running, now-retired Sketchbook festival, the social-issues-focused theater group Collaboraction brought together more than 200 artists to share 24 short “prayers for peace” in Chicago as part of a new performance festival, Peacebook. This winter, the company hones in more specifically on racism and racial healing between communities within the city by curating Encounter, a series of full-length solo plays, free staged readings, film, dance pieces, and more presented by a diverse array of local artists—including some familiar names like Sandra Delgado and Sir Taylor and the Example Setters....

Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago. “Disco folk” is how Sara Basgall describes her retro-leaning statement look. “I’m very inspired by Turkish psych, folk, and disco,” she says. A parallel source of inspiration for her, not surprisingly, is the 1960s and ’70s, which she became infatuated with during childhood while delving into her dad’s large vinyl collection and through mixtapes he used to make for her....

Over the past two decades the European Union Film Festival, presented by the Gene Siskel Film Center, has become a serious rival to the Chicago International Film Festival and a spring counterweight to CIFF’s annual blowout in October. The EU fest may lack the racial diversity and global reach of CIFF, but its programming is just as ambitious if not more so. The 19th edition of the European Union Film Festival opens Friday and runs for four weeks, with 62 new features and numerous personal appearances....

This weekend’s events include two marathons—one that’s 26.2 miles, one that’s 24 hours—plus plenty of other goings-on about town. Here’s some of what we recommend: Sat 10/7: Chicago’s mobile restaurants park it for a makeshift Taste of Chicago at the West Town Food Truck Social, on Noble between Chicago and Chestnut). The galleries along Chicago are also open for free viewings—enhanced with food truck fare. 11 AM-10 PM, $20 for six samples...

The sun won’t rise for a few more hours, but Michael Leider Sr. knows that if he’s not up by 4 AM, he’s already late. He puts his crops into the wagon and starts his day. “He was the second son,” Mark Leider, his great-grandson, a fourth-generation Luxembourger and current owner of Leider Greenhouses, explains. “First son got the farm. Second son got a suitcase, a hundred bucks, and a ticket to America....

This story was originally published by City Bureau on October 16, 2020. What are the different parts of the budget? The best way to understand special revenue funds is to look more closely at certain taxes. Fees collected from vehicle stickers, impoundment, or towing are another source of the city’s revenue. With vehicle stickers costing around $90, the city sought to earn $129 million in revenue this year from that tax alone....

In 1971, Richard J. Daley won the fifth of what would ultimately be six Chicago mayoral elections (he died of a heart attack during his sixth term, in 1976). A little musical called Grease started its very first run at a Lincoln Avenue theater called Kingston Mines. And that summer the Union Stockyards closed for business, leaving a trail of their own kind of grease in the rubble on south Racine Street....

Christian K. Lee / For Sun-Times Media Mayoral challenger Jesus “Chuy” Garcia tells skeptical reporters that he really does have a financial plan for the city. Challenger Jesus “Chuy” Garcia faced a roomful of reporters and camera crews Friday morning to prove that he’s ready to be mayor. But he’s been vague about what he’d do about annual budget deficits and $20 billion in unfunded pension obligations. Emanuel and his allies have hammered the point, portraying Garcia’s squishiness as evidence that he’s not mayoral material....

Chicagoans is a first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. This week’s Chicagoan is Morgan Dixon, church administrator, youth minister, and GirlTrekker. “I work at DuPage AME Church in Lisle. AME is an acronym for African Methodist Episcopal. It is a predominantly African-American denomination, and we got a lot of publicity last summer because of the massacre in Charleston at one of our sister churches, Emanuel AME....

The Belle of Amherst Here’s the problem: the intense inner life suggested by Emily Dickinson’s poems makes her an intriguing subject for theatrical exploration, yet her nearly complete lack of an outer life renders her hard to dramatize. In this 1976 solo piece, here revived by Court Theatre, playwright William Luce tried to turn the problem itself into a source of momentum. We first meet Dickinson near the end of her 55 years, living in almost complete seclusion—but cheerful, even perky about it....

This morning NPR Music published the results of the annual Jazz Critics Poll organized by Francis Davis—it’s been hosted by NPR Music for the past five years, but it started in 2006 at the Village Voice. Though only one album from my personal top ten landed in the upper echelons of the poll, I can heartily recommend all of the consensus picks, especially the new albums by Vijay Iyer, Craig Taborn, Nicole Mitchell, and Roscoe Mitchell....

For a mostly forgotten 1912 play, written by Githa Sowerby (but presented under a male-sounding pen name at the time), this family drama is surprisingly similar to HBO’s Succession—minus the sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. This business is glassworks, not a media empire, but its patriarch, Rutherford (Francis Guinan), is similarly cold, domineering, and cruel to his three children. The siblings—who often blend into the scenery because “the governor” has beat any shred of confidence or identity out of them—are also challenged to form relationships immune to their unhealthy connection with their father....

You can’t talk about San Jose slowcore trio Duster in 2019 without talking about their fan base—whose numbers surged after the band broke up in 2001. During the five years the group existed, they released two albums and a few seven-inches (mostly through Seattle indie Up Records) filled with grainy, sedate rock, recorded onto stolen cassettes using half-broken gear. But their efforts went largely overlooked, and the band split up without achieving much recognition beyond a favorable Pitchfork review of their second album, 2000’s Contemporary Movement (though the site had yet to develop the clout it has now)....

[image-1][This post was updated on January 29 to reflect further developments.] Today I have resigned from the @ProMarket_org editorial board after violation of my recusal from the event with Steve Bannon and @zingales at @ChicagoBooth. Please circulate my statement: https://t.co/MrlzJux1em — Samantha Eyler (@SamEyler) January 26, 2018 As Senior Editor at the Stigler Center and its publication ProMarket, and one of six members of the ProMarket editorial board, I have opposed since its inception the proposal by my colleague Luigi Zingales to provide a platform to Steve Bannon at the Stigler Center, as well as the use of ProMarket to promote the provision of that platform, on grounds that it normalizes white nationalism and implicates us in the concrete violence wrought on American lives every day by that ideology....

Indiana is a long way to go for a beer—especially with the proliferation of craft breweries in Chicago. But sometimes, as the old saying goes, it’s about the journey rather than the destination (OK, if the destination involves beer and food, it’s about that too). Just a mile east of the lake is Bulldog Brewery in Whiting, a picturesque town that during one of my visits last summer was playing oldies through speakers mounted to buildings along the main drag....

If you’ve been on the Internet at all in the last few years, you’re probably aware of Goop. Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle and wellness brand has been the subject of criticism since it came into the public eye, from jokes about their luxury vaginal jade eggs to more serious allegations of scientific misinformation. Paltrow’s critics liken her to a snake-oil salesman for the #girlboss generation, promoting pseudoscientific and capitalistic-minded answers to the very real gaps in women’s health care....

For the last few days, I’ve been obsessing over an old story of corruption in Chicago that I rediscovered while looking for something else. Martin did a good job of linking the raid to the 52nd anniversary of Stonewall, pointing out that “Before Stonewall (and for some time after), a police raid on a gay bar could be disastrous for those arrested. Not only would the raid likely make the papers the next day ....

It might seem backhanded or cute to say that a Grammy–winning string quartet’s 16th record has the feel of a second act. But that more or less describes the Pacifica Quartet’s new release, Contemporary Voices. The album is the ensemble’s second since they changed up their ranks; violinist Austin Hartman and violist Mark Holloway replace longtime members Sibbi Bernhardsson and Masumi Per Rostad, both of whom left the group in 2017....