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In a recurring feature, the Reader will conduct 15-minute interviews with candidates running for city, county, state, and federal offices that represent Illinois. First up: Fritz Kaegi, a candidate in the Cook County assessor’s race. What were you up to in Russia in the 1990s? Yes, because of a government choice. The government didn’t have to choose to do things the way they did. They were so cavalier about the global libertarian philosophy, having no government intervention, that was shown to be wrong....

Leonard C. Goodman is a Chicago criminal defense attorney and co-owner of the newly independent Reader. A generation ago, Americans looked to the federal government for more enlightened policies in areas of civil rights and criminal justice reform. Today, the tables have turned. Progressive ideas are now getting a hearing only in statehouses while the federal government has turned its back on the poor and politically powerless. No policy that threatens the investment returns of the major campaign donors to the Democratic and Republican Parties can get a fair hearing in the halls of Congress or at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue....

When Clickhole launched a year ago this month, it quickly became clear that the Onion sibling was the right site for the right moment. Designed to resemble the host of Facebook-feed-clogging traffic generators such as Upworthy, Distractify, Playbuzz, Viral Thread, and Shocktopia, Clickhole’s mission is to make a mockery of online media’s most gimmicky behavior (lists! quizzes! sales-pitch headlines!) and overreliance on viral-ready subjects such as celebrity gossip, 90s pop-culture nostalgia, reactionary politics, and personal essays....

In the exhibit “Love for Sale: The Graphic Art of Valmor Products,” the Chicago Cultural Center highlights a remarkable chapter in the history of graphics in advertising. While the creativity of both imagery and copy are fascinating to take in, it is the social relevance of the Valmor Products graphics that makes the exhibit worth seeing. Courtesy the artist The Valmor Products Company operated on Chicago’s south side from 1926 to 1984....

Q: I remember the day I was able to come to your show in person. What a joy! It seems like years ago now. How do you maintain your sanity until we are able to go to concerts, theater, museums, and dinner with friends again? I strive to be a good human but so struggle to stay my upbeat self. Q: I need someone to tell me that it isn’t a sign that I see my ex’s name at least four times a day, every day....

Chicago singer-songwriter Ben Klawans, aka Mormon Toasterhead, first got my attention four years ago with 97% Old, which boiled down 90s emo to its melodic skeleton and reassembled it in disfigured but disarming new shapes. Klawans experiments restlessly with genre, but as strange as his music can get, it almost always preserves its pop hooks and emotional center. Last week he dropped his first full-length in nearly two years, Monocarpic—it’s the only thing he’s posted to Bandcamp since 2015’s Slack Tide, excepting the May release of “Bright Green,” the first single from the new album....

Cheer-Accident has been Chicago’s most ambitious and versatile prog-rock band for decades, but within the sprawl of its intricate arrangements and bizarre humor the beauty and tunefulness of much of its material can get lost. If anything characterizes the band’s new album, Fades (Skin Graft), it’s those melodic gifts: on opening track “Done,” one of numerous cuts with guest vocalists (Elizabeth Breen and Lindsay Weinberg, in this case), the band clings to post-motorik grooves, and on “The Mind-Body Experience,” a flinty art-rock song a la Henry Cow, the plaintive singing of the band’s sole founding member, Thymme Jones, recalls the tender fragility of Robert Wyatt....

A few years ago Swedish producer Armand Jakobsson coped with a painful breakup by binge-watching Seinfeld and crafting beautiful, glacially paced house tracks. He’d previously recorded music under various aliases (he preferred the name Rimbaudian), but in 2016, when he released the heartfelt cuts he’d created during that emotional healing process, he chose a new moniker: DJ Seinfeld. The sooty veneer and nostalgic, sentimental mood of the music, combined with the fact that Jakobsson debuted it at a time when an handful of artists with similar sonic proclivities were introducing their own projects under goofy names (Ross From Friends, anyone?...

The biggest thing we recommend you do this coming week is find some way to enjoy the sunshine and hot temperatures that are predicted (and a special shout-out to my fellow fans of air conditioning—we’ll always have the public library at least). Here’s some things to enjoy over the next few days, from music to art to the Alley. (Don’t worry, just read on.) Stay safe and enjoy! Through 7/31, times vary: Wrightwood 659 presents “Yannis Tsarouchis: Dancing in Real Life,” the first American exhibition devoted to the work of Greek artist Tsarouchis (1910-1989), who was regarded as a significant member of the Greek LGBTQ community....

A couple weeks ago I was in Germany, and the end of my trip included a visit to the Moers Festival, whose reputation had been impressed upon me long ago by a series of superb live recordings made at the event (and released by its label) in the late 70s and early 80s by the likes of Fred Anderson, Philip Wilson, John Carter, Anthony Braxton, Phalanx, and Wadada Leo Smith. These days the fest isn’t as thoroughly devoted to free jazz as it was when it began in 1972, but in general it does present adventurous sounds....

In January, Gossip Wolf got obsessed with The Year of Alone, a handmade cassette by local singer-songwriter Hannah Sandoz that’s full of hushed and atmospheric folk that seems to encapsulate the COVID-19 era’s sadness and isolation as well as any music that’s come out in the past 18 months. This week, Sandoz followed it up with To Love and Loss!, which has all of the earlier tape’s rustic charm and sweeping feelings of melancholy....

Links Hall was originally Link’s Hall, named for John J. Link, the dentist who built it in 1914 and emblazoned his name in the plaster above the front door. Links Hall was an empty room above a hamburger joint next to a women’s health organization and a Japanese culture center in a seedy neighborhood where the Red Line rattled by every few minutes. Links Hall was a rehearsal space with shows at night: poetry readings, experimental music, performance art, dance....

Have no fear, Chicago. Even though they still haven’t notified the pregnant teacher I wrote about weeks ago whether she’s exempt for health reasons. If it was up to CPS, they’d make her have her baby under a classroom desk. Slick move, Madame Mayor. Somewhere Mayor Rahm’s going—Man, why didn’t I think of that with the Laquan McDonald video? And you wonder why teachers don’t trust the system to get things right....

Last week Riot Fest’s organizers announced a big coup—a headlining set by the Original Misfits—and this morning they released the rest of the lineup. High on the list is woebegone balladeer Morrissey, a notoriously finicky performer with a history of bailing on tours (if you want a list of the shows he’s canceled, a couple years ago Tumblr user Torr compiled a brief history). Morrissey nixed a gig in Iceland last year when he found out the venue served meat—in 2013 he got the Staples Center in LA to close its McDonald’s stands for his performance, so I’m curious whether the Riot Fest vendors hawking turkey legs will shut down for the day....

Gossip Wolf is a sucker for quality DJ nights and ridiculous puns. Add fancy cocktails, and you’ve got a sure-fire winner! On Thursday, June 9, self-described local “queer witches” Sophie Bee and Lorena Cupcake (cofounder of DIY blog Store Brand Soda and the Reader‘s “best new music blogger” in 2015) launch a new monthly party called Switches of Eastwick at Logan Square bar the Whistler. The party will feature a rotating menu of musical genres and play with themes of power, submission, and the occult; the inaugural installment includes DJ sets by Jarvi (from Chicago’s Naughty Bad Fun Collective) and Sold....

Three songs that I heard blasted through other people’s car speakers this week that you don’t think are about sex but they most certainly are: “Little Red Corvette” by Prince, “La Noche de Anoche” by Bad Bunny and Rosalía, and “I’m So Excited” by the Pointer Sisters. Discuss in the comments below. And that’s . . . as much as I’ve got to share this week (it’s been a long one)....

Tayla Nebesky Marta Sánchez Quintet It’s a well-established fact that New York remains a magnet for jazz musicians from all over the U.S. For years Chicagoans have migrated east to be in the thick of it—the heart of the jazz industry, if not its creative center. Greg Ward, Marquis Hill, Christopher McBride, and Milton Suggs are just a few examples of local talent that are no longer local. But it’s not just Americans that flock to the Big Apple—players from all over the globe gravitate there....

The eggs taste salty and tart, Cikowski says, and smell oddly like coffee beans. She and Kulp used them two ways, sticking to what they know best: fried chicken wings. For a Thai twist, they made a fish-sauce caramel with jalapeño, red onion, garlic, lemongrass, and sugar cooked together until sticky; after being fried the wings are glazed with the caramel and tossed with ant eggs and fried garlic bits. On top goes a garlicky aioli made with lemongrass and ant eggs (crushed together with a mortar and pestle, which Cikowski says makes the eggs smell like cumin), egg yolk, and the oil in which the garlic was fried, plus a bit of salt and vinegar....

Jonathan Pitts, the cofounder of the Chicago Improv Festival, believes that podcasting is the fastest-growing art form of this century. Podcasts have certainly gained momentum in the past three years—according to a Pew report listenership has steadily been on the rise since 2013 and there were more than 3 billion podcast downloads in 2015 alone. That helps to explain why Pitts turned his attention to the medium and created the Chicago Podcast Festival....

The house music scene that dominated Chicago in the 80s comes alive again at the Chopin Theatre, which the Urban Theater Company has transformed into a nightclub with neon lights, jungle juice, and battling dance crews. Based on José “Gringo” Echeverria’s memoir The Real Dance Fever: Book One, The Beginning and written by UTC artistic director Miranda González, who codirected with Raquel Torre, Back in the Day follows the north-side dance crew the All-Stars and their frenemies the Culitos and Imported Taste as they use dance as a means of finding family and acceptance....