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Chicagoland multi-instrumentalist Liam Fagan is 18: young enough to treat emo bands who are still establishing themselves (particularly critical darlings Oso Oso) as aesthetic polestars, but also old enough to legally get the name of one of his favorite albums (the Hotelier’s Goodness) tattooed on his arm. As the mastermind and sole musician behind Park National, Fagan has figured out how to cut his own path in emo. The project’s recent debut, The Big Glad (self-released via Fagan’s P Natty Records), relies on pop-punk propulsion, glistening loop-the-loop guitars, and enough hyperactive hooks to enrapture the most distractible listener—in other words, it ticks all the boxes for the emo subcategory known as sparklepunk....

The dancers of Khecari picked as good a time as any to get off the grid. Last Thursday, two days after the presidential campaign came to an end, I made my way to Indian Boundary Park Cultural Center in Rogers Park for a pseudo-getaway called The Retreat. Upon arrival, I was asked to relinquish my phone for safekeeping and put my mind to rest for at least a few hours. I was assigned a “ranger” who’d help guide me throughout the night....

It’s no coincidence that our national political conversation continues to be toilet talk—and I don’t just mean whatever comes out of Donald Trump’s potty mouth. The headlines keep piling up over the pissing match between Republicans and Democrats regarding who can use which bathroom. It’s not an insignificant issue—but by pitching another battle in the endless culture war, our political gentry can energize their own bases without having to address all those messy economic issues that Bernie Sanders won’t stop preaching about....

Philadelphia’s Steve Gunn had made a name for himself with both his exploratory acoustic fingerstyle guitar playing and his more turbulent, noisy improvisational excursions before finding a new voice as an introspective singer-songwriter with a big sound; his songs meld lyrics that reflect a refined introspection with dusky, sometimes raucous folk rock that borders on the anthemic. In the wake of his 2016 album Eyes on the Lines (Matador) he’s been building an audience the old-fashioned way—as a road dog leading a well-oiled band....

Myles Gebert The old-fashioned diner burger at Dove’s When Dove’s Luncheonette opened last year, I was somewhat surprised to find that the alleged “luncheonette” from One Off Hospitality, located next to Big Star, has a menu that consists mainly of Mexican dishes. It wasn’t what the cassette tape of 60s soul numbers that had been distributed to local food writers had led me to expect. Mind you, One Off is the group who has a Mediterranean restaurant (Avec) that looks like a Swedish sauna, so a certain amount of cultural fusion was to be expected....

Chicago nonprofit arts programmers Homeroom coordinate the concert and recording series Physics for Listeners, which connects local composers and performers from diverse musical traditions. For the current iteration (following installments in 2010 and 2012), Homeroom worked with improvising trio ZRL (clarinetist Zachary Good, percussionist Ryan Packard, and cellist Lia Kohl) to commission ten-minute pieces by Ben Lamar Gay, Ayanna Woods, Sam Scranton, and the members of Ohmme. Reader critic Peter Margasak has said of ZRL that “it’s difficult to describe them in terms of genre—they’re interested in exploration, wherever it may take them....

Poor Hail, Caesar! The latest Coen Brothers film has had a tepid response from critics and its box office returns have been disappointing so far. The survey firm Cinemascore, typically generous to films, determined that opening-night audiences rated Hail, Caesar! a “C-“—dregs usually reserved for artsy action movies like Haywire or Killing Them Softly that tend to alienate their core audience. What accounts for this lukewarm reception? Pinko song-and-dance man Burt Gurney (Channing Tatum) is obviously a riff on Gene Kelly—a figure whose own political activity demonstrates the subtle ideological gradation of the era....

Life isn’t about avoiding pain but plumbing its depths and managing the results wails Another Kind of Love, a female-driven punk-rock masterpiece by Crystal Skillman, now receiving a debut production from InFusion Theatre Company. Maybe masterpiece isn’t quite the right word—it suggests something lofty and out of reach, where this play banks on raw and accessible if festering emotions. But an artistic achievement it is. Skillman jokes that while in rehearsals for her 2012 play Wild, the crew used to tally the show’s F-bombs—more than 300, they estimated....

Much like a player on a scoring streak in NBA Jam, basketball cards are on fire. “When The Last Dance came out, that just brought everything to this outrageous level,” Holloway says. “[The amount of sales] hasn’t stopped since.” Elite is one of two shops in the city. Tim’s Baseball Card Shop on North Western Avenue is the other, specializing in baseball boxes and vintage cards—think rare 1950s and 60s-era cards....

Now in his early 70s, John Primer continues to deliver high-quality sets rooted in postwar blues but spiced with originality. He’s an eloquent songwriter, and even when he plays other people’s material, he avoids the overcooked chestnuts (“Sweet Home Chicago” et al.) that cliche-­weary fans have taken to calling the “set list from hell.” To say that Primer stands on the shoulders of giants isn’t empty rhetoric—his list of early mentors and associates reads like a partial roll call for the Chicago Blues Hall of Fame....

Pennsylvania rapper Lil Skies likes to talk about his face tattoos, specifically about how his decision to permanently install a small gallery’s worth of art all over his head (and neck) provided him the fuel required to focus on a career in music—he’s well aware that no conventional workplace would hire a guy who looks like a walking Sailor Jerry billboard. Regardless of whether or not his explanation is earnest, Skies has found some musical success in music at the moment, which shows on his Atlantic debut, January’s Life of a Dark Rose....

About nine years ago, Mario Luna got a call from his mother. She’d been doing some spring cleaning in her home in Pilsen—the same house where he’d grown up—and she’d found a shoebox that clearly belonged to him. It held a stack of “pluggers,” which is what people in the local house-music scene called show flyers during the culture’s infancy. She wanted to toss them. Luna thought better of it....

In the mid-2000s, local rapper Serengeti imagined rapping as a character named Kenny Dennis, a 50-something with a thick mustache and an even thicker Chicago accent. Ever since Kenny made his debut on the 2006 single “Dennehy,” he’s become the protagonist of a sprawling universe spread out among a panoply of albums, some credited to Serengeti and others supposedly made by figures in Kenny’s fictitious universe. In 2010, for example, Serengeti dropped There’s a Situation on the Homefront by Kenny’s golden-age group, Tha Grimm Teachaz, who were supposedly all set to release music on Jive during their early-90s heyday, only to have their recordings shelved after they beefed with Shaq at a label showcase....

“Ring out the old year, ring in the new, ring-a-ding-ding,” says Shirley MacLaine’s Fran Kubelik with weary resignation near the end of The Apartment (still my favorite holiday film, not that you asked). Two streaming shows give us similar lenses for viewing the transition from hellscape to (vaguely) hopeful as this year winds down. It takes the “goblins” present in the majestic old church bells to show him what his sweet daughter Meg’s life would be like without him (shades of George Bailey), and how easily even the best people can be driven to desperation when there is absolutely no safety net provided....

The low-budget drama Gemini (which is currently playing at the Arclight and the AMC River East) is a 93-minute wisp of a movie that doesn’t seem to unfold so much as evaporate. Writer-director Aaron Katz (Quiet City, Cold Weather) establishes up some plausible relationships and a fairly grounded sense of place; he also makes a half-hearted attempt at telling a mystery story. But the mood is so languid that it overwhelms anything else—aiming for a tone poem on the emptiness of fame a la Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere or The Bling Ring, Katz just delivers emptiness....

If he were still alive today, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would be 90. It’s been 51 years since his assassination, and it’s already difficult to imagine that such a person lived, with such power to mobilize people in the struggle for freedom and equality. His life can feel like folklore now, like a saint’s life. In his last speech, the real Martin Luther King Jr. said, “I have been to the mountaintop, and I have seen the Promised Land....

Merrill Garbus of Tune-Yards walks the walk when it comes to advocacy and political awareness. In 2015 she started the Water Fountain, an organization that raises funds for antipollution and clean water efforts around the world. She’s also the host of C.L.A.W. (Collaborative Legions of Artful Womxn), a radio program that champions the work of female-identified musicians working on the fringes of pop. On her new Tune-Yards album, I Can Feel You Creep Into My Private Life (4AD), she dives headfirst into evolving ideas about white privilege and eroding privacy....

A new exhibit at the Design Museum of Chicago pushes visitors through the theater’s proverbial fourth wall and onto the scaffolded backstages of some of the cities most storied theaters. “The idea when you walk into the space is that it feels like you’re walking backstage,” says Woodford. “We’ve left exposed studwork, really built out the grid in a way that you can add things to it very quickly, and then as objects from theaters come in we’re displaying them on that grid....

Paul Costuros Present-day Deerfhoof: Ed Rodriguez, John Dieterich, Satomi Matsuzaki, and Greg Saunier On Friday, March 13, Deerhoof open for Of Montreal at Metro. The Bay Area band are still touring on their 12th album, La Isla Bonita (Polyvinyl), which came out last fall. Peter Margasak weighed in on it when Deerhoof played here in November: “They’ve found a sweet spot they can keep mining for exciting new forms of beauty,” he wrote....

Last week, as the world caught a bad case of the coronavirus and the stock market began a major swoon, Paul Krugman came to town to talk about zombies. This, apparently in response to an announcement by the Centers for Disease Control that we need to prepare for a possible pandemic. And that it wasn’t a question of if the virus would spread to the U.S., but when. Also, the national debt crisis, which the Republicans were so concerned about during the Obama administration, but have recently “done a 180″ on....