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Julia Thiel Welles Park Craft Beer Fest When the weather is nice, an outdoor beer festival is a magical place to be. When a steady, cold drizzle falls continually—as it did at Beer Under Glass, the May 14 kick-off event for Chicago Craft Beer Week—it’s a little less appealing. Fortunately, some of the beer was actually being served under glass this year, so it was possible to take shelter in the Garfield Park Conservatory and continue drinking (unlike last year, when ongoing repairs to the conservatory meant many breweries had to set up on the waterlogged lawn, earning the event the nickname “Beer in the Mud”)....

Over the past few years Second City has lived in my mind as a stale representation of the comedy world. While I’ll never deny the impact the theater/training ground had on some of my favorite talents, like Bill Murray and Chris Farley and the queen herself, Miss Tina Fey, the shows themselves haven’t broken free of the same sort of Murray-Farley-Fey formula. Yes, Second City revues will always be entertaining; I could watch comics do their own version of Chris Farley’s Matt Foley sketch over and over again and still laugh....

More than a thousand years ago the Wari people built a brewery on a remote mountaintop in southern Peru where they brewed enormous batches of chicha, a corn-based beer that they consumed in copious quantities. When the empire’s reign came to an end around 1100 AD, the Wari set fire to the brewery and smashed their ceramic drinking vessels into the ashes of the burning building. Field Museum scientists discovered the remains of the brewery in 2004, and based on analysis of residues from the drinking vessels, learned that the beer was brewed with berries from the Peruvian pepper plant (also called molle berries)....

Nebraska native Charlie Curtis-Beard, who moved here for school and still attends Columbia College, is one of Chicago’s most promising young MCs. His debut, Childish, was among the best overlooked local hip-hop releases of 2016, and on Friday he drops his second full-length, Existentialism on Lake Shore Drive. In its loose narrative, framed by dramatized phone messages, Curtis-Beard holes up at home while his friends have a wild night out. “I just wanted to tell the story of going out to pointless parties and staying locked in my room, from both sides,” he says....

Austrian guitarist Martin Siewert has always stood out to me for using his instrument like an arsenal of paintbrushes. In his many projects, including improvisational and experimental outfits Trapist and Efzeg, he thoughtfully applies his sound upon whatever canvas the group conjures. And since joining the Viennese trio Radian in 2011, he’s brought the group’s dry, instrumental strain of post-This Heat noise and rhythm closer to rock than it’s ever been—though any band that has a rhythm section of drummer Martin Brandlmayr and bassist John Norman will never sound like a normal rock band....

Two weeks ago, a longtime reader challenged me to create a new sexual neologism. My two most famous and widely used neologisms—pegging (2001) and santorum (2003)—have been around so long that they’re practically paleologisms at this point. So I accepted the challenge and proposed “with extra lobster,” which sounded like it was a dirty euphemism for something equally awesome. I offered up my own suggested definition—”Someone who sticks their tongue out and licks your balls while they’re deep-throating your cock is giving you a blow job with extra lobster”—and invited readers to send in their own....

The harp has always been an oddity in jazz music. Its two most notable practitioners, Alice Coltrane and Dorothy Ashby, were most active decades ago; both musicians had roots in postbop forms and found fascinating ways to translate the cascading sounds associated with the classical instrument into rhythmically elastic settings—though each eventually embraced more contemporary modes rooted in soul, funk, and, for Coltrane, Indian music. Later recordings by both harpists became primo sample material in hip-hop culture, and it’s partly through those records that Brandee Younger (who studied classical music at the University of Hartford) discovered Ashby, whose work became one of her primary musical influences....

Ever since my last Reader column on Chicago’s mayoral election was published, I’ve been fielding a lot of complaints about lawbreaking bicyclists. I mentioned Toni Preckwinkle’s statement from a recent debate that many bike riders “don’t pay any attention to the traffic laws, which is not only infuriating, but also scary for drivers.” Technically illegal, but widespread and largely harmless, behavior. This includes slow, cautious cycling for short distances on sidewalks or against traffic on side streets....

Siobhan O’Loughlin is tired. As her “cast” of friends files into the bathroom of a third-floor walk-up in Rogers Park on November 1, the actress’s head rests heavily in the crook of her rainbow cast-clad arm. “You don’t see your friends for months and months, and then you’re like, ‘What’s going on?’ she said. “They’re giving me a bath and I’m telling them about what’s happened to me, and they’re telling me about what they’ve been through....

In the early hours of Friday, November 6, 26-year-old Chicago rapper Dayvon Bennett, better known as King Von, was shot and killed outside an Atlanta nightclub. Von emerged a couple years ago as part of a newer generation of locals refashioning drill’s austere, hard-edged aesthetic in their own image. He imbued his tough-as-nails verses with touches of sweet melodicism, and he could evoke joy and alarm with just a few steely lines delivered in a tight, bouncy flow....

Dennis J. Leise whistles a high note and a crowd of turkeys, roosters, chickens, and ducks explodes in shrieks, quacks, and clucks. A 250-pound boar named Hamilton grunts as Leise massages his snout. Rabbits snooze on the side porch. Goats box for position to lap up the dry corn he pours from his hand. The video for “Nobody’s Comin’,” directed by Rob Fitzgerald and Dennis J. Leise Leise scheduled a release show for State of Fairs last spring at FitzGerald’s, but the pandemic shut it down....

Elizabeth Tamny has been immersed in the world of the cookie arts since December. She’s not baking snickerdoodles or Toll House, but rather applying her illustrative and calligraphic skills to sugar and chocolate-mint cookies. The cookies themselves may be fairly simple, but Tamny’s designs are anything but. They’re intricate, sometimes lacy filigrees and grids of royal icing, piped in thin lines that swirl and intersect, sometimes rising above the surface in elaborate, delicate spires and domes that echo the towering confectionary structures of the Napoleonic-era French chef Marie-Antoine Carême....

Depending on who you talk to, 46th Ward alderman James Cappleman is either a cold, deceitful hater of the poor who’s destroyed much of Uptown’s affordable housing stock or a friendly, responsive neighborhood booster who’s made Uptown a better place to live. Far from being a firebrand retail politician, Cappleman has a soft-spoken manner. He grew up on the Gulf of Mexico, near Houston, and has a silky voice with the slightest twinge of a southern accent....

I was starting to think we’d crossed a line and that there was no one, except for a few old lefties like me, willing to denounce such blatantly cynical attempts to soak the taxpayers. Deal said the tax break would enable Delta to expand service at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson airport. Similarly, up north in Wisconsin, Governor Scott Walker, another Republican, forked over $4.1 billion for a Foxconn factory. It won’t necessarily raises taxes in Illinois, but we will have to deal with pollution issues since the Wisconsin deal has waived Foxconn from environmental oversight regulations....

Mackenzie Scott is the kind of artist who can turn a song about peach cobbler into a sweeping tale of thwarted lust and bitter memory. The lyric “I know you never dreamed I’d become a damn Yankee / I need you to believe that I’m still your same baby,” from “Tongue Slap Your Brains Out,” the opening track of her latest album, Three Futures (4AD), may be the most over-the-top lament of the personal costs of northward migration since Bobby Bare’s “Streets of Baltimore....

Guitarist Rafiq Bhatia has always been something of a polymath. After graduating from Oberlin—with a degree not in music but in economics and neuroscience—he moved to New York in 2010 and his interests gravitated toward modern jazz. Within two years he dropped Yes It Will (Rest Assured), a record built around a limber fusion of sound featuring extended improvisation—his impressive cast of collaborators includes excellent players from both jazz and classical music such as trumpeter Peter Evans, pianist Vijay Iyer, drummer Billy Hart, and flutist Claire Chase....

Even though Indian-American comic Hari Kondabolu was born in Queens, xenophobes frequently tell him to go back to places like Iraq, Afganistan, and Libya. “Whatever nation our country is bombing, I’m told to go back there at the worst time to go back,” he says. But in Denmark, during a particularly awful performance, he was told to go back to America. Maybe that was a sign of how bad things have gotten here in the States, or maybe it was a sign that Kondabolu had finally proven himself as a Mainstream American Comic (Kill Rock Stars), the sarcastic title of his new album....

As the number of new coronavirus infections in Illinois continues to grow, Chicago has finally caught up with testing at some of the city’s homeless shelters. Results shared by the Chicago Department of Public Health at the end of last week showed that among 1,153 clients and staff tested at 14 shelters, 302 people were positive for COVID-19. However, as of May 7, the department couldn’t confirm if anyone has died from the disease....

Last week local folk-rock outfit Minor Moon dropped their new album, An Opening, via the Midwest Action label. Singer-songwriter Sam Cantor weaves stately vocal harmonies and spacious arrangements around his ruminative, engaging melodies. Gossip Wolf is especially fond of the keyboard-saturated shuffle of “When You Notice (A Little Light),” which eventually bursts into a startlingly horn-heavy, almost jazzy outro. On Friday, February 15, Minor Moon will play a record-release show at Constellation with openers Niika and Storm Jameson....

June 25, 2012, was a terrible day for Jermaine Robinson. Overall, life was good—the 21-year-old Washington Park resident had been studying music management at Columbia College and was a few weeks into a job working as a janitor at a nearby Boys & Girls Club. But his 13-year-old neighbor had been killed by random gunfire the previous day, and Robinson spent the evening at an emotional memorial service. After the service ended around midnight, Robinson repaired to his girlfriend’s house on Rhodes Avenue to hang out with friends and to see his one-year-old daughter, he says....