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In a rare show of respect toward a member of the Chicago Police Department’s top brass, Second City Cop—the prolific, anonymous blog run by members of the department, which often features vicious commentary about both police leadership and citizens involved in crimes—points out that 18th District Commander Paul Bauer “held a rare position in regard to this website . . . we can’t think of a single significant instance where he was the target of someone’s ire....

In the fall of 1971, Faith Wilding was a young MFA student participating in the California Institute of the Arts’ first iteration of its Feminist Art Program. Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, who codirected the unit, hoped to galvanize their students by encouraging them to tackle a major project while working through their own issues as women. Within months the students created Womanhouse, a now-legendary installation that took up an entire mansion in Hollywood....

Director Guy Maddin has been making Canadian cinema excitingly weird for several decades now. His latest feature, The Green Fog, screens a few more times this week at Gene Siskel Film Center, and his 1990 feature Archangel screens next Monday as part of the Doc Films series “Beyond Hollywood North: Contemporary Canadian Voices and Visions.” Following are five more films spanning Maddin’s career; also be sure to check out Jonathan Rosenbaum’s long review of Maddin’s great 2000 short The Heart of the World....

The Tribune reports that “more than 40 percent of Tribune Publishing shareholders withheld support” at last Thursday’s shareholders meeting for each of the company’s slate of eight directors. “That’s a big number, 40 percent,” the director of the University of Delaware’s center for corporate governance told the Tribune.” But Gannett—which has bid $15 a share in a bid to take over the company—promptly came up with a bigger number. It alerted me by e-mail that more than 50 percent of the independent shares—that is, those not held by the company’s powers that be—withheld support for five of the eight directors....

“There wasn’t a single moment when the chummy, jovial craft beer industry became a battlefield of ‘us versus them,’” Josh Noel writes in Barrel-Aged Stout and Selling Out: Goose Island, Anheuser-Busch, and How Craft Beer Became Big Business (Chicago Review Press). “It happened slowly. And then, seemingly, all at once.” But John Hall and his son Greg, who became head brewer in 1991 after the first one quit, did take risks....

Never doubt the emotional layers possible from an expertly crafted, exquisitely manipulated puppet. In the right hands, cloth and carved wood can undergo an alchemy that renders them sentient. Or at least, lulls you into the belief that they are so. That’s what happens in Hansol Jung’s intriguing 90-minute drama, directed by Jess McLeod. At the heart of Wolf Play is Wolf himself (Dan Lin), an eight-year-old Korean adoptee whose insistence that he is lupine allows him to survive, first in a family that decides to sell him on Yahoo, and next with Robin (Jennifer Glasse), the lesbian who “buys” him without telling her child-averse partner, Ash (Isa Arciniegas)....

Cara, take off your bra,” Sarah Gonsiorowski bawls into a megaphone in the opening scene of RockCitizen. And as the other dancers look on, Cara Sabin wriggles out of her bra and tosses it onto the catwalk above the stage. “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” the group chants as a swirl of black-and-white lights takes over the stage and the audience is invited to tune in, drop out, and spend the next hour reliving a tumultuous era filled with sex, drugs, and social protest....

Altered Boy Arguably, the eighth rite of the Catholic church is to make art about parting ways with the Catholic church. Louisiana-born comedian Garrett Allain chronicles his religious upbringing and sexual coming of age in this autobiographical one-man show in the form of a string of loosely related comedic sketches. Allain combines video segments that reimagine his school play performances, heartfelt monologues, family impersonations, and The Lonely Island-style music numbers about “GAMs” (grown-ass men) and Tinder to provide an impressionistic look at his life....

It’s 5 AM on Easter morning, and Wally’s World is dead. After three years and more than a hundred DIY shows, the rock ‘n’ roll speakeasy is calling it quits. In a few months, the building that’s been home to Wally’s World—at 2841 W. Belden, under the Blue Line tracks in Logan Square—will be demolished, as its new owner attempts to have the property rezoned for residential use. The shadow of gentrification hangs over all....

I suppose it would be difficult not to make a mechanical engine the central metaphor of any play about Ada Byron Lovelace. Daughter of the great Romantic poet Lord Byron, she so excelled in mathematics that she surpassed the era’s preeminent mathematician, Charles Babbage, by recognizing the potential his Analytical Engine (arguably the first modern computer) had beyond number crunching. Where Babbage saw numbers only as quantities, Lovelace saw them as units in any system of relational meanings—musical notes, for example—upon which the Engine could operate....

In an October interview with Lyrical Lemonade, Chicago rapper Kembe X (born Dikembe Caston) described a rocky patch in 2017 that brought him to a breaking point in his career. He’d been talking to R&B singer Kehlani, opening up about his lack of confidence and disinterest in his creative direction, and she asked him if he wanted to continue with music at all. The conversation gave Kembe a sense of clarity....

The Reader’s archive is vast and varied, going back to 1971. Every day in Archive Dive, we’ll dig through and bring up some finds. Selle put the Coffee Club up for sale with an ad in the Reader. Phil Tadros, then a 21-year-old Columbia College student, bought the place and in August 2000 opened the first coffee shop in what would become a much-maligned empire of food and beverage businesses....

Anna Ziegler’s 2016 play fictionalizes the case of David Reimer, born in 1965, who had the misfortune of becoming a living laboratory for theories about gender. Like Reimer, Ziegler’s Adam Turner lost his penis in infancy, the result of a botched circumcision. And, also like Reimer, Adam was put under the care of an eminent psychologist (Wendell Barnes here, John Money in real life), who believed that sexual identity was fungible: give a male-born tot a vagina, hormone therapy, the right cultural prompts, and no inkling of the truth, Barnes/Money thought, and he’ll grow up comfortably as a she....

Chicago rapper Fredrianna Harris, aka Freddie Old Soul, uses hip-hop to open a vivid window into everyday life. On “Hot Tamale,” one of the best tracks off her new self-released EP, The First People, she turns groceries into a narrative device that bundles up seemingly stray musings about young motherhood, COVID-19, and the unrelenting presence of death. Her arch delivery bridges her scattered ideas, and her incisive wordplay demonstrates that some of them were interconnected all along....

Pinball was banned in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City for decades and . . . wait, what? All of the anti-arcade pearl clutching isn’t surprising because, well, the older generation is always suspicious of youth culture, especially when it’s paired with rapidly changing technology (hence modern parents freaking out about their kids’ addiction to the online video game Fortnite). But it’s one thing for games to be frowned on, and another for them to be illicit....

Bars and Measures Troubled jazz bassist Bilal thrives off chaos, while his rock-steady classical pianist brother Eric craves order. Playwright Idris Goodwin tries to squeeze two epic battles from their fraught rivalry. The first concerns their efforts to turn common musical ground into a brotherly demilitarized zone, and the second concerns Bilal’s possible involvement in terrorism and Eric’s struggle to believe his brother’s innocent. It’s potent stuff, even with Goodwin’s reductive musicology and undervetted plotting (Bilal’s a federal detainee yet spends regular time with Eric inventing jazz riffs in an ill-defined prison room), but in only 70 minutes neither story is adequately developed; the evening feels like a highlights reel....

The world was introduced to Nav by his featured verse on “Biebs in the Trap,” off Travis Scott’s landmark 2016 Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight. In its alarmingly candid tale of drug abuse and the party life, Nav proved a good complement to Scott while leaning into the disaffected, robotic rap-singing that the psychedelic trap mastermind had popularized. Nav comes from the same Toronto hip-hop scene as Drake and the Weeknd, so “glassy-eyed confessional” is very much his zone, but the material on his past few releases has felt like he’s trying to play catch-up to his hometown peers with shallow but catchy forays into empty excess....

With its relaxed atmosphere and dependably adventurous programming, Elastic Arts is high on the list of local spots Gossip Wolf has been pining to visit since the pandemic hit—especially because when it suspended in-person events last spring it had just introduced a sensational 16-speaker, 16-channel sound system created by the Chicago Laboratory for Electroacoustic Theatre. This wolf’s next date with the CLEAT system will have to wait, but this month Elastic is ramping up its online programming after staying pretty quiet since the end of September....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Tuesday, November 14, 2017. Illinois GOP congressman on Moore: “This is a bridge too far and the Republican Party ought to disown every aspect of him” Illinois Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger is calling on his party to “disown” Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, who has been accused of sexually assaulting several women when they were teenagers. “Roy Moore needs to step aside now....

In Book Swap, a Reader staffer recommends two to five books and then asks a local wordsmith, literary enthusiast, or publishing-adjacent professional to do the same. In this installment, Reader digital managing editor Karen Hawkins swaps book suggestions with author, visual artist, and educator Xandria Phillips. Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity by C. Riley Snorton (University of Minnesota Press) is the book from 2018 that has continued to populate my headspace daily....