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This week’s featured gig poster was created for an online celebration of International Women’s Day sponsored by several organizations, including two from Chicago: music presenter HotHouse and publisher Haymarket Books. ¡Activista!: An International Women’s Day Celebration Framing Solidarity Through Culture premiered on March 7 and features live and prerecorded music and readings from poet Brandy Nālani McDougall, poet and musician Lyla June, Oaxacan activist Irma Pineda, Colectivo de Mujeres Kiñewen (a group of women musicians and artists from Latin America and Europe), Guinean musician Natu Camara, Chicago’s own Angel Bat Dawid, Jordanian singer Farah Siraj, and Korean composer Yu Kyung-Hwa....

Now that I have time to watch movies at home (and, it would seem, as many of them as I’d like), I find myself overwhelmed by the number of choices I have. Firstly there are all the DVDs my wife Kathleen and I have collected over the years, many of which we still haven’t watched. Then there are the films available through our subscriptions to Netflix and the Criterion Channel. And on top of that, there are those movies popping up online in brief windows or at scheduled times....

Local multimedia collective and label Feeltrip has carved out a niche releasing music by outre indie-pop bands and far-out dance artists, including one group who do a great job bridging those worlds: Pixel Grip. The Chicago three-piece meld indie-pop songwriting with electronic music’s insistent, seemingly infinite grooves; the tunes on their new debut, Heavy Handed, sound like they were made to start mosh pits in grimy rock clubs and get people sweating at all-night dance parties in unfinished lofts....

Chicago media Twitter recently pounced on the irony of a simulacrum of a dive bar housed inside the kind of newfangled craft beer spot quickly replacing the very thing it’s paying homage to. so it’s a pop-up in Logan Square of the kind of bars that have been almost entirely pushed out of Logan Square… — katherine of chicago (@kofchicago) January 18, 2018 While there’s something mildly irksome about paying $9 for a glorified gin and tonic named Da Ghost of Studs Terkel, there are plenty of recently established joints in Logan Square and other gentrifying neighborhoods that fake a kind of lived-in authenticity with taxidermy and vintage Old Style signs on the walls, old-timey cash registers, and $15 cocktails whose names reference relics from Chicago’s past....

Hard to Be a God Tonight at 6:30 PM the Siskel Film Center presents the last Chicago screening of Aleksei German’s Hard to Be a God (2013). It’s perhaps the most important movie in town—an epic, philosophical work by one of Russia’s most venerated directors, who worked on the film for over a decade and died during postproduction. In God every image—every sound effect, practically—reflects years of serious thought, although the filmmaking itself feels spontaneous....

There were bathrooms in the building, but the protesters weren’t allowed to use them. And if anyone left the police headquarters, the officers wouldn’t let them back inside. But shortly before 8 PM, nearly five hours into what would be a 19-hour occupation of the University of Chicago Police Department, a protester who was stretching accidentally pushed the metallic handicap button inside the building. The door, which was supposed to be locked, swung open....

Born in Montevideo, Uruguay, Juan Wauters moved to Queens, with his father in 2002, when he was 17, and worked alongside him at a picture-frame factory to save money to bring over the rest of the family. In 2008, having picked up the guitar, he got together with some neighborhood friends to start lo-fi garage band the Beets, which became a favorite on the DIY circuit in New York and beyond....

Playwright Jez Butterworth won the 2019 Best Play Tony Award for The Ferryman, but it’s tough to see that coming in The River. You could use words like “nonlinear,” or “elliptical,” or “opaque” to describe Butterworth’s 65-minute play. Calling the BoHo Theatre production meaningless is more accurate. Well, perhaps not entirely meaningless. Directed by Jerrell L. Henderson, the drama’s myriad monologues about wild salmon and the joys of fishing are mildly educational for those looking to learn about the various lures used in the solitary sport....

In theory, it’s still a few months till festival season. In practice, that season never ends—the events just get smaller and usually move indoors. The key word there is “usually,” because tomorrow the Empty Bottle hosts its fifth annual Music Frozen Dancing, which has succeeded despite the fact that it’s clearly batshit to hold a free outdoor music festival in the middle of a Chicago winter. Apparently the Bottle’s great reputation as a booker—and the absence of a cover charge—is enough to convince perfectly sane people to volunteer for possible frostbite watching bands playing in the street outside the venue....

Formerly known as Chin Chilla Meek, rapper and Harvey native Chimeka shows she’s ingrained in Chicago hip-hop on her most recent self-released EP, January’s Cool. She teamed up with producers such as the hard-grinding Novacane, Twista’s right-hand man Sunny Woodz, and ZMoney’s secret weapon J. Neal, and got a nice assist from rapper the Boy Illinois, but you can easily hear the world of Chicago in her vocals. On “Champagne Showers” she adapts Ty Money’s syncopated flow, though she dispenses her run-on-sentence verses at a slower pace—whereas Ty sounds like he’s sprinting down a track, Chimeka sounds like she’s in the driver’s seat of a convertible, her left arm resting on the car door as her hand gently bobs up and down in the wind....

Bridging the cultural gap between Chicago’s LGBTQ+ individuals and the greater community sometimes starts with a simple act of giving back, like volunteering at a food pantry or cleaning up the debris at Osterman Beach on the city’s far north side. “Honestly, I do not know the origin story of the name,” says Belcher. “Gay may not be the best word to represent the entire LGBTQ+ community today, but I struggle to find a word that does....

Liz Lauren A scene from Stop. Reset.: J, the janitor from the future (Edgar Sanchez), and his boss, Alexander Ames (Eugene Lee) At the outset of Regina Taylor’s new drama Stop. Reset., currently onstage at the Goodman, Alexander Ames, a Chicago book publisher, is struggling to figure out how to adapt his business to the e-book era. The play’s original inspiration was the closure of Taylor’s favorite bookstore, her neighborhood Borders, five years ago, but as it developed, Taylor realized that the subject was far bigger than that....

Hip-hop has welcomed a platoon of talented emerging artists over the past five years or so, but few exhibit their love for the art of rapping quite like North Carolina’s Marlanna Evans, better known as Rapsody. In the late 2000s, she formed a crucial bond with star producer 9th Wonder, who signed her to his Jamla label. After dropping her debut album, 2012’s The Ideal Beautiful, she landed a guest spot on Kendrick Lamar’s 2015 masterpiece, To Pimp a Butterfly, contributing vocals to “Complexion (A Zulu Love)”—a high-profile appearance that enhanced her already blossoming career....

This week we’re getting ready for a spooky time at the drive-in courtesy of Riot Fest! Two fine folks who work for Riot Fest, graphic designer Monique Doron and art director Dan Wade, created a poster to advertise the Riot Fest Halloween Special: two nights that combine live concerts and movie screenings at Bridgeview’s Chicago Drive-In at SeatGeek Stadium. Friday-night concertgoers will be treated to a set by New Found Glory (who’ve excitedly made new merch for the occasion, including car air fresheners), followed by a screening of the 1988 comedy Beetlejuice (if you somehow haven’t seen this beloved goth-nerd favorite, be warned that former Reader critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, while not contrarian enough to pan it, did call it “an appealing mess”)....

When I heard the latest news about my not-so-beloved Chicago Bears, I thought I’d left the real world and entered the realm of some drug-induced fantasy. “We recently submitted a bid to purchase the Arlington International Racecourse property. It’s our obligation to explore every possible option to ensure we’re doing what’s best for our organization and its future. If selected, this step allows us to further evaluate the property and its potential....

Over the years the gnarly, impolite improvising trio called the Thing (saxophonist Mats Gustafsson, bassist Ingebrigt Håker Flaten, and drummer Paal Nilssen-Love) has performed and recorded with many guest musicians: Joe McPhee, Ken Vandermark, Otomo Yoshihide, Jim O’Rourke, Neneh Cherry, and Barry Guy among others). The hard-hitting group have proven an ability to accommodate a wide array of approaches, perpetually modulating their rough-and-tumble sound to the needs of a given context....

It’s Transgender Day of Remembrance as I write this and this year it feels more urgent than ever to take time and remember the transgender people whose lives were taken due to anti-transgender violence. Our lives right now during these times of COVID-19 are getting more and more isolated, even as our technology makes it possible for us to have what seems like a constant stream of information from the outside....

will feel, think, and do in the future, and powerful aids in explaining why. In the realm of politics, psychologists have recently demonstrated how fundamental features of human personality—such as extroversion and narcissism—shaped the distinctive leadership styles of past U.S. presidents, and the decisions they made.” No one could accuse Johnson of neglecting himself. Early in All the Way, director Jay Roach (Trumbo, HBO’s Recount and Game Change) delivers a tour de force scene in which the president strides around the Oval Office like a king, dispatching various problems as his tailor trails after him....

With former Police Board president Lori Lightfoot now in the mayoral race (the Sun-Times‘s Fran Spielman has a shrewd assessment of her candidacy here), it’s going to be harder than ever—and it’s always hard—for mayoral candidates to get the nominating signatures they need to qualify for the ballot. It takes 12,500 signatures to get on the mayoral ballot—and not just any old signature will do. They must be valid signatures that can withstand the careful scrutiny they’re all but certain to get....

Designers Pauline Olesky (set), Claire Sangster (lights), and Ariel Zetina (sound) have transformed the Center on Halsted’s cozy Hoover-Leppen Theatre into a dance club where pumping music and flashing lights provide a rousing and immersive party atmosphere. “In this ballroom, we give you the chance to be the things the world tells you not to be,” declares the show’s charismatic emcee, self-described “Filipino trans goddess” Angelíca Grace. For 75 intermissionless minutes, the performers offer spoken and sung testimony about their own lives and the lives of those who came before them....