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A few years ago, when diminishing page space became an issue at every print periodical in America, the Reader decided to quit listing suburban multiplexes because typically they showed only the same movies one could see in town. In the past year, however, more and more indie films have been opening in the distant suburbs but never in Chicago; sometimes these theatrical engagements are just loss leaders, meant to anchor publicity campaigns for the more lucrative business of video on demand....

Journalist and playwright Paula Kamen first began researching Jane, the underground feminist collective founded in Hyde Park that helped people find safe abortions in the pre-Roe v. Wade years, back in the early 1990s. The play she eventually created from interviews with those involved with Jane has had several iterations over the years, including a star-studded reading in New York in September featuring Cynthia Nixon, Ana Gasteyer, and Kathy Najimy (among others) done as a benefit for the pro-choice theater organization A is For....

For decades Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore seemed like the model artist couple—incontrovertibly cool, multifariously creative, and fiercely independent—but that illusion shattered in fall 2011, when they announced they were separating. They subsequently divorced, taking their main shared endeavor, Sonic Youth, down with them. Gordon kept quiet about the circumstances of the split until 2013, and her new memoir, Girl in a Band (Harper Collins), lays it all out—though she refers to the woman who had an affair with Moore only with “she” and “her....

Chicago is a writer’s town, from top to bottom. We have an excellent public library system, many great independent booksellers, and enough Sturm und Drang in every corner of the city to inspire pens to paper. Fans and fellow writers alike can make their way to reading events for poetry, fiction, and slice-of-life storytelling year-round, and 2019 brought us consistently interesting and dynamic work from writers at a myriad of venues....

In these dark days, when counterculture heroes of the 60s and 70s are dropping at an alarming rate, it’s important to take a break from mourning and assess who’s still standing—and who’s still creating vital art. By all rights, singer-songwriter Marianne Faithfull could have left us long ago. She rose to fame as much for her music as for her association with the famously debaucherous Rolling Stones camp in the late 60s, and she struggled with drug addiction, eating disorders, and homelessness at various times in the 70s and 80s....

With his bands Sic Alps and the Peacers, Bay Area oddball Mike Donovan has treated his sprawling, postpsychedelic sensibilities with a modicum of rock-music orthodoxy as his collaborators lend shape and sinew to his delirious, wobbly tunes. There’s no missing an essence that wants to drift unmoored on last year’s Peacers album Introducing the Crimsmen, but the loose, shaggy grooves keep things more or less centered. Last month Donovan dropped his second solo album, How to Get Your Record Played in Shops (Drag City), and it seems to serve as a corrective to the comparatively polished sounds of the Peacers....

This week the Gene Siskel Film Center is showing two superior debut features by women directors that are set in the 19th century. Marine Francen’s French film The Sower plays through Thursday, and Ash Mayfair’s Vietnamese drama The Third Wife opens for a weeklong run on Friday. Both are highly assured works that interrogate the sexual mores of two centuries ago in subtle, provocative fashion. I prefer The Sower—its visual aesthetic (seemingly inspired by Millet’s paintings) is richer and its montage more surprising—but The Third Wife is nothing to sneeze at....

As Atlanta trio Omni have readied their Sub Pop debut and third LP overall, Networker, I’ve had as much fun parsing the lineage of their sparse, anxiously playful postpunk as I’ve had listening to their catalog. Longtime Reader critic Peter Margasak has compared the band’s sound to the feverish early-80s output of Scottish indie label Postcard, while Atwood Magazine has suggested that Omni’s 2018 two-song single for Chunklet Industries bears similarities to Parquet Courts....

In March, Providence postpunk trio Minibeast launched a Kickstarter to raise funds to master and manufacture vinyl editions of two albums called Ism—one subtitled Volume Silver, the other Volume Gold. The band reached their goal at the end of the month, and in September they self-released those two LPs of expansive, oddball rock, which they’d infused with Afropop rhythms, spiraling psych guitars, and a healthy shot of feral punk attitude. The voice that bellows and yawps through the haze should be familiar to anyone well versed in the music of the 80s American punk underground: it belongs to Peter Prescott, who famously played drums and sang with Boston art-punks Mission of Burma....

Writer and spoken word artist Nikki Patin has long been an advocate for survivors of sexual assault, harassment, and harm in creative spaces. In 2005, she left a position as a teaching artist when the institution she was working for (which she prefers not to name) seemed uninterested in protecting students from sexual harassment and assault, and she started working at Rape Victims Advocates—now Resilience—as a sexual assault prevention educator. She remained involved in Chicago’s spoken word scene and continued to see pleas for protection from survivors ignored....

Imaginative and often beautiful visual projections by designer Tony Churchill transform Strawdog Theatre’s intimate, low-ceilinged performing area into an otherworldly environment for Take Me, by playwright (and Reader contributor) Mark Guarino and songwriter Jon Langford, a quirky world premiere directed by Anderson Lawfer. It’s the story of Shelley (the engaging Nicole Bloomsmith), a service representative for a wireless telephone carrier, who one day is contacted by aliens—or so she believes. As the action unfolds, shifting confusingly between reality and fantasy, we come to understand that this outer-space connection is all in Shelley’s mind....

Two middle-aged men sat in a red Hyundai Sonata with the license plate “RUF,” idling in a back alley parking lot along Farwell Avenue in Rogers Park. When I pulled in and parked, the white man behind the wheel nodded at me. I went to my friends’ first-floor apartment to pick up some belongings and when I came out a few minutes later the men were standing, maskless, in the gangway in front of the back staircase of one of the neighboring buildings that shares the alley....

Leigh Whannell’s low-budget horror feature Upgrade, now playing in general release, reminds me of the goofy genre mash-ups made by Brian De Palma in the 1960s and ’70s (Hi, Mom!, Phantom of the Paradise) and Takashi Miike in the 1990s and the aughts (Fudoh: The New Generation, The Happiness of the Katakuris). Whannell steals from so many different movies—and does it so cheerfully—that Upgrade stops feeling derivative and starts looking like a collage, with the recycled elements forming a new sensibility....

In 2009 Martha Bayne was bartending at the Hideout and had been working with the community meal and hunger-relief fundraiser Soup & Bread over the winter. Bayne, Sheila Sachs, and Ben Helphand began brainstorming ways to keep the momentum of Soup & Bread going well into the summer. “I suggested salad and bread,” says Helphand, executive director of NeighborSpace, which is a nonprofit that preserves and supports gardens in the city....

Thinkstock A local woman who rents out her Ukrainian Village condo on Airbnb says she has nothing but great things to say about doing so. Using the service has introduced her to cool strangers and changed her perspective on people for the better—and it often makes her as much as two times more money in a month than she would make with a standard tenant. But she’d rather not be named because of a lingering fear of being caught in a gray area that had become familiar territory to people participating in the sharing or peer economy....

Environmental consciousness barely registered at the recent Democratic presidential debates, and climate-change deniers still seem comfortable ignoring science and evidence. But sustainability issues increasingly have come to bear on music festivals. The Pitchfork Music Festival generates about 20 tons of waste in total each year, Reed says, and the percentage of it that gets recycled averages in the mid-40s. While this is vastly better than Chicago as a whole has ever managed, it’s not extraordinary for a festival....

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. The culinary influence on the cultures Portugal dominated for nearly 600 years isn’t as celebrated as, say, the shotgun marriage between French and Vietnamese food. By some reports it’s been difficult to even find places serving the old mingling of Chinese and Portuguese food born on the tiny island of Macao ever since the island’s handover to the casinos, gamblers, and the People’s Republic of China in 1999....

Does McDonald’s brand-new “fancy” restaurant stack up with the best of its neighbors on Randolph Street’s Restaurant Row? The actual food? It takes you right back to nearly every other fast-food joint on earth. The menu is chock-full of woefully standard burgers, fries, shakes, and salads with some pastries and other coffee shop-ish items thrown in. Yes, this mothership McDonald’s brags about its one-of-a-kind international menu that includes a Brazilian McFlurry, with strawberry sauce and chocolate-covered coconut candies as mix-ins, and a “French” pasta salad....

On a Sunday morning at New Home Missionary Baptist Church in South Austin, Reverend Mack McCollum waits till the service is well under way to make his entrance. He knows that pacing himself for the long haul always beats making a reckless rush. A banner in the stairwell of this west-side church celebrates his lengthy career: “60 Years Preaching / 55 Years Pastoring / 85 Years Young.” The building itself, constructed in 1996, is relatively modern, but the music inside on this day is mostly time-honored gospel....

Since 2010, Chicago aldermen have been using participatory budgeting to give ward residents a say in how some of the money in their ward will be spent. First implemented in the 49th ward by former alderman Joe Moore, participatory budgeting allows ward residents to propose and vote on capital improvement projects to be funded by the $1.32 million dollars of aldermanic “menu money” allocated to each ward by the city of Chicago each year....