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On its first compilation, Buds Volume 1, Chicago label Rosebud Allday showcases the talent of its roster and its friends from the local scene. Founded in 2018 by Bill Ocean and producer Jayson “Jsun” Rose, Rosebud Allday specializes in the overlap of pop, hip-hop, and R&B; its sunny sounds recall Chicago neosoul groups such as the Social Experiment and the O’My’s or the early work of Los Angeles collective Odd Future (minus the menace)....

Nature documentaries may be plentiful on cable TV, but they rarely connect at the box office—March of the Penguins (2005), the biggest nature film of all time, grossed only $127 million worldwide (compared to $2 billion for the most recent Star Wars sequel). By this modest standard, French filmmakers Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud have been phenomenally successful. Their first two features are firmly lodged among the genre’s top ten: Winged Migration (2001), a stirring account of migratory birds, earned $32 million for Sony Classics, and Oceans (2009), a study of marine life, grossed $82 million for Disney....

Q: I’m a 30-year-old bi male. I’ve been with my wife for five years, married nine months. A month into our relationship, I let her know that watching partners with other men has always been something I wanted and that sharing this had caused all my previous relationships to collapse. Her reaction was the opposite of what I was used to. She said she respected my kink, and we both agreed we wanted to solidify our relationship before venturing down the cuckold road....

Soprano and tenor saxophonist Urs Leimgruber has covered a lot of ground since he first recorded in 1974. On his earliest recordings, with Swiss jazz-rock group Om (which predates by decades the heavy American band of the same name), he played muscular solos over surging rhythms. Since the 90s he’s used several groups—including Quartet Noir and MMM, which both feature French bassist Joëlle Léandre, and a long-running trio with French pianist Jacques Demierre and American bassist Barre Phillips—to combine free improvisation with classical gestures, particularly Léandre’s operatic singing....

My mother always told me, “When you get older, you’ll begin to see the world in shades of gray.” Generally speaking, she was right (as usual), but I often find that idiom falling short of my personal experience. Listening to the prismatic 12 Comp (ZIM) 2017, I finally understood why: I’d much rather see the world in spectral wheels, the way Anthony Braxton does. Throughout the 11 hours of 12 Comp, the experimental composer and reedist—an icon of the hugely influential Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians—investigates the ceaseless shifting of hues....

This article was reported in collaboration with In These Times magazine. But back in October, Ocasio-Cortez had a few others in mind. Tallying potential allies to Vanity Fair, Ocasio-Cortez listed prospective Congress member Kara Eastman of Nebraska (who lost a second close attempt to unseat a Republican) and one seated Democrat: Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García of Illinois’s Fourth Congressional District. When Tlaib and Omar vocally fought a House resolution condemning the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement to end the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, García was one of only 16 Democrats to vote against it....

Sector 2337, the bookstore, gallery, and performing arts venue, closed its doors December 14, marking the end of what its founder and executive director, Caroline Picard, says was intended as a five-year experiment at 2337 N. Milwaukee. Before it became a staple of the Logan Square arts community, it spent nine years in Wicker Park, where it began as the Green Lantern Gallery and Press. In 2007, two years after Picard’s first exhibition, she followed in the footsteps of Threewalls and decided to register Green Lantern as a nonprofit....

A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. Joshua Virtue, “Loosey” Joshua Virtue raps in the duos Free Snacks and Udababy, which both put out music this winter—the former Eat Good Tape in December, the latter a self-titled EP in January. Virtue released the full-length Post Faith Dialogues in March, which includes the killer “Loosey.” When he performed it at his release party that month, dozens of people screamed along as he belted out rubbery rhymes on the song’s hook....

Elsa Muñoz’s paintings carry a sense of intimacy. They’re full of dark colors, but they glow—it’s as if light can’t help but seep through the lines. Panels painted with controlled forest burns have flickers of sunlight glinting through the smoke, flames spreading through shadowy leaves. Even an inky black floor-to-ceiling ocean tide at night shines almost silver in its froth. Her paintings are like dreams, even though they’re as realistic as realism can get....

Update: This show has been canceled to help slow the spread of COVID-19. Tickets will be refunded at point of purchase. Ensemble dal Niente commissions and selects new music that justifies the word “new” not just because it’s recently composed; it also challenges players and audience alike to experience performances in new ways. The ensemble’s latest program draws on the resources of its city by including compositions by current and former Chicagoans, as well as by recruiting as a guest performer one of its most renowned extant improvisers, saxophonist and clarinetist Ken Vandermark....

Despite what the title suggests, Netflix and Channel 4’s Feel Good might not be the comforting series you need right now—and it doesn’t claim to be. It’s a rallying cry for the queers, the addicts, and all of the ways they intersect, for better or for worse. Full disclosure: I’m no stranger to addiction. It dominated my household growing up—whether it came from substances that made you feel numb or dangerous habits that made you smaller, more desirable to others—and no matter how much time passes, the scars left from addiction never really go away....

You could scratch your back with the red-willow twig that serves as the delivery vehicle for the Xinjiang special lamb skewer at Friend BBQ. You could knock it in a bow and practice your apple shot, William Tell style. Or you could order a dozen or so of these fatty, sizzling, spice-crusted meat sticks and, once you’ve gnawed them clean, head into the night to hunt the undead that lurk in the side streets and alleys of Chinatown after dark....

Stay tuned, folks! The exhibit should be a crowd-pleaser. But that’s only part of the strategy behind it. DuMont, producer and broadcaster of the 35-year-old syndicated show Beyond the Beltway (recently dropped by WLS but available through other outlets), says the financially pinched MBC is aiming for “greater awareness of who we are with the major consumer brand companies.” He’s hoping some of them will decide to put an executive on the museum’s board....

There are plays that seduce and anesthetize and candy-coat everything to make the world taste good. And then there are plays like Suzan-Lori Parks’s three-part, three-hour 2014 drama Father Comes Home From the Wars, Parts 1, 2, & 3—long, complicated, intellectually teasing, hard-to-categorize works that riff on difficult issues and refuse to give expected, easy answers. The last part of the play is in many ways a retelling of Ulysses’s return home in The Odyssey, though Parks plays with the story a bit....

In January, Pedro the Lion released their first album in 15 years, Phoenix (Polyvinyl), though in some ways it enjoys that distinction in name only. Anyone who’s followed Pedro the Lion front man David Bazan since the long-running indie-rock group hung it up in 2006 knows that he’s continued to record similarly tender, thoughtful music, often tapping into his extensive network for new collaborators. He’s released this material under a few different names: Headphones, Lo Tom, and (most frequently) his own....

News broke on Monday that Oluwatoyin Salau, a 19-year-old Black Lives Matter activist, was found dead in Tallahassee days after she’d tweeted about being sexually assaulted by a Black man. On Tuesday a video of a young Black woman being thrown into a Dumpster by a group of Black men went viral, and later the same day a video of a Black man hitting a Black woman in the face with a skateboard spread across tens of thousands of Twitter feeds....

Joe Berrios—one of the last vestiges of Chicago machine politics who stacked his payroll with relatives and oversaw a vastly unfair property tax system—is out. “I think that he’s probably going to enjoy his retirement, but he wants to make sure the office is transitioned in a great way,” said Jacob Kaplan, executive director of the Cook County Democratic Party. Even though Fritz Kaegi is the favorite to win and is leading in the results, the election might not be completely resolved tonight, as a third candidate, Andrea Raila, is planning to challenge the results in court....

Producer and songwriter Justice Hill, 29, got his start in the Chicago scene in the mid-2010s playing keyboards as a sideman. He also makes soulful hybrid pop under his own name, and in April he released his debut full-length album, Room With a View. On Saturday, August 14, he’ll play a patio show at the Hideout with his group Nightime Love. I went to Berklee for two and a half years....

Style this well coordinated doesn’t come ready; marketing student Allison Roa, 20, adapted most of her garments to create a cohesive look in which even the shoelaces were accounted for: “I decided to put on green laces with pink and green beads just to match my hair, and then the outfit as a whole,” she says. “The bag, I thrifted it and added a heart pom-pom because it looked too simple on its own....

Last week, we offered a (very partial) guide to some theater and dance events (as well as pop-up performances, playwrights, and artist-activists) that our writers and some curators in the community are excited about this fall. This week, we’re following up with tips from two visual arts curators, as well as ideas for getting out of your house and enjoying some views of other homes and landmarks through (socially distanced) architectural tours....