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Start August off strong with some of our recommended events: Mon 8/1: Live storytelling show the Moth hosts its GrandSLAM Championship at the Athenaeum Theatre (2936 N. Southport), which brings together the winners of Chicago’s past ten StorySLAMS to compete for the GrandSLAM Champion title. 8 PM Mon 8/1: See avant-garde rock collective Lovely Little Girls—along with Bobby Conn, Walking Bicycles, and Chorus of Shadows—at the Empty Bottle (1035 N....

The proud and ancient lobstering traditions of Minnesota have until now remained relatively obscure. But from the Chippewa pulling bugs out of Lake Superior to the Minnesota food truck sourcing certified Lake Calhoun crustaceans, it’s been one of the state’s best-kept secrets. This 100-gallon stockpot produces one of two main signatures at Smack Shack: a straightforward lobster boil with the arthropods scalded red and sold by the pound, served on a metal tray with corn on the cob, red potatoes, slaw, a Leon’s Polish sausage, toasted milk bread, drawn butter, and a cup of the brew in which the beast was boiled....

Paris based, second-generation electronic musician James Kent has a background in black metal (check out his other project, L’Enfant de la Forêt, for a more primeval dark-fantasy ambience), but his synthwave projects evoke a much colder and more subtle form of uneasiness. His releases as Perturbator are steeped in a neo-cyberpunk aesthetic that gradually gets under one’s skin with a sense of oncoming doom befitting a dark sci-fi film. His fifth full-length, New Model (Blood Music), is a loose concept album inspired by Roko’s basilisk—a concept proposed on a “rationalist” Internet forum in 2010 that posited the idea of a theoretical future, godlike AI that would torture everyone who didn’t help bring it into being (it might be doing so even now, in fact)....

Loy A. Webb’s His Shadow: A Parable, enjoyed an enviable premiere run at Berwyn’s 16th Street Theater this fall. The play, about a Black football player torn between his own ambition and a call to social activism, won strong reviews for the story, the three-member cast, the direction, and every other element of the production. It wasn’t until October 20, a day after closing, that the show’s behind-the-scenes drama erupted on social media....

Promoter Peter Jideonwo of Pete’s House says that on Friday night, when G Herbo was supposed to headline the Vic, the Chicago rapper had planned to present Chance the Rapper’s nonprofit Social Works with a check for $20,000. But earlier this week the venue canceled the performance, which Jideonwo had booked, after the Chicago Police Department and the Department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection contacted Jam Productions (owners of the Vic) and expressed concerns about “safety....

Did you know there’s a simple way you can save up to $1200 a year right now? It’s called cutting the cord – or ditching traditional cable TV for streaming alternatives – and it’s easier to do now more than ever. Streaming lets you watch the same shows, movies, and sports that are on traditional TV, but using the internet instead of cable. And most streaming services offer original content you can’t get on cable....

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. But what happens to the memory of war in places where entire families were racked by nightmares through the years: returned soldiers, their wives, their kids, their parents, all jerking awake to overwhelming fears of an impending firebombing? The feelings of scarcity and hunger, the memories of random cruelty and betrayal that become common among people in primal survival mode don’t just fade when a war ends....

Sun-Times Media CEO Edwin Eisendrath released the following statement this evening: “I am announcing today the departure of Mark Konkol from the Reader. Mark came to the publication bringing great hope for a new direction and a new life to a storied brand. Sometimes things don’t work out as planned. A tumultuous ten days culminated in the publication of a Reader cover that we believe was not in line with either our vision for the Reader or that storied history....

I can only imagine how revolutionary the first season of The Bachelor must have been. Back then the premise was: regular guy with a normal job looks for love with a regular girl with a normal job, and the entire nation gets to watch the romance unfold. It was a simpler time (2002), and not every date needed to start with a helicopter ride and end with a private concert. Even the finale was pretty calm: Alex Michel gave his final rose to Amanda Marsh and asked her to be his girlfriend....

If nothing else, the events of 2016 have proven that vast numbers of our countrymen are all too happy to eat shit. In Chicago, of course, we have a higher standard—at least when it comes to restaurants. So even as the rest of the world obediently trundles toward oblivion, at least the city’s restaurateurs have been good enough to provide plenty of estimable places to eat and drink the dread under the table....

The Nutcracker—the 1892 ballet based on a story by E.T.A. Hoffman, set to a score by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and originally credited to choreographer Marius Petipa—has always had a fantastically thin plot. A young girl, born with a silver spoon in her mouth, rides the magic coattails of a mysterious godfather to the Land of Sweets, where the child who already has everything is given still more. The stakes have rarely been so low for a character or an audience....

G.K. Chesterton’s 1908 satire about the battle between order and chaos gets a spirited and beautifully staged production at Lifeline. Though the extreme verbosity of the piece becomes tiresome by about the halfway point of the two-hour-plus show, there are enough visual touches to keep one interested beyond the chatter. The shaggy-dog plot involves a poet recruited by Scotland Yard to infiltrate a supposed anarchist cell. After quickly gaining entry into the inner sanctum, he becomes involved with the anarchists’ various plots to blow up, assassinate, and otherwise disrupt good bourgeois society....

On Saturday, March 10, the Harold Washington Cultural Center in Grand Boulevard hosts an extravaganza to celebrate Chicago rapper Twista and his “25 years in hip-hop.” Would it be obnoxious to point out that his debut album, Runnin’ Off at da Mouth, actually came out in 1992? And that its single “Mr. Tung Twista” dropped in ’91? In any case, Twista is well worth celebrating, and Saturday’s jam-packed lineup includes more than a dozen rap acts, four of whom will perform full sets: PsychoDrama, Phor, the Boy Illinois, and the man of the hour himself!...

Keith Srakocic/AP Pittsburgh mayor Bill Peduto wanted “jagoff” to be included in the dictionary. Journalists are obliged to report what people do. What people say is another matter. If I shoot you, my act of aggression will be described as it occurred. If I insult you I’ll be paraphrased. The American press thoroughly covered the Charlie Hebdo massacre—except it refused to publish examples of the cartoons the Islamist killers claimed to be avenging....

Peter Frampton’s got a right to sing the blues. The versatile guitarist recently revealed he has a degenerative muscle disorder called inclusion body myositis, which means his fingers might eventually stop letting him play his treasured instruments, including his iconic Les Paul. The diagnosis is a cruel blow for Frampton, who while still a teenager played in several 60s British rock bands, joining the Herd and cofounding Humble Pie, and then launched his solo career in 1971; at age 69, he’s still writing music and touring....

This story was originally published by City Bureau on May 11, 2021, and is part of the How a Community Heals series. Rooted in the same sense of community and belonging, at Casa Al-Fatiha immigrants find free community housing and support where they can process, rest, and heal from their experiences in immigration detention centers. Martinez, the first of three asylum seekers to have stayed at Casa Al-Fatiha, left Honduras after being threatened as a student activist for his advocacy and journalism against narcotics trafficking and killings....

Dressed in a GlitterGuts T-shirt under a Hideout sweatshirt, sipping from an Empty Bottle mug, staring at my Reader tote bag (plug!), I can hardly remember a time before I was surrounded by merch from my favorite cultural institutions. But it’s a strangely recent phenomenon, one that was in part sparked by Barrel Maker Printing’s early-in-the-pandemic push to support small businesses with a limited run of T-shirts, $10 of each sale going directly to the business sported on the tee....

Attorney Corri Fetman, 54, doesn’t have the typical resumé of someone running for judge. Fetman says she expected a tough race against Billy Goat Tavern co-owner and Illinois Securities Department enforcement division chief Tom Sianis. But that didn’t prepare her for a Facebook video calling her a “poser” and featuring images from her past presented in a mocking manner by a group tied to a Sianis campaign consultant. It’s an attack ad she sees as being in direct violation of Illinois’s judicial campaign rules....

Richmond-based heavy quartet Book of Wyrms released their second full-length, Remythologizer, in August, following up their accurately if unimaginatively titled 2017 LP, Sci-Fi/Fantasy. The new album immediately establishes a welcome atmosphere: dark, doomy, and highly comforting to anyone raised on a diet of D&D, 70s heavy rock, and ditchweed. Front woman Sarah Moore-Lindsey chants and wails, leading the way through a weird world of hallucinatory images and retrofuturism, while bassist Jay Lindsey (married to Sarah) churns the cauldron and guitarists Kyle Lewis and Ben Coudriet reap the whirlwind....

Q: I’m a gay male in my 40s and I’ve been married to my husband for nine years. There was some mild infidelity on his part (exchanging photos and flirting via text with another guy) early in our relationship. I confronted him at the time, and he lied to me. I decided to let it go, as it was early in the relationship. Fast forward a few years and he gets crabs and gives them to me....