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Aging is wild. You wake up one day and realize that Matt McGachy, who joined Cryptopsy in 2007, has had the longest tenure of any of the four vocalists who’ve fronted the beloved Canadian technical death metal band, and also that your knees don’t work very well anymore. I vividly remember metal-forum wars over which was was better: the guttural incoherence of original singer Lord Worm or the hardcore theatrics of his replacement, Mike DiSalvo....

You can always find great musicians on the streets of Chicago, but not usually members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. But now those performers are walking a picket line, striking mostly for something American workers of the last century commonly had: a dependable pension. This “defined contribution” plan is what most private-sector employees have now, if they’re lucky enough to have any employer- funded retirement benefits. If you have a 401(k) at work, it’s what you’ve got....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, October 4, 2017. Inspector general report: Chicago Police Department wasting money on overtime pay The Chicago Police Department has been wasting millions of dollars on overtime pay for police officers, and the extra hours have caused burnout in the force, according to a new report from Chicago inspector general Joseph Ferguson. “CPD’s management of overtime speaks directly to how inefficient management can lead to wide scale waste and a culture of abuse,” Chicago inspector general Joseph Ferguson said in a statement....

AP Photo/Matt Marton George McCaskey People say things every day that make us cringe, but nothing lately has hit me in the pit of my stomach like George McCaskey’s explanation of why the Bears took a flyer on Ray McDonald. San Francisco had cut the defensive end because his “pattern of poor decision-making” could “no longer be tolerated.” McCaskey had his own doubts; but the Bears need a few decent football players, and when McDonald’s own mother and his college coach, not to mention McDonald himself, pleaded his case, McCaskey’s heart melted....

On the evening of June 17, 1935, Victor de Visé and his young sons arrived in Chicago after pedaling 793 miles from Trenton, New Jersey, over 13 days on their bicycles. They had 2,349 more miles to go. Why Victor would choose to lead his sons on a 3,000-mile bicycle ride is a question I never heard a satisfactory answer to in childhood—Victor died a few years after I was born....

When you hear the word “bread,” what do you imagine? A bakery? A sandwich? The beginning of a meal? Isabelle Frances McGuire, who rejects gender binaries and doesn’t seem to approach anything in a straightforward way, thinks of the artist’s own body. The title “I’m a Cliché” comes from the song “I Am a Cliché” by 70s British punk band X-Ray Spex, whose lyrics often dealt with feminism and anti-consumerism. Relatedly, the setup at Prairie Gallery is somewhat spartan—a small, windowless room whose walls and floor are painted white....

Adverses Chicago novelist, poet and playwright Rey Andújar is equal parts philosopher, aesthete, and insurrectionist—all put to expert use in this savvy, ceaselessly inventive reworking of Euripides’s Electra. This time queen Clitemnestra is a power-hungry, pseudo-feminist nymphomaniac, while princess Electra is a wannabe Marxist revolutionary. Andújar’s stage world is impishly nonsensical (murdered King Agamemnon’s coffin has air holes cut in it), yet the malignant passions that consume everyone—jealousy, ambition, lust, revenge—are unsettlingly true to life....

By definition, vodka should be odorless and flavorless. Kalak Single Malt Vodka is neither—and that’s exactly why bartender Julia Momose likes it. “What I love is the fact that the flavors really shine through,” she says. “I get notes of lemon, freshly baked brioche and croissants, hints of cacao. It’s opened up the possibilities for vodka—that it has all this flavor and complexity that can be played with [in cocktails] is really intriguing....

UPDATE Saturday, March 14: this event has been canceled. Refunds available at point of purchase. Once upon a time, in a room that looked like a fifth-grade classroom after a firebombing followed by an era of mildew, a man named Katurian (Martel Manning) was being questioned. Katurian was a writer of stories that felt like Edward Gorey had infiltrated the dreams of Franz Kafka. In a totalitarian dictatorship such as he was in, the resemblance of recent child murders to the themes of his writing has been taken as practical proof of his guilt....

Move over, Divvy: a new form of bike share could be coming to town. The new bikes are rolling out in cities across the country, including Rockford, which earlier this month got 500 bright green bikes maintained by the San Mateo company LimeBike. That company is one of several vying to operate in Chicago—causing concerns among other operators because Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s former top adviser, David Spielfogel, is on LimeBike’s board of directors....

Chicago artist Nesbitt “Nez” Wesonga broke out in the early 2010s with hip-hop production crew Nez & Rio. By 2014, they’d helped make a bona fide hit album: Schoolboy Q’s Oxymoron features three Nez & Rio tracks, including the triumphant single “Man of the Year.” Q had previously enlisted the duo for 2012’s “Druggys Wit Hoes Again,” which contains flashes of Chicago house—and nearly a decade later, Nez is still finding ways to express his love of house music....

Last year Chicago rapper Fatimah Warner, better known as Noname, explained to Greenroom magazine why she was going to call her forthcoming debut mixtape Telefone: “I like the idea of what it means to be on the phone with someone for the very first time and all its little intricate idiosyncrasies. From the awkwardness to the laughter or various intimate conversations you can have over the phone, I want my project to be very conversational....

Magician David Parr brings old-school magic to life every week at the Chicago Magic Lounge. But the magic isn’t limited to when Parr takes the stage. Hidden behind a laundromat, the Chicago Magic Lounge immerses visitors in a replica of an early 20th-century magic bar, once a staple of the city. The atmosphere leaves little to the imagination, complete with period-appropriate decor, a cocktail menu, and up-and-coming magicians performing tableside tricks in the hour leading up to Parr’s performance....

It’s back to fantasy gig posters this week! John Vernon Forbes (of the band Tijuana Hercules, covered in this week’s Gossip Wolf) brings us this tribute to Roy Head, a Texas singer-songwriter best known for his 1965 soul hit “Treat Her Right.” Head’s onstage gyrations and dance moves could look like high-speed advanced yoga, and he often ended up in pretzel-like positions, much to the delight of his fans. Not everybody can make a fantasy gig poster, of course, but it’s simple and free to take action through the website of the National Independent Venue Association—click here to tell your representatives to save our homegrown music ecosystems....

These are heady times in Chicago. We recently inaugurated Lori Lightfoot as our first black, female, and openly gay mayor, and she immediately signed an executive order to end aldermanic privilege. That dubious tradition has allowed City Council members to veto good projects within their wards, including sustainable transportation initiatives. To get a better sense of what other improvements for walking, biking, and transit are in store, I reached out to the dozen freshman aldermen to ask about their transportation priorities, and several got back to me by press time....

Taryn Allen Especially as the pandemic continues to escalate, going home for the holidays this year doesn’t really feel like an option. But then it’s like the devil appears on my other shoulder, telling me to just say, “fuck it, life is short and the world is ending anyway.” I see people on social media taking vacations, enjoying restaurants, and seeing their parents, so why shouldn’t I? (I know why.)...

In September 2017, Muhammad Habib Ismail joined fellow Rohingya Muslims on a march through downtown Chicago. The march, organized by the Rohingya Cultural Center, was to protest the Myanmar military’s campaign of rape, arson, and killing of Rohingya in northern Rakhine State, which UN investigators found to have been carried out “with genocidal intent.” In Malaysia, where refugees are classified together with undocumented immigrants, Ismail’s family did not have access to public services or legal employment....

God knows what Victor, a hapless English professor holed up in his temporary university office, is up to at the beginning of Neo-Futurist Lily Mooney’s new play. Pants around his ankles, he kneads his stomach with a pillow and then his fists, grunting noncommittally as though caught between masturbation and vocal warm-ups. In barges Mooney, calling herself Herself but also admitting (eventually) to being the evening’s playwright, coy, detached, vaguely threatening, alternately insisting that Victor has failed her and that he must read her paper on Frankenstein—or more accurately, on Mary Shelley’s introduction to Frankenstein, since she acknowledges she never read the novel....

Q: This is another request for a kinky neologism. How about those of us who like the idea of our significant other having sex with somebody else but who aren’t into full-on cuckold-style humiliation? “Cuckold” implies a level of subordination that just isn’t my thing, and “hotwifing,” besides sounding incredibly sleazy, assumes that it’s a couple that is opposite sex and married, and the guy is only interested in watching....

Over the summer a friend sat me down and had me watch the documentary For Grace. She had just visited Grace, the three-Michelin-star restaurant in the West Loop that’s featured in the film, to shoot a video with owner and head chef Curtis Duffy for Escoffier Culinary School’s online program and was in awe of the food, the restaurant, and the man behind it all. As someone who’s more likely to be found eating pizza at a dive bar than sitting for a multicourse meal at the most expensive restaurant in Chicago, watching the movie was the closest I ever thought I’d get to this experience....