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Taxi doorings can happen to anyone on a bike, including yours truly. About 20 years ago I was cycling southeast on Lincoln toward Fullerton, pulling up to the late, great rock club Lounge Ax for a Jesus Lizard show. A cabbie came to a sudden stop in front of me and his passenger popped open the rear right door in my path, sending me flying onto the pavement. Unbelievably, I was unhurt, but my bent front wheel resembled a Pringles potato chip....

On Tuesday, September 13, a burger joint in Fresno, California, called Take 3 transformed itself into a pop-up restaurant called the Powamekka Cafe, named after a business Tupac Shakur once dreamed of opening. Tupac’s restaurant would’ve used other rappers’ recipes, but they weren’t on the menu at Take 3’s pop-up. According to Billboard, the options at Powamekka included “Tupac-inspired dishes such as ‘Thug Passion’ cake pops, ‘Mac-and-Cheeseburgers’ or even a ‘California Love’ chicken sandwich....

Q: I’m a twentysomething straight woman. About a month ago, I had a really vivid dream in which I was at a party and engaging with a guy I had just met. We were seriously flirting. Then my fiance showed up—my real, flesh-and-blood, sleeping-next-to-me fiance—who we’ll call G. In the dream, I proceeded to shower G with attention and PDA; I was all over him in a way we typically aren’t in public....

Chicago rapper Joseph Chilliams is one of the tens of millions of Americans for whom the night of November 8, 2016, was a nightmare. But Chilliams’s evening went south even before the election was decided. While walking home in Austin, he was robbed of his wallet and backpack (the latter empty but for a broken umbrella and some Altoids) and badly beaten. His assailants left him bleeding on the ground with a shattered face....

Veteran conguero Sammy Figueroa is steeped in the heritage of Latin music (he’s the son of 1940s Puerto Rican bolero singer Charlie Figueroa), but 50 percent of his sound is jazz. In that world, he’s worked with artists such as Miles Davis, Chet Baker, and Sonny Rollins as a sideman, and he’s made his mark on pop as well, providing persuasive percussion behind mainstream artists such as Mariah Carey and Dr....

Last month London hardcore label La Vida Es un Mus released a digital edition of Doble LP Discografía, the career-spanning compilation of the music of Pilsen punk heroes Los Crudos. Long-running Bay Area punk zine Maximum Rocknroll originally released the Crudos collection last year as a fund-raiser to help sustain itself, and La Vida Es un Mus handled the physical and digital version for the European release—it coincided with Los Crudos’ European tour last month....

Except for The Return (2003), Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev has shot all his films in wide-screen. The format is crucial to the thematic content because Zvyagintsev uses negative space within the frame to convey his characters’ sense of alienation. This technique peaked with the searing anti-Putin allegory Leviathan (2014), Zvyagintsev’s best film to date, in which his compositions take on a political dimension, making the characters seem like pawns in a system beyond their control....

At 6:15 PM on Sunday, December 4, in the middle of the season’s first real snowfall, there was already a line snaking down the block and around the corner at Ashland and Foster, awaiting entry to the Neo-Futurists’ second-floor theater and another sold-out performance in the 28-year run of Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind. In 1988, given the opportunity to create a late-night weekend show at Stage Left, Allen, then 26, came up with a concept he’d been thinking about since he studied Italian futurism at Oberlin College....

Dozens of activists gathered—and one was arrested—in the west side neighborhood of North Lawndale Wednesday evening during a series of #BlackLivesMatter events that included a rally, a community party, and a civil disobedience action. As more than 20 police officers stood by (the number of cops more than doubled over the course of the evening), activists gathered in front of the entrance to Homan Square. Activists taken into police custody Wednesday during police divestment rally #LetUsBreathe Collective, Black Youth Project 100, and other activists gathered in Homan Square Wednesday for protest and party....

F ew genres stoke snobbery quite like the humble American sitcom. It’s a pity how many viewers write off the format altogether, because for the last few years, the much-maligned art form has been doing much of the creative heavy lifting in reframing thorny social discussions as approachable, empathy-building entertainment as well as in telling stories by and of people of color. Incensed and motivated by a false sense of entitlement, Lillian’s daughters (Louise Lamson, Linsey Page Morton, and Grace Smith) conspire to change their mother’s mind, employing tactics ranging from Wile E....

Santina Croniser An actual sushi roll at Shiawase Shiawase means “happiness” in Japanese, according to the Lakeview restaurant’s website. The fact that the place is BYO and I could get a table without a reservation at around 7 on a Saturday made me happy. The food, though, which ranged from excellent to baffling, produced varying levels of happiness. And I still don’t know how to feel about the sushi roll that was arranged around a battery-operated plastic ice cube flashing red, blue, and green lights (the shredded radish mounded on top of it completed the look)....

More proof that the zeitgeist has shifted: at an earlier historical moment than the one we’re living through now, Stephen Fedo and Tim Rhoze’s new based-on-fact play, A Home on the Lake, might’ve been presented as the story of a brave and canny businessman—a sort of African-American George Bailey—who makes huge sacrifices and absorbs terrible insults to help an expanding black population buy homes in Evanston during the 1920s. But that was an earlier historical moment....

My brother Keegan shrugged when I asked if he’s a Trump supporter. I began interviewing my brother about politics during the Thanksgiving weekend, for one, because I was interested in deflating the myth that having a civil conversation with relatives who supported a different presidential candidate than you was an impossibility, a risky feat akin to dismantling a bomb. “We are all afraid—of trends beyond our control, of neighbors and loved ones who suddenly seem grotesquely alien,” opined a Slate columnist in a post called “The Post-Trump Thanksgiving....

What exactly drives tens of thousands of asylum seekers to travel weeks, months, even years to come to the United States? Those who make the perilous journey north are often at the mercy of coyotes, police, and thieves as they trek through unknown territory by bus and on foot. For many, however, what’s behind them is worse than the unknown that they face: to return home simply means not to survive....

My family and I used to have an inside joke. We wanted to open a restaurant that would showcase my Israeli mother’s cooking, and we’d name all the dishes after her. There’d be the “Get Out of Bed” chicken soup, the “Please Pray for Parking” schnitzel, and of course, the “Water the Garden” salad. And we’d name the new establishment after the queen of our household, the Hebrew word for “mom”: ema....

Songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer Xavier Dphrepaulezz, better known as Fantastic Negrito, takes us on a trip through his consciousness on his latest album, Have You Lost Your Mind Yet? (Cooking Vinyl/Blackball Universe). He confronts heavy issues such as mental illness, addiction, and gun violence, and filters them all through the lens of his own life experiences. These personal and passionate songs sound nothing like the stylized music he performed in the mid-90s, when he established a solo career under his first name and landed a record deal with Interscope, issuing one album of funk and neosoul....

Whether she’s playing keyboards or leading a jazz orchestra, Satoko Fujii revels in the dynamic range of the sounds at her disposal. On Fukushima (Libra 2017), she elicits sounds of forlorn birdsong and mass destruction from a group of New York musicians, and with her band Gato Libre, the most recent to visit Chicago, her accordion playing covers a similarly broad spectrum. Fujii obtains even greater range from the piano, the instrument she uses the most....

Welcome to the Reader‘s weekday news briefing. Holocaust denier expected to win GOP nomination for area Congressional seat Holocaust denier Arthur Jones is poised to become the Republican nominee for the Third Congressional District, representing parts of Chicago and nearby suburbs, according to the Sun-Times. Jones, 70, the sole Republication candidate for the office currently held by Democrat Dan Lipinski, says he’s a former leader of the American Nazi Party and is now affiliated with America First....

Roaring out of the gate in the early 80s as a tight, inventive thrash unit, Quebecois legends Voivod quickly became as sticky as a ball of Velcro, picking up influences from prog, industrial, modern classical, and technical death metal. They’ve forged a singular path of sci-fi tech metal that’s become highly influential in heavy music and beyond, but they’ve also endured their share of bad luck and tragedy—a late-90s car crash badly injured bassist and vocalist Eric “E-Force” Forrest, and in 2005 original guitarist Denis “Piggy” D’Amour passed away from cancer....

Upon its opening in 1982 at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., “Black Folk Art in America, 1930-1980” shook the art world. The show was the first to highlight the work of self-taught black artists and introduced curators to an “undiscovered” scene that flourished in close-knit black communities in the South. To many black artists, however, the Corcoran show reeked of marginalization. Many significant black folk artists were excluded, and some challenged the distinction Corcoran made between fine art and folk art....