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On the first-floor stage of iO Theater eight years ago, the members of Cook County Social Club started performing scenes about fellatio. Why? It’s unclear. Cook County Social Club moves at lightning speed—troupe member Brendan Jennings got on his knees without hesitation, ready to perform stage fellatio on Mark Raterman, as per the scene’s needs, and Raterman immediately turned around and dropped trou. Cook County Social Club consists of Jennings, Raterman, Bill Cochran, Greg Hess, and Tim Robinson (who was a cast member on Saturday Night Live for one season)....

When DJ outfit Groupie Love, aka rapper Vic Mensa and producer Smoko Ono, played Emporium in Wicker Park late Monday night I managed to catch a little bit of their set. I didn’t stick around long enough to catch Mensa roll out “U Mad,” his latest unreleased collaboration with Kanye West, but I did see Mensa bust out a track Chief Keef dropped at the beginning of October called “Faneto.” Released a few weeks before Keef’s public fallout with Interscope “Faneto” has slowly evolved into an underground hit—it’s garnered more than six million plays on YouTube alone....

This week’s poster is for an outdoor concert that actually happened last weekend, but the location was secret until the last minute. Artist Steve Walters, who has previously appeared in the Reader, designed this poster for west suburban venue FitzGerald’s and its first-ever “drive-in” show, featuring the Waco Brothers. Ticket holders were told that the show would take place within ten miles of FitzGerald’s, and on the day it happened they were notified of the exact location via e-mail....

On my way home from work one night in the summer of 2007, I parked in the lot of a shuttered Pizza Hut while I grabbed a burrito from La Pasadita. I’d made it about three steps out of the parking lot when I realized I didn’t have my wallet, so I turned around and headed back to my car. The apprehension I felt at seeing a man standing next to it in the dark turned into a different kind of dread as he explained that there was a boot on my car, it would cost $75 to get it off, and he would be recording our conversation....

As far as I can tell, Tracy Letts has two basic points to make in his new dark comedy The Minutes, getting its world premiere now in a compellingly strange production at Steppenwolf Theatre. One of them is fairly obvious, almost banal given the current cultural moment. The other not so much. The Minutes unfolds over the course of a single meeting of the Big Cherry city council on a portentously stormy night....

L ast October the Indianapolis Museum of Art—an improbably grand institution for a midsize midwestern metropolis—was either gloriously reborn or notoriously trashed. “[M]useums are cultural treasures, not amusement parks,” Capps argued, pinning the blame squarely on the director: “Venable has turned a grand encyclopedic museum into a cheap Midwestern boardwalk.” Organized in 1883 as the Art Association of Indianapolis, the museum has been in its current location nearly 50 years thanks to the heirs to the Eli Lilly and Company pharmaceutical fortune....

According to the Pew Research Center, Gen Z—young people currently aged 14-22—are even more liberal and politically engaged than their predecessors, the millennials. With Free Street Theater’s Parched (Stories About Water, Pollution & Theft), Chicago gets a sip of this generation’s activism and a grassrootsy dramatization of water politics. Devised over the course of ten months by Free Street’s youth ensemble, students aged 14-19, Parched is driven by vignettes drawn from interviews with researchers, activists, and community members....

Willie Wilson was wearing a suit with an American flag pin on the lapel. He stood in front of a pair of local reporters in a downtown hotel in Columbia, South Carolina, waiting to hear the results of the February 27 Democratic presidential primary. The room was nearly empty, but a few supporters and one Black Lives Matter activist milled about, chatting with each other and with the candidate. “I’m not a quitter,” Wilson said as the results rolled in....

In the Greek myth of Pandora’s box, a curious woman opens a box and releases all manner of evil into the world. Once the box is open, there’s no closing it, and only hope is left at the bottom. This story came back to me as I watched Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World, Werner Herzog’s rumination on the range of digital systems and devices that govern our world....

Q: I’m a 21-year-old woman, and I have an IUD. I’ve had sex with quite a few men, and one thing seems to be almost constant among them: trying to fuck without condoms. Many of the men I’ve been with seem to be perfectly fine and terribly eager to have sex without condoms. This has always angered me. They generally assume or make sure I’m on birth control, which they immediately take to mean condom-free sex is welcome....

For nearly 20 years multi-instrumentalist Scott Hirsch has quietly sculpted rich landscapes of expansive Americana in San Francisco’s the Court and Spark. More recently, he’s collaborated with that band’s old front man, MC Taylor, on Taylor’s solo project, Hiss Golden Messenger. But a couple of years ago Hirsch finally stepped out on his own, and in 2016 he produced an album of kaleidoscopic range and beauty that encompasses his varied interests....

Brian Jackson/Sun-Times Media What’s the fun of cleaning up the last guy’s messes if you can’t make some of your own? On Wednesday the City Council overwhelming voted to borrow $1.1 billion to pay the debt on some of Mayor Daley’s really bad deals, including his decision to buy Michael Reese Hospital. That’s my take on Mayor E.’s plan to revive Mayor Daley’s dream of building an express train to O’Hare airport, even though there’s no tracks on which it can run and nobody around town really wants or needs it ’cause we already have a train that runs from the Loop to O’Hare....

Aimee Levitt Roast beef sandwich and chips Like many people who work in offices and who would rather sleep as late as possible instead of getting up early to prepare and pack elaborate lunches, I eat a lot of sandwiches. I wouldn’t say I’m a connoisseur exactly, but I have some firm opinions about what makes a good sandwich. Pleasing though the sandwiches are, the real standout at Andorka’s is a side of their potato chips....

If you’ve ever heard of Chicago composer, singer, and multi-instrumentalist Ayanna Woods, it might have been at Constellation, where groups such as Fifth House Ensemble and ZRL have performed her works. Or maybe her music has streamed through your headphones while you were listening to Eve Ewing’s new podcast Bughouse Square. Woods’s songs, including “Has to Be,” have also been featured in the web series Brown Girls, and in 2017 she appeared alongside Ewing and poet Nate Marshall in the Manual Cinema live-action film performance No Blue Memories—The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks....

The Music Box Theatre was built in 1929 and it feels the way many older, well-preserved buildings feel: beautiful, a little mysterious, and deeply, deeply haunted. It’s the exact sort of place one would expect to see a ghost. Back then, the theater still showed movies on 35 mm film. This meant that Jacobs was responsible for changing over one reel of film to the next in both booths. The process is fairly straightforward: “You watch the little window for that cigarette burn,” she explains, “and then you have to [switch] the audio and the picture at the same time....

Bay Area clarinetist Ben Goldberg always seems to be widening his creative portfolio, applying his restrained virtuosity to an ever-increasing number of pursuits and styles. I first took note of his work in the early 90s, when his New Klezmer Trio melded sometimes raucous, sometimes sorrowful Jewish music with the language of free jazz. Since then he’s turned up in tons of disparate contexts, some emphasizing his melodic gifts, others stressing his skills as a superb group improviser....

UPDATE: the Thursday March 12 show has been canceled and rescheduled for Tuesday, 10/20/20 at 7 PM. It will remain at the Chicago Theatre. Tickets for March 12 will be honored for the new date. Refund information is available at point of purchase. Every member of the Grateful Dead played a vital role in the band: Jerry Garcia was the spaced-out leader, Mickey Hart was the shamanic spiritual guide, and Phil Lesh was the giant brain....

Ten years ago, Jim Becker sought out yoga and meditation teacher Lama Lobsang Palden, hoping to find physical and spiritual healing. But at the end of their first encounter, Palden told the local multi-instrumentalist that they should make an album together. Three years later, they began the protracted process that resulted in the new Drag City release Compassion. Becker, who’s played with Califone, Iron & Wine, and Lanzón, recorded Palden’s chants and percussion while accompanying him on acoustic stringed instruments....

Consider the following fighting words. They’re the end-of-year message from the executive vice president of the Illinois Policy Institute to the friends of IPI. Bold new ideas don’t matter much if no one knows what they are. IPI offers content to media outlets around the state, and among the news shops that take advantage of it is the Sun-Times. It carries op-eds by Scott Reeder, executive editor of IPI’s media arm, the Illinois News Network....

Rob Mazurek came up through Chicago’s jazz community, and the Chicago Underground Duo (his long-standing partnership with drummer Chad Taylor, which has past lives as a trio, a quartet, and an orchestra) attests to his ongoing identification with the city’s heritage of genre-defying improvisational music. But Mazurek, whose artistic practice encompasses free improvisation, large-scale composition, sound and light installations, and painting, is as restless geographically as he is creatively. This summer Astral Spirits Records will release three CDs of music inspired by his sojourns in other parts of the world....