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Though it opened in 1973, four years before the iconic New York club, Dugan’s Bistro in River North became known as the Studio 54 of the midwest, attracting appearances from Bette Midler, Diana Ross, John Waters, Andy Warhol, among many others, and often as a surprise to the bar’s patrons. But the one star they were almost guaranteed to see was Bob Theiss, better known as the Bearded Lady. While he was writing about Renslow’s bar, many people asked Keehnen what day-to-day life must have been like for these 1970s club kids....

L ast Thursday, the Chicago Reader‘s then-executive editor, Mark Konkol, published a cover that depicted gubernatorial candidate J.B Pritzker sitting on a black lawn jockey. He published it without the knowledge of Edwin Eisendrath, CEO of Sun-Times Media, which owns the Reader. The image was meant to call out the sneak racism of white progressives who call themselves friends to the African-American community, but many in that same community interpreted it as a reduction of black Democrats to a racist trope....

Alejandro González Iñárritu is the nominal director of The Revenant, a historical drama set in the American wilderness of the early 19th century, but the movie doesn’t resemble any of his previous work. Prior to his Oscar-winning Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), his films—Amores Perros (2000), 21 Grams (2003), Babel (2006), Biutiful (2010)—were unbearably dour and self-important, with gimmicky overlapping plots, filmmaking techniques cribbed from Steven Soderbergh, and a message that boiled down to “it’s a small world after all....

In far-west-suburban Westmont, tucked inconspicuously among the boxy office parks and asphalt vistas, sits the International Plaza Shopping Center, a large, frequently desolate Asian supermarket anchoring a somewhat dingy food court, perpetually underlit in spite of a broad skylight. Unlike the grocery, the food court seems to do a brisk business, with folks continually lined up at the China Cafe for hot soy milk and Chinese doughnuts, and on weekends at the neighboring Yu Ton Dumpling House, where the owners stack piles of glistening red-green amaranth, Chinese broccoli, and cabbages harvested from their own farm....

In her famous 1975 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Laura Mulvey argued that Hollywood cinema was structured by male gaze and male identification. The male spectator watches some male hero like, say, Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca or Daniel Craig in a Bond film, as he shoots the bad guys, resists the Nazis, saves England, sweeps women off their feet, and looks cool while making things happen. The watcher gets to feel “the power of the male protagonist as he controls events....

I realize it was only a few days ago that I was complaining about Barack Obama’s reluctance to end the war on drugs by taking a wishy-washy stance and legalizing marijuana. C’mon, Kanye—give me a break. Obama was in office for eight years and nothing in Chicago changed. — KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) April 25, 2018 Celebrities are accountable to no one other than their fan base. Give the fans what they want and it really doesn’t matter how many other people you turn off in the process....

On July 21, Mayor Emanuel broke the bad news to Chicago Public School parents, teachers, and students: Sorry, but we have no money, so I’m going to have to cut another $140 million from our schools—even with all the hype over the so-called bailout deal in Springfield. Yes, folks, it looks like the time has come for me to take another deep dive into the fecund swamp known as our tax increment financing program....

Move over, Celts and Vikings—Mongol-horde metal is here. Traditional Mongolian and Tuvan music make natural raw materials for folk-metal fusion, with their regal, windswept tonal palette, their challenging, eerie-sounding vocal styles, and their epic, equestrian-warrior-themed lyrics. So while I’m not the least bit shocked that the Hu (“hu” is a Mongolian root word for a human) sound as good as they do, I am pleasantly surprised by how fast the band have taken off among mainstream metal and hard-rock fans....

The Drawer Boy The three-person cast of this Redtwist production spend two hours swimming upstream. They’ve all delivered convincing performances with the company before, so the problem likely lies in Michael Healey’s belabored script. It starts implausibly: a young actor wandering the Canadian countryside asks a pair of random, reclusive fiftysomething farmers if he can live with them for a while because he’s, um, writing a play about farmers, and they let him right in....

Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart in Clouds of Sils Maria Today Clouds of Sils Maria begins its first Chicago run at the Landmark Century and the River East 21. To my taste, it’s writer-director Olivier Assayas’s most invigorating feature since Demonlover (2002), and like that film, it suggests a continuation of his early work as a film critic, commenting on particular filmmakers and the current state of cinema as a whole....

When it was announced the Art Institute of Chicago was reopening I swore I wouldn’t go. Museums are severely restricted places in the best of times. Would there be anything left to enjoy while masked, distanced, and subject to mandatory directional signage? Can art, which can give a window to the infinite, be appreciated despite the new and necessary scrims and barriers? Yet, when my old college friend Frank asked if I wanted to go, I was among the first in line outside the entrance to the Modern Wing a few minutes before noon on Thursday, July 30, waiting for the doors to open....

Healthy Chicago 2.0, the city’s new four-year public health plan, “aims to ensure that every child raised in Chicago, regardless of neighborhood and background, has the resources and opportunities to live a healthy life,” according to Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Among the damning disparities the report documents: One in two African-American and Hispanic children live in “low child opportunity” areas, compared with one in 50 white children. (“Child opportunity” is a quality-of-life index based on socioeconomic and other community characteristics influencing a child’s health and development....

On May 30, 2015, Sameena Mustafa, Prateek Srivastava, and Rishika Murthy draped Indian fabric across the walls of Bughouse Theater, cooked up a batch of samosas, and hosted a comedy show. It was the premiere of Simmer Brown, the name of both their monthly stand-up showcase and their south-Asian comedy collective. The inaugural event sold out, and now, one year later, the group are celebrating with a special anniversary program....

In his dark comedy about an avaricious, ill-tempered British plutocrat who switches places with a sweet, mild-mannered American kindergarten teacher (both played with considerable comic verve by Rainn Wilson), Matthew-Lee Erlbach pays homage to a brace of farceurs, among them Eugène Marin Labiche, Georges Feydeau, Joe Orton, Charles Ludlam, and Michael Frayn. But the writer he most closely resembles is Terry Southern. Like Southern, Erlbach is a heavy-duty iconoclast. Before The Doppelgänger is over, no sacred cow is left unslaughtered....

Flash back to just before the presidential election in 2016, when comedians were wringing their hands about then-candidate Donald Trump’s toxic effect on people whose jobs it was to make fun of the news for a living. In an interview with Slate’s Jacob Weisberg, Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me! host Peter Sagal memorably put the conundrum like this: “Well, what does Jonathan Swift do if they actually start eating the babies?...

From February 2015 till it was shut down in January, an unlicensed venue in a former Jehovah’s Witnesses church in Humboldt Park was a routine part of my life. Almost every week I paid tribute to the local arts scene inside the cavernous first floor of 2733 W. Hirsch, home to a collective called Young Camelot. I felt more comfortable there—dwarfed by the old church’s high walls, ambling through a cloud of cigarette smoke in its small kitchen, or pressed by warm bodies against the base of its two-foot-high stage—than I did at any legitimate, licensed venue in the city....

In an age where one’s apartment doubles as an office, therapy patients throughout the city have similarly brought treatment into the home via virtual counseling. “I’ve been living in my tiny apartment and it’s just pure chaos,” she says. “So I sort of have to try to block out everything that’s happening. And I see my clothes on the floor, I see pictures of friends on the wall, and these are things I have to really try to block out and focus on what I’m feeling ....

Can’t find a place to lock your bike? Rack it up to bureaucracy. While an average of 700 bike racks were installed per year while I was there, after I left in early 2007 CDOT slowed the pace to roughly 500 racks annually. Chicago currently has more than 15,000 racks, likely the most of any U.S. city. But since the percentage of Chicago commuters who bike to work has more than tripled in recent decades, from 0....

Twenty years after the release of their self-titled debut LP, freaky supergroup Tomahawk have returned with their fifth and best album yet, Tonic Immobility. Formed in 1999 by the best of the best from the avant-punk and noise-rock scenes, Tomahawk originally consisted of Faith No More and Mr. Bungle vocalist Mike Patton, the Jesus Lizard guitarist Duane Denison, Helmet and Battles drummer John Stanier, and Cows and Melvins bassist Kevin Rutmanis—who has since been replaced by Melvins and Bungle alum Trevor Dunn....

ALISON GREEN Chaz Allen in his room back in 2013 Earlier this week a mashup of Brooklyn chanteuse Lana Del Rey and Atlanta-via-Mississippi rap duo Rae Sremmurd took hold of handfuls of music sites. The tune combines the somber-strings instrumental of Del Rey’s 2011 breakthrough “Video Games” and Rae Sremmurd’s slo-mo, Billboard 100 charting anthem “No Type”; like any good mashup this track, which is dubbed “Lana Del Rae,” reflects its distinct parts and creates its own identity....