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As the new City Council was sworn in this week, aldermen said they were organizing themselves into five different, loosely defined blocs. The Don’t Forget About Labor Caucus: Its members received donations from at least one of Chicago’s leading public-employee unions: SEIU, the Chicago Teachers Union, and AFSCME. Though smaller in size and influence than the Becky Carroll bunch, this group is supposed to make sure that the council occasionally listens to people other than the hedge fund operators, investment bankers, and other big-money donors who financed Chicago Forward and the mayor’s reelection....

Powerhouse drummer Mark Guiliana gives two performances with his agile quartet Sunday night at Constellation (the first show sold out, so a second has been added at 10 PM). His terrific band features players who lead their own projects, and two of them, Cuban-born pianist Fabian Almazan and Cleveland-based saxophonist Jason Rigby, have released strong records this year that illustrate their range—their approaches are very different from the fusion-informed rhythmic aggression and complexity of Guiliana’s band....

This is what the bad guys did in WWII: rounded up entire families of innocent citizens on the basis of inherited group identity, tore them from their homes, businesses, schools, and jobs, and sent them to concentration camps. The opera, with music by genre-blending composer Jack Perla, and libretto by Jessica Murphy Moo, was commissioned by Seattle Opera, where it was first performed in 2015. (The cast here includes So Young Park as Setsuko; Nina Yoshida Nelsen and Ao Li as her parents; and Christopher Magiera and Catherine Martin as the buyers of their home; Daniela Candillari will conduct....

Michael Gebert Decor from the ceiling, spices on the wall at Marigold Maison in Bannockburn Considering how alien Indian food must have seemed at first to, well, anybody from any other food culture in America, the ubiquitous Indian buffet is a stroke of marketing genius in terms of gaining early acceptance and making the food accessible. But the buffets’ interchangeable dishes of brightly colored gravies made it unnecessary to ever actually learn anything about the cuisine....

It is spectacular and unsurprising that Captain Marvel, a vivid action-adventure centered on the rise of Carol Danvers, is the first film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe led by a female superhero. The old and stubbornly held Hollywood belief that a superhero movie starring a woman would flop was bolstered by some painful evidence: the critical and financial failures of Supergirl (1984), Tank Girl (1995), Catwoman (2004), and Elektra (2005). Enter Wonder Woman in 2017, a triumph by every measure for DC and Warner Bros....

Alderman Scott Waguespack (32nd) was grilling a witness about the assessed value of property sold by the city to a developer when the witness interrupted. Reifman, whose last day on the job is May 20, was patiently answering Waguespack’s questions about the Cortland/Chicago River tax increment financing (TIF) district at an April 8 meeting of the City Council’s finance committee. Months before the City Council approved both complexes, the planning department’s Reifman kept showing up in the press and at public meetings “plansplaining” the need for the combined 28 million square feet of development and $2....

The barbecue gods are cruel. No one knows better the Sisyphean challenges of making good barbecue than Bruns. Twice a week for two summers, the Tru and Spiaggia vet and his wife Taylor trudged across the North Avenue Bridge to the beach, pushing wheelbarrows and dragging wagons full of produce from Green City Market to a small kiosk owned by the Park District, equidistant between Fullerton and North Avenues. They also brought their own oak wood and meat and a combination smoker-grill setup that they chained to the wall....

Jessica Risker has learned to enjoy playing music onstage, but it’s mostly a means to an end for her. “Being in a band is a necessity for what I actually enjoy most, which is writing songs and recording,” she says. She’s loved listening to and making music for her whole life—she took piano lessons as a child, learned flute and saxophone in school band programs, and taught herself guitar in high school in the late 90s—but it wasn’t till February 2007, when she was 28, that she finally finished a recording of her songs....

Moniker Records co-owner Jordan Reyes tells Gossip Wolf that he’s long planned to move back to Chicago from Minneapolis, and this month he became a local yokel again. Welcome back! As usual, Reyes has plenty on his plate, including a new tape label called American Damage with two releases on Friday, January 19. Autumn Casey of east-coast noise-rock duo Snakehole makes her solo debut with This Is No Dream, which Reyes describes as “a creepy piano/musique concréte type thing....

Back in 2016 when she was still practicing law in Chicago, Loy Webb spent four hours every other Saturday mentoring teen girls. It wasn’t potential lawyers crowding unused rehearsal rooms at the Goodman, eager to talk with Webb. The young women wanted to know about theater criticism, from analyzing sound design to cleaning up dangling participles. Webb spent a year with the Young Critics program, helping a team of nonmale critics usher in the coming generation....

Chicago has distinctive and well-manicured parks to be sure, but for a stroll off the beaten path on a nice day, local mentalist and magician Neil Tobin urges folks to explore the city’s cemeteries, the north side’s Rosehill in particular. “Most people completely overlook [them],” says Tobin, “because we’ve become a culture that tries really hard to ignore death. We happen to have a place in the middle of our city that occupies 350 acres right next to Andersonville....

Many of this year’s hit movies have been sequels or remakes, though as Kyle Westphal of the Chicago Film Society likes to note, Hollywood has been recycling popular intellectual properties for generations. So for this week’s Movie Tuesday post, I thought I’d spotlight five remakes and sequels in American cinema that actually improve upon their predecessors. These are rare feats, considering that the film-based-on-another-film subgenre has got to be one of the hardest in which to produce an outright masterpiece....

Noisy Chicago indie-rock trio Geronimo! announced last year that they’d be calling it quits in early 2015, and to Gossip Wolf’s dismay, they’re staying true to their word. It looks like they’re taking their last live leap on Sat 3/28, playing a show at Beat Kitchen with Meat Wave, Foul Tip, Vaya, and Velocicopter. Next week Geronimo! will release a farewell EP, Buzz Yr Girlfriend: Vol. 4—Why Did You Leave Me?...

In Adam “Amine” Daniel’s breakout video for “Caroline,” the Portland rapper goofs around with pals in the parking lot of a classic drive-in burger joint, in a car—and on top of said car while it’s in motion. He also drops a skit into the middle of the video (which has amassed more than 200 million YouTube views since 2016), an absurd bit in which he asks about the bananas scattered behind him in the car that, according to the driver, are for “decoration....

Q: My little dick has always held me back. I didn’t date in high school because I couldn’t stand the thought of girls discussing my tiny manhood. That said, I’ve adapted fairly well and become skilled with my tongue and hands. The biggest problem is that my dick is just small enough that the head pokes straight forward and can be seen through my pants. I never tuck in a shirt because of it....

As of this month, Chicago is out another $22 million in police misconduct payouts. First, the city settled one lawsuit—brought by the family of Bettie Jones, an innocent bystander shot by police officer Robert Rialmo, who also killed Quintonio LeGrier in December 2015—for $16 million. A few days later, the City Council authorized a $6 million payment for two other police misconduct settlements. A report about the cost of police misconduct settlements and judgments recently published by the Action Center on Race & the Economy, a group that researches racial injustice in the financial industry, estimates that Chicago has paid out more than $800 million for police misconduct lawsuits since 2004....

Avondale Restaurant Crawl A foodie desert no more, Avondale is one of the hottest hoods for good eating. This neighborhood crawl kicks off in Brands Park, then moves on to 12 area restaurants including Honey Butter Fried Chicken, Parachute, and Square Bar. Wed 6/1, 6-9 PM, Brands Park, 3259 N. Elston, 773-478-2414, avondaleneighborhoodassoc.com, $30, $25 in advance. Popstar: Never Stop Never StoppingSpinal Tap meets Justin Bieber in the Lonely Island’s faux documentary of pop singer Conner4Real (Andy Samberg), who leaves his boy band, the Style Boyz, behind in search of a solo career....

UPDATE Thursday, March 12: this event has been canceled. Refunds available at point of purchase. This musical version of the 1987 Michael J. Fox vehicle, receiving its world premiere at the Paramount Theatre in Aurora, tells a sweet, lighthearted story—plucky young man climbs the ladder of success from mail room to executive suite—that feels a lot like an updated version of Frank Loesser’s 1961 Broadway hit How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, only without the bite or wit or heart....

You may have heard about the instigating event of the 1919 Chicago race riot. On Sunday, July 27, Eugene Williams, a Black teenager, inadvertently floated across an invisible line into the “white section” of the water at the 29th Street Beach, where he was stoned by a white man and drowned. A week of rioting followed, ending with 38 more people dead and more than 500 wounded. During the second decade of the 20th century, with the advent of World War I and the Great Migration, Chicago’s Black population grew significantly....

A large crowd braved a snowstorm to come out to Savage Love Live at Boston’s Wilbur Theatre last week. Questions were submitted on index cards, which allowed questioners to remain anonymous and forced them to be succinct. I got to as many of them as I could over two long, raucous, boozy hours. Here are some of the questions I didn’t have time for. A: Relationships end for all sorts of different reasons—boredom, neglect, contempt, betrayal, abuse—but all relationships that don’t end survive for the same reason: the people in them just keep not breaking up....