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Aimee Levitt Donut Fest seemed like such a great idea when I volunteered to go—the prospect of spending a cold Sunday morning eating doughnuts and drinking coffee sounded like heaven! Well, what would make it even more heavenly would be to eat the doughnuts and drink the coffee in bed, bundled up in pajamas, instead of having to get dressed and go to Chop Shop in Wicker Park. But nobody was offering to run and fetch the doughnuts and coffee for me, so a trek through a cold, wet snow shower to Chop Shop it was....

T he impulse to render human likenesses of one kind or another has been with us for 40,000 years, since Paleolithic people first scratched figures onto the walls of their caves. But the idea of portraying individuals was thought to be a relatively modern phenomenon until the beginning of the 20th century, when the mummy portraits of Roman Egypt were excavated in the Faiyum region just south of Cairo. “Paint the Eyes Softer,” on view at the Block Museum through April 22, attempts to examine a few of these revelatory paintings not only through art-historical means but also by employing the latest imaging technology with the aim of uncovering these portraitists’ working methods....

Back in the day, NME music writer Andy Gill (not to be confused with the Gang of Four guitarist) described Bauhaus’s 1980 debut full-length, In the Flat Field, as “hip Black Sabbath.” That’s pretty accurate; the only way Gill went wrong was that he meant it as an insult. By the time of the album’s release the British postpunk group had already scored a runaway club hit with their 1979 single “Bela Lugosi’s Dead”—which was subsequently became adopted as the goth national anthem....

Q: I’m a 20-something more-or-less lesbian in an east coast city. I’m primarily into women, and I’m only interested in relationships with women, but I’m sometimes attracted to men and have enjoyed sex with men in the past. For various reasons, I decided a few years ago not to pursue physical stuff with men anymore and I publicly identify as a lesbian. This worked great pre-pandemic, but now, with a tiny social bubble and no dating prospects, I find myself feeling very attracted to a male friend/coworker....

On Wednesday, December 19, Mark Pinski, the general manager for WCPT—Chicago’s progressive talk radio station—took me out for breakfast to give me an “annual performance review” about my afternoon show. And then, just eight days later—on December 27—that very same Pinski, along with Brian Linscott, the company’s COO, called me into the conference room to break a bombshell. Ultimately, I believe I was fired because the top brass didn’t want my left-of-center voice broadcast from their station....

Project Film via Bandcamp Album artwork for Different Rooms Project Film’s debut album, Chicago, was one of the first to come out on the duo’s own label, Tandem Shop, back in 2010. It was also one of the first records I ever reviewed. Scratchy, hissy, and charming in its bare-bones fidelity, the album was recorded while Megan Frestedt and I were both still undergrads at University of Chicago. We’d lived in the same dorm for our first two years at college; after moving out, she joined a band and founded a label with her friend Sam McAllister....

The 13th edition of the Chicago African Diaspora Film Festival—”an eclectic mix of foreign, independent, classic and urban films representing the global black experience”—runs all week at Facets Cinematheque. Following are reviews of selected films; for a full schedule see facets.org. La Pirogue In this 2013 drama, 30 men and a lone female stowaway, ditching their destitute lives in West Africa, embark on a perilous ocean journey from Senegal to Spain....

Among the flurry of bills passed in the five-day January lame duck session in Springfield was the Predatory Loan Prevention Act, a measure that would cap interest rates for consumer loans under $40,000—such as payday loans, installment loans, and auto title loans—at 36 percent. These types of loans often trap consumers in cycles of debt, exacerbate bad credit, lead to bankruptcy, and deepen the racial wealth gap. Some 40 percent of borrowers ultimately default on repaying such loans....

Coinciding with Black History Month, the arts nonprofit Project Onward hosted the opening of its new exhibition, “Distinct Portraits by disAbled Artists,” last Friday at the Bridgeport Art Center. The exhibition showcased portraits of esteemed African-American artists by Project Onward sculptors, painters, and even glitter artists. “Our artists, like their contemporary artists, are just as capable of performing artwork that can go into a museum,” said Gomez. Andrew Hall on Kehinde Wiley: “When I got the commission, I said, ‘I have a great idea for this guy....

Unlike musicians, dancers never put their instruments down. That’s especially true of Red Clay Dance, where the intersection of art and activism falls under a luminous spotlight. Red Clay performances are instigations as well as entertainment, and have been since founder Vershawn Sanders-Ward brought the company to Chicago in 2011, where it made its local premiere at a dance concert at Grand Crossing’s Harold Washington Cultural Center. (A Chicago native, Sanders-Ward founded the company in Brooklyn in 2008; it’s now based in Hyde Park....

As I walk to Wrightwood 659 in the early afternoon, I hear the sound of recess coming from the school to my left, but I don’t see the students. I just see the brick building where they spend most of their day. After a few moments I realize that they are on the roof of the school, where a tall wrought iron fence wraps around where they spend recess. Their voices bounce off buildings that are a barrier on either side....

Back in the Pleistocene era (that is, 1986), I spent a few months living downtown in the now-gone Herman Crown Center, a Roosevelt University residence hall that also sheltered students from Columbia College Chicago (where I was enrolled) and the School of the Art Institute. (The building was torn down to make room for Roosevelt’s big expensive blue tower many years later.) The dorm was right around the corner from the Fine Arts Building and what was then the Fine Arts movie theater, a four-screen complex that showed a variety of art films and independent releases....

“A guy walks into a bar . . . , ” or so goes the familiar joke setup that works because guys are always walking into bars. Except in Rebecca Gilman’s Twilight Bowl, now playing through March 10 at the Goodman Theatre, the token guy never enters the scene. Over the course of the show’s 90-minute running time, not one man makes an appearance onstage—or even so much as issues a cue backstage....

The Ladies’ Room, at least in name, calls to mind an everlasting ladies’ night, designed to draw women into a meat-market bar scene with discounted drinks. But that’s far from what Fat Rice chefs Abraham Conlon and Adrienne Lo have delivered with their new cocktail lounge in the restaurant’s former waiting room—they’re interested in a more international flavor of sleaze. The bar is inspired by the gambling dens of Macau’s red-light district a century ago, places where hookers and drugs were easy to come by....

On Friday, January 2, an online label called Vaporcake debuted with a digital split by its two founders, experimental artists Vapor Lanes (aka Aroon Karuna, a former Chicagoan) and the Kendal Mintcake (aka Thom Soriano). The release went up shortly after noon on Bandcamp, and within ten minutes it was “out of print.” Karuna and Soriano had limited the number of downloads to ten, after which they removed the music from Bandcamp and deleted it from their hard drives....

If I’d known city officials were going to try to ban biking on the new Chicago Riverwalk, I never would have advocated for building it. From the start, the Riverwalk extension was promoted as a commuting corridor for cyclists and pedestrians, not just a place to lounge with a glass of cabernet. Obviously, you’d have to be nuts to bike at full speed through that mass of humanity. Dismounting, or at least riding at walking speed, are the only safe and nonsociopathic options....

Yesterday New York rapper Action Bronson dropped “Actin Crazy,” the first single from his forthcoming major-label debut, Mr. Wonderful. I tuned in because of the song’s credits—Noah “40” Shebib, Drake‘s close collaborator, produced it—but this is Bronson’s show, and I also pressed play for his outsized persona, flamboyant rhymes, and the occasional food reference. The MC delivers with stoned aplomb, though I wasn’t entirely won over until the halfway mark, when Bronson raps, “All I do is eat oysters / And speak six languages in three voices....

On a Sunday afternoon recently, a crowd only slightly smaller than the one a few miles west at the Pitchfork Music Festival formed around the Bean in Millennium Park for a Pokémon Go meet-up that made the days of Pac-Man fever resemble a mild cough. More than 9,000 people RSVP’d to the event’s Facebook invite, but on the ground estimates ranged from 3,000-5,000 fans, from teens to the middle-aged, some clad in bright yellow Pikachu hats and furry Pokémon-themed costumes....

I wish I could show you a photograph of the voluptuous grilled cheese sandwich I crushed at Fort Willow a few weeks back. That’s a new cocktail bar that sits across the street from the thundering tubular machinery of the Sipi Metals copper-stripping plant. The boite, from David Morton and Michael Kornick’s DMK Restaurants, is hidden off Elston on the decreasingly industrial east end of River West, dead west of the river, in fact....

“No Longer Art,” the Salvage Art Institute When art conservation first entered the jurisdiction of insurance companies, “totaled” works were routinely destroyed. Adjusters haven’t grown less depraved of heart, but at least today they consign wrecked art to storage facilities, usually for 30 years, until a condition known as “acceptable degradation” is reached and the artwork becomes marketable as before. About two dozen such (currently) zero-value works have recently been on view at the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society Gallery during “No Longer Art,” the provocatively titled exhibition of New York artist Elka Krajewska’s fictional-sounding Salvage Art Institute (the show closes June 26)....