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Once a month Dylan Maysick cooks Shabbat dinner for 90. This Sunday he’ll be teaching a Montreal bagel class in an Albany Park shared kitchen. Last Friday he hosted a dinner party for ten featuring, in part, blintzes, stuffed cabbage rolls, and poppy-seed challah—a menu inspired by the pioneering Vilna Vegetarian Cookbook (1938) by Fania Lewanda, who ran a kosher vegetarian restaurant and cooking school in Lithuania before she was murdered in the Holocaust....

The COVID-19 pandemic has put tens of millions of Americans out of work, but even considering that bleak landscape, musicians have been hit especially hard—most of their jobs only barely exist now, and the infrastructure that might allow them to return someday is in danger of collapsing. Festivals have been canceled, larger concert halls closed, and smaller clubs either shuttered or restricted to fractions of their usual audiences. At least in the States, no one is touring....

My family’s beloved 16-year-old Siamese cat, Webley, died in my arms last year. He’d been a sleek fat kitty before he got ill, but he’d lost weight and lost weight till he was little more than a bedraggled shadow. At the end he could barely lift his head, and then the vet gave him the shot and he couldn’t lift his head at all. I was scratching his ears as I’d so often done before, and suddenly they dropped, and whatever I was petting wasn’t Webley anymore....

Cypriot composer and electronic musician Yannis Kyriakides uses polyphonic vocal arrangements, string sections, glitchy beats, and found-sound collages to articulate wordless experiences and evoke things lost or removed. English electric guitarist Andy Moor is best known for playing with the Ex, a band that has never abandoned the principles or ferocity of its punk roots, but whose music can’t be contained within any known genre. He also works in free-form settings, not just with Kyriakides but also with the likes of Ken Vandermark and John Butcher....

Of all the lessons Radiator Hospital founder and co-front man Sam Cook-Parrott took to heart from early 2000s pop-punk or the unclassifiable Jonathan Richman, it’s “do what comes naturally.” As the Michigan native told Better Yet podcast host Tim Crisp on a recent episode, “Anybody can make music, regardless of how their voice is, regardless of their skill level—so I’ve realized pretty early that my voice is probably an acquired taste or something, it’s kind of annoying....

On Saturday, June 16, at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s 21Minus event, 20-year-old North side poet and rapper Tati debuts her first performance-art piece, Luvpotion—the result of a year’s worth of emotional trauma, self-care, and spiritual growth. She’s been writing raps (and rapping for her friends) since elementary school, but her first public performance as a rapper was only about a year and a half ago—part a rapid transformation during which she’s brought several of her private artistic pursuits onto public stages....

If you’d seen any Pivot Gang rappers performing in the last nine months without knowing they belonged to the local hip-hop collective, you’d have soon caught on based on two phrases they pepper throughout their time onstage: “Pivot Gang” (obviously) and “Long live John Walt.” Walt, the Pivot cofounder and rapper-singer born Walter Long Jr. (he changed his stage name to Dinner With John in 2016) was stabbed to death on February 8....

However, it’s challenging to go through all the spiritual advisors with the many options out there and know which one is the real deal. This is why we’ve taken the time to compile a list of the best online psychic reading services that feature professional, verified advisors who are experts in their field. From all these options provided both free and paid, we’ll help you find a medium you can connect with....

The fine French drama Marguerite fictionalizes the life of American socialite Florence Foster Jenkins, whose vocal performances of classical arias, beginning in private music clubs and culminating in a 1944 recital at Carnegie Hall, have earned her a large and respectful entry in the encyclopedia of bad. “She clucked and squawked, trumpeted and quavered,” reports a 1957 story in Coronet magazine. “She couldn’t carry a tune. Her sense of rhythm was uncertain....

At the elevator pitch-level, Philips Dawkins’s world-premiere romantic melan-comedy is such a harmonious coupling of playwright and subject matter that I suspect it may have been preordained by the universe. Dawkins—a young author who is fluent in the parlance of contemporary LGBTQA experiences and issues—looks back at the real-life affair between Tennessee Williams and William Inge and imagines their encounters on the eve and the aftermath of Williams’s first hit, The Glass Menagerie....

On the afternoon of the April 1 pandemic press conference, Governor J.B. Pritzker said, “We’re doing our best to take care of our seniors, our children, people who are in our care. Our number one concern is the welfare of the people who are in our care.” Later that same day, Pritzker quietly issued an emergency order granting Illinois nursing homes and hospitals a broad swath of legal immunities for injuries or deaths from negligence....

Festival of Life Union Park’s annual festival celebrates the lifestyle, heritage, and cultures of the Caribbean, Africa, Latin America, and the U.S. The four-day festival also includes music, arts and crafts, food and drinks, three-on-three soccer tournaments, and more. Fri 7/1-Mon 7/4: noon-10 PM, Lake and Ashland, festivaloflife.biz, $15-$25 single day pass, $45-$100 four-day pass. Frontier Days Festival The Wallflowers, Plain White T’s, and American English take the stage at Recreation Park....

Michelle Kranicke, director of Zephyr Dance, and architect David Sundry have been creative collaborators for years in addition to being married. But their partnership took a significant step forward last year with the establishment of their West Town space Site/less. As part of the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial, they’re premiering their latest, On Notice, at Site/less in October. Sundry’s environment takes center stage with green-screen runways upon which “fabricated personas” are projected....

When asked about medical cannabis cards in a postlegalization state, cannabis-friendly doctor Rahul Khare said there are two different stories to be told: before the coronavirus pandemic and after. Now that recreational adult use of cannabis is legal in Illinois, he’s seen people emboldened to finally get their medical cards. “I hear that a lot. It’s like, ‘Oh, I know I’ve been using this medically but I just never wanted to get my card....

Some musicians need an external reference point to push them to figure themselves out. Fairport Convention’s early recordings with Richard Thompson inspired Los Lobos’ David Hidalgo to pick up folk instruments and address his Mexican heritage. Fairport was likewise influenced to dig into English folk history by the roots moves of the Americans whose songs originally made up the band’s repertoire. For UK guitarist C Joynes, who will play his first U....

In May 2011, a 32-year-old maid at the Sofitel New York Hotel brought charges against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a key member of France’s Socialist Party and managing director of the International Monetary Fund, alleging that he had sexually assaulted her in his hotel room. His subsequent arrest became headline news around the world; in the wake of his criminal trial, other women came forward with allegations of sexual assault, and Strauss-Kahn fell rapidly from political power....

Multi-instrumentalist Marielle V Jakobsons, who plays a solo concert Thursday at Cafe Mustache in support of the shimmery, gorgeous new Star Core (Thrill Jockey), was one of two driving forces behind cosmic Bay Area band Date Palms. She’s currently on tour with guitarist Chuck Johnson, and she plays violin on a couple tracks from his latest album, Velvet Arc. It’s his first electric outing in a decade, and another gem released by Chicago’s great Trouble in Mind....

I low-key love how Otherworld Theatre fully explores the concept of “theater nerd.” A recent Nintendo-covered update on Richard III was enjoyable and crunchy around the edges; it regularly offers Improvised Dungeons and Dragons. Otherworld is absolutely niche, but it’s absolutely itself. This is why I went into Countess Dracula with a huge appetite for sweaty-palmed, glasses-on geekery. Conceptually, the show fits right in with the current zeitgeist of Black, southern gothics, a la Lemonade‘s shadowy and foreboding moments and Angela Bassett in American Horror Story: Coven....

Founded in 2013, blog and Web network Doomed & Stoned has blossomed into a worldwide endeavor with a podcast, a quarterly Bandcamp compilation, and an emphasis on using local reporting to help build up individual scenes. Its laser-sharp focus has helped: the Doomed & Stoned musical aesthetic follows the post-Sabbath school of doom, drone, heavy psych, and stoner metal. Even within those strict parameters this three-day blast—which features more than 20 bands, a DJ, and a Sunday brunch—showcases sonic diversity in the genre while highlighting some of Chicago’s strongest practitioners of meditative gut churns and heavy riffs....

Two Weeks in the Midday Sun: A Cannes Notebook is not, as I’d initially hoped, Roger Ebert‘s report of last year’s Cannes film festival, transmitted from the Great Beyond via Ouija board and painstakingly transcribed by University of Chicago Press interns. The truth is much less exciting: it’s a reprint of a 1987 book ostensibly based on Ebert’s journal from that year’s festival, illustrated with his own amateur drawings. It begins at Heathrow with Ebert en route to France, determined to turn two weeks of jet lag, screenings, and interview chasing into some sort of coherent narrative....