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This week we’ve got another fantasy poster for a real gig! Writer and graphic designer Brian Shamie, who works for the Daily Herald and runs the site Chicago Sound Check, created this poster a year or so after the 2015 Troubled Hubble concert it depicts—the band’s first reunion date since breaking up in 2005. “I wasn’t able to make this Troubled Hubble show,” Shamie tells me via e-mail, “but about a year later, that line in the song [‘14,000 Things to Be Happy About’] was haunting me and I needed to get the vision out of my head....

Beginning with his third feature, Aferim! (2015), Romanian writer-director Radu Jude has seemed to reinvent himself with every new movie. Aferim! was a 19th-century picaresque filled with landscapes and shot in black-and-white widescreen; its follow-up, Scarred Hearts (2016), was a 20th-century chamber drama shot in the squarish Academy ratio (in which virtually all films were shot until the mid-50s) and notable for its devastating static long takes. Jude moved further into stasis with his next feature, the documentary The Dead Nation (2017), which considered Romania’s Jewish Holocaust (1941-1945) through a montage of still photographs from the 1930s and ’40s....

As part of his latest attempt to drive CPS to bankruptcy, Governor Rauner has attempted to transform himself into Tom Tresser. In particular, Rauner directed Tony Smith and James Meeks—appointees who run the state board of education—to order Chicago Public Schools to turn over specific information regarding its budget, payroll, and bond obligations. In particular, I suspect Rauner wants to use whatever dirt he unearths as an excuse to cut state aid to CPS....

Q: I’m someone who does gay porn for a living. How do people who do gay porn meet someone who doesn’t just sexualize or fetishize them? I can’t eat, sleep, and breathe my work constantly, but the guys I meet want me to live out the “porn persona” version of myself all the time. How does someone who does porn know who you can be yourself with? —Aiden Ward (@aidenxxxward)...

As Manhattan is Woody Allen’s love letter to New York City, Easy appears to be writer-director Joe Swanberg’s own fawning missive to Chicago. A small part of the city, anyway. It’s telling that one of the most recurring motifs in Easy, aside from Swanberg’s trademark scenes of awkward sex, is the logo for Dark Matter Coffee. The brand’s emblem appears on paper cups that characters nonchalantly drink from and on stickers that hover conspicuously in the background of certain scenes....

The video for LaSalle Grandeur’s optimistic pop-rap single “Euphoria” shows the Chicago rapper gleefully traipsing through a huge empty field as a light breeze billows his unbuttoned shirt. “Euphoria” appears on Euphoric (Happily Depressed), an endearing EP that’s especially winning whenever Grandeur uses his exceptional grasp of melody to summon the blissful joy of that video; as if to underscore its celebratory nature, Grandeur dropped Euphoric on his 25th birthday. His cheerful hooks have a hard-to-pin-down, bittersweet subtext, as if tacitly acknowledging the emotional difficulties he had to overcome to find happiness....

This story was originally published by ProPublica Illinois. ProPublica Illinois is an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism with moral force. Sign up for The ProPublica Illinois newsletter for weekly updates. Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot proposed Tuesday an end to the city’s punitive practice of suspending driver’s licenses over unpaid parking tickets and said she would support legislation to change state law, moves that are likely to bring relief to tens of thousands of mostly black, low-income motorists and lead to a reduction in bankruptcy filings here....

As we entered the upstairs theater at the Greenhouse Theater Center, a young man with a trim beard and large glasses that accentuated his deep-set eyes, greeted us. When my companion asked him if he was Mark, he said yes. “You know my name already, right?” she joked. “No,” he answered, “I haven’t turned it on yet.” Our greeter, of course, was Mark Toland and the “it” he was talking about was mentalism—the illusion of reading minds....

Purists of Portuguese fado might think António Zambujo is something of a philistine for his penchant for teasing out commonalities between the lyric, sorrow-laden genre and sounds from around the globe—especially breezier forms from Brazil. Not only has he collaborated with Brazilian songwriters such as Rodrigo Maranhão, on his 2015 album Rua da Emenda (World Village) he covered a lovely tune by Uruguayan singer Jorge Drexler and gave Serge Gainsbourg’s “La Chanson de Prévert” a spry fado treatment....

Robinson Devor’s Pow Wow, which opens tonight at Facets for a weeklong run, is a compact and provocative documentary about Americans’ relationship to history. Running just 75 minutes, the film covers plenty of thematic ground, considering the legend of Chemehuevi-Paiute Indian “Willie Boy,” the transformation of California’s Coachella Valley into a suburban environment, the present-day experience of Khaweya Indians (who live on a reservation in the Valley), and the habits of well-to-do whites in the suburban community....

I’m trying hard not to hate Kate Bolick because she’s beautiful. But there she is, on the cover of her new book/ode to the single woman, Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own, perched on the edge of an antique velvet sofa with a cup of tea in a patterned china cup—how spinstery!—dressed in a cocktail dress and heels with her hair in long, glossy auburn waves, like in a shampoo ad....

Metric Coffee Probat roaster at Metric Coffee Yesterday I ran an interview with Darko Arandjelovic and Xavier Alexander of Metric Coffee in Chicago, which just won a Good Food Award, given in San Francisco to artisanal food businesses of note. On and off I spoke with them for well over an hour, and a half hour of that was devoted to Arandjelovic telling me all the twists and turns of procuring and restoring a 1960s German-made, cast-iron roaster....

Ready or not, welcome to 2018—the year that the hottest emerging entertainer is a 26-year-old man who wears a yellow headband and goes by the nickname Ninja. His job? Broadcasting himself playing video games in the basement of his suburban Chicago house. This once-in-a-lifetime surge of mainstream fame isn’t all the result of dumb luck. Blevins has been served well by a combination of superior hand-eye coordination, onscreen charisma, and dogged perseverance....

If I’d read Bee Wilson’s new book First Bite: How We Learn to Eat (Basic) during the joyously fat-and-sugar-filled holiday season, when everything smells like butter and vanilla and you can’t go anywhere without being offered a cookie, I probably wouldn’t have been very receptive to Wilson’s central argument. “Eating well is a skill,” she writes. “We learn it. Or not. It’s something we can work on at any age.” But now it’s January, season of self-improvement, and we’re no longer supposed to enjoy anything we put in our mouths....

The outcome of the 2016 presidential election left Lauren Goldstein shaken and worried, like many others. A junior at Northwestern at the time, she was studying abroad in Copenhagen. When she woke up the morning after the election, she says, “I felt like the rug had been ripped out from under me and my generation of women.” She wanted to do something to empower her generation, and while she was trying to decide what that would be, she remembered interviewing women in the food industry for the Northwestern chapter of Spoon University, a food publication written by college students....

Antarctica has hit a record high temperature. Sixty thousand known cases of the new coronavirus are causing global panic. Australia is still on fire. And the U.S. is gearing up for elections. The Times Are Racing, the title of the Joffrey Ballet’s winter mixed repertory program, captures a sense of the urgency we surely all feel. Yet few guiding principles—not even escapism—bring order to the presentation. The oldest pieces, Mono Lisa (2003) and The Sofa (1995) by Itzik Galili of Israel, account for two of the three Joffrey premieres—the third being the 2017 ballet by New York City Ballet resident choreographer Justin Peck that closes and titles this show....

Launching a business during late 2020 would seem unrealistic to most, but Lalamove did just that—they launched in Chicago in October to help small businesses compete with large national retailers. Lalamove is an app-based delivery service that connects small businesses with local delivery drivers within seconds. The company merges the rideshare model concept with courier services that can deliver anything from flowers to furniture and everything in between, and provides businesses with a way to get deliveries to their consumers for four to eight times less than traditional shipping companies or other delivery apps....

For all his warts, Governor Bruce Rauner deserves credit for putting the brakes on the Illiana Tollway, a pet project of his predecessor Pat Quinn. That $1.3 billion highway boondoggle, proposed for a corridor roughly ten miles south of the metro region, would have been funded by a public-private partnership (P3) that would have put Illinois taxpayers on the hook for some $500 million in borrowing. The Stevenson project would cover the 25-mile stretch between the Veterans Memorial Tollway (I-355) and the Dan Ryan Expressway (I-90/94)....

For its new album, There’s a Riot Going On (Matador), Yo La Tengo borrowed the title of Sly & the Family Stone’s turbulent 1971 classic, but despite what the name might suggest, the music’s surface couldn’t be more placid. In fact, it’s one of the trio’s most gorgeously restrained albums. Self-recorded on a home computer, and mixed by former Chicagoan John McEntire, the album has an attractively modest sound; aqueous organ drones, e-bowed electric guitar tones, gentle electronic and live percussion, and strummed acoustic guitars all cradle the tender, whispered vocal harmonies of Georgia Hubley and Ira Kaplan....

Truthfully, this project has little to do with basketball. What I am trying to do is explore why as a city, we neglect half of it,” Chicago-based photographer Adam Jason Cohen says. “Why are there no resources for the youth? Where is the funding? The infrastructure? There is a growing wealth gap, especially in the advent of gentrification in some of these neighborhoods, that is creating much more problems than [what’s] being spoken about....