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This morning Pitchfork announced the lineup for its 14th annual music festival, and the three daily headliners are Swedish pop star Robyn, LA pop-rock act Haim, and legendary Cincinnati soul combo the Isley Brothers. They Isleys’ set is being billed as a 60th-anniversary celebration, though 2019 is specifically the 60th anniversary of their 1959 debut album, Shout!—the band had already been gigging for about five years at that point. Their booking is the sort of pleasant surprise that helps Pitchfork stand out in a crowded festival ecosystem....

You know it’s a bleak scene when your team’s victory song makes “Chelsea Dagger” sound like “Bohemian Rhapsody.” The Blackhawks’ celebration soundtrack seems straight-up nuanced and sophisticated when compared to the dopey, hokey strains of “Go, Cubs, Go.” Chicago-born folksinger and songwriter Steve Goodman wrote “Go, Cubs, Go” in 1984, the same year he died of leukemia at age 36. Over the years his music has been recorded by an impressive cast of singers, including Willie Nelson, Arlo Guthrie, and Joan Baez....

Q I’m a straight guy in my 30s dating a woman in her mid-20s. We’ve been together for a year, and I’m crazy about her. In love, even. She’s gorgeous, sweet, kind, loving, and very sexual. She’s perfect. In her late teens and early 20s, she had a wild sex life. She attended sex parties, had loads of NSA hookups, sexted with random guys she met online, etc. She revealed this to me slowly and carefully out of fear that I’d look down on her, but what she didn’t know is that I have an intense cuckold interest....

“People have this misconception of hops,” says Sam Ruppert. “Every time they hear the word, they think bitter, but hops impart so many flavors in beer that people don’t even realize.” So when Autumn Eytalis (BellyQ) challenged Ruppert, a bartender at DryHop Brewers, to create a cocktail with hops, he set out to showcase their flavor without the bitterness. For the spirit, he used Casa Magdalena—a Guatemalan white rum he describes as earthy and grassy—along with lemon juice and the hop syrup....

Some neosoul artists focus on torch songs and heartbreak, but as her name suggests, pianist and singer Avery Sunshine (aka Denise Nicole White) sticks to the brighter side of the genre. Working with guitarist and arranger Dana Johnson (who’s also her husband), Sunshine mixes old-school R&B grooves, gentle funk, and jazzy gospel vocals on flirtatiously humorous songs of requited love. The couple’s best-known track, 2005’s “Stalker,” is typical of their good-natured approach to romantic desperation, but they deviate from their usual fare with the song’s disco-fied house beat....

Within its first 30 minutes, Hansol Jung’s riveting drama hurtles from bliss to slaughter. We’re in Uganda, watching two 16-year-old girls celebrate their love with a giddily joyful “wedding” ceremony. Chris (Kearstyn Keller) is the white daughter of missionaries. Adiel (Adia Alli) is a black Ugandan. Their fears are telling: Chris frets her soul will go to hell. Adiel has more immediate concerns. Being a gay Ugandan, she points out to Chris, is punishable by life in prison....

Polls had suggested that Hillary Clinton would trounce Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary in Illinois, but last Tuesday’s contest ended up practically a draw. A poll in mid-February had Clinton beating Sanders by 19 points; a Tribune poll in early March showed Clinton winning by 42 points. Ultimately she snuck by Sanders, 50.5 percent to 48.7 percent. Since delegates in Illinois are awarded in proportion to the vote, Clinton and Sanders will wind up with nearly the same number: according to the latest estimate, Clinton will get 73 and Sanders 70....

A life in the theater, on- or offstage, is so notoriously difficult that it’s become romanticized. Young, aspiring actors and crew members expect long hours, late nights, and hard physical labor, all for little or no pay. It’s the price of joining a profession that many in the industry say is still not well regulated, despite recent efforts. Jack Hickey, the theater’s artistic director, says he and his colleagues “were genuinely surprised” by the complaints and resignations and were unaware of any problems until Grow announced her resignation....

A poster print of the first two stanzas of Shel Silverstein’s poem “Me and My Giant,” hangs squarely in the middle of one wall in Jason Vincent’s decidedly compact Giant, his long-awaited comeback after stepping down two years ago as the nationally exalted chef at Nightwood. The reason for Vincent’s sabbatical is similar to the common refrain heard from retiring athletes and politicians leaving office: some form of “I want to spend more time with my family....

Jim Newberry Liam Hayes in 2010 A couple months ago I profiled the singer-songwriter Daniel Knox; he recently returned from a tour of the UK, and tomorrow night he plays a free show at the Virgin Hotel (where he’s probably played the piano before, though not as part of a performance). Also playing is singer-songwriter and Chicago native Liam Hayes, whom some people might know better as Plush. In January he released the album Slurrup (Fat Possum) under his own name—as Peter Margasak wrote in a Soundboard capsule, the album is “a marked shift toward something more stripped-down after years of richly orchestrated work....

Local rapper Philmore Greene dropped his debut album, Chicago: A Third World City (One of One Music Group), in December, but it sounds like it could have come out in the 90s—its lifeblood is the kind of confident, luxuriant boom-bap that east-coast hip-hop acts regularly cranked out back then. “That’s what makes me comfortable,” Greene said of his sonic aesthetics in a December interview with YouTube talk show Beerz & Barz....

He is Godzilla in a Big Ten college cap—consuming, fucking, and/or fucking up everything in his path. He shovels hot wings and the boozy contents of red plastic cups into his gaping maw with abandon, punctuating each conquest with a guttural roar. Like our pussy grabber in chief Donald Trump, he’s fluent in “locker-room talk” and is obsessed with winning (or the appearance thereof), with dominion over all, no matter how base or trivial, and by any means necessary....

Chicago’s Riot Fest runs Friday through Sunday, September 16 through 18, entering its fifth year as a multiday outdoor event. Riot Fest has changed a lot since 2012, when it spent only two of its three days in Humboldt Park and about 50 bands played on three stages. Since 2013 the festival has been entirely outdoors: that year it booked roughly 80 bands on five stages, and in 2014 it expanded aggressively, hosting more than 100 bands on eight stages and taking up much more of Humboldt Park....

So it would seem Ron and Russell Mael, born and raised in California but whose look and sound often cause people to mistake them for a European band, are finally getting their due. That made the concept of this documentary, more than two hours long and propelled by the force of Focus Features’ PR machine, even more exciting. Early in the film, Wright opines in voiceover that Sparks is “successful, underrated, hugely influential, and criminally overlooked—all at the same time....

The 2003 National League Championship Series coincided with the weeklong Jewish festival of Sukkot. During that week, Rabbi Boruch Hertz, an emissary of the Lubavitch Chabad, built a sukkah across the street from Wrigley Field and encouraged everyone, but especially Jews, to come in and pray with him. The move did not upset any existing loyalties, he said, since he always preferred playing baseball to watching. (This is also an easy to way to disavow any claim that his divided loyalties were responsible for the Cubs’ collapse against the Mets last year....

This New Year’s Eve, the “make a bunch of resolutions” types and the “one year closer to death” types came together around the sentiment that 2020 needed to fuck right off. That said, it’s surely sunk in by now that many things continue to be bullshit—and as Americans, we’ve fucked up our own country so badly that it’d be funny if it were happening to somebody else. “New Year’s,” written by Sooyoung Park and Lexi Mitchell of Seam, appears on Frigid Stars, Codeine’s 1990 debut album....

On the northeasternmost edge of the Art Institute of Chicago, where Columbus meets Monroe, stands an arch in a small plot of land, fenced in with tall grass and dead flowers. Shorter than the glass-and-aluminum facade of the Modern Wing, it hovers over nothing and allows no roads through it. Viewed from the north, it is blank limestone; from the south, terra-cotta dense with ornate detail. “Chicago Stock Exchange Building,” it announces, more like a tombstone than an entryway....

UPDATE: On Saturday, June 6, Second City announced the appointment of Anthony LeBlanc as interim executive director. LeBlanc has most recently served as artistic director for Second City, where he previously appeared in two Chicago mainstage revues. A tsunami of tweets from other BIPOC artists and Second City alumni followed, calling out institutional racism. It was reminiscent of the controversy surrounding the 2016 Second City e.t.c. revue A Red Line Runs Through It, when half of the cast quit in response to what actor Peter Kim described in a Chicago magazine essay as an environment where audiences “hurled increasingly racist, homophobic, and misogynistic comments at me and my castmates: comments demeaning my Asian ethnicity, using the f-word to degrade my homosexuality, and shouting ‘whores’ at the women....

Aymar Jean Christian produced his first Web pilot, Nupita Obama Creates Vogua, in December 2014. The series explored a tumultuous love triangle between Curtis (musician Erik Wallace), Reyes (performance artist Kiam Marcelo Junio), and Gia (drag queen Saya Naomi), and featured original music, art, fashion, and choreography from its three stars. It was the series that launched Christian’s inclusive online television platform, Open TV. Since then he has produced ten projects created by and starring queer people, people of color, and women from a variety of artistic disciplines, and is in the beginning stages of dozens more....

Q: I’m a 40-year-old bi man. I’ve been with my 33-year-old bi wife for three years and married for one. When we first met, she made it clear that she was in a long-term (more than three years) “Daddy” relationship with an older man. I figured out six months later that her “Daddy” was her boss and business partner. He is married, and his wife does not know. I struggled with their relationship, since I identify as open but not poly....