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I don’t watch a ton of television, but I reserve Sunday nights for unwinding and zoning out to just about anything. That’s my only excuse for following Entourage—Mark Wahlberg’s semiautobiographical sitcom about an A-list movie star and his three buddies—for its entire eight seasons, long after I’d stopped laughing at it and grown embarrassed by its puerile fantasy world of limitless wealth and models hastening to blow you. The series focused so much on sexual escapades, romantic relationships, and business maneuvers that you could never get a sense of the actual movies being made by toothsome lothario Vincent Chase (Adrian Grenier)....

Burning sage. Healing sessions. Yoga classes. Filmmaker Caprice Williams admits that when she was a kid, she would have assumed that anyone who did these things was a total weirdo. Yet they’re practices that adult Caprice now preaches, ones that feature prominently in her new webseries Journey. In episode one, Magnolia (played by Williams) threatens to sage every part of her friend Gia (Antoinette Drummer). In episode two, Magnolia learns about the intuitive powers of tea....

In late August, a man was found unresponsive in his car outside the west side location of the Chicago Recovery Alliance, a local overdose prevention and harm reduction group, according to former employee Nikki Carter. Wilson, however, told the Reader in December through an attorney that she was “proud of how everyone on the team handled the situation in the neighborhood,” and said that the window was not broken out of fear the car would later be vandalized....

Q: Is it terrible to believe you can still have a truly monogamous and loving relationship with one partner after 20 years? Or can we walk into a relationship knowing that within those decades of being together that situations like infidelity or being attracted to another is completely unavoidable? And if we acknowledge that in some cases it’s truly unavoidable, should we mentally prepare ourselves for this possibility during our “monogamous” stage?...

Is there a future for grand opera in Chicago? A contemporary English-language chamber opera, An American Dream (with music by Jack Perla, libretto by Jessica Murphy Moo), which Lyric will stage at the Harris Theater in March, will have two performances. So here’s the hard spot Lyric finds itself in: income from opera ticket sales is down (part of a national trend, Freud said), while expenses are growing. What to do?...

Q: I’m a lesbian and my girlfriend is bi. I’ve read your column and listened to your podcast for a long time, Dan, and I always thought I’d be fine with having a partner ask me about being monogamish. Then my girlfriend of about a year and a half told me she wants to see what other women are like. She says the thought of me sleeping with other people turns her on but the prospect of her sleeping with other people only makes me nervous....

American Jews have greeted the election of Donald Trump with mixed feelings. While some say they feel comforted by Trump’s pro-Israel and anti-Iran stances—and by the presence of his Orthodox Jewish daughter and son-in-law—many more say they see echoes of Germany, 1938. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate crimes, has received reports of more than 700 incidents in the past two weeks, including 60 instances of swastika vandalism. Last weekend, at the annual convention for the National Policy Institute, a white supremacist organization, the group’s president, Richard B....

UPDATE Monday, March 16: this event has been canceled. Refunds available at point of purchase. The intersection of comedy and magic has ballooned since the art form’s vaudevillian heyday. Case in point: Trent James, a 22-year-old second-generation magician who approaches the art of illusion with a whole lot of self-deprecating humor and a winking acknowledgment that magic is often little more than “elaborate misdirection.” At one point in his irreverently titled 60-minute show, Pure Lies, James attempts to contact dead twin boys who (he explains) perished in long-ago Louisiana....

When I read year-end “best of” lists, I wonder if I’m living in a different world than the critics who write them. I love Kendrick Lamar as much as the next sentient being, but when I think back on the music of 2017, Damn doesn’t loom as large in my mind as it seems to in everyone else’s (at least judging by its appearance at or near the top of almost every list)....

In 1957 the BBC commissioned its employee Daphne Oram to create a score for a television version of the French play Amphitryon 38. Hired in 1943 as a 17-year-old junior program engineer, Oram had become a music-studio manager in the early 50s—she was a talented and adventurous composer, as well as one of the network’s biggest advocates for the futuristic sounds it called “radiophonics.” For Amphitryon 38 she used electronic and music-concrète techniques, and when the program aired in March 1958 her work became the first completely synthetic score to appear on television....

Ruggles of Red Gap For the past few weeks, the Music Box has been running a special weekend matinee series dedicated to the Marx Brothers. This weekend it’s screening the great Duck Soup, which is not only their best film but also one of director Leo McCarey’s finest comedic displays. Duck Soup is just about the only Marx Brothers film I can really stomach, so I focused this top five on McCarey, a great director famous for his screwball comedies....

Nothing has made me feel quite as old and irrelevant as my 15-year-old son telling me he hates the Beatles. He insists that their music is simplistic, boring, and unlistenable; he’d rather listen to current-day genre-bending experimental groups such as clipping., Watsky, and Igorrr. But if the Fab Four are no longer cutting-edge, no one told Chicago rockers Thee Casual Hex (not to be confused with Seattle postpunk band Casual Hex)....

“New Urbanist Memes for Transit­-Oriented Teens,” known as NUMTOT, the 139,000-member Facebook group of people whom The Guardian has called “millennials who find fixing public transport sexy,” was launched here in Illinois by University of Chicago students. About 4,900 of the group’s members say on their Facebook profiles they live in Chicago, the second­-most of any city. (New York is first.) Metra’s board and staff warn that service is jeopardized by the fact that the commuter rail agency is billions short on the capital funding needed to repair and replace its aging infrastructure....

UPDATE Friday, March 13: this event has been suspended until at least the end of March. Contact the box office for further information about exchanges or refunds. What is it like playing someone you know? There are actual teen debaters in the show who join you in debating the Constitution in the second half. What do you think it’s been like for them? I remember how it felt to do that, to have memorized a speech or to have written my own speech and be delivering it for the first time....

In planning for its 2020 season, Weinberg/Newton Gallery owner and executive director David Weinberg and his team partnered with the ACLU of Illinois to create an exhibition addressing the 2020 election in alignment with the gallery’s mission to engage the public in social justice issues. But faced with social distancing guidelines, and in the interest of public safety, the gallery has been shut down since March, altering previously laid plans. From there, the gallery’s curator and codirector Kasia Houlihan shifted gears and worked to open the exhibition online....

Former Chicago man-about-town Ben Pirani has played a lot of musical roles over the past couple of decades, among them jamming with a bunch of psych bands, including Civilized Age; drumming in maniacal grindcore group My Lai; and playing guitar in blues-rock outfit Chicago Stone Lightning Band. But while Pirani has spent much of his life mastering all the realms of punk and rock, he truly hit his stride about ten years ago, when he started dabbling in funky electro-soul—he made an impression as the hype man for the DJ night he helped found, Windy City Soul Club....

Of all the east-coast bands that helped sharpen screamo into a definitive style in the late 90s, Connecticut three-piece Jeromes Dream have the most compelling mystique—especially for fans who never saw the band before they called it quits in 2001. During their four years together, Jeromes Dream dropped five split EPs and two brief, fiery albums, all seven of which were repackaged on the two-CD set Completed: 1997-2001 (Alone Records) in 2005....

Gossip Wolf got acquainted with local queer crooner Andrew Sa via his show-stealing turns with the Hideout’s hilarious and heartwarmingly campy Cosmic Country Showcase. At this recurring revue, aliens, monsters, and other oddballs display an uncanny talent for belting out country tunes—usually backed by a killer band with Sima Cunningham (Ohmme), Sullivan Davis, Dorian Gehring, Liam Kazar (Marrow), and Spencer Tweedy. On Sa’s new covers EP, Cosmic Country Stars: Andrew Sa, his high, keening voice is very much of this Earth, adding pathos and lovely loneliness to a sparkling version of Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game” and a plaintive duet with Kelly Hogan on Neko Case’s “I Wish I Was the Moon....

It’s a classic meet-cute: Jason Zenz and Andrea Martin met on Hinge in March 2020, against the backdrop of the onset of the global pandemic. OK, not quite classic, but a now common love story. While in pre-pandemic life, the two might have gone out for drinks or gotten dinner at a neighborhood spot, they had to adapt, as is the case for life under COVID-19. “I felt like I already knew him when I met him,” Martin says....

When it was party time in San Juan Pilcaya, Maria Moso was the village’s go-to for pipián verde. About two years ago, Maria, Anay, Daniel, and his stepfather Fernando started a small catering business, making quesadillas and pambazos on a parillada, a portable gas- powered grill. Pambazos, the guajillo-­drenched potato-and-chorizo sandwiches, are a specialty of Mexico City (where Fernando is from). The business flourished for over a year and half....