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On May 9, 2010, Touche Amore opened for Converge, Coalesce, and Black Breath at Bottom Lounge. Every band on the bill was repping an album released within the past year, several of them great—but the Burbank five-piece appeared most in awe of their circumstances, most grateful to be sharing the stage. Just nine months after dropping their 2009 debut, . . . To the Beat of a Dead Horse, Touche Amore were being courted by Converge hardcore honcho Jacob Bannon and his Deathwish Inc....

Ranch dressing as we know it was invented by a Nebraska-born African-American cowboy working as a plumbing contractor in Alaska. It’s true. Steve Henson whipped up the concoction of buttermilk, mayo, sour cream, parsley, onion, garlic, and salt and pepper to feed his crew of hungry workers in the early 50s. Eventually, though, Henson and his wife, Gayle, moved to Santa Barbara and opened Hidden Valley Ranch, where the dressing grew so popular among their guests they began to bottle it and send it home with them....

Ashlee Rezin/for Sun-Times Media Mayor Rahm Emanuel said he “reformed” the parking meter deal, but city drivers continue to pay millions of dollars a month to the private meter company. As Mayor Rahm Emanuel searches for money to cope with the city’s grave financial health, the private firm that controls Chicago’s parking meter system collected another $131 million from city drivers in 2014 to wrap up its most lucrative year yet, according to a financial audit posted Tuesday on the city’s website....

O n the third floor of the Museum of Contemporary Photography’s current 13-artist, 33-piece exhibition exhibition “In Their Own Form,” are two sets of work that depict the dreamscapes of Senegalese children. On the right side of the exhibition space is Senegalese photographer Alun Be’s series “Edification” (2017), well-composed snapshots of young boys engaged in common activities, such as assisting each other onto the back of a bus or bathing in the sea while peering through virtual reality masks....

Rachel Hawley Apartment tours are like first dates, in that you often know you’re not interested within a few seconds of introduction, and must politely smile and nod your way through a sales pitch anyway. I’d been viewing apartments, masked and gloved, for a few weeks when I found The One: an implausibly large one-bedroom with air conditioning a block from the Red Line in Rogers Park. The moment I stepped inside the empty unit, I began sketching a layout in my mind: a couch, comfortable writing chair, and coffee table near the living room windows; a proper desk for my work computer; my kitchen table and chairs in the dining nook (the dining nook!...

Gerard Johnson, who wrote and directed the moody crime drama Hyena, claims to have spent over three years researching human trafficking and police corruption in London, and his effort shows in the film’s immersive presentation of both subjects. Johnson’s camera is rarely more than a few feet away from his characters; intimations of the knotty system they inhabit—a crisscrossed network of corrupt cops, immigrant crime families, informants, and modern-day slaves—enter the frame from all directions....

For more than three decades, the Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival has brought much of the best current, mostly short avant-garde work to Chicago, and this year’s edition is no different, with four installations and nine shorts programs screening through Sunday at Defibrillator Gallery. The best examples of this type of cinema confound expectation, elude fixed categories, and challenge and provoke viewers. “What the hell was that?” might be an apt response to Jake Barningham’s Pink Horses, Blue Oceans I (Saturday March 5, 4 PM), a work of haunting fragility in which the outline of a horse hovers before us in different forms, seeming at times like a cave painting and at times like a video illusion....

G etting ready to write about the future of Lyric Opera a couple of weeks ago, I was scrolling through its latest annual report when three words caught my eye: interest-rate swaps. The swaps are a financial management strategy that was popular among governments and nonprofits in the early years of this century. But for the last decade they’ve looked like a costly folly. Here’s how it works: The bond borrower agrees to pay the opposite party in the swap, usually a bank, a flat rate of interest (along with a fee for entering into the agreement)....

Dan Shore started working on his one-act opera, Freedom Ride, nine years ago. It was the 50th anniversary of the Congress of Racial Equality-organized protests that actually integrated public transportation in the United States, after the Supreme Court had ruled that segregation violated the constitution. Shore, a composer who also writes his own librettos, was teaching at Xavier University of Louisiana in New Orleans and had been asked to create something that would celebrate both that city and the civil rights movement....

It’s gift-giving season and neither rain nor snow nor social distancing will prevent some gift-givers from the swift distribution of their treasures. If you find yourself in Andersonville this weekend, you can swing by Chicago Dance Supply and get your gifts wrapped. The dancewear store is collaborating with Extensions Dance Company to offer free gift-wrapping services to interested shoppers in exchange for donations to two local public schools: Peirce and McCutcheon....

I’ve gotten a lot of pleasure out of the way Nap Eyes singer Nigel Chapman stretches his lyrics across bar lines, elongating certain words with extra syllables—in fact, I usually like his delivery more than the words themselves, which feel a bit too interior and elliptical for me to figure out quite what he’s trying to say. Fortunately, Nap Eyes’ third and best album, Now I’m Bad (Paradise of Bachelors), doesn’t rely on the content of his lyrics—the melodies to which they’re set and the band’s nimble, deceptively simple attack have never been stronger or more seductive....

When I saw Italian psychedelic doom trio Ufomammut debut in Chicago on their first-ever U.S. tour in 2015, my only complaint was that the set ended too soon—they’d played for at least an hour, but their blankets of spacey haze, locomotive riffs, and earth-shaking grooves were so entrancing that even another hour would’ve melted away like minutes. This time around, I’m happy Ufomammut are able to play here at all—or anywhere, for that matter....

For the better part of two decades, Jozef Van Wissem has been on a mission to challenge the notion that his main instrument is a museum piece. The 57-year-old Dutchman has recontextualized the Renaissance lute by submerging its sound in Maurizio Bianchi’s industrial noise, by improvising with guitarist Tetuzi Akiyama, and by engaging in instrumental duels with feedback guitarist and filmmaker Jim Jarmusch. But on his latest album, We Adore You, You Have No Name (Consouling Sound), Van Wissem has returned to the gallery....

The 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, titled A Century of Progress International Exposition, was touted as a celebration of modern innovation, and its grand aspirations were not without merit. Even though it took place during the depths of the Great Depression, it was so successful that its run was extended into 1934. With these events serving as inspiration, Chicago Symphony Center will host “Samson Young: World Fair Music,” which will feature a conversation between Hong Kong-based artist and composer Samson Young and Orianna Cacchione, curator of global contemporary art for the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art, punctuated by performances of music composed for the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair....

Chicago rapper-singer Rich Jones brought his multigenerational monthly hip-hop series All Smiles to a close in April 2019, but its spirit lives on at this Subterranean show he’s headlining. The bill includes great local MCs who might not otherwise have any reason to cross paths, beginning with up-and-comer Musa Reems. On his recent self-released EP, November’s To Whom It May Concern, he speeds through hard verses atop sleepy synths and snaggletoothed percussion; he enlivens “Zombies” (which features Chicago great Mick Jenkins) by switching between thick staccato bars and quick stanzas of rhymes....

Typically When I delve into a housing story, I find that someone with more power is exercising it in a way that hurts someone with less power. In situations where low-income tenants are grappling with exploitative landlords, or public housing residents are battling recalcitrant city officials, or homeowners face off against predatory lenders, narratives are relatively simple to construct. In this story about a struggling South Shore co-op it was clear that the problems residents have experienced are real, and the stakes for resolving them are high....

Since I first discovered the music of Matt Piet in the fall of 2016, the profile of the Chicago pianist has risen around town. Piet plays with the group of musicians associated with the Amalgam Music imprint, including drummer Bill Harris (the label’s owner) and saxophonist Jake Wark in Four Letter Words, and leads his own trio with bassist Charlie Kirchen and drummer Julian Kirshner. More recently, he’s also started working with a number of veteren players, and tonight he celebrates new recordings from two of these groups, both of which find him with one foot in 60s free jazz and the other in the present....

Sunburned Hand of the Man are a loose Boston-based collective whose work has sprawled across multiple genres, including free improv, noise, folk, drone, and psychedelic jams. Founded in 1997 out of the ashes of art-rock trio Shit Spangled Banner, they became part of a scene that specialized in indulgence and reveled in long builds, endless permutation, improvisation, and minimalism that could get pretty damn maximal at the drop of a hat (or the stomp of a pedal)....

It has been 28 years since storyteller, comedian, and teacher of improv Jimmy Carrane debuted his 1991 solo “intimate evening,” I’m 27, I Still Live at Home, and I Sell Office Supplies at the then very outsider-ish Annoyance Theatre. At the time only a handful of performers did this kind of bracingly honest autobiographical work, most notably Spalding Gray. (Comedy clubs at the time were dominated by self-involved, proudly underinformed, testosterone-poisoned white guys, delivering rapid-fire punch lines about how irritated they were at everything and everyone....

As I wrote recently in a post about the horror film Winchester, I’m a fan of historical films that simply use the period as a backdrop to the story as opposed to using the story as a means of investigating the period. I find it encouraging to think that elements of human nature have remained the same over time—that there’s something I can feel that connects me with the people of the past....