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Chicago has plenty of workhorses among its young indie rockers, but few of them can grind like brothers Jake and Paul Stolz. That’s partly because they’re inseparable musically: they make up the rhythm section for pop-minded five-piece Varsity, and they both play in arty foursome Pool Holograph (Jake on drums and Paul on guitar). A couple years ago the Stolzes decided to launch a band where they could take the lead, and their four-piece, Discus, debuted in 2018 with EP (Middle Distance), which showed their grasp of slightly rambunctious slacker rock....

You might know that data from the census is used to draw congressional and state legislative districts, determine the number of House seats a state has, and distribute federal funds for things like Medicaid, schools, and emergency preparedness. (That last one’s particularly relevant now.) But you might not know that getting an accurate census count is also important for the arts. Census-related funding in Illinois helps put foreign language curricula in schools, supports the careers of local artists in every discipline, and assists with keeping museums like the Block and the National Museum of Mexican Art free of charge....

Miriam Nielsen Lotte Anker Since the early 90s the Danish saxophonist Lotte Anker has been a key force in transforming the focus of the sound of jazz in her homeland. For decades jazz in Copenhagen largely replicated the sound of American bop, in large part because heavies like Dexter Gordon, Kenny Drew, and Ben Webster had taken up residence there for long spells during their careers; their presence had a deep effect on local players....

For certain film lovers, April is all about Lucrecia Martel. The Argentine director’s first feature in almost a decade, Zama, continues at the Gene Siskel Film Center for another few days, and her acclaimed “Salta Trilogy” begins on Friday with The Headless Woman. We celebrate the return of one of contemporary cinema’s great filmmakers by taking a look back at five other women directors who made a mark on Latin American cinema: Margot Benacerraf (Venezuela), Sara Gómez (Cuba), María Luisa Bemberg (Argentina), Suzana Amaral (Brazil), and Maria Novaro (Mexico)....

One of the things that sustains my admiration for Vancouver jazz guitarist Gordon Grdina is that he places himself within a seemingly endless variety of contexts. Plenty of musicians who compartmentalize different sides of their work can appear to suffer from split personalities, but Grdina has a distinctive knack for sating his curiosity in many projects while always sounding like himself. I first heard his music more than a decade ago; his debut album was with a hushed trio that included bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Paul Motian....

Donald Trump is humiliating one of his fiercest critics by making Mitt Romney grovel in public in order to be named secretary of state. And he could easily humiliate Romney completely by not naming him. Romney said what millions of us thought. But it turned out there weren’t quite as many of us as we thought there were. But Cassidy suspects otherwise. He goes on: “The cynical explanation is that Romney is in it for himself....

All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. —John 1:3 Julian DeShazier has been leading a congregation at University Church in Hyde Park since 2010 and rapping as J.Kwest for even longer. He’s on a quest—hence his stage name—to find a middle ground where hip-hop and gospel music can coexist. Defined by the qualities that differentiate them—the former is often saturated in profanity, violence, and sex, while the latter is a sacred African-American tradition rooted in praising and worshiping God—the two genres might seem as incompatible as oil and water....

Last week a latch popped on the main mash tun at Marz Community Brewing, sending water, wheat, and oats cascading all over the floor. What was intended to become an IPA overwhelmed the drainage system and “it just halted the day,” says Joe Guzzo. “Anyone who says that brewing is not a glorified janitorial occupation doesn’t know what they’re talking about.” In addition to its prodigious malted output, Marz has plunged into the nonalcoholic beverage arena over the last year, canning and bottling shrubs, kombuchas, waters, coffees, and other intoxicating—but alcohol free—beverages, such as a sparkling yerba mate and a delicately floral CBD-spiked seltzer with seven different botanicals that makes your favorite La Croix flavor taste like fizzy hand lotion....

The Compass The audience is the jury in this interactive courtroom drama devised and directed by Michael Rohd for Steppenwolf for Young Adults. At issue is whether a teenager can be held responsible for calling in a bomb threat to her school when a powerful decision-making app on her phone told her to do it. As in a TV procedural, Rohd carefully parcels out information to keep us guessing, and as in a classroom exercise, the action often pauses so that facilitators can lead us in small-group discussions....

Written in the wake of World War II, with its carnage and cruelty committed by all sides on a scale previously unimaginable, Irish writer Samuel Beckett’s 1949 Waiting for Godot is timeless and of the moment—a bleakly comic portrait of human beings coping with the basic, harsh realities of existence while vainly looking for something “to give us the impression we exist.” Confounding audiences and scholars who have debated for decades what Godot means (or, for that matter, who “Godot” is), this “tragicomedy in two acts” is theatrical poetry that embodies Archibald MacLeish’s dictum (stated in his 1926 “Ars Poetica”): “A poem should not mean / But be....

Last year, Pride events were mostly limited to online celebrations. But with half of the adults in the state now fully vaccinated, this year looks different, even though the parade won’t happen till October. There are still plenty of streaming performances if you’re crowd-hesistant, but you can also fly your flag at some outdoor events as well. Kickback, About Face Theatre’s anthology of digital performances about the intersection of queer and Black lives (inspired in part by the Rebuild Foundation’s collection of African American art and cultural artifacts), continues streaming online with About Face Theatre....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Friday, October 21, 2016. Have a great weekend! Vote early and vote often: a history of voter fraud in Chicago GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump has been talking incessantly about voter fraud and claiming that it still occurs in Chicago. Multiple studies and investigations have found that, nationally, voter fraud is extremely rare to the point of being nonexistent; still, the city is closely associated with political corruption, claims of dead people voting, and Mayor Richard J....

As a young Buddhist monk in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, during the 1960s, Kompha Seth studied the Brahmi alphabet and Magadhi—a root language of modern Khmer—which had been preserved and passed down for generations. Today, he’s one of only a few Cambodians in the world who understands these dialects and their links to modern Khmer. In 1976, Seth cofounded the Cambodian Association of Illinois, where he serves as executive director....

Founded in 1990, the Chicago Film Critics Association is the only critics’ group in the U.S. to mount its own film festival, which offers its nearly 60 members the dubious distinction of reviewing an event they’re simultaneously promoting. (This is the sort of thing that makes two-thirds of Americans distrust the news media.) I haven’t belonged to the CFCA for years, and because this puts me in a small minority of local critics who can comment on the festival impartially, I’d be remiss if I didn’t weigh in....

One evening at Honey’s, in the Fulton Market district, chef Charles Welch appeared at my table to drop off the mains: a spit-roasted pork chop and half rotisserie chicken. After the former Sepia executive sous chef ran down the dishes’ respective attributes, he bid us good eating, and then spun around into a support post with a startled “Whoa!” It was a harmless spot of slapstick that rendered the genial chef all the more genial....

A small group of Jewish teenage girls in Chicago believes in a promised land. “When it came to rape culture, a lot of my students had never heard that term,” says Stephanie Goldfarb, director of youth philanthropy and leadership at the JUF and the director of RTI. “But we would ask, ‘What’s keeping you up at night?,’ and they were describing what rape culture is without knowing there was vocabulary for it....

In a sense, all animation is experimental, because an artist can’t really see how his images will move until he throws them up onto a screen. But don’t tell that to the filmmakers featured in the traveling Eyeworks Festival of Experimental Animation, who’ve rejected the corporate world of commercials and children’s entertainment to pursue their own visions. Based in Los Angeles, the festival favors “works made by individual artists, drawing on the lineage of avant -garde cinema as well as the tradition of classic character animation and cartooning,” with two free programs on Saturday at Block Museum of Art....

Invoking the clock in a musical context raises certain expectations about timekeeping, but composer and woodwind player Anna Webber subverts them on her new Clockwise (Pi). She rarely has percussionist Ches Smith play a steady groove for long—instead he rushes the tempo, changes cadences, drops in brief silences, and switches constantly among vibes, timpani, and drum kit. The rest of the six-piece ensemble negotiates similarly unpredictable terrain. But the album remains true to its title in this respect: its pieces could not unfold in any other sequence....

Blues tributes are too often dire affairs—note-for-note reworkings of timeworn ideas and riffs that betray an almost puritanical obsession with “authenticity.” That approach, of course, dishonors the spirit of the music it purports to celebrate—Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and Elmore James, all of whom attract frequent tributes, weren’t purists or revivalists but instead radically reimagined blues tradition and took it to places it had never been before. Harpist Billy Branch, who learned his craft from some of Chicago’s most legendary postwar bluesmen, honors his mentors in exactly this way: having mastered their tonal attacks and improvisational ideas, he uses them as springboards for his own fresh imaginings....

Before Superman, the Flash, and Captain Marvel, there was real-life hero Harriet Tubman. The biopic Harriet, directed by Kasi Lemmons (Eve’s Bayou), plunges into drama right away, showing a young Harriet (then known as Minty), her freeman husband, John, and extended family receiving a resounding “no” after pleading for Harriet’s freedom with her master. Slave owner Edward Brodess swiftly resolves to sell Minty away from his plantation—and her family—despite his son Gideon’s initial affinity for her....