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Children in color-coded aprons stream in and out of a building on a backstreet in Woodlawn. It’s 3 PM on a recent weekday afternoon at Blackstone Bicycle Works, which is filled with the sounds of tools hitting aluminum and enthusiastic children working on bikes. The community-oriented shop at 6100 S. Blackstone is training roughly 175 students between the ages of eight and 18 this year in a program that not only teaches them bike mechanics and customer service skills but also offers a safe space where they can grow and become leaders....

J.G. Ballard’s dystopian novel High-Rise (1975) takes place in a block of five apartment towers on the Thames River, the first-occupied of which, with 1,000 units and about 2,000 residents, gradually descends into barbarism. Ballard was writing at the tail end of England’s postwar boom in tower-block construction, when the practical drawbacks of such housing communities had become impossible to ignore. Forty years later, the book’s topical moment may have passed, but it still holds up as an urban Lord of the Flies, and given the enduring cult reputation of David Cronenberg’s Crash (1996), adapted from another Ballard novel, you can see how someone might have bankrolled a modestly budgeted screen version of High-Rise....

The three-month-old Mezcaleria Las Flores isn’t Chicago’s first agave-focused bar—Masa Azul predates it—but so far it’s the best known. La Mez Agave Lounge, in the basement of Mercadito, followed hot on its heels, and another mezcal bar, Quiote (from former Garage owner Dan Salls), is in the works. With mezcal and its cousins becoming more familiar to consumers, agave-based cocktails are going to have to succeed based not on novelty but on their own merits—and that’s already happening at Mezcaleria Las Flores....

Leonard C. Goodman is a Chicago criminal defense attorney and co-owner of the newly independent Reader. The plan for the OPC can be viewed on the Obama Foundation website. It includes the construction of a 235-foot-high “museum tower,” which will rise above all neighboring structures, including the Museum of Science and Industry. As Jamie Kalven, award-winning journalist and plaintiff in the POP lawsuit, expressed in a recent Tribune editorial, the privatization of public parkland sets a dangerous precedent....

Last June, Gossip Wolf celebrated when whacked-out local trash-blues necromancers Tijuana Hercules dropped a killer seven-song EP, Evening Dressings, on Skin Graft Records. As it turns out, that EP was just an appetizer—a sort of pandemic stopgap—and now the main course is here! According to Skin Graft boss Mark Fischer, in spring 2020 the band had already finished a new full-length album, recorded over many years and involving 20 musicians—among them the core band of guitarist and front man John Vernon Forbes, drummer Joe Patt, saxophonist Doug Abram, bassist Arman Mabry, organist Tony Mendoza, and “junk” player Mike Young....

CNN had just called the Illinois primary for Donald Trump, but I might have been the only one inside Trump Tower who noticed. When I first arrived at 7 PM, the solitary television over the bar was tuned to ESPN. But “Jeff”—a hardcore Trump supporter from Rockford—kept hounding the bartender, “Ellie,” to change the channel to CNN for election results. She eventually relented and switched the programming from a sporting contest to a political one—though she left the sound muted, forcing us to endure the tepid sounds of corporate lounge music instead of Wolf Blitzer’s tenor....

Detroit-based duo Wolf Eyes have been one of the country’s most important experimental-music acts for more than 20 years, but they’ve also developed a mainstream following due to their presence in the world of viral meme Instagram accounts—it’s nearly impossible to talk about the band without bringing it up. For the past few years, longtime Wolf Eyes member John Olson has been operating the Instagram account inzane_johnny, and he’s racked up more than 100,000 followers by posting dozens of ridiculous memes a day, including takes on the standard Spongebob and Drake templates as well as relatively heady content focused on trolling Steely Dan, Bard College, and experimental guitarist Bill Nace....

Willie Jones clutched his chest and gasped for air. Alone in his bed in one of Elite Houses of Sober Living’s facilities just south of Chicago, Jones, 56, dragged himself into the house’s common area. There he collapsed to the floor, clinging to consciousness. When the virus spread from his housemate to Jones earlier this year, its course was swift. He began to cough in the afternoon, and by that night, he said, each breath was a battle....

Last July, local arts and music nonprofit Quiet Pterodactyl put together a sprawling compilation called Situation Chicago to support local music venues struggling during the pandemic. Almost a year later, with another few hundred thousand Americans dead and live music as we once knew it still mostly impossible, the organization has put together a sequel—this time raising money that will go directly to musicians through the CIVL Save Emergency Relief Fund....

Atlanta rapper Future dropped two full-lengths in eight days earlier this year—Future on February 17 and Hndrxx on February 24. Listening to all that music felt like sifting through a data dump, not like processing two albums—even Future’s gooey AutoTune flow lost some of its sui generis punch in their undifferentiated mass. But a couple days ago, I started returning to the track “High Demand” from Future—not because it’d stuck with me from February, but because Chicago footwork producer and Teklife affiliate DJ Big Hank did something memorable with it on his new full-length, Streetwise....

On the title track of DJ Hank’s debut 12-inch, Traffic Control (Sophomore Lounge), car alarms bleat atop thickets of overactive drums, occasional blown-out hi-hats, hiccuping bass, and a tasteful array of hand claps. At first listen, “Traffic Control” might rattle you just like a real-life car alarm, but thankfully Hank understands how to rearrange anxiety-inducing electronic screams into joyous blasts. A North Carolina native, he’s lived in Chicago for nearly a decade, paying his bills as a bike messenger while ingraining himself in the city’s footwork scene....

Few local hip-hop artists have been as interesting to watch grow in the spotlight as Taylor Bennett. Part of the buzz that’s come to surround him is due to his family name: Chancellor Bennett, better known as Chance the Rapper, is his older brother. Whatever amount of initial attention Taylor has garnered because of that connection, the pressure to live up to Chance’s level of success—and whatever expectations people have of Taylor because of big bro’s Grammys, headlines, late-night appearances, and everything else—could be enough to crush a small village....

Ever since Chicago riff machines Bible of the Devil first cranked up the jams 20 years ago, Reader critics have had a devil of a time deciding whether their music is metal or hard rock. Gossip Wolf is ready to settle the debate—it just doesn’t matter! Last week the band self-released their seventh full-length, Feel It, and BotD’s snapping dual-guitar attack and strutting rhythms are in fine fettle on blasters such as “(Love at) The Speed of Night” and “The Downtown Boogie....

Courtroom 100 is on the first floor of Chicago’s dreary, neoclassical George N. Leighton Criminal Courthouse at 26th and California. And it is one of the dreariest rooms in the whole building. Unlike its wood-paneled cousins on the upper floors, this room has bleak, beige walls, PVC-tile flooring, and rows of uncomfortable wooden pews filled seven days a week by the anxious friends and relatives of the newly arrested. This room, where daily bond court hearings are held, is a gateway to the expansive machinery of the Cook County criminal justice system....

Daniel Zaitchik’s new musical (he wrote the songs and the book) is a sweet little show that works very, very hard to keep things real—believable characters, believable dialogue, a story that feels like a slice of life. But Zaitchik’s premise is as old as musical comedy: a quirky young composer with writer’s block falls in love with a struggling young actor in a Broadway musical just waiting for her big break....

Footwork and ghetto house producer DJ Clent turns 38 on Saturday, and he’s decided to celebrate with a party—a party he hopes will feel like the juke blowouts he remembers from the late 90s. Back then hip-hop and R&B were rarely if ever heard at the south- and west-side parties Clent attended. “It was pretty much just footworking and dancing on females—it was a straight party vibe,” he says. “Just pretty much ghetto house, juke, and footwork....

If you’ve read Leah Pietrusiak’s 2011 Reader story on the Arts of Life Band, then you know that the group—a project of Chicago nonprofit the Arts of Life—includes members with developmental disabilities who are also kick-ass rock stars. This wolf has seen them play, and they rule! On Saturday, November 5, they host their annual Charitable Chili Cook-Off at the Arts of Life headquarters, judged by the likes of Hot Doug’s founder Doug Sohn and Chicago Fire star Doug Eigenberg....

Last year Florida rapper Dominic Fike landed a multimillion-dollar deal with Columbia Records on the strength of a string of songs totaling just shy of 15 minutes. The label wasn’t wrong to see Fike as a Soundcloud-rap star in the making: his music is about as transgressive as jaywalking, but his tracks are great at worming their way into your head. Columbia reissued that material in October as Fike’s debut EP, Don’t Forget About Me, Demos, which includes the runaway single “3 Nights....

If months of dire news, pandemic-related social isolation, and deepening national trauma have thrown you into a tailspin of ill will and lethargy, then Gossip Wolf has just the musical antidote. The upbeat, exuberantly riff-packed trad metal of local jammers High Spirits has appeared in this column before, but their latest album, Hard to Stop (out July 31 via German label High Roller), has arrived with exquisite anti-apocalyptic timing. Though High Spirits perform live with a five-piece band, Hard to Stop was entirely written, performed, and recorded by front man Chris Black, the local metal lifer who’s also the heart of long-running units Dawnbringer and Superchrist....

To the uninitiated, Alice’s Lounge is an unassuming corner tap with a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it facade. But once Alice Boron permits you, with a quick touch of a door-buzzer button, entrance into her Avondale domain, you realize it’s an oasis filled with cheap drinks, good company, and some of the best karaoke in town courtesy of Fred Wood, a middle-aged man who plays a mean inflatable saxophone. But these days Boron has seen business boom....