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The collaborative spirit of Chicago’s young hip-hop scene is beautiful, but for somebody trying to keep track of everyone’s affiliations, it can be confusing. Rappers, producers, and singers rep their cliques and crews with pride on recordings, but they’re also likely to hit the studio with people from a different set. I’ve seen people mistakenly claim that Noname, Alex Wiley, and even Virginia rapper-singer D.R.A.M. are members of Save Money—I assume because all three have recorded with the collective’s most prominent member, Chance the Rapper....

Summer holiday weekends are usually meant for lazy outdoor faux-activity like backyard badminton or resting one’s dirty feet in a kiddie pool while neighbor children throw snap-its at you through the fence. One must rise to the occasion from time to time, and Independence day weekend is a good moment to reflect upon what more we can each do to guarantee that BBQs and cornhole can be enjoyed in peace by anyone who chooses to live in our fair city....

If you’re involved with art or music or writing in Chicago and keep at it for any length of time, odds are you’ll meet everyone else involved sooner or later. I’d first met Jeremy Kitchen, the head librarian at the Chicago Public Library’s Richard J. Daley Branch and host of its semiregular Punk Rock and Donuts shows, a decade ago through the artist Tony Fitzpatrick. Last year, after a chance meeting at Jackalope Coffee in Bridgeport, not far from the library, he invited me to be a guest on his radio show Eye 94, which airs Sundays and Thursdays on Lumpen Radio, with monthly live shows at Pilsen Community Books....

Windy City Playhouse’s 2018-2019 production of Southern Gothic was not the first and not the only immersive theater production in town, but it is among the first to achieve a sustained high profile and perhaps the longest run at some 22 months. It earned Jeff Awards for its director, David Bell, scenic designer, Scott Davis, and properties designer, Eleanor Kahn. Its success helped put the then-five-year-old theater firmly on the map, and drew the attention of a wider audience to this form of theater loosely termed “immersive....

The allure of street food for people who didn’t grow up in a place where it flourished is largely psychological. For tourists it’s not just the affordable, practical, utilitarian way of feeding oneself that it is for locals, but a cheap and easy way to feel like you belong—or at least identify—with a foreign culture at its realest. Somehow one is convinced this food tastes best in the open heat and exhaust of a thrumming metropolis....

The problem with the 1984 movie Footloose is that it tries so damned hard to be a serious, realistic drama about a rebellious teen fighting against the joy-killing puritanism of a middle American small town that it drains the joy out of the best parts of the movie: the silly, energetic, entertaining dance scenes. The beauty of the 1998 Broadway version of the movie, at least as it has been realized in this Marriott revival, directed by Gary Griffin and choreographed by William Carlos Angulo, is that the most sanctimonious elements in the story have been stripped away, leaving more room for the fun that the show’s hero yearns to bring to the town....

T hey bust out onto the scene like champions, faster and larger than life, feet flying, balls in the air, to Beyoncé’s “Run the World (Girls).” When the colored lights stop strobing and the cheers of the crowd die away, nine teenage girls in red uniforms stand on an Astroturf field in Middle America. They pass a disjointed conversation among themselves as they put themselves through a set routine of warm-ups and drills in unison, a single slap of the hand as it grabs the foot for a quad stretch: They discuss whether Khmer Rouge leaders should be jailed 40 years after the Cambodian genocide, where Cambodia is, whether they have been to Cambodia, how to pronounce “Khmer Rouge,” whether the girl who is an Episcopalian is a bitch, whether it’s OK to use the word “bitch,” snake handling, and how to use a tampon....

“I always, always, always wear a mask! I have three of the same pattern,” says Zoe Hendrix Johnson. She paired her leopard-print face mask with a chartreuse duster coat, sneakers, a flowy skirt, and a cropped polka-dot shirt: “I think that was truly the first day [during the pandemic] that I set my intention on building an outfit,” she explained via e-mail. “And strangely enough, as I was leaving my house, I checked my mail and my masks had been delivered!...

Despite plummeting temperatures last week, about two dozen people filled a classroom on the seventh floor of the School of the Art Institute one evening for a workshop on the basics of “cop watching.” While the idea of observing police has become tightly linked in recent years with bystanders filming officers, the organizers of the training emphasized that cell-phone cameras aren’t required to keep an eye on cops. Last week’s workshop focused on how to conduct oneself if one chooses to observe a police stop, and what to do if the cop being watched turns his or her attention to the watcher....

If you’re planning to skip the Air and Water Show on Saturday and Sunday, there’s plenty of other goings-on far from the lakefront hoards, sonic booms, and the gratuitous displays of military might. Here’s some of what we recommend: Fri 8/19-Sat 8/20: Catzilla 4: A Cat Fest at Prop Thtr (3502 N. Elston) features cat-inspired dance performances, spoken word, music, and more, plus the feature act starring real felines: Science Fiction Cats....

A human being, Bertolt Brecht once wrote, is the sum of his social circumstances. In mounting Brecht’s great 1943 drama The Good Person of Szechwan, Cor Theatre has managed, against all odds, to create a world in which social circumstances barely exist. In true parable fashion, the social circumstances in Szechwan are simple and straightforward: poverty abounds and goods are in short supply, making everything costly and poverty worse (not coincidentally, Brecht wrote the play in exile from Germany as World War II raged)....

I pay the guy no mind the first couple times he comes up. Young, kind of conceited-sounding, typical. He sits toward the back of the bar with a couple acting like they are on a date. But as the night wears on, he becomes a problem. He begins to linger at the bar, chatting up whoever is nearest. He acts in a way that forces us to watch him. But he isn’t the only distraction this night....

The moral implications of Drunk Shakespeare, in which a performer gets deliberately plastered before attempting a major role in Macbeth, may feel a bit troubling. But concerns about liver damage aside, the recently opened Chicago version of this show (created by Scott Griffin and director David Hudson) that’s now in its fifth year in New York brings together a murderers’ row of comedic talent to what is essentially Comedy Central’s Drunk History with a literary twist—served on the rocks, straight up, and with many disgusting variations in between....

If you spend many nights at Beauty Bar in West Town or East Room in Logan Square, you’ve probably seen or heard about Chris Mojekwu, aka Mojek. The producer spins at the occasional late-night party, and there’s rarely a week when you won’t see his name on a flyer hanging somewhere. The variety of events at which he’s appeared speaks to the breadth of Chicago’s intermingling scenes—and of Mojek’s artistic palette....

Update 9/23/2019: This show has been cancelled. Please contact the venue for information about pre-purchased tickets. Vocalist Frank Carter split with British hardcore outfit Gallows in 2011 over creative differences, and when he launched his band Pure Love that same year, it was obvious that he was less interested in punk and more into aggressive, melody-forward rock ’n’ roll. But with Carter’s current project, Frank Carter & the Rattlesnakes, launched in 2015, the lines between genres are much less clear....

Q: I’m a straight man who’s been dating a woman for not quite four months. In the beginning things were light. But things started to get heavy quickly. Two weeks in she revealed her very serious abandonment issues and then began asking me whether I really loved her and demanding reassurance that I wasn’t going anywhere and she wouldn’t be “just a single chapter” in my life. After a month, I met her seven-year-old son, her parents, and her ex....

Updated Wed 6/26 at 2 PM: This preview has been edited to reflect the addition of Gucci Mane and Famous Dex to the Summer Smash bill (and the removal of Kodak Black). The Summer Smash, presented by Chicago hip-hop blog turned cultural powerhouse Lyrical Lemonade, is already the biggest rap festival in the city—and it’s on track to be one of the biggest in the country. After debuting in August 2018 as a one-day event with two stages, the Summer Smash has expanded to two days, with three stages and 51 acts....

Terence Hannum is perhaps best known as the keyboardist and vocalist of prolific Chicago-born experimental metal trio Locrian, who blend dense, crushing drones and harsh, sweeping black metal to stir up some serious dark energy. But Hannum is also an accomplished visual artist, writer, and solo musician. I was expecting his brand-new album, Dissolving the Bonds, to contain some Locrian-style dissonance, but when I hit play I was treated to five warm tracks of calming, ambient beauty....

I’ve never had the luxury of not giving a fuck about what I do with $145. But Maple & Ash—which offers a $145 chef’s tasting menu friskily called “I Don’t Give a F*ck”—is aimed squarely at those who do. The Gold Coast steak house apparently was conceived as a playground for the fabulously wealthy and businesspeople with large expense accounts. A $95 seafood tower for two? Why not! Caviar ranging from $100 to $240?...

It’s been a tough three years since Susan Henking was installed as president of Shimer College, the tiny Great Books school embedded on high-tech IIT’s Bronzeville campus. On another of Miller’s lists—this one giving equal weight to student cost, debt, loan defaults, and graduation rates—Shimer was ranked the 16th worst out of 20. The magazine has been compiling lists of the best colleges and universities in America since 2005, evaluating schools not on “expense, luxury, and exclusivity” but on what they’re “doing for the country,” as measured by social mobility, research, and public service....