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After quarantine took away live concerts, all you had to do was scroll Twitter for a minute to see just how much people missed live venues and enjoying their favorite tunes with like minds. In February 2020, Chicago streets bustled with activity in celebration of the NBA All-Star Weekend. It was the first time the city had hosted the event since 1988, and in addition to the usual attractions—including the celebrity game, the dunk contest, and of course the main event—the weekend featured WGCI’s Big Jam 2: Rappers and Ballers Edition at Credit Union 1 Arena on Saturday, February 15....

On a steamy summer evening in 1933, a group of young black dancers readied themselves into position behind the plush curtains of Chicago’s Auditorium Theatre. They were the last act on a program of music and dance, a lineup that had been full of Chopin and orchestral favorites. Theirs was a new ballet, La Guiablesse, the story of a “she-devil” from the island of Martinique who lures a young lover away from his beloved, pushes him over a cliff, and disappears in a puff of smoke....

My peers and I spent our formative years seeking out the hardest, heaviest, fastest music we could find. We considered it a rite of passage, a way to rebel against the bloated arena rock and pillowy AM gold of our parents’ generation, much like they rebelled against their own folks’ Pat Boone with the Beatles and Stones. It’s because of this tradition, seemingly ingrained within American culture, that the phenomenon of Whitney confounds me....

Experimental indie duo Wye Oak make their commitment to reinventing their music feel like an integral part of their art: whether they’re incorporating shades of folk rock or R&B or even scraps of their earliest songs (as they did on 2016’s Tween), it always comes across like a natural progression. On their new five-track EP, No Horizon, they embrace their most avant-pop side by recording with the Grammy-winning Brooklyn Youth Chorus....

Over the years, great Swiss label Hat Hut (which operates under the name Hatology these days) has reissued plenty of gems from its catalog that were originally produced in the vinyl era, including material by Steve Lacy, Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, and Anthony Braxton. But many of its early releases have remained out of print for decades. Luckily the label (owned by Werner Uehlinger) has begun selling or licensing some of those rare titles....

The challenge with Spanish baroque drama—and other putative classics that are not Shakespeare—is how not to make doilies out of them. If the peasants in Lope de Vega’s little garrison town of Fuente Ovejuna represent a medieval way of life in conflict with the incursion of new values, and if the immoderate brutality and sexual appetites of the Commander of the Order of Calatrava delegitimize his authority as an agent of Juana and Alfonso of Portugal, further justifying the imperial reign of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, all of that has to not sound like I just made it sound, which is the sound of who cares, get on with it, that crown is made of paper, what’s he talking about....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Thursday, October 19, 2017. Durbin confronts Jeff Sessions on his failure to help Chicago solve its gun violence issues Illinois senator Dick Durbin and U.S. attorney general Jeff Sessions got into a heated discussion over Chicago’s sanctuary city status at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday. Durbin told Sessions that undocumented immigrants are not causing Chicago’s gun violence problems, despite Sessions’ frequent protestations....

The gig poster we’re featuring this week was created for the third incarnation of the interdisciplinary festival Freedom From and Freedom To, curated by artist and teacher Cristal Sabbagh and hosted by Elastic Arts. The first and second events, held in September and December of 2019, were both single-night affairs, but the third will stretch out into two jam-packed evenings of improvisational music and dance. Previously Sabbagh had asked audience members to pick artists’ names from a bag before each performance, in order to determine who would improvise together on the spot, but this year there won’t be an in-person audience: Freedom From and Freedom To will be livestreamed via the Elastic Arts website and Twitch channel, in deference to COVID-19 concerns....

Gordon’s cell phone has a cheerful ring, light and lilting, not the ringtone of a man you take seriously. Still, it cuts through the air with the disarming insistence of an ice cream truck, or maybe only an ice cream pushcart, and Jean, the woman next to him in the cafe, at last picks up. Jean is a polite woman. Gordon is dead. Sarah Ruhl’s Dead Man’s Cell Phone explores what happens to love and loss when the previously discrete variables of presence and absence are muddled by our common technology....

Q: I’m a straight white woman in my early 30s. In theory, I’ve always been into men of all races—but in practice, most of my exes are Latino and white. In September, I met this really handsome Chinese-American guy, and I feel like he rewired me. I’ve been exclusively attracted to Asian guys since. I’m not writing to ask if this is racist, because I’m not asking these guys to, like, speak Korean to me in bed or do any role-playing stuff....

Before the 1970’s, queer characters and themes were all but invisible in Hollywood films. Sometimes coded references clued people in; sometimes gay viewers would interpret a film differently than was intended to find points of identification (“reading across the grain,” as theorists would say). Facets Cinémathèque‘s screening of Basil Dearden’s 1961 British film Victim (with an accompanying lecture by Northwestern film professor Nick Davis) provides an opportunity to highlight five pre-Stonewall Hollywood films (one per decade, 1920s-’60s) that have become iconic (if not always queer-positive) works in gay cinema history....

Gossip Wolf loved grungy stoner-metal band Alma Negra, but alas, they played what turned out to be their last show in 2015. Singer-guitarist Erin Page—who also runs print-art operation Kill Hatsumomo—says her new band, Reivers, arose “after several lineup changes and my desire, along with my copilot, guitarist Greg Hamilton, to take Alma Negra in a slightly different direction.” Joining Page and Hamilton in Reivers are drummer Madison Maloof and bassist Tim Preciado; the name, says Page, refers to the Scottish border clans of her ancestry, “known as gypsies, robbers, and thieves and damned by the church....

Their students include gun enthusiast Diana (an endearing Isa Arciniegas), who is attracted to her best friend, Mojdeh (Ariana Mahallati), who in turn harbors a crush on an older guy in her biology class. Painfully shy Nikki (Andrea San Miguel) and the well-meaning-but-out-of-their-depth male duo of Andy (Ryan McBride) and Eggo (Jayson Lee) round out the class. What Padilla’s play—directed with pinpoint precision and plenty of startling wit by Marti Lyons—asks us to consider is how defending our lives can so often clash with living our lives....

Is it the water in Lake Michigan that makes Chicago such a politically corrupt city? That might sound like an outlandish theory, but R.J. Nelson’s Dirty Waters: Confessions of Chicago’s Last Harbor Boss makes a compelling case. What also keeps things lively is the tone of Nelson’s writing, a chili bowl full of corner-tap talk, sensitive memoir, and detective fiction. At times the gumshoe similes soar: “New furniture and carpeting were ordered, but like reform in government the process took time while the stench of chain-smoked corruption lingered....

Al Podgorski / Chicago Sun-Times Cook County Board president Toni Preckwinkle (left) says state’s attorney Anita Alvarez (right) has a “narrow” and “punitive” approach to justice. Not so long ago politicians were afraid of appearing soft on crime, and in many places they still are. But the landscape is shifting rapidly—to the point that everyone who wants to be Cook County’s top prosecutor is promising to keep more people out of jail....

If you’ve ever watched someone you love struggle through a cruel illness and eventually succumb, you know that some days it can be hard to find any lightness under the crushing weight of grief. So it’s beyond inspiring that Michelle Zauner, the solo artist behind Japanese Breakfast, made not one but two dreamy indie-pop albums exploring the complex emotions she went through while caring for her mother as she underwent cancer treatment (2016’s Psychopomp) and then healing after she passed away in 2014 (2017’s Soft Sounds From Another Planet)....

courtesy of the Harry Partch Foundation Harry Partch One of the reasons the brilliant music of American composer Harry Partch isn’t more widely known and performed has to do with the fact that he had to custom-build an orchestra of instruments to play the sounds of his 43-tone scale. Those instruments, such as diamond marimba or cloud chamber bowls, were fragile and imperfect to begin with, and for many years they were stored at Montclair State College in New Jersey—they recently moved to a new home in Seattle at the University of Washington....

Q: I’m a 40-year-old gay male. I live in a big city, in a dense neighborhood. While I’ve been working from home during COVID, I’ve been sitting at my kitchen table facing a big window. Across the alley is an apartment with a deck. At one point, I noticed a cute, young, muscular guy outside. I ran into this guy a few weeks later at a neighborhood liquor store. While I was looking at porn one night I was stunned to find his nudes and a link to his OnlyFans....

It’s 1972 and Haskins’ bar has been a fixture on the south side of Chicago for 30 years, passed down to Ray Haskins (Darren Jones) by his father, Big Ray, who laid every brick and installed every pipe in the shop. Malört takes pride of place on the shelf, and the names of those chosen few with a taste for it are carved into the wall—but everyone who comes through the door for the first time gets a shot as a rite of passage....

Rapper Taurus Bartlett, aka Polo G, grew up in Old Town’s Marshall Field Garden Apartments, and he’s channeled the resilience he learned as kid into one of the most durable hip-hop tracks of the year. On “Pop Out” he delivers a vivid hook that indicts the poverty and mayhem in Black communities, but his plaintive, melodic rap-singing can instill lyrics about suffering with a triumphant sense of pride. The song has had serious staying power: released in January, in June it went platinum and reached a new peak at number 11 on the Billboard Hot 100....