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On Sunday afternoon, after Chicago police shot 20-year-old Latrell Allen but before the city would mourn broken windows and looted Best Buys, a block in Englewood was about to erupt. That man was Tyrone Muhammad. The 41-year-old was dressed in a white T-shirt, which he wore under a black bulletproof vest with a matching black mask. Muhammad speaks in a calm voice, like a friend who knows you well. Williams knew the situation was fraught and that he likely couldn’t handle it alone, so he called on other community members for assistance....

Danny’s Tavern, the intimate, candlelit, apartment-shaped bar that’s been a fixture of Chicago nightlife for 34 years, is permanently closed. It’d been shuttered due to the pandemic since March 18, and its owners told staff in early October that it wouldn’t be opening again. Rumors of the closure started circulating on social media midway through last month, and Block Club confirmed the bad news on November 5. Danny’s Tavern staff GoFundMe Donations to gofundme/com/f/danny039s-taven-staff-support will still reach former Danny’s employees....

It seems like every time the Gossip Wolf crew have seen surfy punk quartet Blizzard Babies play over the past few years—roughly a bazillion—we’ve snooped around the Chicago four-piece’s merch table looking in vain for their debut full-length. Our wait is almost over! On Sat 2/21, the Babies will finally release their debut LP, a self-­titled release on local label BLVD Records; they celebrate with a show at Cole’s featuring openers Melkbelly and Yeesh....

Welcome to the Reader‘s weekday news briefing. Mother of police shooting victim Quintonio LeGrier waits for answers Quintonio LeGrier, 19, was shot and killed by a Chicago police officer on December 26, 2015, following a domestic disturbance call. LeGrier’s family sued the Chicago Police Department just two days later, but the case is still tied up in court. The city quickly dropped a lawsuit it filed against the LeGrier’s family in December, but Robert Rialmo, the officer who fatally shot both LeGrier and neighbor Bettie Jones, is countersuing both the family and the city, contending that LeGrier swung a bat at his head several times and failed to drop the bat when asked, giving him reason to believe that LeGrier would kill him unless he used deadly force....

In 2010, Camilo Medina and Javier Forero, natives of Colombia who grew up in Miami, moved to Chicago to attend the School of the Art Institute. They settled in Lakeview and tried to immerse themselves in the neighborhood’s music scene, but they had a hard time finding other aspiring musicians on the same wavelength—people with an interest in 50s and 60s pop, ideally who also spoke Spanish. They did manage to connect with another SAIC student, Guillermo Rodriguez, and in 2013 they started the band that would eventually become Divino Niño, with Rodriguez on guitar, Forero on bass and vocals, and Medina on guitar and vocals....

If there’s anything Eternals front man Damon Locks isn’t good at, Gossip Wolf doesn’t know about it—dude is not only a great musician but also a fine visual artist, a fun dancer, an inspiring teaching artist, and a dependable dance-floor DJ! On Friday, November 10, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, he’ll craft a “sound essay” titled Right On, Be Free as part of the evolving installation Open 24 Hours by Chicago artist Edra Soto....

The Bauhaus art school may have closed in 1933, but its influence on visual design has endured. Melding crafts and fine art with an emphasis on simplicity and utilitarianism, the Bauhaus movement helped define the modernist aesthetic. Hedwig Dances artistic director Jan Bartoszek pays tribute to these groundbreaking artists with her in-development dance project Futura; two of its numbers are presented in “Point | Line | Plane,” a program that highlights the company’s focus on incorporating sleek visual elements into choreography....

A few years ago, some friends joined me in writing a Passover Haggadah that borrowed the tunes of Beatles songs. We named it “You Say Shalom, And I Say Shalom.” None of us is particularly observant (we’re more Jew-ish), but we longed for the days when matzo was a delicacy and grandpa chugged the glass of wine left out for Elijah—the prophet who is said to attend seders in spirit form, thirsty for that sweet, sweet Manischewitz—when nobody was looking....

When a potent new expression of derision comes along, it needs to be applied sparingly. Think of it as like a cutting-edge antibiotic. In a pinch, it’ll zap whatever lower life form needs zapping, but if it’s used repeatedly bad things happen. Bacteria develop resistance; objects of contempt stop reeling and begin to giggle. On to the Washington crowd, Democrats and Republicans alike. “Both sides are the meat puppets of Wall Street,” he wrote....

Shortly after Carolinas indie label Tiny Engines launched in 2008, it became a crucial outlet for the burgeoning fourth-wave emo scene, releasing material by bands such as Tigers Jaw, Restorations, and The Hotelier, which began breaking out in the mid-2010s. A few years ago, the label began to aggressively expand beyond the sounds that characterized its early years, and in the process inadvertently highlighted the ways many contemporary punk and indie-rock outfits borrow from emo....

The student population at the School of the Art Institute is just 3 percent black. “It’s very frustrating,” says Da’Niro Elle Brown, a senior who studies sculpture, performance, and film. “People put you with the other black people. They assume every black person loves Kara Walker or Basquiat. During critiques, if you’re black, you feel like people are expecting something from you. People assume your work is about you being black and that they can’t ask questions because they can’t identify....

The centerpiece—soul, even—of every Lars von Trier film is a scene of compelling destruction. Breaking the Waves (1996), a fictional tale, has Emily Watson on a stretcher believing that the love of her life needed her raped and beaten in order to survive himself. In the 2003 documentary The Five Obstructions, von Trier’s real-life mentor Jørgen Leth is served an elaborate meal in the red-light district of Mumbai. The local poverty serves to highlight Leth’s wealth and privilege, of course, but we watch something more complex erode in the relationship between the two Danish filmmakers—respect, maybe, or admiration, and the combination is gutting and awful....

With schools in Illinois closed for the remainder of the current school year, families may be scrambling to find enrichment activities for the quarantine to take the place of their usual extracurricular outings. Several theater companies have either created new family-oriented material or stepped up their existing online roster of classes to address the need. But another goal was to find ways to involve the entire family. CCT quickly unveiled the “Play at Home” video contest, which encourages kids and families to create a short (five minutes or less) play involving “a mythical creature of your choice, an evil villain, AND one of your family members....

Former war correspondent Kim Barker got the full-hair-and-makeup treatment for the TV cameras last Saturday in her suite in the Ritz-Carlton in New York City. Barker says she gave 50 TV interviews in her suite last Saturday. Barker understands that when the pieces air, nothing about Afghanistan is likely to make the cut. Even Barker’s appearance in the stories isn’t a sure thing. Tina Fey was giving interviews at the same time, in another suite down the corridor, and which makes better television: Barker talking about Tina Fey or Tina Fey talking about playing a reckless, hard-drinking war correspondent?...

Built around the demos of Detroit-based singer, guitarist, and pianist Alexandria Maniak, Shortly has evolved from an emo-tinged indie-rock solo project into a full-fledged band. The four-piece group show their promise on their debut EP, Richmond, released on Triple Crown last September. On standouts “Finders Keepers” and “Spare Time,” Shortly strike a balance between fragility and propulsive momentum, accenting Maniak’s quivering, beautifully vulnerable voice with reverbed-out rock. On “Finders Keepers,” a tune that wouldn’t sound out of place on an American Football album, Maniak sings of friendship lost and garments left behind: “All I have is a flannel shirt you gave to me / All you have of mine you can keep / I don’t want it back now,” she sings....

Kevin Yatarola for Lincoln Center Eighth Blackbird One of the ways Eighth Blackbird has distinguished itself over the years is by flirting with the genre-agnostic outlook of Kronos Quartet: they function as a new music ensemble that sometimes looks beyond its own borders for repertoire. More often than not, however, Eighth Blackbird has played music written by folks best known for their rock affiliations, and tonight they deliver a program at the Old Town School of Folk Music that puts the focus largely on that facet of its work....

Long-running German group the Notwist perfected their airy combination of lovelorn indie rock and tender electronic sounds nearly two decades ago, but once they got it just right, they apparently decided never to repeat themselves. They preceded the new Vertigo Days (Morr Music) with an instrumental album steeped in the wallpaper aesthetics of library music (2015’s Messier Objects) and a live full-length whose tension and aggression contrast with the relatively restrained feel of their studio work (2016’s Superheroes, Ghostvillains & Stuff)....

Michael Gebert Rich Bowen, coauthor of Hot Dog Chicago A snarkier example of the book’s reviewing, though accurate as of the mid-2000s. The place is a cell phone store now. The idea of devoting serious writing to joint food wasn’t very old—Calvin Trillin and Jane and Michael Stern had only been doing it for about a decade at that point—and a certain air of sarcasm might have been a defense mechanism....

When Mayor Lightfoot stormed across the council floor last week to confront Alderwoman Jeanette Taylor, we got a demonstration of a mayor breaking her promise—not that anyone asked for it. The mayor’s council floor showdown with Taylor stems from the case of Anjanette Young, the woman whose west-side home was invaded one night in 2019, by a dozen or so police officers waving a no-knock warrant, as she stepped from the shower....

“What Worldstar Hip Hop was for fight videos, we’re trying to become for police interactions,” says XMO’s creator, Channing Harris. While users can review their interactions with cops and provide information including the officers’ badge numbers, officers’ names won’t be attached to reviews and badge numbers won’t be visible to other users—only to the XMO developers. Efforts to create a “Yelp for cops” in other cities have been made before....