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When Chicago postrock band Tortoise began attracting international attention in the 90s, critics frequently discussed the band’s nifty adaptation of Steve Reich-style minimalism, particularly its use of hypnotic, interlocking tuned percussion. Tortoise’s “Ten-Day Interval,” from the brilliant 1998 album TNT, reconfigured his ideas for an indie-rock audience. At the time lots of underground artists took inspiration from Reich, and the following year Nonesuch Records released Reich Remixed, which featured electronic acts such as Howie B....

Richard A. Chapman/Sun-Times Rahm Emanuel has turned on his national fundraising spigot to help him stay in office in Chicago. On Tuesday—hours before the last prime-time mayoral debate—Rahm Emanuel released his latest TV commercial. And his donors aren’t just suburban residents who work or have investments in the city. More than a third of his haul came from beyond Illinois. But as election day approaches, Emanuel has avoided talking about how flush his campaign is, probably because it doesn’t square with the image of a guy fighting for minimum wage workers and middle-class parents....

Twin sisters—an academic with a Fulbright and a struggling songwriter—return from New York to their small Tennessee hometown after their divorced father gets suspended from his teaching job. But it soon becomes clear that the women need their own reckoning with their personal problems. And what the family can’t say to each other clearly, they try to say in songs. In Sundown, Yellow Moon, Rachel Bonds follows a familiar blueprint, but the play, now in a local premiere at Raven directed by Cody Estle, doesn’t coalesce....

Zac Efron: two-time winner of the MTV Movie Award for “best shirtless performance,” four-time nominee and two-time Teen Choice “Male Hottie” winner, CinemaCon Comedy Star of the Year, and Golden Raspberry nominee for Worst Actor of 2018: what does he have to do with Asians? (Or Gaysians?) Rhee initially resisted. He was dead set on producing an all-Asian Our Town as Token’s first play. “I am a classics/canon fiend,” he says....

As the coronavirus pandemic overshadowed this week’s primary election in Illinois, depressing turnout and delivering the state’s delegates to Joe Biden, Cook County voters also had a choice to make about their next clerk of the Circuit Court. The clerk of the Circuit Court is an unfamiliar office for many voters. As a record-keeping body, its role is essential but mostly invisible unless one works in the courts or has to deal with a case....

Bojan Milicevic’s hometown is best known for two things: thick, sweet, and spicy ancho-like red adjvarka peppers, which blanket exterior house walls as they dry each autumn, and September’s Roštiljijada, “barbecue week,” when the main drag is occupied by hundreds of amateur and professional grillers firing up everything from cevapcici to uštipak, to whole hogs and lambs, only upstaged by the record-holding pljeskavica, the world’s largest Serbian burger. It’s not a foam-and-forceps situation, but rarely do most Balkan restaurants roast Slagel Farm chickens, drizzle charred scallion oil over feta-stuffed peppers, or develop a Nashville-style hot chicken sausage with ground ajvarka, let alone offer a cocktail menu built around different Serbian fruit brandies....

Q: I’m a 26-year-old cis queer woman. My best friend has identified publicly as asexual for the past two years. She constantly talks about how since she doesn’t “need” sex, this means she is asexual. She does have sex, however, and she enjoys it, which I know isn’t disqualifying. But she also actively seeks out sex partners and sex. But, again, she insists that because she doesn’t “need” sex the way she presumes the rest of us do, she is asexual....

Back in 2012, just as Black Ensemble Theater was moving into its brand-new home in Uptown, the theater’s founder and CEO, Jackie Taylor, gave an interview to the Reader‘s Tony Adler. “I always knew that the theater company had to be more than just a name, it had to have an asset, it had to have a foundation,” Taylor told Adler. “Owning your own space, having your own theater solidifies you in a way that nothing else can....

Chicago has no shortage of inventive underground bands that borrow from punk, indie rock, metal, and any other pulse-quickening style to create a deranged, idiosyncratic sound. But no one in town does it quite like the Cell Phones. This three-piece can whip up as much noise as a crash of rhinos—if rhinos had thumbs and the dexterity to pull off tight, supple melodic flourishes on guitar. Bassist Ryan Szeszycki and drummer Justin Purcell flit between burly breakdown grindcore breakdowns and grungy doo-wop with start-stop precision, while powerhouse front woman Lindsey Charles lends the band’s severe sound a playful looseness with her coarse screams and honeyed coos....

One of the most enduring plot devices of classic Walt Disney animations is the separation of a young hero or heroine from his or her family. Dumbo, Bambi, Pinocchio, and numerous other characters all get estranged from their parents or parental figures, and the anxiety that results from the estrangement motors the stories of the films in which they appear. With this narrative trope, Disney and his storytellers mined a universal childhood fear for maximum emotional impact, and for this reason, the classic Disney features remain powerful experiences decades after they were made....

New York-based French composer Daniel Wohl writes concert music that generally follows current trends: it’s notated for orchestral instruments but often enhanced by electronics. On his recordings, though, he pursues a more seamless marriage of acoustic and electronic elements. A couple years ago he knocked me out with his gorgeous album Corps Exquis (New Amsterdam), performed by New York chamber ensemble Transmit with help from So Percussion and singers Julia Holter and Aaron Roche....

The Underflow take their name from the Greek record store where guitarist David Grubbs, cornetist Rob Mazurek, and saxophonist Mats Gustafsson played their first trio gig in May 2019. But the connections joining the three musicians were forged in the 1990s, when Grubbs and Mazurek were associated with Chicago’s postrock scene and the Sweden-born Gustafsson played here so often that he was considered an honorary Chicagoan. Nowadays they’ve scattered across two continents (Brooklyn, New York; Marfa, Texas; and Nickelsdorf, Austria), and it takes a European tour to get them on the same stage at the same time....

Some of the rare bright moments in this slow terror are the random porch presents from masked bandits bearing treasures. Last month, prompted by a text, I leapt from my desk (couch) and found a bag of perfect morel mushrooms at the door, purchased by one friend, delivered by another, and foraged in central Illinois by someone I’d never met before but had been curious about for a long time....

Thursday’s release of footage from the killing of Adam Toledo, a 13-year-old Mexican American boy, in Little Village last month, which showed the child was unarmed with his hands up at the moment a white police officer shot him, has further intensified the calls for a racial reckoning that grew in May 2020 with the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. When the CMP website launched, there were limited—or no—explanations for singling out some monuments over others....

This clever 2003 Broadway hit by songwriters Jeff Marx and Robert Lopez and playwright Jeff Whitty, now in a breezy, intimate staging by director L. Walter Stearns at Mercury Theater, is the story of Princeton, a 23-year-old college grad with no job, no girlfriend, and no sense of purpose. After moving to Avenue Q, a fictional slum on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Princeton meets plucky but lonely Kate Monster, a kindergarten teaching assistant with dreams of opening a school for monsters like herself—or “people of fur,” in her words....

December 15, 2012, was a bleak, rainy Saturday with a chill in the air. Chicago police officer Ruth Castelli, an eight-year veteran of the force, was patrolling the city’s southwest side with fellow officer Christopher Hackett. The two didn’t usually ride together, but Castelli’s regular partner was on leave. The day started innocuously enough—earlier that morning Castelli had participated in “Shop With a Cop,” a seasonal initiative that sends officers on a shopping trip to Target with underprivileged children on their beat....

A few weeks ago an e-mail popped into the inboxes of the authors of this post inviting us to swim like a mermaid. We knew we had to accept, because how often in your life do you get to fulfill one of your most cherished childhood dreams? Aimee Levitt: Did you have mermaid aspirations when you were little? I think I probably did because I couldn’t actually swim, so I had to find other ways to fill my free swim time....

The influence of gospel music on singer-songwriter Luke Winslow-King is obvious, even when he’s playing an up-tempo song with a title such as “Swing That Thing.” Though King doesn’t approach it in a superficial, frantic, tambourine-banging way, if you’re familiar at all with southern gospel you can easily identify its hallmarks in his use of chord changes and repetition—it often vamps on a groove. And if it’s possible to be reflective while delivering songs with a hard backbeat, then Winslow-King fills the bill....

First it was Jorge Soler. Back when he played right field for the Cubs, he really liked the churrasco plate at Cuba 312. Soler told Javier Baez and Willson Contreras and Pedro Strop, and before long all sorts of Latin American players and coaches started hanging out at Billy and Jamie Alvarez’s Roscoe Village restaurant. Then they discovered the couple’s first restaurant, Taste of Cuba, in Lincolnwood, which served a more traditional, homier menu....

Q: I’m a 31-year-old cis bisexual woman. I’m hetero-romantic and in a monogamish relationship with a man. We play with other people together. I’ve never liked giving blowjobs because I was taught that girls who give blowjobs are “sluts.” Phrases that are meant to be insulting like “You suck,” “Suck it,” “Go suck a dick,” etc. created a strong association in my mind between blowjobs and men degrading women. (Men take what they want, and women get used and called sluts....