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In Endgame, life is more than a “tale told by an idiot . . . signifying nothing,” as Macbeth puts it when he’s feeling blue. It’s also a tale told to idiots—and no one is listening. I couldn’t tell you what Kays hoped to accomplish by having Beckett’s existential clowns perform at a birthday party, unless it’s meant to be a kind of memento mori—the fly on the cake reminding us that all fun and games come to the same end....

It took me a couple of listens before I realized that Louisville singer Joan Shelley was tackling Nick Drake’s singular ballad “Time Has Told Me” on her new six-track covers EP, Rivers and Vessels (released as a benefit for the antipollution advocacy organization Kentucky Waterways Alliance). Shelley’s honeyed, weightless voice can express both pain and empathy; it’s so distinctive that her interpretations of songs have a tendency to utterly remake the source material....

After Chicago pizza-rock garage ragers Party Bat called it quits, bassist and singer Chris Clark and guitarist Aaron Turney recruited drummer Michael Petrucelly to form Problem People in 2014. Shedding the zany antics of Clark and Turney’s previous project, Problem People swing straight for the gut with heartfelt punk that channels the melodic sensibility and rough-around-the-edges attitude of midwestern greats past and present, including Hüsker Dü, the Replacements, and the Honor System....

Michael Taus is back. Not that he was ever gone for long. But the veteran chef—who got his start at Charlie Trotter’s the year after it opened before embarking on a nearly 20-year run at Zealous—became a bit of a ronin when he closed that restaurant’s second incarnation two years ago. Oh, he’d opened Duchamp before that, but he was long gone by the time it closed the same year. Since then there have been a few low-profile consulting gigs (Da Lobsta and the ill-fated Coppervine), but Taus, by his own account, has spent much of his time traveling....

This past weekend saw the release of Captain Marvel, but Brie Larson isn’t the only superwoman of American cinema you can see on Chicago screens this week. Tomorrow at 7:30 PM at Northeastern Illinois University the Chicago Film Society will screen the 1932 drama Christopher Strong, which was directed by Dorothy Arzner, one of the few women to direct Hollywood movies between the 1920s and the 1970s. And at Chicago Filmmakers at 7 PM on Saturday, local filmmaker and educator Shayna Connelly will present an introduction to pioneering women filmmakers, incorporating clips by such key U....

The neighborhood clubs of Chicago’s south and west sides aren’t the incubators of blues talent that they used to be, but some artists on that circuit still have the potential to break out and establish themselves among a more general audience. One is vocalist Mzz Reese, a sultry alto who cites Denise LaSalle as her primary inspiration. Reese’s “Cookies,” a sexual throwdown in the LaSalle mode (“If you don’t treat my cookies right / I’ll be dippin’ someone else’s milk”), shares its title with her self-released 2015 debut album, and it’s already become her signature song....

One of the most distinctive characteristics of the west side’s Douglas Park is the rows of Chicago-style two-flats lining the perimeter of its 218 acres. Like many of the beautiful green spaces around the city, the park was created for the neighborhood that surrounds it—in this case North Lawndale, a predominantly black, blue-collar enclave. On any warm day, the concrete porches of these homes fill with families gossiping, laughing, and enjoying the sunshine while their little ones play in the big park across the street....

Like so many other musicians based in New York, saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock and pianist Kris Davis migrated there. Davis moved from Canada in 2001; Laubrock was born and raised in Germany, then spent nearly a decade in England before moving to the U.S. in 2009. For as long as they’ve lived in the same neck of the woods, they’ve appeared on each other’s records, and for a time they played together in the trio Paradoxical Frog with drummer Tyshawn Sorey....

Ata KakObaa Sima (Awesome Tapes From Africa) DJ ClentLast Bus to Lake Park (Duck n’ Cover) This anonymous black-metal act, which originally claimed to be from Chong­qing, China, recently confessed that it’s based in Minot, North Dakota. But the only thing lost with the unraveling of this fiction is an exotic origin story—the new Moonlover, recorded with Michigan-based engineer Josh Schroeder (one early hint that the band’s biography was bogus), is atmospheric, almost lyrical black metal with no perceptible Chinese character....

YouTube Earlier this month, when I first saw Mayor Rahm’s “Mister Rogers” ad, the one in which he wears a sweater and humbly admits that he can sometimes rub people the wrong way, I laughed. Then I felt a bit sad that Rahm’s campaign had spent so much money to make him appear at least as likable as Chuy Garcia and his big, cheerful mustache and ended up with something that at any other time might have been mistaken for performance art....

Longtime Reader music writer Peter Margasak began the weekly Sunday-night Frequency Series in May 2013 at Constellation (3111 N. Western), the eclectic music venue that had been opened by jazz drummer and all-around mastermind Mike Reed only a month prior. The series provides a regular stage for a burgeoning and adventurous new-music scene that before was plenty accustomed to occupying relatively unconventional spaces such as storefronts and galleries. And as evidenced by a marathon Frequency Series performance this last month in which pianist R....

Warning: This review contains spoilers. But with tear gas, police surrounding protesters, and Mayor Richard J. Daley’s vow to increase police and National Guard presence, the protest visuals looked eerily similar to recent events, as people across the country took to the streets to protest the police killings of Black people this summer, set off initially by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. (According to the U.S. National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence later, police did in fact cause the violence during the 1968 DNC protests....

Q: I’m a 25-year-old woman currently in a poly relationship with a married man roughly 20 years my senior. This has by far been the best relationship I’ve ever had. However, something has me a bit on edge. We went on a trip with friends to a brewery with a great restaurant. It was an amazing place, and I’m sure his wife would enjoy it. He mentioned the place to her, and her response was NO, she didn’t want to go there because she didn’t want to have “sloppy seconds....

At the beginning of the year, Theatre Y had big plans to celebrate its upcoming 15-year anniversary. But once the realities of the pandemic set in and shows, tours, and theater festivals were canceled, the company had a clean slate of time and still wanted to celebrate its birthday. “Now that we are in this period of isolation, choosing from his body of work and sending something out weekly felt even more appropriate because András has a great deal of experience with a crisis of this scale, which most Americans are not professionals at,” Lorraine says....

Walking into the Chicago History Museum’s new exhibit “Amplified: Chicago Blues” is like walking the streets of 1960s Chicago—when the music dominated clubs and living rooms across the city. The museum created the exhibit after purchasing 45,000 artifacts—including 40,000 photos—from the estate of Raeburn Flerlage, a music promoter, salesman, and radio host. Flerlage also worked as a freelance photographer for publications including the Chicago Daily News and DownBeat from 1959 to 1970....

Michael Gebert Chef AC Boral before “No Guts, No Glory” “Street food is a pretty common part of life there, at least where my family grew up,” Chef AC Boral said of the Philippines. “You see people just kinda hustling, they have their own individual street food that they’re hustling. Pretty much anything that you could just fry up or grill up, you see it.” Street food, as it happens, was about to be part of the menu at “No Guts, No Glory,” a pop-up dinner held Saturday at Ampersand, the pop-up space inside Kinmont in River North....

Ayinde Barrister is known as the pioneer of Nigerian fuji music, but it’s King Wasiu Ayinde Marshal who has spread the percussion-rich style globally—after working with Barrister as backup singer between 1975 and 1978 he emerged as a bandleader himself. Though the densely percolating form first erupted in the mid-60s, it would be three decades before the music of the Islamic population of the country’s Yoruba people ascended to pop dominance....

W e told a lot of people when we were leaving that we had the trip planned out,” Arthur Swidzinski says now. “That we had trained, that we were in tip-top shape. In reality we had gone on the Internet to Mapquest and printed a 150-page document of turn-by-turn directions to New York City. Everything sort of fell apart from the get-go.” Swidzinski, who at the time worked at a hospital transporting patients to the morgue, adds, “We developed a passion for radio and making short films in high school....

Alarmist Brewing alarmistbrewing.com When Gary Gulley launched Alarmist Brewing this spring—after four years of preparation, uncountable revisions of his business plan, and several rounds of investors’ meetings—he had only one beer, Pantsless Pale Ale. It was a gutsy choice, not least because pale ales and IPAs are by far the most crowded and competitive subcategories in craft beer. But any brewery would do well to have Pantsless as its flagship: extravagantly juicy and beautifully harmonious, it braids fruity, floral hops with silky caramel malts for an easygoing sipper you never want to stop drinking....

The Reader‘s first gig poster of 2021 is a tribute to jazz, Cuba, and collaborative concert organizing by a designer with roots in alternative weekly papers. Venerable local arts presenter HotHouse, which has been bringing diverse online programming to international audiences for the past few months, celebrates its 34th year with HotHouse Meets Havana, a five-night stream of Latin-jazz musicians based in Cuba interspersed with sets by artists based in the States—including current and former Chicagoans Hamid Drake & Michael Zerang, Tomeka Reid & Junius Paul, Ari Brown (with Josef Ben Israel and Charles Heath), Ben LaMar Gay (with Mike Reed and Mayda Del Valle), and Edward Wilkerson Jr....