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courtesy the candidates Scott Davis and Mark Thomas are Tom Tunney’s first opposition in 12 years. It’s been 12 years since Alderman Tom Tunney faced an opponent in the 44th Ward, and there was a chance that streak would continue this election cycle—challenges were filed against all three of Tunney’s potential opponents. But signatures were reviewed, arguments were made to election officials, and two longtime Lakeview residents are left standing to take on Tunney in February: Scott Davis and Mark Thomas....

It’s been almost a month since footwork collective Teklife and hip-hop posse Treated Crew released Live From Your Mama’s House, a collaborative EP helmed by Treated Crew coleader Mic Terror, and this weekend you’ve got two chances to bust a move to its lovingly crafted dance tracks live and in person. At 6:30 PM on Saturday, both crews perform at the Pilsen Food Truck Social, on 18th Street between Racine and Throop ($5 donation to enter)....

Q: My boyfriend and I live in San Francisco where we’ve been sheltering in place. We are unfortunately unable to shelter together, which means that we cannot have physical contact, especially since he lives with a parent who’s at heightened risk. (It’s not an option for him to stay with me for the duration.) We’re as frustrated about having to abruptly end the physical aspect of our relationship as you might expect....

At 5 PM Saturday, March 21, Governor J.B. Pritzker’s COVID-19 Executive Order No. 8, aka the Stay at Home order, took effect. Here’s a daily-ish journal of how Reader staff, our friends, family—and our pets—are spending our time. Day 24: April 13 What we’re listening to: Carmen G.’s “Es ist kalt um mich herum” Alice Elysée “Lolita” Karen Clark’s Finally Karen (blasted it from my windows on Easter Sunday) What we’re watching:...

Toronzo Cannon is an internationally recognized Chicago bluesman. For more than 25 years, he’s also been a bus driver for the CTA. In September 2019, he released his second album for Alligator Records, The Preacher, the Politician or the Pimp. Millennium Park at Home: Blues Music featuring Ivy Ford, Toronzo Cannon & the Chicago Way, and host Tom Marker Night three of the livestreamed festival Blues Music in the Key of Chicago, presented by DCASE and WXRT....

It’s not hard to see why Alan Janes’s 1989 jukebox musical charting the rapid rise and early death of seminal rock and roller Buddy Holly ran in London’s West End for 14 years or why it has been produced all over the world. The show really rocks. Holly’s high-spirited tunes are featured front and center, and if the band is even half good, it sells the show. The cast of talented actor-musicians assembled for American Blues Theater’s current revival is sharp and energetic....

Nominated for an Oscar this year, Laura Checkoway’s short documentary Edith+Eddie tells the story of two nonagenarians in Alexandria, Virginia—Edith Hill, a black woman, and Eddie Harrison, a white man—who married in June 2014 after ten years of companionship. The happy couple resided in Edith’s home of 44 years with her daughter Rebecca Wright but, as the film records, had to be forcibly separated after a court-appointed attorney ruled that Edith should be moved to Florida to live with her other daughter....

I regularly search Bandcamp for Chicago releases, and this past August I found the album Bless the Mad. At that point it was still a month from release, with only a few tracks streaming, and the information on the Bandcamp page didn’t enlighten me much—just the identities of the core members of the group behind the music, also called Bless the Mad, plus a little backstory and a detailed breakdown of the guest players on each track....

This year brought a resurgence of putting Black pride onstage and a national recognition of Juneteenth—and it was also the first in many years that the Bronzeville Children’s Museum did not have its annual celebration. Today, four months after Illinois museums closed their doors for safety, there’s no clear end in sight for the pandemic still upending daily life in the U.S. Some museums have reopened, but many that have interactive exhibits and are classified as “high touch”—like children’s museums—have not....

On July 5, Alton Sterling was selling CDs in front of the Triple S Food Mart in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, when he was tackled to the ground and fatally shot by police. A chorus of prominent voices have eulogized the 37-year-old father of five, who many believe died because he was black—among them Chicago rapper and Save Money cofounder Vic Mensa. Within days of the killing, Mensa posted an Instagram photo of Sterling, his face lit up by an open-mouthed smile....

According to Billboard magazine, singer-songwriter Kevin Junior—who spent his most prolific and fruitful years in Chicago—has died at age 46. The story says “the cause of death is not clear,” but as Gossip Wolf reported in 2011, he’d suffered from the life-threatening heart disease endocarditis, which required open-heart surgery. He moved back to his native Akron, Ohio, a couple years ago, putting together a new version of his band Chamber Strings....

Chicago hardcore five-piece Porcupine use society’s fetid underbelly like a renewable energy source—they must know they’ll never run out of cruelty to drive their outrage. Their new album, The Sibyl (New Morality Zine), opens with “Pederasty,” sung from the point of view of an adult survivor of childhood sexual abuse who’s still haunted by trauma; its nonstop barrage of vicious drumming and guttural riffs sharpens the plainspoken anger and grief in the desperate lyrics....

Cold Beaches are one of the most aptly named bands I’ve discovered this year: their new album, Drifter, evokes a decidedly beachy but sometimes gloomy world that makes me think of walking along an east-coast oceanfront in the fall. The band started as the solo project of Chicago singer-songwriter and guitarist Sophia Nadia, who grew up in the Maryland suburbs of D.C. After spending a few years in Richmond, Virginia, where she wrote and self-released Cold Beaches’ 2016 debut, Aching, she moved here in 2017....

Even before Alicia Greco moved from Buffalo, New York, to Chicago in November 2017, she knew she wanted to start a party series that centered women and nonbinary DJs. She was already DJing herself, under the name Leesh, but she figured she wouldn’t be able to launch an event and simultaneously find her bearings in a new city. After she arrived, she decided to pursue the same goal—spotlighting contemporary dance artists from marginalized gender communities—with a podcast instead....

Twenty years ago, actor Cherry Jones gave an interview to the industry trade Backstage, where she called out one of the problems facing those hoping to make acting their profession. Bullard notes that, due to COVID, this past year was the first time that the Theatre School didn’t have an incoming class of MFA candidates in the acting program. “The reason was not many people would choose a year of remote training for their first year,” he says....

The famously vegetarian state of Gujarat in northwestern India is also famously dry. And yet after dark in many large cities, out come the laaris, street food carts, many trafficking in an endless variety of egg dishes well-suited to meet the restorative demands of anyone who happens to have imbibed. Eggs—boiled, fried, folded into omelets, simmered in curries, swaddled in chapati, scrambled with rice, or even sandwiched between grilled white bread—are a popular street food (and hangover preventative) all over India....

In the last few days, we’ve been having one of those feeding frenzies in which the powers that be who run our fair city create some manufactured crisis so we open our mouths and they collectively shovel in some bullshit. With that, Janice Jackson joined the ranks of exalted mayoral appointees whose tenure we, the ordinary citizens, must forever praise with gratitude. ’Cause without them, we’d be lost. And what is the lesson to be learned from Jackson’s time as school boss?...

Pig Destroyer have been at the forefront of grindcore for more than 20 years, and over that time they’ve found a way to push the notoriously rigid style into far-reaching spaces. Helmed by guitarist Scott Hull (also the mastermind behind psychotic “cybergrind” outfit Agoraphobic Nosebleed), the Virginia band started out playing fairly standard grindcore in the 90s: 30-second songs with tortured screams, incomprehensible high-end riffs, and nonstop blastbeats. As the decades have passed, their songs have slowly gotten longer, their rhythms more complex, and the fidelity of their albums more atmospheric....

This week’s poster is by Chicago designer and musician Emily Burlew, who came to Chicago from New Jersey to attend Columbia College and graduated from its music-business program in 2019. Burlew creates posters for bars and events, and occasionally does artwork for bands, including her own current group, Late Nite Laundry (she plays bass). The poster advertises a streaming performance debuting this week on the Noonchorus platform. Chicago-based garage-soul band Hollyy are playing a concert to benefit two vital nonprofit organizations: the Chicago Independent Venue League and Skateistan....

Generally speaking, cinephiles love onscreen gangsters. As the writer-director of the gangsteresque dramedy Hustlers, Lorene Scafaria, recently told the New York Times, “we can name 1,000 of those characters by their first and last names. We’ve enjoyed them.” Indeed, Hustlers feels akin to the crime films of both Martin Scorsese (Goodfellas, Casino) and Adam McKay (The Big Short, Vice). This movie too is zingy, surreal, and wildly entertaining. The key difference between it and the many great films that depict men doing horrible things for understandable reasons—love, money, power—is that Hustlers asks, why not women?...