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Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Monday, October 2, 2017. More than 1,000 people turned out for funeral of Kenneka Jenkins More than 1,000 people attended 19-year-old Kenneka Jenkins’s funeral at the House of Hope Church on the south side Saturday. Many of the attendees never knew Jenkins and learned of her mysterious death through social media. Jenkins was found dead in a freezer in a Rosemont hotel September 10, and her strange death quickly gained national attention and spurred conspiracy theories....

Twenty-nine years ago, when Curious Theatre Branch cofounders Jenny Magnus and Beau O’Reilly hunkered down with a handful of struggling fringe artists to create the inaugural Rhinoceros Theater Festival, they insisted that submissions would be accepted only if they met at least two of three criteria: new, local, and good. Which meant new, local, bad work could get in. “And yes indeed, it did,” says Magnus. There will also an art exhibit, “Zone Rats: The Afterlives of the Fabulous Killjoys,” curated by Vicki Walden and daughter Maci Greenberg, featuring international fan art inspired by characters in My Chemical Romance’s album Danger Days, as well as Saturday-morning workshops from CreativePush Collective, designed to help get your half-finished creative project closer to the finish line....

Dear Cecil: Years ago I was deer hunting on my friend’s farm in Ohio. As the sun rose I noticed I was in the middle of a large cow pasture. Some cows walked toward me slowly. When they were about 100 feet away, I decided I had better leave. As I was walking I could see the cows picking up their pace. I got pretty nervous and decided to run toward a fence....

On their second album, 2018’s Pop Therapy (Inflated Records), New Orleans indie duo Video Age liberally apply the glassy, frictionless keyboards and cheesy affectations of 80s synth-pop. But fortunately, Ray Micarelli (drums) and Ross Farbe (guitar, vocals, production) aren’t interested in simply replicating the unmistakable sounds of the Reagan years—the duo transplant them into a slightly different context, building a connection to some of modern indie pop’s illustrious ancestors. Video Age have cited Donald Fagen and Paul McCartney as influences, and Pop Therapy nods to more than just the digital production of Fagen’s classic 1982 LP, The Nightfly—it borrows the sly, sophisticated, slightly bent songwriting of both stars’ 80s work....

It’s September 2019 and Johnny Christmas is getting ready to enter an abandoned children’s hospital in Berlin’s Weissensee neighborhood. “We weren’t ghost people, we weren’t Wiccans in junior high,” Christmas says. “Even now, when I speak of them, I say ‘the ghosts’ and ‘they,’ but then also try to claim I don’t believe in them. It’s this weird internal conflict.” “My own personal theory is ghosts were once human, and they’re probably lost and confused and want to get back home,” Christmas says....

The backbone of Chicago’s illustrious history of improvised music is made up of a small handful of indefatigable players who endlessly explore and play gigs—sometimes for just a handful of folks—but few have been as long devoted to spontaneous experimentation as keyboardist Jim Baker and percussionist Michael Zerang. Each Tuesday this month at the Hideout they’ve been celebrating their musical relationship, which goes back 35 years. Baker is a jazz-trained master who’s long bridged the divide between Bill Evans and Cecil Taylor, while Zerang, who grew up playing in his father’s Assyrian band, Kismet, has crossed lines between Arabic traditions, free jazz, and theater music, and for decades has served a crucial role as a live music programmer....

In my last column, I wrote about Brian Loevner and the white paper he’s created through his company, BLVE Consults, on the subject of “cultural triage” and what arts leaders and funders might need to do to ensure the survival (or help the ending process) for the arts in a post-pandemic world. But as Loevner himself acknowledges, the lens through which many arts consultants view the future of the field tends to be dominated by the experiences of predominantly white institutions (PWI)....

Chris Hillman has built a sturdy career as a bluegrass musician, bringing a melodic sweetness to a chill strain of virtuosic mountain music since forming the Desert Rose Band in 1985, and carrying on in recent years through a durable partnership with cofounder Herb Pedersen. But he remains best known for his fruitful memberships in country-rock avatars the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers as well as in Stephen Stills’s Manassas....

Nashville’s Lost Dog Street Band mixes old-timey music with touches of contemporary Americana, but what most distinguishes the group is the voice of front man Benjamin Tod Flippo. He’s not a powerhouse singer—his delivery wavers somewhere between high-lonesome bluegrass and Bob Dylan-style talk-singing. As he flirts with the wrong key, or scrambles to keep up with the rollicking pace of songs such as “Hard Road Again,” his ragged-but-right approach adds a pleasingly uncertain punk edge to the band’s sound....

More postapocalyptic plays about staging Chekhov in people’s living rooms, please! The digital has eclipsed the physical in this new show by playwright and theater instructor Jason Hedrick, directed by Kayla Adams. Feral vagabonds snort across empty stretches of what used to be America. Cops make the rounds of the few outposts of organized human life that still exist on the fringe. There are barely any more phones or screens now, only an Internet of vivid, government-sanctioned visualizations, called “dives,” that fuzz together dreams and reality past all distinction....

Gossip Wolf conceded that Cassette Store Day was “kinda silly” when it debuted in 2013, but it’s still going strong—this year it’s on October 8! Shannon Candy, guitarist for punk confectioners Strawberry Jacuzzi, sure feels this retail holiday’s boom-box vibe—she’s started a label called Bernice Records and Tapes, and her first release is a local cassette compilation! Super Roar: Volume One features 18 tracks from Chicago indie acts, including Gossip Wolf faves Swimsuit Addition and Bleach Party....

It was Halloween when the Chicago City Council gave final approval to the deal that will allow the Obama Presidential Center to be built in Jackson Park, and it’ll be Valentine’s Day when a federal district court judge hears oral arguments on a lawsuit trying to bring that deal to a halt. POP suggests that other south-side locations would be less disruptive and costly (taxpayers will be on the hook for road reroutes and other infrastructure expenses that the city has estimated at $175 million), and would bring greater benefit to local residents and businesses....

2018 On November 15 Dariana Ruiz woke before dawn to find an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent standing over her bed and shining a flashlight in her face. The ICE officer guided the 18-year-old into the kitchen of the suburban Elmhurst home where she lived with her mom, Carla, her dad, Kikin, and her eight-year-old sister, Viviana. Her dad sat at the table across from a cup of hot coffee and a slice of bread, his hands cuffed behind his back and another ICE agent by his side....

Adam Seger/Facebook Adam Seger in Panama Want to work on your tiki drink technique? Adam Seger of Hum fame will be doing a class at Lush Wine & Spirits/West Town next Wednesday, March 25. For 40 bucks you get a couple of drinks to try and the chance to concoct your own. Everyone will be calling you Trader Justin or Sailor Ashley in no time! Call 312-666-6900 to reserve your spot....

Beyoncé’s album Lemonade, released in April, includes imagery of African-American women in flowing white dresses that recalls a landmark film made 25 years ago—Daughters of the Dust (1991), written and directed by Julie Dash, is a vivid tone poem focused on a family of Gullah women living on the Sea Islands in South Carolina in the year 1902 and contemplating a move to the American mainland. For those who’ve seen Daughters of the Dust and Lemonade, the parallels are noticeable....

With text drawn in part from court transcripts, this complex, multilayered piece of theater chronicles the case of Matthew Shepard, the gay University of Wyoming student whose 1998 murder paved the way for passage of federal hate crimes legislation. But the play also dramatizes the experience of its creators, playwright Moisés Kaufman and members of his Tectonic Theater Project, who traveled to Laramie, Wyoming, after Shepard’s death to interview residents of the traumatized town....

Vic Spencer opens his new single, “Love for Vic,” with the lines “Vic Spencer the worst rapper from Chicago / They want me out the city, as far as the Chi go.” If you follow Spencer on Twitter, you may have noticed his proclivity for, um, starting shit—and the trash talk that often comes back at him as a result. Sometimes he ends up kicking off a good-natured, playful back-and-forth, like when he provoked Lupe Fiasco into a sort of freestyle battle on Twitter early last year—that is, insofar as anyone can freestyle on a platform that allows users to self-edit before dropping the hammer....

Wardruna’s fifth full-length was due last June, but due to the pandemic, the Norwegian neo-prog-folk band bumped the release date of Kvitravn to this January. Though Wardruna were born out of Norway’s black-metal scene—two of the band’s three founders, Einar Selvik and Gaahl, are veterans of the influential Gorgoroth—they’re also inspired by Norse folk traditions, so their sound isn’t expressly metal. I wouldn’t say it’s not metal at all, though: the emotional scope of the music makes it feel like metal, but because it’s played on traditional Norse instruments, it also has an organic vibe that feels steeped in ancient history....

Botanically, the eggplant is a berry, but culinarily it resides firmly in vegetable territory. That makes it challenging to incorporate into a dessert, says Beacon Tavern pastry chef Kevin McCormick, who was tasked with just that by Kymberli DeLost (the Gage, Acanto, the Dawson). “It doesn’t have a lot of flavor on its own, but you can manipulate it in a million different ways,” McCormick says. “Every manipulation gives us a different quality of the eggplant itself....

More than four years have passed since Chicago’s last teachers’ strike, but in many ways it seems as if time has stood still, what with teachers recently voting to authorize another strike as soon as October 11. Now that I’m sufficiently depressed about the state of things, let’s break them down, starting with the mayor’s fabrication. If you add the cost of living raises to the step and lane hikes, then, yes, the mayor’s offering teachers a 13 percent raise....