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Chloe Riley 25th Ward candidate Byron Sigcho stands outside the Chicago Board of Elections Tuesday after filing a lawsuit requesting a recount within the ward. Standing in the damp chill after a morning of freezing rain, 25th Ward aldermanic candidate Byron Sigcho made his case for a recount outside the Chicago Board of Elections Tuesday: he alleged that the campaign of incumbent alderman Danny Solis was responsible for a range of high jinks on election day....

My natural skepticism rose when I heard about How Did I Find Myself Here? (Anti), the first new Dream Syndicate album in 30 years. While the band’s 1982 Velvets-infused debut The Days of Wine and Roses remains one of my all-time favorites, the albums made in its wake, as original members Kendra Smith and Karl Precoda left, delivered diminishing returns until the group disbanded in the late 80s. Leader Steve Wynn went on to pursue a solid if unspectacular solo career, and Smith formed Opal with guitarist David Roback and released a couple of sublime solo albums in the early 90s before stepping away from music....

Alicia Swiz is a feminist. She’s also a writer, a performer, and an educator who uses her various platforms to initiate conversations about women’s issues, intersectionality, and the representation of gender in media. Now, thanks to her recently released online course, potential students don’t have to be enrolled in college to learn from her. Shortly after moving to Chicago, Swiz began working as an adjunct professor at Harold Washington College, where she teaches courses on media and pop culture, explored through a feminist lens....

Frank Maugeri knows something about picking himself up after a shutdown. When Redmoon Theatre, the spectacle-oriented company where Maugeri worked for 23 years (the last few as producing artistic director) folded in 2015 in the wake of the failure of the Great Chicago Fire Festival, Maugeri took some time to regroup (including a stint developing education and community engagement programs with Chicago Children’s Theatre). Then in 2017, Maugeri unveiled his new company, Cabinet of Curiosity, which, in Maugeri’s words, focuses on “this desire to investigate the spiritual, the sacred, and the supernatural through objects, devices, actors, and songs....

Preston Bradley Hall Claudia Cassidy Theater Jay Pritzker Pavilion Noon | Dan Trudell Trio Superbad Chicago organist Dan Trudell draws on the full spectrum of Hammond B-3 tradition, from Jimmy Smith to Don Patterson, for a fresh and fully formed sound that he’s put to good use in his organ trio and with the B3 Bombers (featuring James Brown drummer Clyde Stubblefield). Last year Trudell threw a changeup with Dan Trudell Plays the Piano, a mainstream acoustic date that combines Coltrane-era vocabulary with the same kind of ingenuity and down-home sound you’d expect on a Ramsey Lewis LP....

T he Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo (C2E2) is Chicago’s biggest and most comics-focused comic con-much larger than the wonderful CAKE and much less celebrity-centric than Wizard World. Selene Idell-co-owner of Alleycat Comics in Andersonville-loves cosplaying at C2E2: “It makes you feel like a celebrity for the day.” But C2E2 doesn’t just give ordinary civilians the chance to be Batman or Harley Quinn (or Elvira, one of Idell’s go-to costumes). The community of cosplayers becomes a massive team-up that could rival the cast of Avengers: Infinity War....

In 1967, a TV crew from the state-run network of communist Czechoslovakia dropped in on veteran illustrator and animator Jiří Trnka at his Prague workshop. The resulting ten-minute segment, which you can find on YouTube, forsakes dialogue for a classical music score—like so many of Trnka’s films—and shows the 55-year-old artist creating the sort of exotic settings and evocative puppet characters he’d brought to life onscreen for 20 years. Trnka, who would die of heart disease two years later, puffs on a cigarette as he kneads a palm-size ball of white plastic compound and uses the edge of a shallow-straight gouge to carve out not just the face of an old man but a whole personality....

When former Reader staff writer Peter Margasak began programming the Frequency Series in 2013, he envisioned concerts that would expose audiences of different avant-garde musical disciplines to artists from other genres that they had not heard before but might well appreciate. Margasak left the Reader and Chicago in order to move to Rome in 2018, but he’s continued to program the series, (which usually takes place on Sunday nights at Constellation) as well as a semiannual festival....

Lady Parts Justice League isn’t taking the mounting threat of the repeal of Roe vs. Wade lying down. This group of feminist comedians claps back at attacks on reproductive rights, dispelling myths about abortion with pointedly funny videos. Lizz Winstead, cocreator of The Daily Show, cofounded the New York-based nonprofit in 2015, and today she’s its chief creative officer—a role she takes to with humor and a lot of swearing....

We are living in a golden age of queer cinema. Now more than ever, films about, starring, and made by queer people are taking up space in Hollywood. But sometimes the discourse surrounding queer representation in media is exhausting— especially since the media play such a powerful role in shaping how marginalized groups are perceived by society. The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) directed by Anthony Minghella A recent addition to the “Be Gay, Do Crime!...

The Reader‘s archive is vast and varied, going back to 1971. Every day in Archive Dive, we’ll dig through and bring up some finds. “You don’t,” he told Aschman, “drop a parachute into an area completely surrounded by the enemy. You can’t survive in a wagon completely surrounded by angry Indians. And you can’t build an urban renewal project in an area completely surrounded by blight. You have to have easy access to the area, be able to get in and out of it....

On Thursday afternoon, all the content vanished from the DNAinfo and Gothamist network of websites, replaced by a letter from owner and CEO Joe Ricketts announcing that he’d “made the difficult decision to discontinue publishing.” Some 115 employees have been laid off, the New York Times reported, including those working at DNAinfo Chicago, which Ricketts launched in 2012, and Chicagoist, the 13-year-old blog he acquired in March. Staffers will be placed on paid administrative leave through February 2, according to CNN....

You’re standing in pure sunlight in a crystal pavilion levitating over an infinite green melon patch. You move into the structure and pedestals rise from a platform, each one supporting a perfectly spherical green melon. Meanwhile, a soothing disembodied narrator congratulates you: “We made this,” she says. “Together.” Brooks is the artist constructing the very real backpack that will contain a “taste display” that pumps randomized liquid flavor combinations through an array of converging straws into the waiting mouths of players each time one approves of a particular melon’s sound and elects to take a taste....

Still Alice The ads for Still Alice (which is currently playing around town) make it seem less like a film and more like part of a PR campaign to win Julianne Moore an Oscar. Having seen it, I’d say that’s a fair representation. Alice often calls upon Moore to illustrate some symptom of Alzheimer’s disease or to remind us of the character’s integrity in the face of suffering. Moore performs these things with the care and consideration you’d expect from an actress of her caliber, but the film gives us little to consider beyond her performance and the basic facts of Alzheimer’s disease....

A couple of things we can count on during any presidential election are partisan orators assuring us that “this is the most important election of our lifetimes” and media critics complaining that nobody’s paying enough attention to the issues. I’ve been one of those critics myself a time or two, though a half-hearted one, as I don’t honestly believe anyone ever lost the White House because voters didn’t hear enough about his trade policy....

courtesy of the artist Mbongwana Star The Belgian producer Vincent Kenis, who made music as a member of the late-70s experimental-rock band Aksak Maboul, has thrived at taking motley assortments of traditional musicians from far-flung locales and forming bands out of them. He was one of the guys who rounded up a group of village musicians in tiny Clejani, Romania, and convinced them to work together as Taraf de Haidouks, the popular Romani string ensemble currently in its third decade (with a new album called Of Lovers, Gamblers & Parachute Skirts out on Crammed Discs); he was the guy who coined the term “Congotronics” and helped propel the veteran Congolese group Konono No....

Update Tue 2/6: Nate Wooley will perform not with Knknighgh but with his trio Icepick. If you measure the power of a provocation by its enemies, Aram Saroyan’s “Lighght” is a megaton bomb. Fifteen years after the one-word poem was included in the 1965 edition of The American Literary Anthology, Ronald Reagan used it as a reason to try and shut down the National Endowment for the Arts. And if you measure it by the duration of its influence, it still packs quite a bang....

I try to keep tabs on all the activity in Norway’s jazz and improvised-music scene, but its strength and depth is such that I still get surprised regularly. I’ve been listening to saxophonist André Roligheten for years, but as much as I’ve enjoyed his contemplative, lyrical playing in long-running duo Albatrosh (with pianist Eyolf Dale), I feel like he’s only come into his own in the past few years. He’s done great things in the Ornette Coleman-inspired Friends & Neighbors and delivered some of his most inspired and expansive work in the trio Acoustic Unity, with bassist Petter Eldh and drummer and bandleader Gard Nilssen (a ubiquitous player with the likes of Cortex and Bushman’s Revenge)....

Phillip Foss has never had much of an internal censor. A gentler way of putting it is that he’s always worn his heart on his sleeve. The chef arrived in Chicago in 2007, taking the top job at Lockwood, the Palmer House’s fine-dining restaurant, during a time when chefs had become public figures rather than faceless, nameless galley drudges. Foss also launched the Pickled Tongue, one of the first and most consistent chef blogs, and was a prolific Twitter scamp....

Early this morning—long before the sun—I was up in a panic. And I think I know why . . . Not immediately obvious why it would set off such a panic in me. It’s far removed from the stuff that usually frightens me. You know the type of character I’m talking about. You may be one of them. Loud and brash. Braying one moment, bawling the next. A lot like each other, even if they ostensibly hate each other....