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I feel the modern media has a big focus on personalities,” Edward Snowden tells journalist Glenn Greenwald in Laura Poitras’s Oscar-winning documentary Citizenfour. “I’m a little concerned the more we focus on that, the more they’re gonna use that as a distraction.” Snowden, a computer contractor with the National Security Agency, was meeting with Greenwald and Poitras in a Hong Kong hotel room in June 2013 as they prepared to publish a series of news stories revealing that the U....

Cassette Store Day is a slightly ridiculous concept (ever been to a cassette store?), but its list of U.S. releases includes a substantial Chicago contingent—reflecting the healthy interest that local labels and fans have in the format. This year it falls on Saturday, October 8, and several Chicago imprints that regularly issue tapes—Girlsville, Dumpster Tapes, Grabbing Clouds Records & Tapes—have put together special releases. Among them is long-running reggae, ska, and rocksteady label Jump Up Records, which is releasing a handful of full-lengths—including a compilation from defunct local ska group Rude Guest, Lost Chicago Ska 1982-1993....

N ow that I’ve seen my first Michael Allen Harris play, I’m adding him to the short list of Chicago playwrights who understand the difference between drama and diorama. While so many of his contemporaries seem content to schematize Big Ideas by populating narrow, transparent stage worlds with one-dimensional characters, Harris trades in compelling, aggravating ambiguity. Like the prodigious Ike Holter, Harris takes messy human impulses and makes them poignantly messier, in the process illuminating the societal forces that can turn human shortcomings into iconic tragedies....

Rory Ferreira, the rapper-producer better known Milo, who also records and performs as Scallops Hotel, is an artist who pushes himself endlessly. As a lyricist he packs scathing wit, emotive historical references, and magnetic pathos into easy-flowing lines. As a performer he’s in his element, further perfecting the way he rounds his syllables while retaining a natural amiableness even at his most ferocious; when he rips into the ugliest aspects of contemporary society it’s with a spirit that encourages his listeners to seek out something greater....

Au Hasard Balthazar Among the great slate of programs currently running at the University of Chicago’s Doc Films is one titled “Prison Break!,” featuring films about convicts escaping from prison. As Anton Yu explains in his introduction to the series, “Due to the sheer number of them, prison escape dramas have almost become a genre unto themselves—and for good reason. At their heart, prison break films are tense, exciting, inspirational, and, often, just plain fun....

Evan F. Moore is a culture/entertainment writer with the Chicago Sun-Times. Evan attended Donald Trump’s Chicago rally and lived to tell about it. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, I’m running out of excuses. Like the rest of us, she’s trying to make sense of the new reality. “That was fun,” my daughter blurted out. Unfortunately, we’ve had to cut our visits short due to social distancing guidelines, my parents’ susceptibility to COVID-19, and the fact that they live blocks away from Symphony South Shore, the nursing home/rehabilitation center where 70 percent of the residents tested positive for COVID-19....

Drummer Quin Kirchner has quietly made himself an indispensable presence in Chicago’s music scene since Hurricane Katrina drove the Oak Park native to return from New Orleans in 2005. He’s now a consistent member of the pop band Wild Belle, but the lion’s share of his activity has been his work in a countless number of jazz and improvised-music groups, including bands led by saxophonists Nate Lepine and Dave McDonnell, pianist Paul Giallorenzo, and guitarist Tim Stine, among others....

This morning Ravinia announced the schedule for its 2019 summer festival, and the talent buyers clearly hope to appeal to an audience broader than classical music lovers, oldies fans, and Billy Corgan (he’s a great cheerleader for Highland Park, but he’s just one guy). Among the notable bookings this year are rappers T.I. (July 2) and Queen Latifah (August 31), who’s making her Ravinia debut. (Her opener, Common, first headlined Ravinia in 2017....

As a founding member of Ensemble dal Niente—and in the solo and duo programs she has presented since leaving them—flutist Shanna Gutierrez has consistently championed new music that pushes compositional and performance boundaries. The four pieces she’ll perform tonight include two world premieres and a work being performed in Chicago for the first time, and each one proposes a different role for her instrument. Opening the performance is David Means’s “Berliner Andenken” (1990), which blurs the line between live performance and installation by requiring the flute player to play at a succession of fixed music stands while another musician wreathes squelchy electronic tones around intricate woodwind phrases....

Local four-piece Slow Pulp had to deal with some real-life nightmares to make the dreamy indie rock on their debut full-length album, Moveys, which arrives Friday, October 9, via indie label Winspear. Near the end of the writing and recording process, singer and guitarist Emily Massey had to return to Madison, Wisconsin (where the band had formed), to help her parents convalesce after a severe car crash. A week later COVID-19 shut down the country, so the rest of the band (bassist Alexander Leeds, guitarist Henry Stoehr, and drummer Theodore Mathews) finished the instrumental portions in Chicago while Massey recorded vocals at her father’s home studio....

After David Bowie decamped from Los Angeles to the then-divided city of Berlin in the mid-70s, he recorded Low, “Heroes,” and Lodger. The three albums, known as the Berlin Trilogy, contain some of the most challenging music of his career, and he paid the price for it; to this day, none of them has gone gold. But their icy synthscapes, alienated lyrics, and robotic funk grooves seem prescient now, and the period yielded one of his most enduring songs, the anthemic “Heroes....

Chicago Style, a “forward-thinking” cocktail conference taking place next week for the first time, was born from conversations—and the goal of the event is to create more. Founders Shelby Allison (co-owner of Lost Lake), Caitlin Laman (beverage director at the Ace Hotel), and Sharon Bronstein (vice president of marketing for the 86 Company) are friends who often discuss their jobs and the beverage industry in general. “That’s how this conference came about,” Laman says, “from Shelby, Sharon, and I talking about our regular experiences, and the topics [we wanted to highlight] are the things we talk most about right now....

A few days before last week’s election, I got a call from a local political operative, freaking out over the fact that the lead items on the news were not about the upcoming mayor’s race, but about the ongoing sagas of R. Kelly and Jussie Smollett. Wait, wrong Maya utterance. No, the relevant Maya theory is that the local electorate is basically divided between those who passionately care and obsess about Chicago politics—like me and Maya and that freaking-out political operative—and those, alas, who don’t....

I should say right now that when we started this contest to determine the Greatest Ever Chicago Book, we knew it would be impossible to find one title that would satisfy every Chicagoan in terms of both greatness and Chicago-ness. Books don’t work that way. Neither does the experience of a city. Both of these things are entirely subjective, even more than the basketball tournament that inspired the shape of this contest....

Eviction Since March, the federal, state, and local versions of an eviction moratorium have kept thousands in their homes. While typically there are some 20,000 eviction cases filed every year, as of December 14, only about 6,600 eviction cases have been filed against Chicago residential and commercial tenants—and 65 percent of those cases were initiated before the governor issued his first moratorium. I’ve been dropping into seminars and discussions hosted by local landlord groups....

Author’s note: since the publication of this article, two new Black Chicago theater leaders have been brought to my attention—Arlicia McLain, the artistic director at Halcyon Theatre, and Myesha-Tiara McGarner with the newly-formed Perceptions Theatre Company. As she takes the helm, one of her biggest challenges is grappling with COVID and the safety of returning to live performance. Selemon says, “We are never going to jump the gun on something like that....

Since 2007, Los Angeles rapper Blu has dispensed more than a dozen albums indebted to hip-hop’s golden age, and on his releases with producer Exile, his garrulous style finds a firm footing. The duo’s third effort, the double disc Miles: From an Interlude Called Life (Dirty Science), spans the globe and the history of the African diaspora. The nine-minute epic “Roots of Blu” tells the story of humanity through the accomplishments of Black folks, name-checking the likes of Tutankhamun, W....

No, there is no vegan sausage on the menu at Boonie Foods, but I wasn’t the first person to imagine there was. Vigan longganisa is actually an exception to the general profile of Ilocano food, which Fontelera says, “in my experience is a lot more simply prepared compared to any other region in the Philippines. It’s very technique-driven versus being ingredient heavy.” “I wanted to put my best foot forward with this,” he says....

Jazz-related music rarely gets any sort of mainstream hype these days, and it’s gratifying when one of the figures attracting wide attention outside of the jazz press actually deserves it. British reedist Shabaka Hutchings, a dynamo rooted in jazz, is an agile and curious musician who spreads his soulfully biting improvisation across wildly disparate projects. Last year he made his local debut at the Chicago Jazz Festival, playing in a band led by veteran South African drummer Louis Moholo-Moholo, where he extrapolated dancing solos sparked by free-jazz exploration and fueled by kwela melodies....

In the months since Rogers Park native Stevon Odueze graduated from Northern Illinois University in December, he’s been singularly focused on transforming his music from an undergraduate extracurricular activity into a career. And judging from the pop-forward hip-hop he’s released in the past six months, he’s well on his way. As OG Stevo, Odueze encodes melody into the DNA of his mike technique to supercharge his instrumentals—even when he’s not outright singing, he often ends his rapped lines with a honeyed lilt....