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Israel-born, New York-based guitarist Yonatan Gat is still best known for his stint in Tel Aviv trio Monotonix, who made a lasting impression on rock audiences last decade with their maniacal anything-goes showmanship and fiendish take on heavy garage rock; in fact their performances were so legendary their records often got short shrift in comparison, possibly due to lack of Smell-o-Vision and the slight but real chance of physical danger that came with being in their crowds....

(Note: This essay contains spoilers) Or maybe that’s just me. As a former fundamentalist Christian and missionary, I’m one of the few people in Chicago that may have needed something akin to a trigger warning in lieu of the otherwise G-rated trauma portrayed in The Christians. After reading a review, I nearly decided to skip it because of my personal connection to the material in a way that goes beyond the general theme of a evangelical church divided amongst itself....

Welcome to the Reader‘s weekday news briefing. Jeanne Ives is “a little bit surprised at some of the hysteria” over campaign ad Republican gubernatorial candidate Jeanne Ives says she’s “a little bit surprised at some of the hysteria” surrounding her campaign’s controversial ad, which slams transgender rights, undocumented immigrants, Chicago Teachers Union members, and women who have had abortions, among other liberal targets. “The commercial does not attack people, it tackles issues, I truly believe illustrating the constituencies Rauner has chosen to serve, to the exclusion of others,” Ives, a state representative running from the right against Governor Bruce Rauner in the GOP primary, said at the City Club of Chicago Monday....

Rahm and John in more idyllic times A year ago I posted a video of Tribune columnist John Kass schmoozing with Mayor Rahm Emanuel. It was Christmastime. Followed by a Tribune camera crew, Kass had trotted over from the Tower to exchange presents in Emanuel’s office. On Friday Kass struck a familiar note—the media are full of suck-ups. But all I seem to hear is this: WWCD? What Would Chuy Do?...

Welshman Jon Langford’s love and fascination for American musical culture has long pulsed at the center of his work, whether he was sending his pioneering punk band the Mekons toward honky-tonk or forming the Waco Brothers to honor the forgotten sounds of Nashville. In 2015 Langford, a longtime resident of Chicago, contributed visual artwork to an exhibition at the Country Music Hall of Fame celebrating Nashville’s musical legacy, and by chance he met bassist and producer Norbert Putnam—a key figure behind the nexus of soul, country, and gospel music recorded over the decades in Muscle Shoals, Alabama....

Former Saturday Night Live cast member Julia Sweeney considers herself “the Al Jolson of androgyny.” She’s best remembered from SNL for portraying Pat, a character whose ambiguous gender is the subject of much speculation. In her one-woman show Older and Wider, Sweeney breezes past her career in comedy and shares charming stories about what came next: the life of a stay-at-home mom in Wilmette, having the idyllic “bread-eater” fantasy with a husband and their daughter, Mulan....

Courtesy of Kendrick Lamar On Monday afternoon Kendrick Lamar released a new song called “The Blacker the Berry,” and most of the ensuing coverage has referenced Sunday night’s Grammy Awards. The connection makes sense on a basic-news-cycle level considering the Compton MC won two awards for his decent, but not outstanding, 2014 single “i.” The power of Lamar’s new song underlines the insignificance of a perfectly manufactured TV event centered on glamorous people collecting shiny trinkets....

This Oakland-based women’s choir specialize in vocal traditions from eastern Europe, including styles from Russia, the Balkans, Greece, and Turkey. Like their compatriots Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares, Kitka perform both traditional music and original compositions, and have lent their shimmering, otherworldly tones to film soundtracks (in their case, Braveheart, Jacob’s Ladder, and The Queen of the Damned). They’ve created a multidisciplinary work inspired by the Women in Black antiwar movement, released albums focusing on Jewish and Romani music, created an ambitious concept album, The Rusalka Cycle (based on Slavic folklore about vengeful female spirits), and collaborated with avant-garde composer Meredith Monk....

The Earrings of Madame de . . . This weekend, the Music Box wrapped up its series “Weepie Noir: The Dark Side of Women’s Pictures” with a 16-millimeter screening of Letter from an Unknown Woman, the great melodrama by master filmmaker Max Ophuls, whose unfortunately brief career yielded one of cinema’s richest and most resonant filmographies. He is, of course, known for his baroque style and brilliant long takes, but as Francois Truffaut explained in his obituary of the director, “He was not the virtuoso or the aesthete or the decorative filmmaker he has been called....

A lan Epstein had been in Chicago just a year in 2016 when he started What Was Breakfast (@whatwasbreakfast), the Instagram feed dedicated to what its subjects had for breakfast. When he’s not taking photos, Epstein, 37, is a server at the Cherry Circle Room, where he began the project. What Was Breakfast begs comparison to Humans of New York, but Epstein doesn’t ask the same soul-baring-some critics have said saccharine-questions as HONY (“What is your greatest struggle right now?...

Michael Gebert Rene Deleon presses squab for Next: The Hunt in 2013 When we last spoke about the economics of Next, the most interesting and forward-thinking of Chicago restaurants from a business perspective, it had announced its latest season by significantly lowering its entry-level pricing. Last season, one of their premium menus (Trio) had started at $245 per person, making it one of the most expensive restaurants in Chicago (along with Grant Achatz’s other restaurant, Alinea)....

The last time Gil Faizon and George St. Geegland came to Chicago they were selling hot dogs to police at the Democratic National Convention of 1968. They’re a pair of self-proclaimed “racist liberals” who met in Toronto while dodging the draft during the Vietnam war, and they bonded over a shared love of wearing turtlenecks with blazers. That’s the basic story of these two characters, or at least it is according to their creators, comedians Nick Kroll and John Mulaney, the latter a Chicago native....

Chemist and X-ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin’s crucial contributions to discovering the double helix in DNA were largely uncredited during her too-short life. (She died of ovarian cancer—possibly caused by exposure to radiation in her work—at age 37.) Anna Ziegler’s drama is a sturdy if sometimes overschematic portrait of the professional purdah Franklin endured in and out of the laboratory. (She’s called “Miss” not “Doctor,” and can’t eat lunch with the men because the staff club doesn’t allow women....

Few figures have been as important, ubiquitous, and reliable in modern British folk music as singer and guitarist Martin Carthy. He was born in 1941, and like so many teens of his generation was sucked into music by England’s mid-50s skiffle craze. The first song he learned to play was “Heartbreak Hotel,” but by the early 60s he’d become fully absorbed by the folk revival. Nearly six decades later he remains one of the genre’s greatest and most profound proponents....

If you look carefully over to the right, you can see the line where I gave up dusting this table. I haven’t written about a Local Option beer in more than a year, but not because they haven’t rolled out anything new. The saison Walk ov Shame debuted on draft in November, and a second batch, split between kegs and 500-milliliter bottles, started shipping about a month ago. And a bottled beer is a beer I can review at home....

Museums can often feel like a cold, overly formal place. On one hand, that setting promotes an aura of respect around the artwork; on the other, it can lengthen the distance between the art and its viewer. “Duro Olowu: Seeing Chicago” is an antidote to that. Famous for creating unexpected yet harmonious combinations of vivid prints, Olowu also takes his tailoring seriously. According to Goldman, what makes his garments special is “a lightness in fabrics and extraordinary taste in color and print mix....

Jake Barningham’s narrative, glimpse (2013) Tomorrow night at 6:30 PM Chicago Filmmakers will present a program of recent video work by local artist Michele Smith and former Chicagoan Jake Barningham at Columbia College’s Hokin Hall. The event is but one highlight in a month full of noteworthy avant-garde video screenings and exhibitions. On Friday at 6:30 PM Jesse Malmed, a multimedia artist and programmer at the Nightingale, presents a program called “UNTITLED (JUST KIDDING)” at the U....

Horse Money Every once in a while I’ll see a movie in which the use of a piece of music leaves me floored: the Rolling Stones’ “Jumping Jack Flash” in Mean Streets, New Order’s “Dreams Never End” in Carlos, or, hell, all of the music in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Such a thing happened to me last Friday, when I saw Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa’s latest film, the hypnotic and slow-moving Horse Money, at the Gene Siskel Film Center....

Shervin Lainez The two Johns of They Might Be Giants, Linnell and Flansburgh At the start of 2015, unstoppable nerd-pop geniuses They Might Be Giants relaunched the Dial-a-Song service that had helped them build their devoted audience in the 80s. From 1983 till 2006 fans could call an answering machine whose outgoing message, usually on cassette tape, consisted of an unheard TMBG recording—often a demo or sketch of a song that would later see conventional release, but sometimes a skit or fake jingle....

In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, several jazz musicians from New Orleans took refuge in Chicago—including trombonist Jeff Albert, bassist Matthew Golombisky, and drummer Quin Kirchner. During their stay, those three forged lasting connections with the local scene, and one product of those new relationships was a band called the Lucky 7s. Golombisky and Kirchner, neither of whom is a Crescent City native, settled in Chicago, but Albert eventually returned south....