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Gossip Wolf has been missing the heck out of local live-music game show Shame That Tune since it went “off the air” with a good-bye episode at the Hideout last summer—so we’re stoked to report that former STT cohost and Baby Teeth front man Abraham Levitan has a brand-new music-related podcast! For Nerds on Tour the dependably hilarious Levitan talks to folks who’ve “endured in this nutty industry” (as he puts it) about how to do the same—including alt-­country belter Kelly Hogan and New Yorker critic John Seabrook....

Midwestern emo cornerstone Bob Nanna made his bones working guarded feelings into nervy posthardcore with anthemic ambitions. Nanna started his streak in the early 90s with teenage band Friction, and by the end of the decade he’d established himself as scene royalty, fronting Braid and then Hey Mercedes. He also took up writing solo material in 1997, and in the mid-2000s he began issuing it as City on Film. As prolific as he’s been, only now is he finally releasing music under his given name....

In an e-mail interview with Dominican music site Vents Magazine, Chicago art-rock foursome Woongi claim they wrote their forthcoming second album, Rip’s Cuts (Sooper), to “sync up” with a 1993 family film called The Skateboard Kid. Though I’ve never seen it, I’m more than willing to listen to musicians who say they’re inspired by a flick featuring a magical flying skateboard voiced by Dom DeLuise. Woongi approached Rip’s Cuts with borderline cartoonish audaciousness, using ever-shifting prismatic synths to set a different tone on each song—and they get particularly experimental on the grandiose but occasionally anxious prog-adjacent number “Tired Fortress....

Al Podgorski/Sun-Times Patrick D. Thompson—the D is for Daley—embraces his uncle, county commissioner John Daley, after joining the water reclamation district board in 2012. Patrick D. Thompson’s campaign website has a page labeled FAMILY that describes how he grew up at 35th and Lowe in Bridgeport around the family of his mother, Patricia Daley. Thompson insists that’s not the case. “I am not running away from my Daley name at all....

About a year after Aaron Lippelt and Mary Gibbons opened Pilsen Community Books on 18th Street, things finally started to fall into place. They had a solid customer base, who were starting to make the store feel homey. They had no plans to open up a second bookstore. Lippelt and Gibbons took over the four-room space in June and started renovating. The old bookshelves, which Peterson had brought from Selected Works’s previous location in Lakeview, were rickety and had to go....

Update on Friday, April 19, at 4:30 PM: Papa M is no longer on the bill for the Friday show. Sunn O))) will play at 9 PM. Papa M is still scheduled for the Monday show. If you’ve ever heard the music of dark-hooded dronemeisters Sunn O))), you may have reached the conclusion that its core members, Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson, have a different sense of time than the rest of us....

Eviction has become a prominent topic of academic research, public debate, journalistic investigation, and artistic expression in recent years, spurred largely by the 2016 publication of sociologist Matthew Desmond’s book Evicted. Set in Milwaukee, it painstakingly describes the lives of poor tenants and their landlords and contemplates solutions to the nation’s eviction epidemic. Since the book’s release, Desmond has opened the Eviction Lab, a research center at Princeton University, where he teaches, and spearheaded various projects to raise public awareness of the problem....

Hali Palombo, 29, is a composer and sound artist who works in found and lost audio and media, frequently including shortwave radio, and creates visual art and video installations from slow-scan television. Her January release Cylinder Loops collages audio from antique wax cylinders, and in March she launched an intermittent podcast, Unknown America, that delves into historical oddities and obscurities. She’s been making field recordings of Wisconsin tourist attraction the House on the Rock (“It’s terrifying—I’m very inspired by it”), which she plans to use for a seven-inch coming out this summer via local label Ballast....

Courtesy of Paul McCartney’s Facebook page This guy is headlining Lollapalooza Lollapalooza announced its lineup at 6 AM today, and the biggest name on the bill is also its oldest: Paul McCartney. The Beatle headlines the three-day Grant Park festival alongside Metallica, Florence + the Machine, Sam Smith, Bassnectar, and the Weeknd. It’s a far more perplexing list than the tame, underwhelming collection of acts rounded up to close out each night of the megafest last year, but the uneven distribution of talent rests heavily on the two names at the top of the bill....

In 1991, when I was a student at the SAIC, the Art Institute hosted a retrospective exhibition of Martin Puryear’s sculptures. Most of the pieces on display were made of wood and somehow familiar and mysterious at the same time. Some resembled boats, others were like human figures; but the works would turn away and in on themselves, refusing to be defined. When Puryear was invited to illustrate a new edition of Jean Toomer’s 1923 Harlem Renaissance novel Cane he set himself the challenge of working solely on a flat surface....

Welcome to Flopcorn, where Reader staffers and contributors pay tribute to our very favorite bad movies. In this installment, associate editor Jamie Ludwig ponders her love-hate relationship with The Great Escape. Obviously, given the track records of the prisoners, this was hardly a stroke of genius. Many troops considered it their sworn duty to try to escape captivity; a POW on the run was an annoyance to the Nazis and a drain on resources....

Jack Fuller died Tuesday at the age of 69, just as his latest latest book, One From Without, was being published. It’s described as a novel of “corporate intrigue,” which Fuller, at the end of his long career at the Tribune, would have learned pretty much everything about. I recommend it out of hand. Fuller edited the Tribune editorial page and then the entire newspaper. Then he was the publisher and eventually he was put in charge of all the Tribune Company newspapers....

L ast September, former White House press secretary Sean Spicer appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live! and was asked about the president’s obsession with fake news. Spicer took a breath, futzed with his jacket, and explained how news has moved beyond “true or false” and into an arms race for the truth adjacent. “They’d rather be first than right,” Spicer said of modern journalists. “That’s unfortunate, and it gives a bad name to those who actually do take the time....

Anna Tsymbaliuk, 31, works as a babysitter and takes ESL classes at Truman College. We met at her apartment in Edgewater, where she prepared syrniki, fried cheese pancakes, according to her mother’s recipe. Most people make them flat, but hers are spherical, like fritters. She insists they taste better this way. She served them with coffee. Starbucks doesn’t compare to Ukrainian coffee, she says, but Metropolis comes close. I’m from Dnipro in Ukraine....

Matthew and Sarah Johnson own a spacious two-flat in Logan Square, nestled in a tidy tree-lined street around the corner from the “square” proper. The house was built in 1896. It has five bedrooms, three and a half bathrooms, high ceilings, a spacious yard, and a quaint front stoop. Yet the Johnsons live with their two children in the basement. Despite possessing no major renovation experience whatsoever and a tool kit consisting of a hammer, a screwdriver, an assortment of nails, and nothing else, the Johnsons took the plunge to transform the two-flat into a single-family home....

Derry Queen takes the stage in a laced leather corset and a black skirt. He begins performing a traditional lip sync to Lady Gaga’s “Paparazzi.” And then things turn sour. An edited sound bite of Anderson Cooper declares that “Derry is a top,” a term in gay culture that, well, you can look it up, and Derry runs from the stage in shame. “I’m not a top!” he protests as Britney Spears’s “Piece of Me” plays him off and performers posing as paparazzi snap photos of him....

A few days before Governor Rauner’s State of the State speech, I woke to find a couple of unusual comments on my Facebook time line. With that I was hit by a jolt of panic not unlike the “midnight terrors” that the great Daily Southtown columnist Phil Kadner recently described in his farewell column. And that’s how I discovered that a column published April 15, 2014—with a now outdated wisecrack about the Bears—had suddenly gone viral....

Chicago hosts one of the world’s most vibrant improvisational scenes, so it’s not automatically remarkable when three of the city’s musicians get together to create in a live setting. But this combination stands out because of the unusual affiliations each member brings to this first-time encounter. In addition to playing low-key rock music with Zelienople and abstracted folk themes with Scott Tuma, percussionist Mike Weis performs ambient soundscapes with Mirror of Nature and solo material influenced by forms of Korean rituals....

Burgers are about more than just the meat, say Molly Birnbaum and Dan Souza, the people behind Cook’s Science. On Thursday, October 13, they’ll be at the Athenaeum Theatre for the second stop of Cook’s Science Live: The Burger Tour, explaining just what makes the standby such a crowd-pleaser. “We go through each part, everything from the bun to the ketchup to the burger to the onions,” Souza says. “There’s a lot more going on in each element than you would first imagine....

Brian Jackson ‘Mayor Garcia’ probably sounds good to this guy too. As must be painfully obvious to everyone by now, I have what you might call a complicated relationship with Chicago voters. I realize, of course, that this sounds delusional, given that just the other day the Tribune came out with a poll that said Mayor Rahm was up 58 to 30 percent among likely voters. The same, of course, can be said for Mayor Rahm....