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Before there was Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, and Laquan McDonald, there was 17-year-old Eugene Williams. Williams’s death and its aftermath sparked the weeklong Chicago 1919 race riots that disproportionately affected the city’s Black community: 38 people died (23 of them Black and 15 white), another 520 people were injured, and 1,000 Black people were displaced by fires that were intentionally set by white mobs. Such was the state of alarm during the race riots that Black Chicagoans lived in fear, and simple errands such as going to the grocery store or work compromised their safety....

This morning Pitchfork begins rolling out the second batch of acts for its three-day music festival in July. We’ll keep track of the performers as they’re added to the Pitchfork mural on the side of the Violet Hour in Wicker Park. Chaka Khan same set up as last time except there are nicer cameras and shelby is dressed a lot warmer (insert it’s what she deserves meme) #P4Kfest pic.twitter.com/XX2T49myUW...

Brooklyn rapper Young M.A is a star on the rise thanks to his snarling single “Ooouuu,” with its wafting, dreamlike synth and its sparse (and sparsely deployed) beats. The YouTube video for “Ooouuu” has accumulated more than 25 million views since it was uploaded in May, and other rappers have contributed to the song’s popularity by recording their own versions—among them Nicki Minaj and A$AP Ferg. Meek Mill used the track to dis LA rapper the Game (who also released his own take on the song), and last week Calumet City native Tink put her own spin on “Ooouuu....

In Chicago, the year 2016 really began on November 24, 2015—the day the city released the infamous dash-cam video of Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke shooting 17-year old Laquan McDonald. “Sixteen shots!” would come to be the mantra of the protesters flooding the streets the night the video was released, and for the year to come. 2016 thus also became the year that many city residents stopped believing police reform was possible, with some calling for police to be abolished altogether....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Friday, October 27, 2017. Have a great weekend! Illinois house fails to pass ban on semiautomatic rifle bump stocks The Illinois house rejected a ban on controversial bump stocks and other devices that allow guns to fire more rapidly Thursday after “opponents on both sides of the aisle contended the measure was too broad and would turn legal gun owners into criminals,” according to the Tribune....

Back in 2011, and then again in 2013, Court Theatre presented one of the best shows I’ve seen on a Chicago stage: An Iliad. Building on Robert Fagle’s English translation, adapter/deconstructors Denis O’Hare and Lisa Peterson turned Homer’s Trojan War epic into a bravura solo (performed by Timothy Edward Kane) that not only retold one of the founding stories of Western civilization but sent it vibrating up through the generations, into our time, and across our spines....

Ryan Smith Joseph Vourteque (right) and fellow steampunk circus performer mingle shortly before their performance. Chicago steampunk circus maestro Joseph Vourteque stood on the corseted back of a fellow performer as she lay face down in shards of broken glass. Wearing a top hat and a button-up jacket with a watch chain dangling from the pocket, Vourteque flashed a toothy grin as his colleague stood up unharmed—but only a tiny fraction of the crowd clapped in appreciation of the stunt....

In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Sigmund Freud describes the first phase of a child’s psychosexual development as “cannibalistic pregenital sexual organization,” popularly known as the “oral stage.” During this period, which is said to occur between birth and the age of two, the child focuses on receiving pleasure via the mouth. According to Freud, children overindulged or neglected during this stage may develop neurotic oral fixations that manifest as talking, eating, drinking, and smoking too much....

In the winter of 1951-’52, in the early days of commercial air travel, there was a series of plane crashes in Elizabeth, New Jersey, which was directly on the flight path for takeoffs and landings at nearby Newark Metropolitan Airport. Two of the emergency landings were in residential neighborhoods and killed people on the ground as well as passengers. The residents of Elizabeth, quite understandably, freaked out. There were protests and calls to shut down the airport and wild theories, including Communist sabotage, alien invasions, and a plot against the town’s children....

At first glance, Non-Fiction (which opens this weekend at the Music Box) might appear to be a minor effort from French writer-director Olivier Assayas. The film is dialogue-driven, as opposed to advancing a remarkable visual aesthetic, and the conversations seem to spell out the ideas Assayas wants to communicate. Practically every scene contains some exchange about the nature of mass media in the 21st century, and while these exchanges are eloquent, even provocative, some viewers might find them a little too clear-cut....

Lyric Opera’s 2012 production of Elektra, Richard Strauss’s one-act powerhouse of misery, set a high bar for follow-ups. The current revival with a new cast lost its dress rehearsal to the polar vortex and greeted its opening-night audience with an announcement that celebrated Swedish soprano Nina Stemme, making her Lyric debut in the title role, had injured her knee and would have to curtail her movement on stage. There are plenty of operas in which a more-or-less immobile lead would be business as usual, but not this one....

Update: Because Charles Joseph Smith has lost income due to the pandemic (the Fine Arts Building, where he teaches piano lessons and works as an accompanist, is closed), on April 11 he launched a GoFundMe campaign to help him afford to have food delivered. “Charles and I met through Chicago artist and oracle Angel Bat Dawid, who appears in the video,” says Moussavi. “Angel, myself, and our collaborators in Raw Music International have been working on a documentary together for the last year, and Dr....

When theaters closed their doors for COVID-19 in March, it looked like curtains for performing artists. With distancing guidelines in place for a virus with no cure in sight, an industry based on contact and physical presence was forced to retreat behind a screen—to video, video calls, and livestreams—where dimension and shared space is reduced at best to the illusion of shared time. In the absence of spaces verified by the lives of others, never has time seemed so fictional (“What is time?...

There is a distinction to be drawn between adaptation and dramatization. Dramatizations are lovely. They are almost as nice as reading the book yourself. Audiences ideally come away from a dramatization with a sense of accomplishment at having sat all the way through most of the famous scenes in an important literary classic, all without dozing off more than a handful of times. Adaptation is a different can of beans. It ought to require just as much ingenuity, moral acumen, and sleight of hand to retool fictional characters for stage presentation as it took for the author to fashion them....

As we at the Reader head into 2020, a spirit of transformation and renewal prevails. In keeping with that spirit, we’re publishing what as far as anyone here knows is the first music critics’ poll in the paper’s nearly 50-year history. Initially the brainchild of Reader senior staff writer Leor Galil, it quickly grew to involve nearly half the editorial department and dozens upon dozens of outside contributors. Everyone chose their ten favorite Chicago albums of the past ten years, and we compiled all those picks into a ranked list of several hundred releases....

Q: I could really use your advice. I recently found my boyfriend’s HIV meds while I was house-sitting for him and went into his cupboard for a multivitamin. We’ve been dating for a year and I had assumed he was negative. I’m negative myself and on PrEP and he is undetectable, so I know there is essentially zero risk of me getting infected, but we agreed to some degree of “openness” at the start of the relationship—having threesomes together—and I recently found a guy we’d like to invite over....

Last week the folks at the Upright Citizens Brigade (UCB) sent out a letter announcing they were permanently closing their venues for both performances and classes in New York City. (This on top of announcing in March they were laying off all their employees at their theater spaces in NYC and LA, in response to the pandemic.) The letter was signed “Matt Besser, Amy Poehler, Ian Roberts, Matt Walsh, Founders of the Upright Citizens Brigade....

Imagine if the CTA, a public transportation system that’s subsidized by taxpayer dollars, were mostly serving wealthy white folks. That would be bullshit, right? To its credit, CDOT has recently taken steps to address Divvy’s equity problem. When the system added 175 more stations last summer, many of them went to low-to-moderate-income, predominantly African-American and Latino communities on the south and west sides. Last week I took out one of the big blue bikes and set out for the heavily African-American communities of West Garfield Park and Austin, the first neighborhoods to get docks in this round of installations....

There’s an old saying that if you’re more fortunate than others, it’s better to build a longer table than a higher fence. Loosely, that’s the principle on which the new website Equity at the Table is based; it describes itself as a “practical and proactive response to the blatant gender and racial discrimination that plagues the food industry.” The site’s founder, Julia Turshen, chose the name “equity” deliberately; it’s not the same as equality....

Carnival of Killers, the first album by south-side heavy-music pioneers Macabre in nearly a decade, is pretty much exactly what I hoped it would be. The trio, who haven’t had a lineup change since forming in 1985, have built a global following with what they call “murder metal”—that is, songs about serial killers and other heinous criminals. For all their morbid subject matter, Macabre also provide welcome reassurance: even in these troubled times; you can count on them to create a solid product....