Winter in a pandemic. The roads obstructed with snow. The sight of the same street outside the same window inside the unchanging footprint of the apartment whose every corner and contour is saturated with a sickening familiarity. The scent of your own breath exhaled back through your mask, fogging windows frozen shut. A year, every day of which brings the same emergency home again. Vaccine. Variants. At the Joffrey Ballet, a new Boléro by company artist Yoshihisa Arai, intended for the company’s spring gala, had just begun the creation process two weeks before the city entered lockdown....

This morning Pitchfork announced the aftershow lineup for its Chicago music festival in July. There will be one prefestival performance on Thursday, July 19, and during the festival (it runs Friday, July 20, through Sunday, July 22, in Union Park) aftershows will take place at venues scattered across the city. Headliners include Japanese Breakfast, Girlpool, Kweku Collins, the Curls, Open Mike Eagle, and Zola Jesus. Saturday, July 21 Japanese Breakfast, Varsity, Mothers at Thalia HallKweku Collins, Ajani Jones, Loona Dae at SchubasMelkbelly, Nnamdi Ogbonnaya at Subterranean

Dayna Stephens’s melodic feel and versatility have made the New York-based saxophonist a key player in a wide range of ensembles. Veteran pianist Kenny Barron and inventive Australian bassist and composer Linda Oh are two of many who have relied on Stephens’s warm tone. His compositions, which comprise the bulk of his ten albums as a bandleader, convey a similar lyricism—and the new double disc Right Now! Live at the Village Vanguard, recording in 2019 during two quartet sets at the storied New York jazz club, serves as an ideal overview while also showing off his knack for self-reinvention....

On a visit to the Donald J. Trump Presidential Twitter Library, I’m greeted by a screen labeled “The Trump Nickname Generator.” According to this machine, were the leader of the free world attempting to bully this particular member of the failing fake-news media, he would apparently address me as “Kooky Steve Heisler.” (Sick burn!) Squatting on a replica of the Donald’s fabled Trump Tower golden toilet, I began wishing I could flush away a filthy feeling—that the exhibit’s Viacom-approved satire lite inadvertently enshrines the propaganda of the most dangerous man in the world....

The Green Knight is at its best when it’s at its weirdest. A24, with its reputation for visual sumptuousness and bold, unsettling storytelling, seems a perfect fit for an adaptation of the 14th-century chivalric romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, an Arthurian tale of magic, violence, and honor whose strangeness continues to fascinate modern readers. The film excels when it leans into this fascinating strangeness, showing us fantastical, horrific sights and teasing us with chronological fake-outs in its plot....

We should establish a new rule in our politics: When you know a candidate’s immense flaws, yet choose to endorse him or her anyway, you don’t get to piggyback when the tides turn—at least not without owning up to a major miscalculation. I only wish our vinyl record player could’ve scratched when I clicked on that headline. To be fair, the original endorsement wasn’t without clear hesitation, as the Tribune cited his administration’s achievements with a lot (and I do mean a lot) of hedging....

Missed out on Pitchfork, or just want something to take your mind off of the Republican National Convention? There’s plenty to do this week in Chicago, and here are our top recommendations: Tue 7/19: Old-time rockers Heart, Joan Jett, and Cheap Trick return to Chicago for a night of screeching guitars and quick-belted lyrics at the FirstMerit Bank Pavilion (1300 S. Linn White). 6:30 PM For more stuff to do this week—and every day—check out our Agenda page....

Joel Auerbach/AP Photos Rumor has it . . . You have someone in your family—a brother, a cousin—who is constantly embarrassing himself in public, and when you walk into a room and he’s already there you pray no one finds out you’re related. If language had the power, this would make me break out in hives. But Morrissey insists we don’t care and have no reason to care—a pretty thought, and if only it were true....

Nam Y. Huh/AP Which guy is really for Chicago? Like, all of Chicago. I can say without much hyperbole that there’s no colleague I esteem more than Michael Miner, the Reader‘s media critic/supplier of whimsical musings/bestower of the Golden BAT award. That didn’t stop me from sharing the feelings of many commenters on a post of his a few weeks back, “Why aren’t progressives ecstatic about the race for mayor?...

Saxophonist Hafez Modirzadeh has spent the better part of 30 years forging connections among jazz, Persian artistic concepts, and free music. This has resulted in a clutch of albums that ping-pong between gutsy postbop and meditative duets, the latter of which come into focus on his new album, Facets (Pi). Modirzadeh has frequently worked with Chicago-bred trumpeter Amir ElSaffar, and here he taps pianists Kris Davis, Craig Taborn, and Tyshawn Sorey (better known as a drummer) to accompany him on an expertly and alternately tuned piano in his endeavors to deconstruct equal temperament....

You need something—make that everything—delivered, and before you’ve even finished typing A-m-, your browser has taken you to that magical behemoth in the sky (aka Seattle) that will make all of your free two-day shipping dreams come true. Not so fast, friend. Before you hit Add to Cart and add another dime to Jeff Bezos’s billions—with a B—consider supporting a local business instead, especially for things you’d usually stroll by and buy....

When people talk about “Trump’s America,” they mean two things at once. In general, the phrase is simply a term to describe where the country’s been at since the 2016 election. It’s also the preferred term of condescension among blue-staters for the great swaths of Americans who elected him president. Simply as an explanation for how Trump’s America got the way it is, and, by extension, how the country got the way it is, Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play is the most important work of art produced in the last five years....

The first thing you see is a large cement viaduct bisecting the Fulton Market neighborhood. But when you walk closer, it resolves into an explosion of brightly painted murals. One mural shows photo-realistic children while another shows an elephant riding a penny- farthing bicycle. Hoard, a Fulton Market resident, had spent years walking by the fading murals. Three years ago, he finally decided to look into the history of the neighborhood and discovered that in the 70s, it had been predominantly African-American....

Donald Trump is a bigot. Let’s just get that out of the way first. Dwyane Wade’s cousin was just shot and killed walking her baby in Chicago. Just what I have been saying. African-Americans will VOTE TRUMP! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 27, 2016 When Trump talks about Chicago’s problems he offers no real solutions. Rather, he uses our city as a prop for his platform. And not coincidentally, he mostly does so in front of predominantly white, suburban or rural audiences....

In the first runoff debate, Mayor Rahm Emanuel conceded that Chicago struggles with economic disparity. But he argued that “it is a false choice to pit one part of the city of Chicago against another.” But about 48 percent of what he has committed to spend in TIF funds over the last four years has gone to these same favored communities, an area stretching roughly from the Gold Coast on the north to McCormick Place on the south and from the United Center on the west to the lake....

It’s another case of parks versus parking lots. But here’s what really gets me: the parking lot expansion has been endorsed by none other than Friends of the Parks, the same group that helped tank George Lucas’s proposal to replace Soldier Field’s 1,500-space south lot with his Museum of Narrative Arts. That’s one reason the Active Transportation Alliance opposes the 31st Street Beach lot expansion. “Car parking and streets are a poor use of the city’s very limited park space....

Ben Lerner, the celebrated young poet and novelist in town for the Chicago Humanities Fest late last month, is said to have once apologized to an audience of poets for having even written a novel. Since then, Lerner—a 2015 MacArthur fellow for his poetry and fiction—has become something of a cult hero for the literary inclined, myself included. His three novels Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), 10:04 (2014), and now The Topeka School (2019), all written in the genre of “autofiction” (i....

The 2016 Brock Turner rape trial, which ended with Turner receiving a slap-on-the-wrist six-month sentence for assaulting an unconscious woman, is the obvious antecedent for Selina Fillinger’s Something Clean, now in a coproduction from Rivendell and Sideshow Theatres. But the rapist never appears in Fillinger’s drama, which focuses instead on his parents. Charlotte (Mary Cross), the mother, volunteers at a center for sexual assault survivors, where she forms a friendship with Joey (Patrick Agada), a gay survivor and counselor whose own mother kicked him out as a teen when he told her about being raped by a male babysitter....

Ricardo Blake is not having it with your jerk egg rolls. Blake grew up in his mother’s restaurants in Saint Elizabeth, Jamaica, and is steeped in this tradition. He’s unimpressed by the jerk taco revolution that swept the south and west sides of Chicago in the last few years. Though he has allowed jerk chicken, shrimp, and catfish tacos on his menus, that isn’t what he’s making his name on....

I think my biggest issue with working in an office is that it’s socially unacceptable to do a few jumping jacks, squats, or burpees during the workday. Trust me, I’ve tried. I’m not a fitness freak by any means but I do love to move. As a trained dancer, I’m just not well equipped to sit for eight hours a day. So, one positive for me during this self-isolation period is my ability to break out into movement whenever the hell I want—it’s something I desperately need during this time of chaos, panic, and overwhelming stress....