Meet Me in St. Louis The Music Box is currently running a weekend matinee series titled “Weepie Noir: The Dark Side of Women’s Pictures,” dedicated to those studio melodramas influenced by the expressiveness of film-noir style. The first film on the program is Vincente Minnelli’s adaptation of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, an ideal selection. Minnelli, of course, is among the most expressive American filmmakers ever, a master of aesthetic design and transcendent style....

UPDATE Friday, March 13: this event has been canceled. Refunds available at point of purchase. Actors Gymnasium primarily functions as a training school in the circus arts, but they put on a full-length show for an extended run every winter. And in the case of The Ghost in Gadsden’s Garden, you’d be a fool to miss it. A reclusive gardener, Gadsden (Adrian Danzig) spends his days tending the beautiful flowers on the grounds of an old (and allegedly haunted) mansion....

Michal Osmenda/Wikimedia Commons The New York Times pretends it has a policy against using unnamed sources that readers should respect. Times readers don’t, its own ombudsman (“public editor” Margaret Sullivan) doesn’t (as I noted just a month ago), and I’ve been making fun of it for years. Or spike the policy. We all understand people like to blab and not get caught and that these people are a reporter’s best friends....

At 5 PM Saturday, March 21, Governor J.B. Pritzker’s COVID-19 Executive Order No. 8, aka the Stay at Home order, took effect. Here’s a daily-ish journal of how Reader staff, our friends, family—and our pets—are spending our time. Ice cream Popsicles Sorbet Dear god, anything that will cool us down, please, it just got so hot v v

The need for a good Chicago bike map has never been greater. Thankfully those key corridors have reopened with restrictions, and the city has been gradually rolling out several miles of Slow Streets in neighborhoods like South Shore, Kenwood-Oakland, Bucktown, Logan Square, and Ravenswood. But we’re still way behind other U.S. cities. For example, Oakland, California, with a fraction of the population of Chicago, is doing 74 miles of Slow Streets, many times more than our city....

Weezer Nachos It’s no secret that a lot of crap is put out as “exclusive Record Store Day releases.” So leave it to brutal powerviolence four-piece Weekend Nachos to issue something worthwhile and hilarious on the fully overblown holiday. Last Saturday, Boston-based Run for Cover Records released the Weezer Nachos seven-inch, and as the name suggests, it features the superheavy band covering two Weezer classics. I was expecting them to take on the songs in their usual, crushing style, but they instead turn out completely faithful renditions....

My New Year’s resolution is to put in a good word for somebody who doesn’t deserve one, and the sooner I get this out of the way the better. The picture above is a frame from Batman Begins, offered Sunday on a premium TV channel. It poses the question: Did Chicago judge Donald Trump by a double standard? We scorned his narcissistic display of naked egotism. Yet did local movie audiences recoil from the sight of swaggering Wayne Tower?...

Jeremy Joyce, the dynamo behind @blackpeopleeats, is one of the pandemic’s great pivoters, scrapping plans for an inaugural outdoor food festival set for tomorrow into the Juneteenth Restaurant Celebration, where some 70 Black-owned restaurants across the city will be offering $6.19 specials in socially distanced celebration of the day in 1865 when slaves in Galveston, Texas, were told they were free (two and half years after the fact). The restaurant celebration offers an astonishing number of tempting deals that collectively present the potential for an infinite combination of al trunko food crawls....

Social media can be useful as a browseable depository of human knowledge and news. Other times it’s a swirling maelstrom of profound stupidity. Based on the outrage directed my way, I could have made broad statements about the average person who is a passionate supporter of Lady Gaga and concluded that the singer’s fans are disproportionately angry and unhinged people. Conceivably, I could’ve labeled them “Lady Gaga Loonies” and written a hasty think piece theorizing that there’s something inherent in the music of Lady Gaga that inspires a mob of millennials to harass people online....

Tasya Hardono thought hard about where to locate the midwest’s first and only Indonesian grocery store. Meanwhile, Hardono was bouncing back from an especially difficult year. She was born in Jakarta and for the better part of the last 25 years she’s worked in middle management at fast-casual chain restaurants in the northern suburbs, moving up from server to manager at Panda Express, and going on to oversee multiple KFC/Taco Bell locations....

What’s most impressive—and frightening—about Donald Trump is the size of his fan base. Trump could disappear, I commented in a recent post, but they won’t: “There are tens of millions of them now. They are a fundamental piece of American reality.” Trump didn’t create these multitudes, but thanks to him now we know they’re there. Even more importantly, now they know they’re there. And so we see, thanks to Trump, the conservative movement beginning to eat its own, its intellectuals turning against rabble they can no longer count on to swallow whatever medicine they’re spooned....

The Back Room Deal features radio personality and longtime Reader political writer Ben Joravsky arguing local Chicago politics with Reader staff writer Maya Dukmasova. With sharp wit and stinging analysis, Joravsky and Dukmasova cut through the smoky haze of the elections to offer you a glimpse of the current Chicago races—ward-level and, of course, mayoral. Will these historic elections be determined in back-room deals, like so many in Chicago’s past?...

Before I went to the Julie Ruin concert at Thalia Hall last night, I was talking to a friend who told me about a group of high school girls whose class she’d addressed recently—and they had no idea who Kathleen Hanna or Bikini Kill were. It seemed impossible! How could these young people not know our hero, our leader, the woman who made it OK to talk about sexual assault and who spread the mantra “all girls to the front” to help protect us?...

courtesy LUMA Shaker chairs on pegs Of all the religious sects in the world, there is probably none more American than the United Society of Believers, or Shakers, who combined mysticism and a utopian vision with Yankee ingenuity, talent for entrepreneurship and PR, and excellent design sense. The Loyola University Museum of Art is currently showing three exhibits of their art, music, furniture, and architecture, collectively known as “Shaker in Chicago,” the first major exhibit of Shaker art, architecture, and artifacts here....

Now that Steve Earle‘s career has entered its fourth decade, it’s not particularly defensible to keep calling him a country-­music maverick. In the mid-90s, after recovering from a disastrous drug habit, he began carving out his own niche of the periphery of Nashville, a bad boy learning to coexist with the industry. He’s stayed loyal to the honky-tonk, hard rock, bluegrass, and Dylan-esque folk-rock of his youth, reshuffling those sounds into different combinations with each new project; though his music won’t surprise you, it continues to satisfy....

There’s never any point in nursing a grudge, unless you’re telling a story—then it’s a great idea. Ziad Doueiri’s Lebanese drama The Insult, nominated for an Oscar in the foreign-language category, tracks the escalating conflict between two stubborn men in Beirut. Tony Hanna (Adel Karam), an auto mechanic hopped up on the nativist politics of a right-wing Christian party, is hosing down his apartment balcony overlooking the street when Yasser Salameh (Kamel El Basha), a Palestinian refugee supervising a nearby construction project, comes to Tony’s door to complain about a leaky gutter that’s dropping water on passersby....

The Joffrey unveiled its new Anna Karenina this weekend before packed houses at the Auditorium Theatre. The product of an international team of luminaries, including choreographer Yuri Possokhov, set and costume designer Tom Pye, lighting designer David Finn, and projection designer Finn Ross, it’s the Joffrey’s first commissioned story ballet and for ambition alone deserves praise. It’s heroically danced by the company to a cinematic new score by Ilya Demutsky, with sumptuous costumes flashing against the muted blue of a minimalist set enhanced by a masterful use of lighting and projections—and if the making of a new piece of theater were the manufacture of spectacle, this rendition of the Tolstoy classic would take home prizes for the way it captures the story of its title character’s adultery, downfall, and demise in a series of arresting images....

Earlier this month, when the Chicago Public Schools inspector general issued a report that CPS CEO Forrest Claypool engaged in a “full-blown cover-up” of ethics violations and “repeatedly lied” to investigators, Mayor Rahm Emanuel tiptoed into the controversy. Rather than condemn his handpicked CEO, a longtime loyal factotum and friend, Emanuel said simply, “Forrest made a mistake,” and asked that no one make any snap judgments. Board of Education president Frank Clark immediately commended Claypool for “exemplary leadership” and said the board would review the report....

Timeless is the tale of sex and suppression. And this drama from Spanish playwright Federico García Lorca offers no shortage of players looking to put the kibosh on lust. There’s a mother, snuffing out promises of marriage and passion for her five daughters following their father’s sudden death. There are the sisters, who progressively warp into sex-starved monsters, drooling and jealous. And finally, the great male manipulators, unseen perhaps because they represent more than just themselves—a whole patriarchal system, stifling in its detached greed....