Julia Thiel The patio By far the best reason to go to the Spoke & Bird is the patio. The inside of the cafe, which replaced Cafe Society in March, is cute and modern, full of reclaimed wood and flooded with natural light. But it’s the 2,500-square-foot space outside, partially shaded by trees and equipped with enough seating for 100 people, that makes the place stand out. In fact, even calling it a patio—which in Chicago is often applied to a few tiny tables shoehorned in between a sidewalk and a busy street—feels like an understatement....

A leisurely record store browse, a bartender’s recommendation, an unplanned run-in with a friend—pandemic life lacks these moments of happenstance. There’s no real replacement for digging through zines at Quimby’s Bookstore. The beloved store is open at limited capacity right now, but I live two bus transfers across town. Luckily, they’ve devised a pandemic-era innovation. They started selling Qustomized Quimby’s Zine Packages. It works like this: When you order a Zine Package online, you submit a list of your interests in the comment section....

This week I wrote about the extraordinary sandwich artist Ethan Lim and his efforts to “sandwich” dishes that aren’t typically served between two slices of bread, particularly the Cambodian foods he grew up with. Lim told me that part of the reason he’s kept such a low profile over the last four and half years is because he didn’t want to be seen as some kind of gentrifier in this working class neighborhood, serving expensive, cheffy fast food in a working class neighborhood that really just needed a reliable hot dog shop more than anything else....

The laid-back, unassuming, eminently cool aesthetic of Pilsen’s Thalia Hall is such a harmonious fit for veteran stand-up Todd Barry that it’s wild he hadn’t performed there yet in his many stops through Chicago. The ASMR-voiced comic and author will play the historic venue for the first time February 22 as part of his facetiously-named Stadium Tour. Well, one of the best green rooms is near you, actually, in Evanston in a place called Space....

ARTIST: Matthew Gladly SHOW: Ono and Glad Rags at Constellation on Sat 6/29 MORE INFO: instagram.com/glad_matt

It’s storming heavily outside as I ring the buzzer for Western Exhibitions. It’s my first gallery experience since the pandemic locked us down months ago and I feel like I’m breaking some sort of rule. Am I supposed to be here? Is my mask on tight? Where’s my sanitizer? I remember the last opening I was at in the building. Bodies were packed so incredibly close, we had to leave early to catch a breath of fresh air....

Weeks before the official start of summer, Do Division helps Chicago kick off music-festival season. Empty Bottle Presents and Subterranean programmed its East and West stages, respectively, with a lively mix of bands and DJs from Friday night through Sunday evening. Among this year’s notable acts are two groups that have recently celebrated career milestones: Cincinnati indie-rock and alternative hip-hop band Why? and southwestern alt-rock giants the Meat Puppets (now based in Phoenix and Austin)....

Willie Watson makes no bones about his allegiance to tradition on his new album, Folksinger Vol. 2 (Acony). In his liner notes he writes about his favorite versions of some of the tunes he performs: it takes a certain amount of guts to inform listeners about the Bascom Lamar Lunsford version of “Dry Bones” or the definitive reading of “Samson and Delilah” by Reverend Gary Davis while presenting your own renditions....

Q: I’m a professional dominatrix, and I thought I’d seen everything in the last five years. But this situation completely baffled the entire dungeon. This middle-aged guy, seemingly in fine health, booked an appointment with me and my colleague for one hour of some very light play and a golden shower to finish off with. We did no CBT, no cock rings, no trauma to the dick area at all, no ass play, no sounding or catheters, no turbulent masturbation, nothing that could have caused this reaction....

R &B singer-songwriter Kelela Mizanekristos, a D.C.-area native who was raised by Ethiopian parents and performs and records under her first name, makes music that sounds like it could’ve emerged from a dream. On her new debut album, Take Me Apart (Warp), she sings with an hard-to-place otherworldly quality—her vocals are both ethereal and exact; she cuts a striking presence even as it feels as though you could run your fingers through the plume of her layered and overdubbed melodies....

For its second year in Millennium Park, the Chicago Blues Festival has expanded, adding a new stage and extending the hours of an existing one. Whether more quantity translates into more quality, though, remains to be seen. A few of the bookings adopt a refreshingly creative definition of the blues—Vieux Farka Touré brings his Mali-to-Memphis roots-blues fusion to the Crossroads Stage on Saturday, for instance, and the flamboyant and impossible-­to-categorize Fantastic Negrito plays Pritzker Pavilion on Sunday....

Near the beginning of Stephen Sachs‘s Bakersfield Mist, a big-time art expert stands in the trailer home belonging to an out-of-work bartender and breaks the news to her that the painting she bought at a thrift store isn’t the genuine Jackson Pollock she hopes it is. “This is shallow. Empty,” he says of the canvas. “It has no allure.” I’ve seen only the first nine minutes and 22 seconds of the documentary, but that’s enough to confirm that it’s framed as a Teri-versus-the-snoots narrative, the primary snoot being the late Metropolitan Museum of Art director Thomas Hoving, who’s shown discussing his “connoisseurship”—and making lots of geeky moves—on his way to declaring that Horton’s painting is no Pollock....

A cutlass descends and the hand of merchant banker Isaac Randall is severed at the wrist. The pirate captain holds it high, removes the ring, and flips the hand over the rail. As his wife, Betsy, watches helplessly, the prancing pirates lift her three young children—Alice, Mary, and the baby, David—and finally Isaac himself and throw each of them into the sea. Now it was 2003, and the president was sending America back to the gulf to clean up his father’s unfinished business....

By coincidence, two of the more provocative documentaries I’ve seen this year arrive in Chicago on Friday. Pervert Park, screening for one week at Facets Cinematheque, takes viewers inside Florida Justice Transitions, a Saint Petersburg trailer park that provides temporary housing for some 120 registered sex offenders. Tickled, which opens at Music Box, chronicles the efforts of two New Zealand journalists to uncover the truth behind “competitive endurance tickling,” a new sport based in Los Angeles, despite a series of legal threats from the sponsor....

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Who’s next: Pfeiffer has challenged Dan Snowden of Bad Hunter to create a dish with olive loaf, the olive-studded lunch meat.

Aaron “Haroon” Garel, 39, recounts fond memories of growing up in his vibrant south-side neighborhood, Woodlawn, during the 1980s. Block club parties were “on and poppin,’” treating neighborhood children to an abundance of candy and a free petting zoo. Stores and restaurants lined 63rd Street and at the corner of Kimbark Ave, the original three-story branch of the neighborhood public library doubled as a community center that held talent shows, dance practices and a local theater....

I had a blast hosting Savage Lovecast Live at San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts. Audience members submitted questions before the show, and I consumed a large pot edible right after the curtain went up and then raced to give as much decent sex advice as I could before it took effect. Here are some of the questions I didn’t get to before my judgment became too impaired. A: This is outside my area of expertise/giving a shit....

When the Art Ensemble of Chicago reinvented itself as an orchestra for its 50th-anniversary recording, last year’s We Are on the Edge, the idea didn’t come out of thin air. It reflected a use of the classical methods and sounds that the ensemble’s lone surviving founder, woodwind and percussion player Roscoe Mitchell, has been pursuing in his own work since the 1980s. The new album Distant Radio Transmission consists of four completely notated works, three of which are derived from Mitchell’s improvisational practice....

Also known as the “fourth trimester,” the postpartum period is an incredibly challenging time for people who give birth. Up until recently, that challenge included finding appropriate underwear. With that neglected need in mind, friends and thirty-something new mothers Aubrey Howard, Eden Laurin, and Mia Clarke set out to create FourthWear Underwear, an undergarment with an opening for an ice or heat pack to address often “unmentionable” issues that affect postpartum bodies (and souls)....