Chicago is a sanctuary city. This does not mean it’s a haven for criminals from other countries. This does not mean people from other countries can commit crimes with impunity. It simply means that immigrants can live their lives without worrying that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will round them up and send them back to where they came from. Just like everyone else who moved here in search of a better life, from as far away as India or as near as the collar suburbs, Chicago has become their home....

One of the best Chicago rock albums of the past year was made by a band that no longer lives here: the Funs. The duo of Jessee Rose Crane and Philip Jerome Lesicko, who both sing and trade off guitar and drums, recorded September’s double LP My Survival at Logan Square’s Public House Sound Recordings, but they wrote it in New Douglas, Illinois, a former coal-mining town nearly five hours south of Chicago where they’d moved in 2012 to refurbish a house near Lesicko’s parents’ place....

The excellent record/vintage clothes shop Wild Prairie is one block from my pad and has been a godsend during quarantine. The small, very-easy-to-distance-within store has always felt safe, often with just one shopworker present (usually of the wonderful owner couple of Alex Gonzales and Natasha Rac) and there’s usually a shopper or two perusing the bins. They have a great selection of vinyl including house, jazz, soul, and loads of 60s psychedelia (making this guy VERY happy)....

The neighborhood of South Lawndale, aka Little Village, home to the recent power plant smokestack disaster, can add one more trophy to its showcase of immiseration: 149 residents in 60623 have died because of COVID, more fatalities than in any other Illinois zip code. The death data also reveal disparities in morbidity for those with COVID diagnoses. For instance, among the 304 COVID cases in 60415, just southwest of Oak Lawn, 34 people (11 percent) died....

Magician David Parr brings old-school magic to life every week at the Chicago Magic Lounge. But the magic isn’t limited to when Parr takes the stage. Hidden behind a laundromat, the Chicago Magic Lounge immerses visitors in a replica of an early 20th-century magic bar, once a staple of the city. The atmosphere leaves little to the imagination, complete with period-appropriate decor, a cocktail menu, and up-and-coming magicians performing tableside tricks in the hour leading up to Parr’s performance....

It’s back to fantasy gig posters this week! John Vernon Forbes (of the band Tijuana Hercules, covered in this week’s Gossip Wolf) brings us this tribute to Roy Head, a Texas singer-songwriter best known for his 1965 soul hit “Treat Her Right.” Head’s onstage gyrations and dance moves could look like high-speed advanced yoga, and he often ended up in pretzel-like positions, much to the delight of his fans. Not everybody can make a fantasy gig poster, of course, but it’s simple and free to take action through the website of the National Independent Venue Association—click here to tell your representatives to save our homegrown music ecosystems....

These are heady times in Chicago. We recently inaugurated Lori Lightfoot as our first black, female, and openly gay mayor, and she immediately signed an executive order to end aldermanic privilege. That dubious tradition has allowed City Council members to veto good projects within their wards, including sustainable transportation initiatives. To get a better sense of what other improvements for walking, biking, and transit are in store, I reached out to the dozen freshman aldermen to ask about their transportation priorities, and several got back to me by press time....

Taryn Allen Especially as the pandemic continues to escalate, going home for the holidays this year doesn’t really feel like an option. But then it’s like the devil appears on my other shoulder, telling me to just say, “fuck it, life is short and the world is ending anyway.” I see people on social media taking vacations, enjoying restaurants, and seeing their parents, so why shouldn’t I? (I know why.)...

An easy exercise in local tourism would be to walk by a local police station and contemplate the night that the mayor fired the entire police force on March 22, 1861. Claiming budget concerns during his second term in 1861, Wentworth reduced the police force and imposed a midnight curfew. Outraged voters prompted the state of Illinois to become active in Chicago’s police politics again. On February 15, 1861, the state legislature established a Board of Police Commissioners in the city....

Both of your proposed fixes are basically pipe dreams, as I suspect you know, BBOK, and I further suspect you’re not really interested in either one. Because what you really want is right here: “Sometimes I’d like to have gentle and slow ‘unadorned’ sex with an attentive partner who calls me by name, compliments me, and does things to my body he knows I enjoy.” (Emphasis mine.) A: Unless this ball-less mess is climbing up the fire escape and slipping into your bedroom uninvited—which I’m guessing you would’ve mentioned—he keeps turning up in your bedroom because you keep inviting him....

Might Meets Right imperial stout aged in High West manhattan barrels, one of the two beers in Temperance’s first bottle release I got to Evanston’s Temperance Beer Company a bit late—I didn’t manage a column till last May, when their kegs had been turning up in Chicago bars for seven or eight months and they’d just debuted on retail shelves with Gatecrasher English IPA. (I felt a little better, and even a tad prescient, when Gatecrasher won a silver medal at the Great American Beer Festival that summer—I’d given it an immoderately positive review....

In the weeks leading up to the November 8 City Council vote that approved the $10 million purchase of a parcel of land for a new police and firefighter training academy, the organizers behind the #NoCopAcademy campaign stayed busy. Teens and adults from the campaign’s coalition of 50 groups have led a push to prevent the city from spending a total of $95 million on the new state-of-the-art facility, which is planned for West Garfield Park; they’ve been canvassing, calling aldermen, and showing up to ward nights....

Even before visual artist and designer Terrell Davis began his first year of classes at the School of the Art Institute in 2016, he’d already helped define outre pop and Web-centric electronic music. In the early 2010s, he contributed to the hallucinatory retro vision and sound of vaporwave. He made slyly funky songs under the pseudonym Visaプリペイド; the artwork for his 2013 album, スムーズOCEANS, for example, centers on a hyperclean disc shaded with a pastel emerald gradient and set atop a picturesque beachside image that looks too pristine to exist in real life....

ARTIST: Frank Okay SHOW: The Footlight District, the Million Reasons, and Bubbles Erotica at Martyrs’ on Fri 2/21 MORE INFO: Through their 120 Free Posters project, Frank Okay is offering Chicago bands and DIY venues the chance to get a free gig poster designed by Frank. All the posters will be shown in an exhibition later this year.

“Oh fuck, what is he doing?” —Joe Schofield, in Chimerica And, like I say, I got the T-shirt. Bowling’s staging seemed diffuse, perhaps a little underrehearsed on opening night. The elements were all there, though, and I have no doubt that the show has pulled itself together by now. Coburn Goss is a charmingly obnoxious Joe, wearing his self-righteousness like a foolscap while others try their best to steer him toward their versions of growing up....

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has begun an impeachment inquiry into President Trump for asking Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter. I get that there is a strong desire for many Americans to be rid of what they see as the national nightmare of Trump’s presidency. But I urge caution for several reasons. A dozen years ago, Speaker Pelosi rejected calls to begin an impeachment inquiry against President George W....

T his play has an embarrassingly autobiographical origin story,” says playwright Clare Barron in the program for You Got Older, running now at Steppenwolf Theatre. And she runs down the real-life parallels to prove it. And so it goes. We meet Mae’s siblings—bossy older sister Hannah, lesbian PC-language-policeperson Jenny, big friendly lug Matthew—all of whom live outside Seattle and bear a zeitgeisty resemblance to the Tim Robbins-Holly Hunter brood in HBO’s Portland-based Here and Now....

Fashion, for many, is all about fantasy. In normal circumstances, this week we would have spent several days picking apart the outrageous outfits of celebrities attending the Met Gala (the theme would have been About Time: Fashion and Duration). But instead, at least here in Illinois, we’re left to contemplate a future with a mandatory, less-than-fantastical item: the face mask. Roger Rodriguez from Jugrnaut is also getting creative with materials, in part because fabric stores have closed....

Cumbie front man Aaron O’Neill says his three-piece isn’t a “real band”—they’ve only ever performed publicly once—but on their new self-released debut, EP, they rock like road-tested veterans. O’Neill started writing the record’s sleek, rowdy songs a couple years ago, when he lived in Saint Louis (he played in several bands there, including Shady Bug, a touring indie-rock group on respected indie label Exploding in Sound). To realize the material he was creating for Cumbie, he recruited bassist-vocalist Reid Maynard, who still lives in Saint Louis, and drummer Zach Simmons, who lives on a farm outside Bloomington, Illinois....

Three new shows this season celebrate defiance and derring-do, from the poetic grit of Saul Bellow to the feminist sass of six famous wives to a pioneering thrill-seeker. “He’s taken this extraordinary 400-page novel and turned it into a play,” he says. “If you know the novel and the language, you think, ‘How the hell is this going to work onstage?’ He was brilliant in many ways, one of which is that he’s translated all the events into language that sounds like real people, yet at various moments, particularly for someone who is voiceless or powerless or unable to speak, he then used direct quotes pulled from the novel for what we now refer to as ‘the Bellow music....