T he first time Rick Erwin, executive director of the City Museum in Saint Louis, tried to buy a piece of a Louis Sullivan building, a Catholic priest damned him to hell. That was back in 2012. The museum had sent workers to Hammond, Indiana, to pick up some terra-cotta by the architect George Grant Elmslie. On that trip, one of Erwin’s colleagues negotiated a deal with Father Donald Rowe, a former head of Saint Ignatius College Prep in Chicago and an avid collector of architecture, who was involved in procuring architectural artifacts for the school’s atrium....

Two weeks before Christmas But a tiny old gremlin The gremlin did bray Jill Biden earned a doctorate in education; Epstein earned no advanced degree, but saw fit, in a December 11 Wall Street Journal opinion piece, to let her know that “A wise man once said that no one should call himself ‘Dr.’ unless he has delivered a child [italics mine].” Sage advice that neatly eliminates anyone who has actually delivered a child, by, you know, bearing it....

Hindi isn’t the only language into which Mumbai’s Company Theatre has translated Twelfth Night. They’ve also rendered it into a theatrical style that takes liberties with everything but Shakespeare’s plot points. But if the foreign language forces an Anglophone to depend on English supertitles, the foreign conventions are universally accessible. Delightful too. Twelfth Night is the one where Viola washes up on the coast of Illyria after a shipwreck, thinking her twin brother has been drowned (he hasn’t)....

In a post last week, I lamented the inevitable gap between how many great albums come out and how many I’m actually able to listen to. I could probably spend the rest of 2018 posting about worthwhile stuff that I missed in 2017—though of course I won’t, because I’d rather try to keep up with this year’s onslaught. But before I move on, I’d like to give props to a pair of previously unissued live recordings by the great LA folk-rock singer Tim Buckley that dropped late in 2017....

Borden describes the typical Milk customer as a trendy 25-year-old or a professional 40-year-old or a mother or a retiree—in other words, all kinds of women. She loves how the neighborhood fosters small businesses and partnered with her sister, Dana Karlov, to open the bridal store Honey next door in 2017 for modern brides looking for an untraditional wedding dress. “Our brides are amazing women, and it’s such an honor to be a part of this exciting moment in their lives,” she says....

After nearly nine months, Portage Park resident Tom Jackson is finally comfortable calling himself an artist. Since the pandemic began, he’s been making one-of-a-kind greeting cards from “Quarantinaville”—it’s where we all live now and will likely stay awhile. Luckily, people like Jackson have helped make 2020 less miserable by bringing levity, humor, and original craftsmanship to the once-again-booming card business while also raising funds to help local establishments on the northwest side survive the pandemic....

When Chicago Public Schools suspended its meal distribution program on Sunday, May 31, it followed a weekend of citywide protests in response to the extrajudicial killing of George Floyd by a white Minneapolis police officer. CPS announced the news after 10 PM through its Twitter account, which mirrored the city’s confusing, haphazard response to the protests; that Saturday, Mayor Lori Lightfoot declared a 9 PM curfew at 8:25 PM, after CTA suspended service to the Loop and the city raised most of downtown’s drawbridges....

It wasn’t so much confidence that motivated Fat Rice chef Abraham Conlon to write a Macanese cookbook after only two visits to the former Portuguese colony of Macau. It was fear. The problem with compiling a book based on such recipes is that the relative scarcity of Macanese cookbooks means that they’d never been widely codified. So Conlon’s worry that his recipe for diabo, aka devil’s curry, might be spot-on for one family and all wrong for another isn’t without merit....

A weekend marked by extreme heat and storms makes the cataclysm at the outset of The Tempest hit home. But even without that assist from nature, Midsommer Flight’s free outdoor touring production of Shakespeare’s late romance, directed by Beth Wolf, has plenty of resonant moments, thanks in part to the cross-gender casting of Stephanie Monday and Julie Proudfoot as Prospero and Alonso. The idea of powerful women being cheated of their place in public life—or even having their lives threatened—by callow, grasping men like Antonio (Dylan S....

Fans of both the 1999 film riff on Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s 1782 novel Les Liaisons dangereuses and of 1990s pop and rock hits are the obvious target audience for this musical, now in a touring production. Roger Kumble adapted his own movie (which itself was de Laclos by way of Jay McInerney in its portrait of rich dissolute Manhattan private-school kids) with assists from Jordan Ross and Lindsey Rosin....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Tuesday, June 7, 2016. The perils of social media: Teen admits to murder in Snapchat video There’s no shortage of young people getting in trouble on social media, but 17-year-old Anthony Mendoza took it to a new extreme. Mendoza confessed to the murder of his friend, 16-year-old Christian Bandemer, in a Snapchat video sent from the back of a police squad car after his arrest, according to prosecutors....

The other day I was walking past Trump Tower, steaming over the sight of that wretched name on its side, when it hit me. I know a way that might make Trump take his name off that building. Make him choose between giving up the sign or the property tax break he effectively gets for having it there. He shouldn’t get both—especially not in a Democratic city like Chicago. Burke recently dropped Trump as a client—in part because he’s worried the connection will cost him votes as he runs for reelection next year in a mostly Latino ward....

These two sax-percussion duos represent several generations in Chicago improvised music—saxophonist Gerrit Hatcher is 26, while drummer Steve Hunt is 63—but all the musicians share an exploratory curiosity, and both pairs engage in fascinating modes of communication. Reedist Keefe Jackson and Hunt—a perpetually overlooked titan in the city’s jazz scene who’s played in NRG Ensemble, Caffeine, and Extraordinary Popular Delusions, among others—are celebrating the release of The Long Song (1980), a succinct cassette featuring three feverish pieces of bob-and-weave interplay, aerated friction, and surprisingly bruising onslaughts that reveal less common sides of each musician’s personality....

What a difference a day makes. Inspired to build upon King’s legacy, the organizers carried out Saturday’s action while railing against what they describe as the whitewashing of his legacy. King’s work, they told attendees, has been sanitized and coopted to emphasize his status as an orator and messianic leader at the expense of highlighting the politics at the forefront of his advocacy work. The outside crowd sent messages of support to their cohort inside the building....

Just before Anand Giridharadas took the stage at the Chicago Humanities Festival earlier this month, in the auditorium at the private and pricey Francis W. Parker School in upscale Lincoln Park, a giant “Thank You” to the Robert R. McCormick Foundation flashed up on the screen. It was followed, in smaller type, by thanks to 20 other sponsors: organizations like ITW, the MacArthur Foundation, Allstate, and Bank of America. An accomplished speaker with an approachable presence and an aura of cool (the uniform: waxed jeans, black blazer over black tee, sneakers, and an impressive salt and pepper coif), Giridharadas, himself a onetime McKinsey consultant and Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute, is fully aware of the ironies here....

With her band Saicobab, semilegendary Japanese noise weirdo YoshimiO (Boredoms, OOIOO) has taken a sharp left turn in a career of sharp left turns. The group, which also includes Yoshida Daikiti on sitar, Akita Goldman on bass, and Motoyuki Hamamoto on percussion and gamelan, perform deconstructive surgery on Indian music, revealing (or forcing) a connection with Japanese classical traditions. On their 2017 debut, Sab Se Purani Bab (Thrill Jockey), the result is something like noise-punk raga or “The Boredoms Do Bollywood”: fractured bursts of South Asian melodies sped up and interspersed with YoshimiO shrieking, hissing, and yipping....

This week we here at the Reader faced something we haven’t had to deal with in months: in-person events. It started an interesting discussion—if we don’t feel comfortable sending our critics to cover, say, Judy and Liza at the Greenhouse Theater, should we tell our readers to check it out? While some of us pondered adding disclaimers to events—things like “we do not think this is a good idea” and “ARE YOU FUCKING INSANE WHAT ARE YOU EVEN DOING?...

Bob Dylan has famously and relentlessly toyed with the melodies and arrangements of his voluminous repertoire, using his songs as perpetual works in progress despite the iconic status of many of them. His open-ended mind-set makes his ouevre particularly well suited for treatment by veteran soul singer Bettye LaVette, who in 2005 rebooted a largely moribund career by putting an indelible mark on songs by Dolly Parton, Aimee Mann, and Lucinda Williams on her now-classic record I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise....

Gossip Wolf is sad to report that Haki, one of Chicago’s best young bands, broke up after a show in Pilsen on Fri 5/8. Drummer Ruby Dunphy posted the news on the group’s Facebook page Saturday, and explained Haki’s sudden demise: “Our advice to make a long lasting band is don’t date someone in your band.” Dunphy also wrote that all four members of Haki will continue making music in other contexts—this wolf hopes that whatever comes next is as killer as Haki’s Big New EP and last year’s ace full-length Positive....

In an addendum to the liner notes of a reissued 1993 album of the first recordings of music by Galina Ustvolskaya, scholar Art Lange offers corrections and new revelations about the reclusive Russian composer. At the time of the original release, just after the era of glasnost had ended in the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ustvolskaya’s work was just beginning to reach the West, but very little was known about her life or the full range of her compositions....