I guess it’s official now: Marie Antoinette is a 21st-century American cultural metaphor in the tragic airhead/poor-little-rich-kid vein. A sort of Danube Valley Girl. A Habsburg Kardashian. Barely literate yet thoroughly steeped in the lore of the Pradas and Louboutins of her era, our Marie has been bred for nothing but display. She’s trapped in a luxurious vacuum—a celebrity without achievements, a personality without self-knowledge, a victim of privilege condemned to play consort to a sexually incompetent recessive called Louis XVI....

A short woman in a plastic Guy Fawkes mask strolled in front of the cherry-red, two-and-a-half-ton truck pulling into the driveway of the Swissôtel on East Wacker. Armed with a megaphone, her head barely above the hood, she chanted at the driver: “Heartland Alliance jails kids for money!” The truck crept forward, making contact with her torso and pushing her back one tiny step at a time. As dozens of protesters in carnival masks, feather boas, and tulle skirts beat empty plastic buckets, and chanted and jeered from the sidewalk, hotel security guards in suits shuffled her out of the truck’s path....

I spend more evenings than most people in the dark with other people, watching yet other people pretend to be . . . well, other people. So seeing Teenage Dick at Theater Wit Monday night, knowing it was the last live performance I’d be at for a while, had a special poignancy to it. (Mixed with pandemic guilt—”Should I even be out here tonight?”) It also draws on the narrative trope of social media as a driver of conflict, à la Dear Evan Hansen, with tweets projected on the walls of Sotirios Livaditis‘s locker-lined set....

August Wilson’s Two Trains Running, the seventh in his ten-play Pittsburgh cycle, is a drama of thwarted hopes and stagnation. It is 1969. Malcolm X is dead. Martin Luther King is dead. And though only Malcolm is mentioned by name, the ghost of King hovers over the proceedings, contributing to the miasma of desperation. Director Chuck Smith re-creates this existential nightmare exceedingly well. The pace of the play replicates the feel of daily life, communicating routine without letting us get bogged down in it....

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. What we can’t stop thinking about:

It’s been several decades since punk first mutated into hardcore, and many of its young acolytes still prefer to let it fester in the world’s dingiest basements and DIY spaces. But since 2010 Baltimore-area five-piece Turnstile has been streamlining hardcore’s abrasive attack into huge, brightly colored anthems that seem to zoom forward without friction, or much concern for friction in either their music or among ortho punks who easily upset at nontraditional hardcore sounds....

It would be worth an outing to the Empty Bottle just to see two of the most compelling bands Chicago has produced in recent years on one bill. Dark postrock trio Lume entered the fray last year with their full-length debut, Wrung Out (Equal Vision), a raw, emotional, and cinematically dreary work that examines loss from every angle with its combination of fuzzed-out guitars and beguiling vocals. Also last year, four-piece Rezn released their second full-length, Calm Black Water, a beautiful heavy monster that adventurously and seamlessly weaves together psychedelia, doom, and electronics....

A press release promoting the app “I’ve Been Violated” arrived in my inbox last week, just as I was about to dig into The History, Uses, and Abuses of Title IX, a new report by the American Association of University Professors. Written by a five-member committee, The History, Uses and Abuses of Title IX traces the evolution of the legislation (signed into law by Richard Nixon in 1972) from its origins as a tool to fight sex discrimination in academic hiring, through its revolutionary impact on school and college athletics, to its current high profile use in addressing complaints of sexual assault and harassment....

Chicago’s millennials are making their voices heard in this election. After the success of Chance the Rapper’s one-day music festival, Magnificent Coloring Day, the nonprofit he cofounded the same month, SocialWorks, is hosting a get-out-the-vote event on Monday afternoon that includes a free rooftop concert atop the Wabash and Lake entrance of the Virgin Hotel (203 N. Wabash). For this event, SocialWorks has partnered with music-and-lifestyle blog Prime Fortune and nonprofit Chicago Votes....

Not to make light of the profound suffering and loss of life during the COVID-19 pandemic, but it’s been a while since death and despair sounded as much fun as they do on Phantasma, the new third record by Georgia four-piece Vincas. These southern gothic firebrands have spent much of the past decade making maniacal death-punk and postpunk with a stomping garage-rock fury and a devil-may-care attitude straight from a 60s outlaw biker flick....

It seems crazy to me that the new Love Goes is only Sam Smith’s third album. The UK singer-songwriter made their debut in 2014 with the international breakout In the Lonely Hour, but it feels like they’ve been a go-to modern torch singer for much longer. Perhaps that’s partly due to the strange passage of time during quarantine, where a month can simultaneously feel like a decade and like five minutes....

The annual Chicago International Movies & Music Festival has moved from April to November for its ninth iteration—though this week’s big event shares a calendar year with an abbreviated April program called “CIMMFest Spring Fling Thing.” CIMMFest proper opens Thursday, November 9, and closes Sunday, November 12, and in those four days will screen almost three dozen feature films (plus a generous selection of music videos and shorts), including a wide-ranging retrospective devoted to director Penelope Spheeris....

If downtown bascule bridges are show ponies—with curved, double-leaf spans painted a deep maroon—vertical lift bridges are Chicago’s underappreciated workhorses. In time, I would learn the truth. Vertical lift bridges were favored in the 1910s—unlike bascule bridges, they required counterweights only as heavy as the bridge span itself. That meant that the spans could be heavier, and were thus well suited for freight-train traffic.

ARTIST: Josh Davis SHOW: The Ponys reunion at Empty Bottle on Wed 6/8 MORE INFO: deadmeatdesign.com

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. A new grill from Backyard BBQ Where we’re going for essentials:

Warning: This post contains spoilers. There are some nice interactions here and there. Ezra Miller, playing Barry Allen (aka the Flash), expresses some juvenile anxiety toward his superpowers, and he bonds with Cyborg (Ray Fisher) over their mutual feeling of being outsiders. Batman (Ben Affleck) has a nice rapport with his butler, Alfred (Jeremy Irons), who assists with his crime-fighting from a top-secret lair. Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) and Aquaman (Jason Momoa) seem to have little to do but bask in their godlike powers, yet they establish a certain chemistry with each other and the other stars....

In a development you’d have to describe as only in Chicago, it’s taken a Chinese-American candidate for state representative to bring the city’s two best-known Latino politicians back together again. At this point, I’m feeling the urge to indulge in one of my favorite pastimes: offering history lessons on Chicago politics. So he cultivated a slate of young Latino politicians, many of whom he hired to work in his administration, including Rudy Lozano, Gloria Chevere, Juan Soliz, Juan Velazquez and, of course, Garcia and Gutierrez....

The Reader is publishing this story in partnership with the Better Government Association. The former Lyons mayor assembled a team of candidates to retake the village government. In 2009, his son Chris, then just 26 years old, became mayor and has held the reins of power ever since. Over his two-plus terms, Chris Getty has built up a political army with campaign funds currently holding more than $400,000, restored the family fiefdom and transformed the financially ailing government under his control into a stronghold of nepotism and cozy deals, a Better Government Association and Fox 32 investigation found....

Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place. “Syl Johnson‘s band was playing there, and I won a singing contest,” Ross says in Robert Pruter’s 1991 book Chicago Soul. “The award was a weekend of singing and being paid. And that started me singing in Syl’s band....

Three years after releasing their first record with new guitarist Brandon Ellis, the Billboard-charting Nightbringers, the Black Dahlia Murder have returned with their ninth studio album, Verminous. It turns out the Detroit five-piece have been trying out some new tricks and angles in their fervent death metal, making this release arguably their most diverse and varied yet. Front man and songwriter Trevor Strnad (one of two remaining original members, along with guitarist Brian Esbach) is more intuitive than technical, and takes a literary approach to his tales of vampires, serial killers, plagues (timely), and Things That Should Not Be....