It’s a little crazy to think that Steve Malkmus has been fronting the Jicks for half again as long as he served as the face of indie-rock paragons Pavement—maybe it just seems like a shorter span to me because his solo work has never resonated the same way his old band did. A couple weeks ago, Malkmus dropped his seventh solo album, Sparkle Hard (Matador), and though I don’t see it restoring him to his 90s relevance, it’s far more direct and less fussy than most Jicks records—it’s my favorite thing he’s done since Pavement called it quits in 1999....

This year local punk cover choir the Blue Ribbon Glee Club turns ten years old! If it were an actual child, it’d be starting fifth grade, which makes a weird kind of sense—Gossip Wolf remembers keeping track of the group’s upcoming gigs by checking its MySpace page! On Saturday, October 7, the BRGC throws a birthday party and reunion at Cafe Mustache, a good occasion for glee clubbers (and fans) to catch up; joining the choir on the lineup are a slew of bands featuring current and former members, including Wet Wallet, Dust Bunnies, and Hex Kittens....

Large family gatherings may still be fraught as we sort out who’s vaccinated and who’s not. But being a fly on the wall for the generations of WASPs in A.R. Gurney‘s 1981 play The Dining Room might make you take a fresh look at family dynamics. When the stay-at-home order went into effect, DeRogatis, like a lot of theater practitioners, found her plans tossed and gutted. But when some back pay from unemployment hit her bank account, DeRogatis says, “I was like, OK, I’m going to buy myself one nice thing....

“I’m sure you’ve heard the words to describe Englewood are ‘Black, dangerous, poor, gun violence,’” says Tonika Johnson in one of the opening lines of her short film, The Folded Map Project. Englewood is where Johnson was born and it’s where she still lives. Englewood is home. Crossing one bridge can propel you into a new circle of people and culture. Intersections and cross streets are linchpins for communities. Bus stops, train stations, and bike routes connect us and divide us....

Last Saturday afternoon, I joined protesters marching in the Loop against police brutality and the murder of George Floyd. I had no intention of documenting the day. I’m a photographic artist, not a photojournalist, and even if I was, the story of Black oppression is not mine to tell. While marching and chanting during the early stages of the demonstration, I took pictures of graffiti, debris on the ground, a burnt flag, and tattered posters....

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. Almond flour cookies with cranberries What we’re considering for virtual meeting number gazillion: v

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. Older strips are archived here. Posted by The Weaker Sex 60s All-Girl Band on Friday, February 24, 2017

When I’m watching a film by Todd Haynes (Far From Heaven, I’m Not There), I’m usually too caught up in the director’s formal decisions to think about the emotions of the characters. The deeper engagement comes later, after the movie has sunk in and I can separate the aesthetic from the themes. So it goes with Haynes’s latest, Wonderstruck, which opened in Chicago last Friday. Like his debut feature, Poison, Wonderstruck alternates between separate narrative lines set in different eras, with each given its own visual style....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, July 13, 2016. Imagining the global media spotlight during a 2016 Summer Olympics in Chicago Chicago’s failed 2016 Olympic bid may seem like a distant memory, and the winning city, Rio de Janeiro, has been plagued by crises ranging from the Zika virus to political instability to rampant crime. Vice Sports has imagined a very cynical alternate reality in which Chicago was selected to host the upcoming games, and the global media starts picking apart all of Chicago’s problems from its violence epidemic to police brutality issues to corrupt politicians to a deep fiscal crisis and the discovery of lead in the drinking water at public schools....

A couple of years ago, Brian Hieggelke, the editor and publisher of Newcity, traveled to Brazil with his friend Ted Fishman, who was speaking at a summit on globalization. While he was there, Hieggelke realized a few things: The more he thought about it, the less far-fetched it seemed. “As Newcity became more virtual,” he explains, “I realized we’ve become less tethered to space. You can do your work from anywhere in the world....

In December 2016, as I whittled down my annual “best overlooked Chicago hip-hop” list for the year, local rapper Lin-Z released her debut, Awetumn—an EP so good that I wished it’d come out earlier, if only so I could’ve done more than mention it in passing in that post. In the spring Lin-Z will drop its follow-up, the EP Sprung, and last Friday she released its first single, “Grown.” Even if the rest of the EP isn’t as strong, “Grown” is extraordinary enough all by itself for me to call Lin-Z one of the best emerging rappers in the city....

On May 30, 2015, Sameena Mustafa, Prateek Srivastava, and Rishika Murthy draped Indian fabric across the walls of Bughouse Theater, cooked up a batch of samosas, and hosted a comedy show. It was the premiere of Simmer Brown, the name of both their monthly stand-up showcase and their south-Asian comedy collective. The inaugural event sold out, and now, one year later, the group are celebrating with a special anniversary program....

In his dark comedy about an avaricious, ill-tempered British plutocrat who switches places with a sweet, mild-mannered American kindergarten teacher (both played with considerable comic verve by Rainn Wilson), Matthew-Lee Erlbach pays homage to a brace of farceurs, among them Eugène Marin Labiche, Georges Feydeau, Joe Orton, Charles Ludlam, and Michael Frayn. But the writer he most closely resembles is Terry Southern. Like Southern, Erlbach is a heavy-duty iconoclast. Before The Doppelgänger is over, no sacred cow is left unslaughtered....

Flash back to just before the presidential election in 2016, when comedians were wringing their hands about then-candidate Donald Trump’s toxic effect on people whose jobs it was to make fun of the news for a living. In an interview with Slate’s Jacob Weisberg, Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me! host Peter Sagal memorably put the conundrum like this: “Well, what does Jonathan Swift do if they actually start eating the babies?...

From February 2015 till it was shut down in January, an unlicensed venue in a former Jehovah’s Witnesses church in Humboldt Park was a routine part of my life. Almost every week I paid tribute to the local arts scene inside the cavernous first floor of 2733 W. Hirsch, home to a collective called Young Camelot. I felt more comfortable there—dwarfed by the old church’s high walls, ambling through a cloud of cigarette smoke in its small kitchen, or pressed by warm bodies against the base of its two-foot-high stage—than I did at any legitimate, licensed venue in the city....

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. Toy Story 4 and Moana, both on Disney+ What we’re wearing:

ARTIST: Aaron Lowell Denton SHOW: Twin Talk; Mike Lewis, JT Bates, and Jeremy Ylvisaker at the Hideout on Sun 2/10 MORE INFO: instagram.com/aaronlowell

In an age where one’s apartment doubles as an office, therapy patients throughout the city have similarly brought treatment into the home via virtual counseling. “I’ve been living in my tiny apartment and it’s just pure chaos,” she says. “So I sort of have to try to block out everything that’s happening. And I see my clothes on the floor, I see pictures of friends on the wall, and these are things I have to really try to block out and focus on what I’m feeling ....

Can’t find a place to lock your bike? Rack it up to bureaucracy. While an average of 700 bike racks were installed per year while I was there, after I left in early 2007 CDOT slowed the pace to roughly 500 racks annually. Chicago currently has more than 15,000 racks, likely the most of any U.S. city. But since the percentage of Chicago commuters who bike to work has more than tripled in recent decades, from 0....

Twenty years after the release of their self-titled debut LP, freaky supergroup Tomahawk have returned with their fifth and best album yet, Tonic Immobility. Formed in 1999 by the best of the best from the avant-punk and noise-rock scenes, Tomahawk originally consisted of Faith No More and Mr. Bungle vocalist Mike Patton, the Jesus Lizard guitarist Duane Denison, Helmet and Battles drummer John Stanier, and Cows and Melvins bassist Kevin Rutmanis—who has since been replaced by Melvins and Bungle alum Trevor Dunn....