Karly Zucker received a startling piece of mail at her DeKalb home on Friday. As it turns out, the photo was taken almost two years ago in the kitchen of the Voluntary Action Center of DeKalb County. Zucker and her colleagues were preparing food for a summer meals program when Kinzinger visited the nonprofit based in Sycamore, Illinois, to get better acquainted with the services that VAC provides, according to Ellen Rogers, the agency’s executive director....

I haven’t thought about Salvador Dalí since high school, a time when melting clocks, genitalia, and sundry visual jokes are especially well suited to the overheated adolescent psyche. Dalí specialized in realistic renderings of the subconscious, fantasy imagery as described and popularized by Freudian psychoanalysis. Like his fellow surrealists, he loved to shock and provoke with his art; what teenager doesn’t want to do the same? I tried to recall that period of my life while visiting “The Imaginative World of Dalí,” an exhibit currently on view at Zygman Voss Gallery....

Quentin Tarantino’s movie Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood is in part a gauzy wish fulfillment fantasy that fictionalizes and rewrites the true-life brutal murder of actor Sharon Tate. The play graveyard shift at the Goodman Theatre takes a similar, if not more practical, path. The play knows that it’s impossible to practice necromancy and raise the spirit of the beloved from the grave but hopes that perhaps it is possible to drape flowers on her legacy....

Lollapalooza may not have the boho fashion cred of Coachella or Glastonbury, but for four days the festival turned Grant Park into a parade of original looks. The overall theme seemed to be “come as you are, with a dash of who you want to be.” Feel like wearing a full-length prom gown over combat boots? Knock yourself out. Thinking more jeans and a T-shirt topped with a dramatic mermaid crown?...

Last summer, Intuit began exhibiting nearly a dozen Wesley Willis drawings as part of “Chicago Calling: Art Against the Flow” in conjunction with Art Design Chicago, an expansive, yearlong celebration of the city’s art history. Intuit’s show honored Willis and nine other local outsider artists (including Henry Darger, Lee Godie, and Mr. Imagination), and argued for their place in the historical canon. Willis, a six-foot-five schizophrenic Black man who drew detailed renderings of Chicago’s skyline and infrastructure, was the youngest figure included in the show—he was just 40 years old when he died in 2003—and he transcended the art world like none of the others....

This story was originally published by City Bureau on August 26, 2020. The Trump administration’s attempted changes to the census have stoked fear and discouraged immigrants from responding, according to PRI The World reporting. On top of delays in outreach due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. Census Bureau announced recently it will end all counting efforts one month sooner than planned on September 30. “The immigrant community [in Chicago] as a whole is very diverse, and looking at the foreign-born population alone doesn’t account for the many other factors that make a community hard-to-count, such as the presence of young children, housing insecurity and income levels that all contribute to civic participation,” said Brandon Lee, an Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights census consultant....

The Chicago Reader is one of the few alternative newsweeklies in the nation that still publishes long-form film criticism, and over the past 40 years we’ve presented work by such talented writers as Noah Berlatsky, Fred Camper, Cliff Doerksen, Andrea Gronvall, J.R. Jones, Joshua Katzman, Dave Kehr, Patrick Z. McGavin, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Ben Sachs, Lee Sandlin, Hank Sartin, Bill Stamets, Elizabeth Tamny, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, and Albert Williams. The index below isn’t complete yet—we’ve made it only as far back as 1993—but we plan to keep adding to it until it is....

Starting this week, we present a biweekly post focusing on new additions to the streaming channel Filmstruck, a partnership between Turner Classic Movies and the Criterion Collection. Filmstruck is currently featuring Italian actress Anna Magnani (1908-1973), whom filmmaker Roberto Rossellini called “the greatest acting genius since Eleonora Duse.” Noted for her raw, intense performances, she starred in films for Rossellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Federico Fellini, Sidney Lumet, Jean Renoir, and Luchino Visconti....

As Wild Belle, siblings and Chicagoland natives Natalie and Elliot Bergman construct a tropical pop sound that draws from rocksteady, reggae, dub, dancehall, West African music, and more. The eclectic mix is unified by Natalie’s smoky, sultry voice and Elliot’s equally sexy baritone saxophone and electrified kalimbas. For their brand-new third LP, Everybody One of a Kind, the Bergmans eschewed outside producers, opting to work almost exclusively on their own in Elliot’s Chicago and LA studios....

There’s plenty to do this week. Here’s some of what we recommend:

In 2011, a Reddit user came to the site asking for advice on how to deal with his best friend’s passing. In a response that quickly went viral, a user by the name of GSnow wrote, “As for grief, you’ll find it comes in waves.” This prioritization of assertion over emotions comes with a cost when, after Tyler’s shoulder is severely injured early in the wrestling season, he bottles up his pain and continues to push himself until he is physically and emotionally broken beyond repair—taking his father’s painkillers instead of getting surgery and partying with his friends without acknowledging his drug use and injury....

Willie Clayton left Chicago in 1993 for the warmer climes of Atlanta, but he’s a proud product of the Windy City soul circuit. Well before turning 21, Clayton was opening for the greats of the genre at the city’s top venues. He’s long since graduated to headliner status himself: he made his main-stage debut at the Chicago Blues Festival in 1996, and Saturday evening’s set is his fourth appearance there....

For a comedy show, the Second City E.T.C.’s latest sketch revue, directed by Anthony LeBlanc, seems unusually poignant. The venerable theater’s offerings—particularly on the main stage—have long saved room for little bursts of sentimentality, but I don’t remember ever seeing a revue that felt quite as touchingly suffused with longing as this one does. We meet, among others, lonely online daters, roommates singing about the sorrow of parting when one gets a fiancee, and a fatherless tyke aching for a stepdad who’ll play Dance Dance Revolution with him....

Every year brother-sister duo White Mystery celebrate tokers’ holiday 4/20 with a sweet spring surprise—and 2015 is no different. This time Gossip Wolf’s favorite Chicago garage rockers have switched up the format, releasing not a new album but instead a feature film about their “breakneck nomadic lifestyle” called That Was Awesome. This wolf has seen only the trailer so far, but it features cartoons, basketball, poetry about the band written by drummer Francis White and read by their dad, and cameos from underground rock luminaries (among them Cody Blanchard from Shannon & the Clams and Timmy Vulgar from Human Eye)....

A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. Brockhampton What’s not to love about a boy band whose 15 members include their webmaster? What’s not to love about group leader Kevin Abstract rapping about being gay, when so many other MCs can’t even handle other people being gay? What’s not to love about their immersive Saturation trilogy? I say all this because I’m still adding to a lengthy Twitter thread in which I make my case to join Brockhampton—come on, guys, put me in!...

We all know the most important ballot we’ll cast in 2016—Trump?!—but the Reader‘s annual Best of Chicago poll is a close second. This year, we’ve created separate ballots for different interest areas, so you can quickly weigh in on only the things you really care about. Vote below by category:

F Apparently, Emanuel will do just about anything to avoid spending that money on boring things like our dead-broke schools. As soon as Daley created the TIF, he made the land more valuable to developers. The TIF signaled the city’s readiness not only to approve but to subsidize any subsequent development. But Daley turned down Rezko’s TIF request. But he didn’t. “We’re very grateful and gratified that the appellate court did a good job,” says Greg Scandaglia, Sirazi’s lawyer....

Windy City Playhouse’s 2018-2019 production of Southern Gothic was not the first and not the only immersive theater production in town, but it is among the first to achieve a sustained high profile and perhaps the longest run at some 22 months. It earned Jeff Awards for its director, David Bell, scenic designer, Scott Davis, and properties designer, Eleanor Kahn. Its success helped put the then-five-year-old theater firmly on the map, and drew the attention of a wider audience to this form of theater loosely termed “immersive....

For a few years now the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events has hosted a free house-music party on Memorial Day weekend, and this year it’s getting supersized into the Chicago House Music Festival. On Saturday, May 26, nearly two dozen acts perform on three stages in Millennium Park. Gossip Wolf can’t wait to see New York nightlife king Louie Vega, best known as half of Masters at Work, headline Pritzker Pavilion with his Elements of Life project, though his 7:30 PM slot overlaps with DJ sets from Chicago legends Paul Johnson (on the Chicago Stage) and Ron Trent (on the Deep House Stage)....

The allure of street food for people who didn’t grow up in a place where it flourished is largely psychological. For tourists it’s not just the affordable, practical, utilitarian way of feeding oneself that it is for locals, but a cheap and easy way to feel like you belong—or at least identify—with a foreign culture at its realest. Somehow one is convinced this food tastes best in the open heat and exhaust of a thrumming metropolis....