To me, Chicago congressional hopeful Benjamin Thomas Wolf—aka the “cannabis candidate”—seemed like someone I could get behind when he burst into the spotlight before last month’s primaries. More disturbingly, I also learned he was accused of abusing women. I care about people and families, NOT politics, corporations or the chicago establishment. The people need healthcare, they want cannabis, they hope for free education. I’m fighting for them. Rahm and the establishment are afraid we might win....

“Leading requires telling people the truth,” Rahm Emanuel declared at one point during the final mayoral debate, held last week. Even if you think Emanuel is our best bet—and maybe he is—he’ll be a better mayor, and Chicago will be a healthier city, if he’s forced to consider following his own advice. Emanuel was among those who lined up firmly behind Daley. Now he says he’s bringing Chicago back from those dark days....

Ambient music is often unfairly regarded as “background noise,” but in the hands of its most passionate practitioners, it can be as striking as the loudest and most confrontational music ever produced. Minimalist composer William Basinski has been mastering this realm of sound for four decades, and he’s bringing his expertise to Chicago for two performances at Pitchfork’s Midwinter fest. On Friday night, he’ll perform his seminal work The Disintegration Loops with the Chicago Philharmonic....

The centerpiece of this year’s Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival is Sauerbruch Hutton Architects (Sat 1/31, 3 PM), the penultimate documentary feature by German filmmaker and theorist Harun Farocki, who passed away last summer at age 70. Farocki’s massive body of work—which spans films, gallery installations, and critical essays—centers on the theme of social control in everyday life, and Sauerbruch documents a group of Berlin architects as they design an impersonal-looking office complex for a French software company....

Standing in the middle of Standard Market/s new 1,200-square-foot cheese cave in Countryside, a suburb 20 miles southwest of Chicago, David Rogers looks worried. “You shouldn’t see that,” he says, frowning at the mist hissing from the cooling units on the ceiling. “I don’t know where that moisture is coming from. I’ll have to talk to the refrigeration company.” Affinage, the art of aging cheese, is a separate concern from the making of the cheese, and is often done by different people....

A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. Jawbreaker’s Riot Fest reunion set Holy shit, I still can’t believe that happened. Bev Rage & the Drinks Fronted by a bratty drag queen named Beverly, Bev Rage & the Drinks are a fast, catchy queer-punk band who fucking love snacks. The most recent time I saw them play, they raffled off the opportunity to shave their guitarist’s beard onstage....

For this week’s Reader music feature, I traveled around the city with Save Money rapper Joey Purp, visiting places that have shaped him and his music. Part of the impulse for that project came from all the writing I’ve seen from outsiders to Chicago that reduces the city’s hip-hop scene to a few bullet points and a handful of easily recognizable names. Though I cover local hip-hop week in and week out, my knowledge will never be complete, and I thought it would be good for me to learn about a local rapper (who’s receiving more and more national attention) by listening to him talk about his experiences—otherwise it’s distressingly easy to fall into the kind of facile, well-trodden narratives peddled by people who learn about Chicago exclusively from websites based in New York....

The old man is angry. “It is NOT MEDIUM RARE!” he insists. “And even if it was, you should’ve informed me that’s how the chef serves it—then I could decide for myself.” This most recent act of bravery was committed by the principals behind the music video production company Audiotree, the relatively new owners of Schubas (and its attendant Lincoln Hall). They commissioned the Chicago office of Gensler, the world’s largest architecture firm, which flattened Harmony Grill and built this lovely modern annex that somehow manages not to mess with the aesthetic integrity of the 115-year-old neo-Gothic tavern....

Peter Nickeas is a Tribune reporter recently accused of informing on protesters to the police. Monica Trinidad is the activist who publicly accused him. Jerry Boyle is the Chicago attorney who put the idea in her head. And I’m the media writer who wishes he hadn’t. On a pro bono basis, Boyle serves the causes he believes in. He was on hand when Black Lives Matter demonstrators gathered at Taste of Chicago earlier this month, wearing the green hat that identifies him as a legal observer....

Update: As of Friday evening, Ex Fest has been canceled, according to a post on the festival’s Facebook page. Salsation The all-Latinx members of Salsation have plenty to say about Donald Trump’s new immigration policies and not-so-subtle racism. This sketch show focuses on Trump’s policies, specifically those about discrimination against folks of Latin American descent. Fri 1/12, 8 PM The Cool Table This high-energy ensemble returns to Chicago for a 12th appearance at SketchFest....

Is tattooing an art form? Answers vary. People who work at tattoo parlors will respond in the affirmative without batting an inked eyelid. My parents would adamantly disagree; not only does Jewish law forbid the practice (Leviticus 19:28: “You shall not etch a tattoo on yourselves”), but many Jews of my grandparents’ generation associate tattoos with the Holocaust and don’t care for any kind of reminder. “Tattoo,” a new exhibit at the Field Museum, doesn’t provide any kind of resolution, which is part of what makes the show so worthwhile....

To fully appreciate the game Stormy Daniels is playing with Donald Trump, I urge you to watch Foxy Brown, the Pam Grier flick from 1974—or at least, watch her scene with Judge Fenton. Daniels, as you know, is the porn star who says she slept with Trump one time in 2006—hoping he’d cast her in Celebrity Apprentice. (He didn’t.) And then, of course, she went on 60 Minutes to tell Anderson Cooper many, though not all, of the details—leaving much more to the imagination....

Last August, in the wake of the racist violence in Charlottesville, downtown aldermen Sophia King (Second) and Brendan Reilly (42nd) called for renaming Balbo Drive. The street honors Italo Balbo, a leader of the Blackshirts, the paramilitary wing of Italy’s National Fascist Party, who later became Mussolini’s air commander and governor of colonized Libya. The aldermen blasted Balbo as a brutal racist. King and Reilly’s offices didn’t immediately respond to my interview requests this afternoon, but King told the Sun-Times that a major concern was the expense and hassle posed to business owners and residents who would have to change their addresses....

An important aspect of drag that doesn’t readily translate to a mini-challenge on RuPaul’s Drag Race is an artist’s ability to command a stage: whether that means lip-syncing in front of an audience, or marching in the streets. Chicago’s drag community showed up and showed out in 2020 at the crucial moments when we needed their unique perspectives and leadership abilities. In June, when civil unrest and public demonstrations were a consistent daily presence in the city, Black LGBTQ+ community activists organized the Drag March for Change, leading crowds on the “Boystown” strip in Lakeview to protest racial inequity in the neighborhood and beyond....

Summer of Soul (. . . Or When the Revolution Could Not be Televised) could command attention just by virtue of its treasure trove of previously unreleased vintage footage of R&B, soul, gospel, jazz, and blues legends, including Nina Simone, Stevie Wonder, Max Roach, and Sly and the Family Stone. But the documentary, which spotlights the 1969 Harlem Culture Festival, a six-week series of free performances celebrating Black music and culture in Harlem’s Mount Morris Park (now Marcus Garvey Park), is much more than a standard concert film....

Richard A. Chapman/Sun-Times Among the employees who took buyouts, the guy who took this photograph Fifteen members of the Chicago Newspaper Guild have taken buyouts from the Sun-Times, and Friday is the last day for most, Monday for a few with projects to wrap up. Before the buyouts, I was told the Sun-Times was down to 73 Guild employees. Jerry Minkkinen, retired executive director of the CNG, recalls that when he took that job in 1976, a time when the Sun-Times was owned by Field Enterprises and its afternoon sister, the Daily News, was still publishing, he represented more than 600 Guild members at the two papers....

Few aspects of modern life require a larger amount of denial than the waste we produce every single day. We’re seeing the planet turn into a huge garbage can, but it seems like there isn’t much we can do because most of what we consume comes wrapped in disposable containers. But environmentalist Christine Sorich, 34, decided to face this urgent issue and do things differently. But it’s not only packaging Sorich is concerned about; she is also careful about what goes inside those mason jars....

Mike Sula Angry shrimp “You guys stink!” That was the warm welcome that greeted us upon returning home from an evening spent diving into bulging plastic bags of butter-drenched, chile-loaded, garlicky crustaceans. I thought I smelled delicious, but I did need to hose down. Mike Sula The aftermath ăn uống tốt Mike Sula The Angry Crab

As Wonder Years front man Dan “Soupy” Campbell spoke to the press while his band prepared to drop their sixth album, April’s Sister Cities (Hopeless), he avidly described the new material as a means to seek out and create connectivity. The six-piece group have always wanted to touch people with their music—their catalog emanates empathy, even unto the suburbs they hoped to escape as young men. And hell, their sweet sound is primed for accessibility, though the pop-punk scene they emerged from is divisive among punk and rock fans—remaining one American product that many actively ignore because it’s so sugary....