Perhaps you, like me, have walked past a closed movie theater in the last few days and wondered about the people who used to work inside. Whether it’s the person who takes your tickets, or shovels butter-glossed popcorn into a paper bucket, or patiently clears away the garbage to ensure a clean next showing, movie theaters are run by a veritable constellation of hourly workers. But the current shelter-in-place order makes such workers’ livelihoods precarious; as cinemas are considered nonessential businesses, Chicago’s beloved movie theaters have been shuttered....

Years ago, when I went to work for UPI in Saint Louis, my in-service training consisted of a demonstration of how to operate the teleprinter. Most of the time an operator would be available; but on Sundays, and also on Saturday and Monday nights, it was up to me to do everything myself. I know this about the AP because in recent weeks I’ve been speaking to AP staffers who went through the training and swear by it....

The 70s were about excess. Big hair, big stupid lapels, and even bigger piles of cocaine. (At least that’s what I’ve been told; I didn’t appear on planet earth until the early 80s.) I suppose it makes sense, then, that a French bread pizza would be excessively expensive at the Brass Monkey, a spendy West Loop spot that channels Me Decade cuisine, from classed-up versions of processed foods loved by kids to elevated French dishes popularized by Julia Child and her ilk....

Disobedience , the first English-language feature by Chilean director Sebastián Lelio (Gloria, A Fantastic Woman), considers the constrictive nature of traditional Jewish culture, particularly as it impacts the lives of women and homosexuals who grow up within it. The film tells the story of a woman named Ronit (Rachel Weisz), the estranged daughter of a prominent Orthodox rabbi, who returns to the close-knit Jewish community of her youth after her father dies....

Johalla Projects gallerist Anna Cerniglia, Hide singer Heather Gabel, and filmmaker Robert Stockwell bring the second annual Palace Film Festival to the Studebaker Theater (410 S. Michigan) on Friday and Saturday, January 22 and 23. It features a slew of unconventional filmmakers, plus several mostly local (and equally unconventional) musicians. This wolf is geared up for Asia Argento’s Misunderstood, scored by one-man electro army and Midwich label founder Jim Magas. It screens Friday, before drum warhorse Noah Leger collaborates with multi­media artist Mark Comiskey; Olivia Block closes the night pairing sound with 35-millimeter slides....

Spotlight, the Oscar-winning movie of two years ago, made me feel proud to be a journalist. The Post, which I finally saw over the weekend, reminded me how much fun the business is. Or at least was once upon a time. I’m pretty sure it still has its moments. The Post, like All the President’s Men, and like Spotlight, is about reaching a specific end—the publishing of a series of epochal news stories....

The premise of Lauren Gunderson’s two-hander is remarkably simple: a socially isolated, housebound high school girl receives an unexpected visit from an only-slightly-less introverted classmate she barely knows. He brings the unwelcome news that the two of them have been assigned to collaborate on a class project—due tomorrow, OMG!—about Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” a poem she has barely read and loathes. But from this Spartan setup, Gunderson spins a sweet, rich, nuanced story in which, over the course of 90 minutes, we watch two socially awkward adolescents open up and become a little less awkward....

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. Bandcamp For watching

Memphis musicians enjoy a well-deserved reputation for having more going on beneath the surface than they initially let on. Alex Chilton, Tav Falco, and Jim Dickinson are known for putting a trashy stamp on roots music in their songwriting, but they also incorporate outside influences at unpredictable times. Such is also the case with the Reigning Sound, led by singer-guitarist Greg Cartwright—a founding member of the Oblivians, a trio that deconstructs blues and punk until they sound nearly avant-garde....

Actor Tandy Cronyn, whose one-woman show The Tall Boy plays at Stage 773 for a limited engagement December 5 through 15, came across the source material for the project by chance. “It was a long and winding road,” recalls the 74-year-old Cronyn, whose distinguished career has ranged from Broadway musicals to classical drama at the Stratford Festival. Browsing through Boyle’s work, Cronyn encountered a tragic tale titled “The Lost” in the 1951 short-story collection The Smoking Mountain: Stories of Postwar Germany....

It’s hard to think of an opera more timely for 2017 than The Consul, which was first performed in 1950. Composer and librettist Gian Carlo Menotti’s expressive meld of words and music—both lyrical and dissonant—tells the story of a family trapped by an unresponsive bureaucracy as they desperately try to escape a nameless “large European city” in a violent police state. Born in Italy, Menotti came to America at age 17 and stayed for 30 successful years before returning to Europe....

Mental illness as woman: It’s a trope that keeps on giving. From Blanche DuBois (A Streetcar Named Desire) to Bertha Mason (Jane Eyre) to Norma Desmond (Sunset Boulevard) and beyond, writers have used female characters to embody the myriad manifestations of mangled synapses and misfiring neurotransmitters. For Fotos, anxiety issues escalated after he graduated from Downers Grove North High School and was accepted at Boston’s ultracompetitive, highly prestigious Berklee College of Music....

Nebraska native Charlie Curtis-Beard, who moved here for school and still attends Columbia College, is one of Chicago’s most promising young MCs. His debut, Childish, was among the best overlooked local hip-hop releases of 2016, and on Friday he drops his second full-length, Existentialism on Lake Shore Drive. In its loose narrative, framed by dramatized phone messages, Curtis-Beard holes up at home while his friends have a wild night out. “I just wanted to tell the story of going out to pointless parties and staying locked in my room, from both sides,” he says....

Austrian guitarist Martin Siewert has always stood out to me for using his instrument like an arsenal of paintbrushes. In his many projects, including improvisational and experimental outfits Trapist and Efzeg, he thoughtfully applies his sound upon whatever canvas the group conjures. And since joining the Viennese trio Radian in 2011, he’s brought the group’s dry, instrumental strain of post-This Heat noise and rhythm closer to rock than it’s ever been—though any band that has a rhythm section of drummer Martin Brandlmayr and bassist John Norman will never sound like a normal rock band....

In honor of the late Dave Shelton, this week we’re featuring a gig poster from a 1987 show at the legendary Sheffield Avenue location of his club Medusa’s. Artist Rob Schwager lived in Chicagoland back then, and created this image for a packed bill featuring punk bands the Meatmen, Straw Dogs, and Rights of the Accused alongside rockers Redd Kross. Not everybody can make a fantasy gig poster, of course, but it’s simple and free to take action through the website of the National Independent Venue Association—click here to tell your representatives to save our homegrown music ecosystems....

Published in 1947, Chicago Japanese-American Year Book takes the reader into a time capsule of an ethnic community feeling its way after the government of Japan had waged war against the United States. The U.S. government had responded by forcibly removing Japanese American citizens and aliens from the Pacific coast, where the majority lived, and consigning them to detention centers in remote areas. Sono was born in Omaha in 1919, the first of three children, and the family moved to the north side of Chicago in 1925....

The Witness has the awful pull of a true-crime mystery as Solomon and Bill Genovese (who’s credited as an executive producer) try to track down the 38 witnesses. They begin with a trial transcript, then obtain a police report with nearly all the names redacted. Finally they get their hands on summaries of the original police witness reports, compiled by ABC News for a 1979 segment of 20/20. He tracks down Lynne Tillotson, who remembers only hearing a scream in the night, seeing nothing out her window, and going back to bed....

It’s weed week, Chicago! [content-2]

Seth Perlman/AP Photos The insurgent fringe? I’ve had an insight into the Republican gains in the November elections. A lot of people aren’t going to agree with it. It happened, I think, because the the Republicans managed to present themselves to voters as both a party of government and as an insurgent fringe party. Trust us to run the government was one message; Let’s bring the temple down! was another....

Mary Gauthier has often looked to her turbulent past for subject matter for her poetic, hardscrabble songs; amid flinty folk rock she’s openly grappled with being adopted as a child and her struggles with addiction and heartbreak. But on Rifles & Rosary Beads (In the Black/Thirty Tigers), her first album in four years, she turned outward to work with SongWritingWith: Soldiers, a program that brings veteran and active-duty members of the U....